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| Upper River Welland in flood (Feb 2026). Photo: Ian Bateman |
There is a particular kind of dread that comes not from sudden catastrophe, but from slow acceptance: the point at which something once shocking becomes familiar, then normal, then mere background noise.
In recent weeks, flood warnings have scrolled across our phones, met with only fleeting attention. Roads close. Trains stop. Fields disappear beneath shallow seas. Insurers quietly retreat from whole postcodes. Phrases like “managed retreat” and “once-in-a-century event” lose their meaning through overuse.
Last week, that background noise briefly came into focus with the story of Clydach Terrace in Ynysybwl, South Wales.
The local authority in Rhondda Cynon Taf agreed to spend up to £2.6 million to buy up and demolish 16 homes on a residential terrace that has repeatedly flooded – including during Storm Dennis in 2020, when water inside homes reached almost two metres deep.
The homes, on a floodplain beside the Nant Clydach, were deemed so dangerous that there is no economically viable way to protect them. Natural defences are no longer viable; the risk to life is judged “high”.
Journalists covering the story described this as the first time in the UK that a whole street has been bought out and will be demolished because of climate-linked flood risk: a de facto announcement of the country’s first climate evacuees – though the word itself remains carefully unspoken.
The most frightening thing about climate collapse is not the spectacle of it, but how quickly we absorb it into everyday life.
That sense of quiet inevitability – the feeling that something fundamental has shifted beneath our feet – is what led me to write Flood Waters Down.
I live on the edge of the South Lincolnshire Fens, a landscape that exists only because we forced it into submission. Drained, straightened, regulated, pumped. A triumph of engineering and agricultural efficiency – and a reminder of a very old human habit: believing control to be the same as permanence.
The Fens are flat, exposed and deceptively fragile. They sit mostly at or below sea level, held in place by embankments, lock gates and sluices – and by faith in powerful pump engines that must work perfectly, all the time. As the atmosphere warms and the seas rise, that bargain begins to look increasingly brittle.
Historically, when the water returns to the Fens, it does not do so politely. It spreads. It lingers. It reshapes the land and the people who live on it.
The phrase – the water always wins – became a quiet mantra while I was writing Flood Waters Down. Not as a slogan, but as an observation. Nature does not need to be dramatic to be unstoppable. It only needs time.
So why turn to fiction this time, rather than reportage?
I’ve spent much of my career reporting on complex systems – space, technology, the environment. Good, honest journalism is vital. It tells us what is happening, who is responsible and why it matters.
But it has limits. In the context of climate change it struggles to capture what collapse feels like from the inside. How it alters relationships, priorities, morality. How people adapt not in heroic arcs, but in compromises and retreats. How systems designed to protect us quietly begin to outlive us.
Fiction offers the possibility of stepping beyond the headline and into the atmosphere. To explore not just submerged landscapes, but flooded institutions. Not just environmental breakdown, but the psychological weather of a society learning, slowly, that it may not recover.
Flood Waters Down is not set in some far-off, abstract tomorrow. It occupies the narrow band of time where today’s assumptions still mostly hold – but are beginning to fail.
Its lineage owes more to J.G. Ballard than to blockbuster dystopia: environments that shape behaviour, infrastructures that become characters in their own right, and futures that feel uncomfortably adjacent to the present.
The flooded Fens become a fragmented, part-rewilded zone of survivors and renegades. Elsewhere, enclaves of wealth retreat behind technology and automation, convinced they can outlast the chaos. Over it all hangs the presence of increasingly autonomous systems, designed to manage crisis, but quietly redefining what “order” means.
None of this requires a leap of imagination. We are already living with early versions of these dynamics: climate adaptation by postcode, algorithmic governance, uneven resilience, the quiet return of sovereign rule, the outsourcing of responsibility to systems no one fully controls.
Nothing transforms the world overnight – the future arrives with more of a shrug than a bang. But fiction can change how we pay attention.
Climate fiction, at its best, is not about predicting the future. It is about rehearsing emotional and ethical responses to the futures we are already drifting towards. It asks uncomfortable questions: Who adapts? Who retreats? Who decides? What do we cling to when the structures we trusted begin to dissolve?
As Flood Waters Down moves towards publication, I find myself less interested in whether readers find it frightening than whether they find it recognisable. That quiet click of understanding. That sense of yes, this feels plausible.
Because once a future becomes imaginable, it becomes discussable. And once it is discussable, it becomes harder to ignore. The water, after all, does not need our belief. It only needs our inaction.
Flood Waters Down is released in paperback by Cliftop Publishing on 9 April 2026 and will soon be available for pre-order.
