When reality catches up with fiction

 

EVERY so often, reality catches up with fiction. Watching Europe endure another brutal heatwave this week, I found myself thinking back not to a scientific paper or a news report, but to a passage I wrote for Flood Waters Down several years ago.

It comes from the opening of Chapter 3, introducing one of the novel's principal characters at his Surfleet Seas End houseboat home.

It was barely nine o'clock in the morning, and already the outside temperature was edging towards thirty degrees centigrade as the sun climbed into a cloudless sky of menacing blue. Jack Craft had become accustomed to the energy-sapping heat of such days that now interspersed the frequent storms like a distorted form of meteorological punctuation.

The more temperate and predictable seasons of the past had never been part of his experience. He often wondered what it would have been like to live a life that was, in meteorological terms at least, almost carefree compared with the harsh realities of survival he now faced each day.

Reading those words today gives me no satisfaction. If anything, it is deeply unsettling because the novel is set 20 years or more in the future, whereas the conditions that inspired it are seemingly becoming steadily less fictional.

This June, temperatures across Europe climbed into territory once regarded as exceptional. Hospitals have come under pressure. Wildfires have flared. Roads have buckled. Railways have slowed. And before the continent has had time to recover, forecasters are already warning that another spell of intense heat may arrive within days.

It is tempting to dismiss each event as simply another extraordinary summer but that misses the point. Prof Sir Jim Skea, Chair of the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, expressed it succinctly during an interview on BBC Radio.

"One heatwave by itself doesn't tell you that climate change is happening. But if it becomes a pattern, if they keep coming back, and if the long-term temperature records are an upward rise, it's a sure sign,” he stated

Such distinctions do matter because climate is measured over decades and centuries not afternoons or years. Yet patterns are becoming increasingly difficult to ignore. Records that once stood for generations are now broken frequently. Events described as "once in a century" seem to arrive with unsettling regularity.

Conversation is changing too. For years, much of the debate focused on preventing future warming. Now it is increasingly about adapting to the warming that is already here and locked in.  That is assuming we can adapt at large.

As Prof Skea observed, much of Britain's infrastructure was built for a different climate. Our homes, hospitals, railways and roads were designed for weather that is becoming part of history rather than everyday experience. He argues that even as temperatures continue to rise, we have not paid enough attention to adaptation.

The world’s oceans tell an equally worrying story. New figures released this week show that global ocean surface temperatures reached their highest June level on record. That’s relevant because the oceans are Earth's great heat reservoir, regulating weather, influencing rainfall, feeding storms and sustaining marine ecosystems.

Samantha Burgess, Deputy Director of the European climate service Copernicus, explained that warmer oceans affect almost everything: marine ecosystems come under stress, sea levels continue to rise through thermal expansion, storms gain energy and even fish populations begin to shift.

Perhaps most strikingly, she noted that changing ocean temperatures are already altering European weather patterns, making summer heatwaves “more intense, more frequent and more longer lasting than they were historically speaking”.

In other words, what we are experiencing is not simply bad luck. It is easy to become overwhelmed by statistics. Every few weeks seems to bring another record, another graph trending upwards, another headline declaring the "highest ever".

But climate change is not really experienced through graphs. It is experienced through cancelled train journeys, sleepless nights, reservoirs running low, rivers shrinking, forests burning and communities beginning to wonder whether the weather they once regarded as normal has quietly slipped into history.

When I began writing Flood Waters Down, I was interested not in predicting the future but in exploring where today's trends might eventually lead. As a space and environmental journalist, I had spent years reporting on climate science, flooding and changing landscapes. Fiction offered something journalism could not: the opportunity to imagine what it might actually feel like to live inside those changes.

The novel focuses on rising seas because it impacts the landscape of the Lincolnshire Fens that has always fascinated me. But flooding is only one chapter of the climate story. Heat, drought, wildfire, rising sea temperatures and more violent storms are all connected. They are different expressions of the same changing planet.

Science provides the evidence. Fiction asks a different question: what does it feel like to live there?

That was one of the issues I wanted to explore in Flood Waters Down. Looking across Europe today, it feels rather closer to home than when I first wrote the opening lines of that chapter.

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Editor's note: The picture at the head of this article is based on an original photo by the author from a shop window display during a visit to Manitou Springs, Colorado. The book title was added subsequently. 

Flood Waters Down (2026) is available now in paperback and ebook from bookshops and online.

Where data meets dystopia

 

Future flood risk areas across Eastern England. (Climate Central)

I’ve always been fascinated by maps. Even in today’s world of satellite navigation and real-time updates, there’s something deeply reassuring about unfolding a trusty Ordnance Survey chart.

But whether modern digital or old-style printed, these visual guides can reveal far more than just the lay of the land. They hint at stories – past, present and future. 

Look long enough and you begin to see not only how the world is today but how it might be reshaped in the years ahead.

One such projection, hosted by Climate Central – a non-profit organisation of scientists and journalists that researches and communicates the impacts of climate change – powerfully illustrates how the world’s coastlines are gradually being redrawn.

Much of eastern England’s low-lying coast is a prime example of the land that will be changed by current rates of global warming and sea level rise.

Zoom into the coastline around The Wash, the Lincolnshire Fens and parts of Norfolk and Cambridgeshire, for example, and the familiar low-level terrain begins to vanish beneath a soft wash of red.

