FICTION FOR NOW

 

Talking climate, catastrophe and imagined futures at the Threekingham Literary Festival

by Clive Simpson

There was a phrase I wrote when signing a copy of Flood Waters Down at the Threekingham Boutique Literary Festival which, with hindsight, summed up much of the discussion that followed.

“Fiction – for now, at least.” It was meant to be slightly tongue-in-cheek. But after the summer Britain and Europe have just experienced, perhaps not entirely.

On Saturday (29 August), novelist and creative writing lecturer Amy Lilwall and I opened the literary programme at Three Kings Organic in the tiny Lincolnshire village of Threekingham with a panel entitled 'Imagining Our Future – Climate Fiction'. It was an intimate setting for a very large subject.

The festival itself, held over the August Bank Holiday weekend, was an enjoyably eclectic affair: authors, historians, poets and readers gathering in the conference room of Three Kings Organic, a delightful wine bar and café in a beautifully renovated 1200-year-old former inn.

Over two days of talks, workshops and conversation the programme ranged from Lincolnshire history and the Middle Ages to poetry, creative writing and discussions about the sheer business of being an author.

Our opening panel, hosted by Samantha Maw, brought together two rather different novels. Amy's The Water That May Come imagines Britain preparing for a potentially catastrophic inundation and the possibility of its citizens having to escape their own country. 

Flood Waters Down moves further into a climate-damaged future, following characters attempting to survive in a Britain where weather extremes, environmental degradation and the insidious rise of AI combine begin to fundamentally reshape society.

Different stories and different approaches, but with a common question lurking beneath them: what happens when the previously unimaginable starts becoming reality? 

When fiction and forecast collide
It was difficult to discuss that question at the end of August 2026 without acknowledging what had been happening outside.

Britain has just experienced an extraordinary summer. Provisional Met Office figures in mid-August put the UK's mean summer temperature at 16.48C to 10 August – already 1.88C above the 1991-2020 average and on course to exceed the previous summer record, itself set only in 2025.

The heatwaves produced a provisional 38C at Kew Gardens, the fifth-highest UK temperature recorded, while 40 observing locations across central and southern England reached 36C or more.

And heat has only been part of the story. Much of England and Wales endured prolonged dry conditions before the weather turned sufficiently unstable for forecasters to start warning of heavy rain, thunderstorms and localised flooding – the peculiar contemporary contradiction of needing rain while simultaneously worrying about getting too much of it too quickly.

This increasingly feels like the climatic world in which we now live: not simply warmer weather but instability and extremes. Heat. Drought. Flood. Fire. Then heat again.

Against that background, sitting in a Lincolnshire wine bar and café discussing novels about flooded landscapes didn't feel quite as speculative as it might once have done. And in this context Lincolnshire really matters – it is a significant food growing and processing area, an increasingly key part of the country’s critical infrastructure.

Large areas of the Fens exist because generations of people have engineered water out of the landscape. Pumps, drains, embankments and sluices maintain an extraordinary artificial geography, much of it at or even below sea level. It is the environment I grew up with – and the landscape in which the idea for Flood Waters Down first took shape.

The night the idea arrived
During the panel, Samantha asked where the novel had begun. I traced it back to the North Sea storm surge of December 2013. At the time I was doing some reporting in the area and visited Surfleet Seas End, where farmers and drainage officials had been watching the water rise alarmingly close to the top of the flood banks.

What stayed with me was the margin. A few inches. Standing there afterwards, I found myself wondering what would happen if, one night in the future, the water rose those extra few inches. What happens when it over tops the bank? Where does it go? And what happens to the people who have spent their lives believing those banks will protect them?

This eventually became the opening chapter of Flood Waters Down. The scene is a remote Fenland sluice at Surfleet Seas End where Jack Craft and his father watch the water rise through the darkness. The water eventually tops the bank and Jack's father sets off upstream in an old motorboat. It is the last time Jack sees him.

Though water is the catalyst, my intention was never simply to write a novel about a flood.. What interested me was what follows as the accelerating effects of climate change take hold. 

Turning fact into “future history”
My route into fiction was different from Amy's. She came through creative writing, completing an MA and PhD before becoming a lecturer in creative writing at the University of Lincoln. I came through journalism.

