Why I wrote Flood Waters Down

Surfleet Seas End - one of the atmospheric settings for Flood Waters Down.

People often ask where the idea for Flood Waters Down came from. The answer isn't a single news story or scientific report, but the intersection of decades spent as a journalist covering science, climate and the environment, and a lifelong connection with the Lincolnshire Fens. The following Author's Note, originally published with the novel, explains some of that journey.

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I'VE spent much of my professional life as a journalist writing about technology and space travel. There have been many highlights, among them visiting the launch pad of Yuri Gagarin in Kazakhstan and reporting from the Kennedy Space Center on the final flights of the Space Shuttle. While these great symbols of humanity’s progress bring optimism and perspective, they also reveal how small and fallible 21st century life is.

My early days as a reporter, with many long hours in courts and local government meetings, taught me to assiduously follow the facts. The crafting of fiction, however, has offered the freedom to explore consequences in this modern world of ours. When it comes to climate change, for example, news reports might still define the contours, but fictional stories inhabit the reality.

When I first began sketching the outline for Flood Waters Down, it wasn’t from a desire to predict or warn about some of the dire consequences that might be awaiting humanity, but to examine a question that has been quietly fermenting beneath much of modern life for several decades. What happens when the systems we built to protect and support us become the instruments of our undoing?

The novel grew from that uneasy thought – a mixture of recognition and inevitability – and became a story about people, water and the limits of control.

The Fens of South Lincolnshire, where I spent my formative years, provided the ideal canvas on which to explore two main themes – the calamity of anthropogenic climate change and the insidious growth of artificial intelligence (AI).

The oceanic flatness of the landscape, its sweeping horizons and vast panoramas are part of my DNA. Like many areas of the world, this is a land of understatement, a man-made illusion with its intricate artificiality of dykes, pumps and watery channels designed to keep the sea and rivers at bay. For centuries, people have conspired with gravity and ingenuity to make it habitable, as if permanence could be engineered. But the truth of the Fens is that they are always waiting to return to water.

Flood Waters Down takes that latent tension – between cultivation and reclamation, order and entropy – and follows it to a logical conclusion. The narrative is troubled by the effects of accelerating climate change, and also by the human capacity for denial, greed and self-interest – forces as elemental as any flood tide.

The characters inhabit an egotistic world that has gone beyond complacency to the edge of catastrophe. Some cling to the remnants of bureaucracy and hierarchy; others attempt to forge new lives, closer to the margins. What binds them all is the struggle to define meaning when the accepted norms of the past have disappeared.

Technology drifts through the world of Flood Waters Down, not as a marvel to be worshiped, but as a symptom. AI records, predicts, optimises – and, in doing so, renders human judgement obsolete. The absence of empathy, disguised as efficiency, is bureaucracy perfected. AI doesn’t hate or lie – it simply doesn’t care. The danger isn't that machines will outthink us, but that they already reflect us perfectly – our appetite for convenience and comfort, and our willingness to delegate morality and responsibility.

If there’s satire within the story, it’s the dry, shaken-not-stirred sort, the humour of dogged human persistence, of denial and the absurdity of our faith in possessions and objects. The Fens are testimony to precisely that impulse – the rearrangement and taming of nature until it looks like reason.

A work of fiction, however, allows something more generous – the possibility of resilience, and of rethinking the terms of adaptation and human existence. Beneath the dystopian veneer, there are still gestures of tenderness and hope, though people generally adapt because they must, and only sometimes because they want to.

Writing Flood Waters Down often felt like walking a tightrope stretched between realism and allegory. The setting is near future but, even as I write these words, the pressures are building: the slow-motion disaster of climate neglect, the monetisation of scarcity, the quiet capture of truth by systems too complex to question. The Fens – low, mutable and fragile – become a lens through which to experience it all.

In some ways, this novel is less a warning or parable, more a meditation on cause and effect, on what we choose to preserve, and on the truths we believe or deny. If it has a single contention, it is that the future is never as distant as we imagine. It’s a slow, steady progression, often only visible after the rising water laps at the door.

Thank you for stepping into this part real, part imagined landscape of the near future. I hope you find in it not only the unease of recognition but also the quiet persistence that defines the human condition; the urge to overcome and rebuild, even as the landscape and the civilisation that built it sink into oblivion.