In near-future years, areas known for agriculture, an unassuming rural life and their historic market towns are increasingly shown as sitting in high flood risk zones – places where the sea will make ever more frequent inroads.

In technical terms the scenario depicted by Climate Central is based on the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC) 2021 median projection under the SSP3-RCP7.0 pathway, which suggests global sea levels could rise by an average of over half a metre by 2050.

Whilst this may not sound catastrophic in itself, the impact on low-lying coastal and inland regions such as the Fens could be profound.

Sea floods will become more frequent and, in some places, just a few more inches of water could turn temporary storm surge flood zones into permanent wetland or, worse still, uninhabitable zones.

It’s a slow-motion disaster already moving forwards apace - and it’s also the starting point for the world I build in my forthcoming novel.

Personal and urgent

Flood Waters Down is set in a dystopian near-future Britain, where the eastern lowlands have been severely impacted by rising sea levels, repeated flooding and  climate-driven societal change.

Much of the action unfolds in and around a transformed Fens region – a landscape made unfamiliar not just by water also but by the consequences of ecological neglect and authoritarian responses.

I didn’t choose the setting by accident. I grew up here and live not far from these primal lands. I know their moods, the smell of the fields, the rhythm of life in mile after mile of flat country where sky and soil focus the conversation.

This familiarity made the writing more personal – and more urgent. When you imagine your own region unravelling at the edges, fiction quickly becomes something more than entertainment. It’s like a window on the future.

In recent years, climate fiction – or “climate-inflected sci-fi” – has matured into a serious literary genre. It’s not about predicting precisely what might happen, but rather projecting emotional, social and political truths through the lens of imagination.

That’s the intention behind Flood Waters Down – to extrapolate not just environmental conditions but the human responses that arise in their wake.

Map reading

The Coastal Risk Screening Tool developed by Climate Central uses peer-reviewed data and elevation models to simulate areas likely to fall below future annual flood levels.

The default setting projects flood risk for the year 2050 by combining anticipated sea level rise with the statistical height of a typical annual coastal flood. This leads to a visualisation of areas where permanent or frequent inundation may occur, reflecting  land, in the absence of any flood protection infrastructure, that would be below water during an annual flood event in 2050.

As a result, it can add risk to areas that may currently be defended in one way or another – and act as a reminder that such protections require continuous investment, maintenance and political will to remain effective.

The visual simplicity of the tool belies its complexity. You can explore different scenarios and time frames using the year slider and other settings – including more severe flood probabilities or the projected impacts of sea level rise alone.

Disappearing towns

In the SSP3-RCP7.0 scenario – considered a “regional rivalry” pathway with moderate-to-high emissions and limited climate policy cooperation – vast swathes of Lincolnshire and the East Anglian coast appear increasingly vulnerable.

Towns like Boston, Holbeach, Wisbech, King’s Lynn and Spalding are among those at greater risk. Crucially, it’s not just coastal settlements but deep inland areas at sea level, historically reliant on pumps and drainage defences, that face the greatest exposure.

In Flood Waters Down, I take this reality and extend it into the future. Civil infrastructure has failed, government priorities have shifted and certain regions are no longer considered worth defending or restoring.

People who stay behind – by choice, by poverty or protest – form fragmented communities, surviving in marginal conditions and living outside the protection of what remains of the state.

This isn’t science fiction in the conventional sense. It’s a narrative echo of today’s policy drift and tomorrow’s possible consequences.

We’ve been here before

The Fens, of course, have always lived with water. Historically marshland, they were systematically drained between the 17th and 20th centuries to create some of the UK’s most fertile farmland. That reclamation was a triumph of engineering, ambition and hubris – the human desire to master nature.

But as climate change accelerates and sea levels rise, this delicate equilibrium is under threat. According to the UK Environment Agency, around 620,000 properties in England are currently at risk from coastal flooding.

The same organisation warns that parts of Eastern England may be impossible to defend indefinitely without major adaptation or relocation strategies.

Add to that the social and political dimensions – resource stress, forced migration and increased surveillance – and you begin to glimpse the world Flood Waters Down inhabits.

Fiction as foresight

After many years writing as a journalist, I now also believe fiction has a vital role to play in climate discourse. Scientific data tells us what might happen; stories help us imagine what it could feel like. 

And in a time when climate anxiety is increasingly widespread – but often abstract or numbed – storytelling can make the intangible personal again.

The characters in Flood Waters Down are not heroes in the traditional sense. They’re ordinary people living in extraordinary times – facing moral compromise, loss and the persistent pull of memory. They resist erasure, they adapt and sometimes they fail. But above all, they bear witness.

Through them, I explore the many layers of the climate crisis, not just floods and nature, but governance, inequality, fear and the question of what kind of future we’re willing to fight for.

Flooding as a metaphor

When I began writing Flood Waters Down, I used flooding as metaphor – representing broader themes of collapse and disruption. But as I continued, and as the flood risk projections grew starker, I realised the metaphor was becoming real.

Sea levels are rising. Maps across the world are being redrawn. And governmental policy is either non-existent or still in the slow lane.

Climate Central’s map is a tool anyone can use to visualise what might be coming. My upcoming novel is a tool to feel it. 

Both are meant to spark conversation, reflection – and maybe, just maybe, preparation. Because the floodwaters aren’t just coming. In many places they’re already here. 

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Explore the map: Climate Central Coastal Risk Screening Tool

Flood Waters Down – for further details contact Clive Simpson