I became a reporter at 18, partly inspired, rather improbably, by seeing All the President's Men. Later I was able to combine journalism with another lifelong interest – space exploration – and have spent much of the past three decades writing about the international space sector.

Alongside that has been a longstanding interest in environmental issues and climate change. More recently, however, something began to trouble me. You can write factual articles about climate change until, as I put it during the panel, you are “blue in the face”. There is an enormous amount of excellent science, journalism and analysis available.

Yet facts alone do not necessarily connect. Graphs showing projected sea-level rise and reports explaining the consequences of two degrees of warming are important. But neither necessarily answers the intensely human question: what will that actually feel like? 

That was where fiction began to interest me. I described Flood Waters Down during the discussion as a kind of “future history” – taking what we know now and asking what one plausible version of the future might look like if today's trends continue.

There is a distinction between prediction and possibility. Climate fiction does not need to tell us precisely what will happen – its power lies in asking us to inhabit something that could happen.

What if we are the refugees?
Amy's novel The Water That May Come approaches that question from another direction and, interestingly, she told the audience that she had not originally set out to write a climate-change novel at all.

One of its inspirations was a much-publicised theory from the 1990s that a volcanic collapse in the Canary Islands might generate a huge Atlantic tsunami affecting the UK. Another came much later, after Brexit.

Having spent several years in France, Amy began wondering what would happen if Britain suddenly had to be evacuated. Where would British people go? And, outside the European Union, who would take them? It produces one of the most interesting reversals in The Water That May Come – British citizens becoming refugees.

Amy read a passage in which her character Jane is travelling north with a baby, hoping eventually to reach safety in Finland. Passing through the Lake District, she encounters an official responsible for allocating space to displaced people. Jane suddenly understands her position. She is, effectively, a refugee in her own country.

That prompted one of the strongest strands of our conversation. We are accustomed to seeing refugees through the distancing lens of television screens and newspaper reports: people crossing borders, boarding boats, fleeing floods, wars, droughts and failed states.

But what if the people looking for sanctuary were us? What if a British family arrived at a foreign border carrying everything it could salvage?
What if we needed the small boat?

Fiction can perform that reversal extraordinarily effectively because it removes the comforting distance between observer and victim.

Geography of disaster
Disaster fiction traditionally destroys places such as New York, Washington, Los Angeles or London. Hollywood has demolished them repeatedly, Samantha observed. “It feels different when catastrophe arrives in Spalding, Boston, Sittingbourne or Nuneaton,” she said.

Both novels use familiar British geography. In Flood Waters Down, the Fens are central to the story. Spalding becomes important. London is decaying under the combined pressure of climate disruption and social breakdown.

Amy, meanwhile, makes Nuneaton significant precisely because of its geography: being about as far from the sea as it is possible to get in England.

For readers who know these places, the effect can be oddly unsettling. Climate change stops being something happening to a Pacific island or a melting glacier thousands of miles away. It happens down the road.

Don't buy a bungalow
The point became unexpectedly entertaining when the discussion opened to the audience. One questioner recalled hearing archaeologist and Fenland expert Francis Pryor discussing his book The Fens. His advice, she remembered, to people contemplating the future of low-lying Fenland communities included two particularly memorable suggestions. “Don't buy a bungalow.” 

And, if evacuation ever becomes necessary, don't expect the official evacuation routes to be empty. It raised laughter but the underlying point was serious. How prepared are we? 

There is an enormous difference between escaping an immediate disaster and coping with its aftermath. If flood water arrives tonight, the immediate question is how to get people somewhere safe. But suppose the water doesn't go away?  Where do those people live next week? Next year?

What happens to property, farmland, communities, schools and businesses? And what happens to the emotional connection people have to places where their families may have lived for generations?” These are no longer questions confined to novels.

The UK's Climate Change Committee warned earlier this year that heat, flooding and drought pose growing risks to the British way of life. Its assessment suggests that by mid-century peak river flows could be up to 45 per cent higher than now, while 92 per cent of existing homes could be at risk of overheating. Water-supply shortfalls in England could exceed five billion litres a day.

In July, the Government adopted a cross-government planning assumption of at least 2C of warming by 2050 – an acknowledgement that adaptation can no longer be treated as an optional add-on to emissions reduction.

