Humanity’s climate emergency no longer lurks in some distant, abstract future. It is encroaching – slowly and unevenly – into our daily lives, politics and psychology.
We are living in a time when yesterday’s dystopias are starting to feel like tomorrow’s headlines, and the Danish TV drama Families Like Ours, which I’ve just finished watching (BBC 4 and iPlayer), could hardly be timelier.
Set in a recognisably near-future world, the series imagines a country that will soon become unliveable due to rising sea levels.
The nation is forced to evacuate in order to avoid the worst effects of climate collapse – an unsettling premise that turns the tables on our assumptions about migration, power, and privilege.
These are not just speculative ideas for me. Similar themes – a fractured country grappling with inundation, social disintegration and a creeping authoritarianism born of environmental breakdown – are explored in my own forthcoming novel.
Watching Families Like Ours, I felt as though I was viewing an alternative version of my own future world – an unsettling “what if”, unfolding not in an alien realm or distant century but just around the next political and climatic corner.
Drama of denial
What’s particularly powerful – and is also noted in The Guardian’s excellent review – is the drama’s restraint in the midst of crisis.
There are no Hollywood-style disasters, no CGI tsunamis or blazing infernos. The apocalypse arrives in the form of an official government directive urging people to evacuate for their own good.
It’s slow, procedural and quietly bureaucratic – a polite but chilling, “Leave while you still can”. It’s not the bang of destruction but the whimper of compliance.
As the review puts it: “The creeping horror comes from how normal everyone is trying to pretend it all is.”
That line haunted me because in many ways it captures the most terrifying part of our own present: the societal impulse to look away from impending disaster.
Denial – especially around the politics of human-driven climate change – is one of the most potent forces of our age. It manifests not only in outright scepticism, but in the performative optimism of politicians and social media commentators, the greenwashing of corporations and the general inertia of daily life.
We’re encouraged to adapt, to “build back better”, to install air conditioning or move to higher ground – all without seriously confronting the root causes or long-term consequences.
In my upcoming novel Flood Waters Down, I explore how denial calcifies into something darker: a form of authoritarianism cloaked in pragmatism. When people become desperate for security, they often look to ideology, to borders, to technological fixes and political scapegoats.
The regime that emerges in my novel doesn’t rise through a coup. It grows organically, incrementally, from the fertile soil of fear, apathy, and obscene wealth.
That’s the genius of Families Like Ours. It shows how easily we might slide into such a world – not with jackboots and firestorms but via polite emails, official notices and a quietly panicking population.
Climate as character
Another powerful parallel is how the environment itself becomes a kind of character – not a passive backdrop, but an active force that shapes events, relationships and identities.
For the Danish series, the land is turning against its people. It’s no longer safe or reliable, forcing individuals and families to make choices they never imagined – not just about where they live but about who they are.
In this context, Flood Waters Down uses the English Fens as a landscape transformed by flooding into a waterlogged no-man’s-land of shifting loyalties and fragile settlements.
It is at once beautiful and treacherous, steeped in memory and myth, but altered beyond recognition. My characters must navigate not just physical terrain but the moral geography of a broken society.
A question that looms large in both the TV drama and climate fiction like mine is: who gets to stay, and who is forced to go?
In Families Like Ours, the reversal of current refugee and migration narratives is pointed. Suddenly, it is affluent Europeans who must flee. The usual script is flipped, inviting viewers to reconsider the racial, economic, and geopolitical dynamics of climate migration.
By contrast, Flood Waters Down focuses on those who are left behind. Those who remain in the Fens – whether by choice, circumstance or resistance – are seen as dangerous or irrelevant by the centralised regime. The government has moved on. Sovereign individuals are given free rein, exploiting the fears of the wealthy.
The people left behind, ghosted from the national narrative, become the seedbed of something new – an insurgent hope, a counterculture rooted in resilience and memory.
Not all of them are heroes. Some are lost, vengeful, morally compromised. But they refuse to disappear. They refuse to comply with the tidy story of evacuation and erasure.
And maybe that’s what climate fiction, at its best, can offer. Not just warnings but alternatives. Not just despair but a glimpse of the radical imagination we’ll need to survive – and adapt.
Edge of reality
Stories about what the future has in store matter because they help us feel the unfolding crisis – not just understand it intellectually but inhabit it emotionally. What would you do? How would you respond? What would you cling to, and what would you let go of?
Climate fiction is not about predicting the future with accuracy. It’s about preparing ourselves with clarity and courage to meet what materialises. And it may yet prove to be one of our most powerful tools in confronting the climate emergency.
The Danish drama ends not with neat resolution but with the unsettling knowledge that something has irrevocably changed – and that our familiar categories of nation, family, identity and home may no longer apply.
Flood Waters Down concludes too not with triumph but with possibility. With characters who have chosen to fight for a different kind of future, even as the old world sinks beneath the waterline and a new, uncertain one begins to emerge.
The climate emergency is already here. The question is: what stories will we tell about it – and what kind of world will we shape in its wake?