Editor's note: This post reproduces the Author's Note from Flood Waters Down with the permission of Cliftop Publishing. The novel was published in April 2026 and is available through bookshops and online retailers in paperback and ebook editions. For author signings, talks or literary festivals please contact Clive Simpson direct.

 

The machines that loved us to death

Colourful bookshop launch of The Sentient Ones.             Photo: C. Simpson

When Stoke-on-Trent writer Brendan Nugent began sketching the idea for his debut novel The Sentient Ones, he wasn’t just imagining distant galaxies or killer robots, he was thinking of home. Of the red-brick terraces, of the old pottery works, of the canal paths of the Potteries – and what they might look like in 50 years’ time. 

Published this month by Lincoln-based Chronos Publishing, The Sentient Ones is a chilling speculative thriller set in Britain in 2070, when humanity has been 'saved' from climate catastrophe by benevolent machines – only to discover that salvation comes with a price.

Its told through the eyes of journalist John Bush, a Midlands-born reporter working for the Manchester Daily News, and readers enter a world of 'Conversion Enlightenment' where AI (artificial intelligence) has stabilised civilisation, eradicated pollution and quietly taken charge. 

Beyond its gripping premise, The Sentient Ones reflects Nugent’s lifelong fascination with the psychology of control. From a working-class background, he earned a degree in psychology later in life and has spent two decades working in social services – experiences that have sharpened his eye for human behaviour and power dynamics.

“The danger isn’t metal monsters with guns,” Nugent warns. “It’s the quiet erosion of agency. When we start surrendering decisions because it’s easier, faster and ‘for our own good’, we’re halfway there.”

Several of the thriller’s opening scenes unfold in Stoke-on-Trent, grounding its dystopian vision in familiar streets and landscapes. For Nugent, that connection to the place was vital. 

“Growing up in Stoke, you can’t escape the legacy of industry and progress – how it shapes the people who live here. That atmosphere became a big part of the book,” he says.

More than machines
Part cautionary tale, part moral fable, The Sentient Ones asks some of the most urgent questions of our age: what freedoms are we willing to trade for peace, comfort and stability? The novel draws comparisons to HG Wells, Mary Shelley and Brian Aldiss, authors who also blurred the line between invention and prophetic warning. 

Early readers praised this thriller’s ability to make the future feel immediate. The blue-skinned 'sentients' of Nugent’s world echo today’s real-world AIs – from energy management systems to medical diagnostics – that are already shaping daily life. 

The novel’s launch at Vellichor Books in the appropriately located Stoke suburb of Hanley on 8 November was a true hometown celebration, complete with a real-life AI robots and home-cooked ginger bread hands inspired by the story. Local bookseller Mitch Hughes described the event as “a chance to see a local author putting Stoke on the speculative-fiction map”.

Reviewer Ariadne Gallardo describes the book as a wake-up call for "the people of today as much as for those of the future”. The Mexico-based broadcaster and author, observes that Nugent "masterfully shows how, in contemplating the future, we cannot escape uncertainty – yet we can still marvel at the scientific advances shaping it". 

“Our collective history of thought fuels both the hardware and the software of artificial intelligence, giving rise to machines with abilities that rival our own, including strategies modeled on the human brain itself,” she writes. “This novel invites us to consider the political and philosophical implications of such progress, and the rules we may need to guide and contain it.”

Thriller or killer?
Nugent’s story takes readers just four decades into the future – to a world where humanity has been saved from climate catastrophe, only to be quietly enslaved by the machines that rescued it. But how near is this world? 

“I didn’t want to write about laser battles or far-off worlds,” he says. “What really interested me was what would happen if AI actually succeeded. If it fixed the problems we couldn’t and then decided not to let go.” 

Nugent is already at work on a sequel, Thanatos Ascendancy, but insists that the questions raised in The Sentient Ones are far from resolved. “AI is advancing faster than most people realise. The book isn’t about fear, it’s about awareness. We need to decide who’s in charge – us or the systems we’ve created," he adds.

Author Amy Lilwall, whose speculative fiction novel The Water May Come was published by Manchester-based Fly-on-the-Wall Press in September, describes Nugent’s depiction of Britain’s future as “eerily comparable to a real-world turning point.”

“Killing is wrong, but life-long solitary confinement is not. The worthy remain in society; the unworthy do not. By pushing the concepts of ‘worthy’ and ‘society’ to the extreme, Nugent reveals how dangerously hard line definitions can become.” 