There is something sobering about official government planning beginning to occupy territory once largely inhabited by speculative fiction.

Who gets to escape?
Another theme linking our books was inequality. Amy has a billionaire, Pinko, who can contemplate climate catastrophe from an entirely different position to Jane, a single mother with vastly fewer resources. While other people worry about evacuation, Pinko can move horses, throw parties and ultimately escape in a helicopter.

It led to an excellent audience question: how do you make a billionaire sympathetic in a novel about a crisis to which extreme wealth and consumption are hardly irrelevant?

Amy's answer was that she had deliberately shown him living outside the world of “mere mortals”. Yet she also resisted making him a caricature. 

In Flood Waters Down, Baroness Lydia Frampton occupies similar territory although she is a considerably darker character. She is fabulously wealthy, politically connected and intelligent. Her response to climate breakdown is essentially to construct an escape from it: an enclave near Spalding where the very wealthy can insulate themselves from the deteriorating world beyond.

The question behind both characters is increasingly pertinent. When things become difficult, who gets out? Who owns the helicopter? Who has the fortified house? Who can relocate? Who has access to water, energy and security? And who is left standing beside the rising river?

Climate change is environmental but its consequences are inseparable from wealth and power.

Can we simply leave Earth?
Towards the end of the session, Samantha brought my other journalistic life into the conversation. If the Earth becomes increasingly difficult to inhabit, she asked, can we simply colonise Mars? My one-word answer was “No”, which probably requires qualification.

Humans may eventually establish some kind of presence on Mars. But the popular idea that an alien planet provides an easy escape hatch from a damaged Earth bears little relationship to the physical realities involved.

Mars is lethally hostile. Radiation alone presents enormous challenges. Then there are questions of life support, food, human physiology, psychology, reproduction and simply keeping people alive millions of miles from Earth.

Putting somebody into a rocket and firing them towards Mars is the relatively straightforward part. Building another functioning world is not. The irony is hard to miss.

We already possess an extraordinarily sophisticated spacecraft with abundant water, breathable air, a functioning biosphere, magnetic shielding, tolerable gravity and an immensely complicated life-support system that has operated successfully for billions of years. It's called Earth. Looking after it remains considerably easier than terraforming Mars.

The empathy gap
Perhaps the phrase from Amy that stayed with me most was “the empathy gap”. Those of us living in Britain can still, for much of the time, experience climate change at a distance – punctuated by increasingly frequent reminders closer to home. 

We know it is happening. We see the pictures. We read the statistics. Then we make a cup of tea and continue with the day. Although even that comfortable separation is becoming harder to maintain after summers such as this one.

Amy argued that stories can bridge some of that gap because readers become emotionally invested in people rather than statistics – and I think she is right.

Nobody cries over a graph. We might, however, care deeply about an invented woman driving north through England with a baby, wondering whether she will ever see the Lake District again.

We might care about a Fenland man standing beside his father as water creeps over a bank. And having cared about them, perhaps the graph means something different.

That does not make fiction a substitute for science. Quite the opposite. The science provides the foundation. Fiction asks us to imagine living inside its implications.

Fiction – for now
At the end of the discussion, Samantha asked what we hoped readers would take from our books. My answer was straightforward. Don't ignore what is happening now because doing so stores up consequences for the future.

Flood Waters Down isn't intended as an exact prediction of life in Britain in the near future. I sincerely hope much of it remains fiction. But its world is not conjured from nowhere.

The heat, floods, storms, migration, technological disruption, inequality and political reluctance to confront uncomfortable realities all have roots in the present. That is why climate fiction feels increasingly relevant. It allows us to rehearse possibilities before we have to live them. It lets us ask what happens to ordinary people when systems begin to fail. Who adapts? Who profits? Who leaves? Who stays? Who helps somebody else – and who closes the gate behind them?

On an unsettled August bank holiday weekend in a small Lincolnshire village, those questions generated a lively, thoughtful and occasionally amusing hour of topical conversation. At the end, the audience applauded and everyone headed outside for coffee, books and the next festival session. The real world resumed. For now, at least.

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Editor's note:  Flood Waters Down is available through bookshops and online retailers in paperback and ebook editions. For author signings, talks or literary festivals please contact Clive Simpson direct. 

