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. 

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.

 

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