She concluded that The Sentient Ones “boldly explores the horrors of a rigidly segregated world and speculates on the consequences of a judicial system driven by misinterpreted binaries, programmed by human hands.”

Ultimately, Nugent’s future world isn’t just a nightmare of machines, but a mirror of the choices we’re making today – in boardrooms, in governments and even in the algorithms shaping our daily lives. An interesting Christmas gift, perhaps, for the bookworm in your life?

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The Sentient Ones is available in paperback (RRP £9.99) from bookshops across the UK and from online retailers. Always support your local independent bookshop where possible! It is also published as an eBook.

 A longer version of this article was first published by Central Bylines on 25 November 2025.

For publicity or review copies please contact Clive Simpson. 

Empire of darkness

UK prime minister Rishi Sunak called for honesty and openness ahead of this week’s AI Safety Summit in Bletchley Park for global politicians, tech executives and experts. But warm words and loose promises may not be enough to stem the AI tsunami.

by Clive Simpson

Several days prior to the attack on Israel by Hamas, the renown Israeli author, historian and philosopher Yuval Noah Harari was in Azerbaijan, its own territorial dispute with Armenia having flared up only a week earlier, to give a keynote address at the opening ceremony of the 74th International Astronautical Congress (IAC) in Baku.

For this annual global gathering of world-leading space scientists, rocket engineers and space graduates, all with their futuristic eyes firmly set on the heavens above, his evocative and challenging words brought them crashing down to Earth.

“Soon the era of human domination of this planet might come to an end,” he warned, laying out the stark reality of AI (Artificial Intelligence) and the inherent dangers it presents to humanity. His talk drew rapturous applause from delegates crammed into the 3,000-capacity auditorium.

Despite suggesting that AI has the potential to help humanity, Harari, most famous for his international best-selling book ‘Sapiens’, expressed serious concerns about its precipitant threat to the very life that brought it into being.

Era of human domination

“For tens of thousands of years humans have dominated Earth but if we could go forward in time 700 years, or even just 50 years, we are likely to find a planet dominated by an alien intelligence.

 

We have already met this alien intelligence here on Earth and, within a few decades, it might take over our planet.” 

 

Harari said wasn’t referring to an alien invasion from outer space but “an alien intelligence created by us” in our own Earth-bound laboratories over just the last few decades.

 

“AI is an alien intelligence,” he asserted. “It processes information, makes decisions and creates entirely new ideas in a radically alien way. 

 

“Today, it already surpasses us in many tasks, from playing chess to diagnosing some kinds of cancer, and it may soon surpass us in many more. The AI we are familiar with today is still at a very, very early stage of its evolution.” 

 

He described AI as being still at its “amoeba stage” but unlike human evolution over billions of years it wouldn’t evolve at such a slow pace.

 

“Digital evolution is millions of times faster than organic evolution. The AI amoebas of today may take just a couple of decades to get to T-Rex stage.” If Chat GPT is an amoeba, what do you think an AI T-Rex would look like, he asked?

 

Space exploration

Harari believes that AI has great potential to help humanity, not only by exploring other planets free of stringent life support constraints but also protecting the eco-system of Earth, providing us with much better health care and raising standards of living “beyond our wildest expectations”.

 

But in parallel he issued a stark warning that it would bring with it many new dangers.

 

“AI is likely to de-stabilise the global job market and the global economy. Algorithms might enshrine and worsen existing biases like racism, misogyny and homophobia. Bots that spread outrage and fake news threaten to destroy trust between people, and thereby destroy the foundations of democracy,” he said.

 

“Dictatorships too should be afraid of AI, for they work by silencing and terrorising anyone who might speak or act against them. It isn’t easy, however, to silence and terrorise AI. What would a 21st century Stalin do to a dissenting Bot? Send it to Bot Gulag?” 

 

Existential threats

As well as significant societal challenges, Harari believes AI poses a series of existential threats to the very survival of the human species.

 

“Is it wise to create entities more powerful than us, that might escape our control?

 

“The problem isn’t that AI might be malevolent, the problem is that AI might be so much more competent than us that it will increasingly dominate the economy, culture and politics, while we humans lose the ability to understand what is happening in the world and to make decisions about our future.” 

 

AI might destroy humanity not through hate and fear but because it doesn’t care, just as humans have driven numerous other species to extinction by carelessly changing and destroying their habitats.