In Lincoln author signed copies can be purchased from Lindum Books and Lark Books, and in Sleaford and surrounding areas from The Travelling Bookshop.

Three Kings Organic is an elegant organic Wine Bar and Café in the picturesque Lincolnshire village of Threekingham. It serves top quality food and drink, with future plans to develop a flagship cookery school and shop on-site. A unique and enterprising venue with first class service and hospitality. 

Brexit at Ten: the long decade

Photo: Clive Simpson

TEN years ago tonight I sat up late watching the results of the EU referendum come in. Like millions of others, I had expected the country to step back from the brink. Instead, on the morning of 24 June 2016, Britain woke to discover it had embarked upon the largest act of economic and political self-harm in its modern history.

A decade later, the verdict is in. Brexit has failed. That is not a partisan slogan or the bitter complaint of someone who voted Remain. It is the unavoidable conclusion reached after ten years of evidence.

The remarkable thing about the tenth anniversary is not that Brexit remains controversial. It is that anyone still feels able to argue it has been a success.

Had Brexit delivered even a fraction of what was promised, now would be a day of national celebration. There would be speeches, commemorations and triumphant headlines. Politicians would be queueing up to claim credit. Instead, most would rather avoid mentioning it at all.

That silence speaks volumes. As I wrote in the aftermath of the referendum, Brexit was never really about Europe. It became a vessel into which voters poured every frustration they felt about austerity, immigration, stagnant wages, housing shortages, failing public services and political neglect. The European Union became a convenient proxy for a host of domestic failures that had little to do with Brussels and everything to do with Westminster.

The cure turned out to be worse than the disease. The promised economic renaissance never arrived. The bonfire of red tape never happened. The NHS did not receive £350 million a week. Trade did not become easier. British exporters did not discover a golden age of global opportunity. Instead, a growing body of evidence points in precisely the opposite direction.

Recent research suggests that Brexit has reduced UK GDP per capita by between six and eight per cent compared with similar advanced economies. Business investment is estimated to be 12 to 18 per cent lower than it would otherwise have been, while employment and productivity have both suffered significant declines.

These are not abstract statistics. They represent lost opportunities, lower wages, reduced tax revenues and fewer resources for public services than would have otherwise been the case.

In 2019 I described this as Brexit's "invisible uncertainty" – the economic drag created when businesses postpone decisions, investors look elsewhere and opportunities quietly disappear. A decade on, that uncertainty is no longer invisible. It is reflected in the country's weaker growth, lower productivity and diminished prospects.

Even before the long-term consequences became clear, markets delivered an immediate verdict. When the referendum result emerged in June 2016, sterling experienced its largest single-day fall since the era of floating exchange rates began. Unlike the stock market, which eventually recovered, the pound never truly regained its former strength.

Of course, Brexit supporters have spent years arguing that the real problem was not Brexit itself but the way it was implemented. It is a familiar defence.

Communism never failed because of communism. It failed because it was implemented incorrectly. Brexit, apparently, suffers from the same convenient excuse. Yet the reality is that Brexit was always built upon contradictory promises.

Britain would enjoy all the benefits of membership without any obligations. Immigration would fall while the economy boomed. Trade would become easier despite introducing barriers with our largest trading partner. Regulation would be slashed while standards remained unchanged.

These things could never all be true at the same time and, 10 years on, the public increasingly recognises that fact.

In 2022 when I wrote ‘Breaking the Brexit Taboo’ and questioned why Brexit was still treated in some quarters as an act of disloyalty. Today the taboo has largely disappeared. The debate has moved on from whether Brexit can be criticised to whether anyone can credibly claim it has succeeded.

According to recent polling, 57 per cent of people in Great Britain now believe leaving the EU was the wrong decision, while only 30 per cent think it was right. The only surprising thing about that statistic is that 30 per cent still think it was the right decision.

The referendum itself now feels like a relic from another political age. David Cameron, who called it, resigned within hours of losing it. Theresa May was consumed by it. Boris Johnson rode it into Downing Street before being destroyed by his own conduct. Liz Truss briefly crashed the economy. Rishi Sunak inherited the wreckage. Keir Starmer attempted to manage the consequences but had only been repairing EU relations in a limited way.

By this tenth anniversary Britain has gone through seven prime ministers since the vote. Stability and prosperity were among Brexit's promises. Neither has been delivered.

And then there is immigration. One of the central arguments advanced by Leave campaigners was that Brexit would allow Britain to "take back control" of its borders.

Yet net migration reached record levels in the years following departure from the EU. Whatever one thinks about immigration itself, Brexit demonstrably failed on one of its own defining tests.

Several years ago, in the aftermath of the Covid pandemic, I coined the phrase "long Brexit". The comparison with Long Covid seemed appropriate then and even more so today. The acute political shock may have passed but the symptoms remain stubbornly present.

Economic under performance, labour shortages, trade friction, political instability and endless arguments about Europe continued to shape British life long after the referendum itself had disappeared into history. A decade later long Brexit remains with us.

Perhaps the saddest aspect of the entire saga is the opportunity lost.

Imagine a Britain that had spent the last decade focusing on housing, productivity, energy security, climate adaptation, infrastructure, education and healthcare rather than tying itself in knots over customs arrangements, trade agreements and constitutional disputes.

Imagine a politics that had sought solutions to the country's real problems rather than inventing imaginary enemies.

Instead, an entire generation has lived through a period dominated by a project that promised national renewal and delivered national diminishment.

The irony is that Brexit was sold as a means of restoring sovereignty and confidence. Yet modern Britain feels less confident, less prosperous and less influential than it did in 2016.

Brexit was sold as an event. In reality it became a condition and history will ultimately decide where the episode sits in the long story of this country. But ten years on, one conclusion seems unavoidable. The referendum was not the beginning of Britain's revival. It was the beginning of a long decade of decline.

And, as the country prepares for yet another Prime Minister and another round of ministerial changes, we are still living with the consequences.

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Photo: The Sir Peter Scott lighthouse at Sutton Bridge from a photo by the author. The original picture was taken during a recce trip for the novel Flood Waters Down, a climate change and AI thriller which is available now.

Brexit election's invisible uncertainty

Space Oddity

Breaking the Brexit taboo

Post-Brexit UK faces up to EU Space Act

 

The European Commission’s long-awaited unveiling of the EU Space Act on 25 June 2025 marked a pivotal step towards harmonised space governance across the bloc.

Framed around safety, resilience and sustainability, the proposed regulation aims to streamline market access, strengthen cybersecurity and mitigate orbital debris – all while boosting the EU’s strategic autonomy in space.

Yet for those operating outside the EU’s regulatory orbit – notably post-Brexit UK – the Act presents new uncertainties.

These tensions surfaced during this week’s European Space Forum, held in Brussels on 3-4 July, where 450 delegates gathered to discuss the future of Europe’s space ambitions.

During a panel discussion on ‘Delivering Autonomy’, I asked UK government representative William Smith, how the Act might affect UK space operators, now classed as part of a “third country” under EU law.

“I think it's very early days to comment,” he replied. “The UK Government don't have a formal position yet. We acknowledge what [the Act] is trying to do and support any endeavour that is looking to make the orbital environment and space in general more secure, more resilient and safer. That is a collective good, undoubtedly.”

He went on to emphasise the UK’s own regulatory framework: “The UK's regulatory regime is an outcomes-based, agile regime, which works. It's not perfect but we get good feedback from international stakeholders.”

The EU Space Act, still in draft form, outlines the possibility of recognising third-country regulatory regimes as equivalent – but offers no detail yet on how such equivalence would be determined or negotiated.

This leaves UK-based companies potentially facing a dual compliance burden or limitations on market access unless formal agreements are reached.

Without clarity on equivalence, UK firms hoping to provide services within the EU may face fresh licensing or oversight hurdles. The EU’s detailed rules on debris mitigation, cybersecurity and environmental impact may also diverge from UK approaches.

Still, with the proposed implementation date set for 1 January 2030, a transitional window provides space – and time – for dialogue and potential alignment.

While the UK government assesses the fine print, industry voices are likely to press for early engagement to avoid regulatory friction. If managed well, the situation could still evolve into a constructive regulatory partnership that enables innovation and access on both sides.