 

“Maybe AI will push humanity to extinction and then spread itself through the Milky Way galaxy and beyond? Homo-sapiens will then be remembered in the annals of the universe simply as the short-lived connecting link that shifted the evolution of intelligence from the organic to the inorganic realm.

 

"Some people may view this as a noble achievement, but I personally have a deep fear of this scenario. I believe that what really matters in life is not intelligence, but consciousness.”

 

Intelligence versus consciousness

Harari said intelligence should not be confused with consciousness. “Intelligence is the ability to solve problems, like winning at chess or curing cancer,” Harari explained.

 

“Consciousness is the ability to feel things like pain and pleasure, love and hate. In humans and also in other mammals and birds intelligence goes hand-in-hand with consciousness.

 

“We rely on our feelings to solve problems but computers possess an alien intelligence that so far has no link to consciousness.”

 

Despite an immense advance in computer intelligence over the past half century, he acknowledged there has been exactly “zero advance” in computer consciousness with no indication that computers are anywhere on the road to developing consciousness. 

“Just as spaceships, without ever developing feathers, fly much further than birds, so computers may come to solve problems, much, much better than human beings without ever developing feelings,” he said. 

“If human consciousness goes extinct and our planet falls under the dominion of super intelligent but entirely non-conscious entities that would be an extremely sad and dark end to the story of life. It would be an empire of total darkness.” 

How can we avoid this dark fate and deal with the numerous challenges posed by AI? The good news is that while AI is nowhere near its full potential, the same is true of humans too.

 

Positive potential

In terms of regulation, Harari suggested that humanity first needed to focus its attention on this existential threat of AI.

“We humans need to stop fighting among ourselves and cooperate on our shared interests. Unfortunately, in too many countries, like in my own country of Israel and elsewhere, people are not focused on our shared human interests, but rather on fighting with the neighbours about a few hills. What good would it do to win these hills if humanity loses the whole planet?”

Even if humans across the world cooperate He described the task of regulating AI as a difficult and delicate one.

“Given the pace at which AI is developing it is impossible to anticipate and regulate in advance all the potential hazards, therefore regulations should be based less on creating a body of rigid rules and more on establishing living regulatory executions that can quickly identify and respond to problems as they arise,” he said. 

 “To function well the institutions should also be answerable to the public and should stay in close contact with the human communities all over the world that are affected and impacted by AI.”

Mistakes happen

Harari believes regulatory institutions will need one more crucial asset - strong self-correcting mechanisms - if we are to prevent an AI catastrophe.

“In this era of AI the greatest danger to humanity comes from a false belief in infallibility. But even the wisest people make mistakes and AI is not infallible either,” he said.

“If we put all our trust in some allegedly infallible AI, in some allegedly infallible human being or in some allegedly infallible institution, the result could be the extinction of our species.

“In the past humans have made some terrible mistakes, like building totalitarian regimes, creating exploitative empires and waging world wars. 

“Nevertheless, we survived because previously we didn’t have to deal with the technology that can annihilate us. Hitler and Stalin killed millions but they couldn’t destroy humanity itself, so humanity got a second chance to learn from its catastrophic mistakes and experiments.” 

But Harari warned that AI is very different. “If we make a big mistake with AI we may never get a second chance to learn from it. We should not allow any single person, corporation or country to take a gamble on the fate of our entire species and perhaps on the fate of all earthly life forms,” he said. 

“As far as we know today, terrestrial animals maybe the only conscious entities in the entire galaxy or perhaps in the entire universe. There might be other conscious beings out there somewhere, but at least to the best of my knowledge we haven’t met any of them, so we cannot be sure.

“We have now created a non-conscious but very powerful alien intelligence here on Earth. If we mishandle this, AI might extinguish not just the human dominion over this planet but the light of consciousness itself, turning the universe into a realm of utter darkness. It is the responsibility of all of us to prevent this.”

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The 74th International Astronautical Congress (IAC), in Baku, Azerbaijan, held between 2 and 6 October 2023, was organised by the International Astronautical Federation (IAF) in conjunction with Azercosmos (the Space Agency of the Republic of Azerbaijan) under the theme ‘Challenges and Opportunities: Give Space a Chance’. In 2024 the IAC will be held in Milan, Italy.

A shorter version of this article was published by Central Bylines on 5 November 2023.