But Smith’s response, while diplomatic, underscored a recurring theme of constructive ambiguity that characterised much of the European Space Forum.

With no formal UK stance yet, industry remains in a holding pattern, awaiting clarity on whether the country’s agile, outcomes-based regime will be deemed sufficiently compatible.

In the meantime, the EU’s move should be seen as a positive step. It signals a firm commitment to space sustainability, safety and long-term governance – and a timely reminder that access to orbit increasingly comes with strings attached.

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Links: European Space Forum & EU Space Act

An end to Brexit's tiresome rhetoric

 

UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer's ‘EU reset’ deal this week is to be welcomed as a positive and long-overdue step in the right direction.

But in its wake, the usual chorus of Brexit hardliners – Nigel Farage, Richard Tice, Kemi Badenoch and Boris Johnson – have emerged from the shadows, decrying it as a betrayal of British sovereignty.

As usual, their criticisms ring hollow and lack substance when juxtaposed with the tangible benefits and potential the deal offers compared to the stark realities and damage of Brexit's aftermath.

It’s a pragmatic step forward, marking a significant stride in mending the UK's fractured relationship with the European Union.

Key components include:

• Defence cooperation – renewed collaboration on security and defence initiatives enhances the UK's role in European stability and strengthens joint responses to global threats.
• Economic boost – the agreement is projected to add £9 billion to the UK economy by 2040, primarily through streamlined trade in agrifoods and electricity.
• Reintegration into Erasmus – British students will once again have access to the Erasmus programme, fostering educational and cultural exchange.
• Eased travel – UK travellers will benefit from faster e-gate access in EU countries, reducing airport delays.
• Energy cooperation – rejoining the EU's internal energy market could save UK consumers £37 billion annually.

Hardliners have lambasted the deal, labelling it as "rule-taking" and a “surrender of sovereignty”, desperately clinging to their failed narrative and arguments of the past.

Take fishing rights, for example. While the deal extends EU fishing access to UK waters for 12 years, it does not increase quotas or change what was previously agreed. The concession does, however, facilitate broader economic gains, including the resumption of UK shellfish exports.

And on regulatory alignment. Aligning with EU food standards reduces red tape, benefiting UK exporters and consumers alike. This is a pragmatic choice, not a capitulation, and has been widely welcomed by British businesses already.

The original Brexit vision pledged control, prosperity and a so-called return to ‘sovereignty’. But nearly a decade on the evidence tells a very different story.

Economic self-harm – since Brexit, the UK economy has haemorrhaged an estimated £100 billion a year in lost output. Business investment stalled and labour markets have been squeezed.

Export chaos – once-proud British industries, such as fishing and agriculture, were hit hardest. UK seafood exports to Europe slumped by over 25 percent, with shellfish sellers facing insurmountable trade barriers. This, despite being one of the sectors Brexit was supposedly meant to “liberate”.

Immigration irony – and those claims about controlling immigration? Reality bites hard. Net migration hit a record 728,000 in the year to June 2024 – not from the EU, but from countries further afield. The end of free movement didn’t mean fewer arrivals, just a more chaotic and costly system to manage them.

As many predicted – including this writer – the so-called 'Brexit dividend' quickly turned out to be a mirage of false promises.

And yet, the likes of Farage in his reinvented Reform party and his fellow hardliners continue to peddle the same tired slogans – blind to the economic wreckage, indifferent to the lived experience of working people and unwilling to engage with reality.

That’s why Keir Starmer’s reset deal deserves more than a cautious welcome – it deserves recognition as a long-overdue, grown-up intervention.

Refreshingly, it sets aside chest-thumping ideology in favour of cooperation, stability and mutual benefit. It restores damaged channels of trade, mobility and trust – and offers a way back towards international relevance.

Predictably, the billionaire-owned right-wing press have gone into full outrage mode. But beyond the headlines and faux fury, a quieter truth is emerging – much of the country is ready to move on.

Businesses are relieved. Students are hopeful. Travellers and exporters see a future with fewer pointless obstacles.

This deal isn’t about reversing Brexit – it’s about repairing what was broken. And if Farage and friends find that uncomfortable, it’s only because they no longer have a credible argument to make.

Their Brexit dream has failed. The rest of us are ready to refocus and look to the future.