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.

 #         #

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.

 

Earth's climate imbalance

The World Meteorological Organization’s (WMO) State of the Global Climate report 2025 confirms that 2015-2025 are the hottest 11 years on record, and that 2025 was the second or third hottest year on record, at about 1.43C above the 1850-1900 average.

Extreme events around the world, including intense heat, heavy rainfall and tropical cyclones, caused disruption and devastation and highlighted the vulnerability of our inter-connected economies and societies.

The ocean continues to warm and absorb carbon dioxide. It has been absorbing the equivalent of about eighteen times the annual human energy use each year for the past two decades. Annual sea ice extent in the Arctic was at or near a record low, Antarctic sea ice extent was the third lowest on record, and glacier melt continued unabated, according to the report.

“The state of the global climate is in a state of emergency.  Planet Earth is being pushed beyond its limits.  Every key climate indicator is flashing red,” said UN Secretary-General António Guterres.

“Humanity has just endured the eleven hottest years on record. When history repeats itself eleven times, it is no longer a coincidence.  It is a call to act,” said Mr Guterres.

 WMO’s flagship State of the Global Climate report was released on World Meteorological Day on 23 March, which has the theme Observing Today, Protecting Tomorrow.

For the first time, the report includes the Earth’s energy imbalance as one of the key climate indicators.

The Earth’s energy balance measures the rate at which energy enters and leaves the Earth system. Under a stable climate, incoming energy from the sun is about the same as the amount of outgoing energy. 

However, increasing concentrations of heat-trapping greenhouse gases - carbon dioxide, methane and nitrous oxide - to their highest level in at least 800,000 years have upset this equilibrium.

The Earth’s energy imbalance has increased since its observational record began in 1960, particularly in the past 20 years. It reached a new high in 2025. 

 “Scientific advances have improved our understanding of the Earth’s energy imbalance and of the reality facing our planet and our climate right now,” said WMO Secretary-General Celeste Saulo. “Human activities are increasingly disrupting the natural equilibrium and we will live with these consequences for hundreds and thousands of years.”

“On a day-to-day basis, our weather has become more extreme. In 2025, heatwaves, wildfires, drought, tropical cyclones, storms and flooding caused thousands of deaths, impacted millions of people and caused billions in economic losses,” said Celeste Saulo.

The warming of the atmosphere including near the Earth’s surface (the temperatures that humans feel) represents just one percent of the excess energy, whilst about five percent is stored in the continental land masses.

More than 91 percent of the excess heat is stored in the ocean, which acts as a major buffer against higher temperatures on land. Ocean heat content reached a new record high in 2025 and its rate of warming more than doubled from 1960-2005 to 2005-2025.

Another three percent of the excess energy warms and melts ice. The ice sheets on Antarctica and Greenland have both lost significant mass and the annual average Arctic sea-ice extent for 2025 was the lowest or second lowest on record in the satellite era. Exceptional glacier mass loss occurred in Iceland and along the Pacific coast of North America in 2025. 

 he warming ocean and melting ice are driving the long-term rise in global mean sea level, which has accelerated since satellite measurements began in 1993.

Ocean warming and sea level rise will continue for centuries, according to projections by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). Changes in ocean warming, and deep ocean pH are irreversible on centennial to millennial time scales.

The report is accompanied by an interactive story map. It has a dedicated supplement on extreme events, highlighting their cascading impacts, including on food insecurity and displacement.

It includes a chapter on climate and health, showing how rising temperatures, shifting rainfall patterns and changes in extremes are affecting where and when health risks emerge, how severe they become and who is most exposed.

It highlights the examples of the mosquito-borne dengue disease and of heat stress – and illustrates how climate data, early warning systems and integrated climate services for health can protect people in a warming world.

“And in this age of war, climate stress is also exposing another truth: our addiction to fossil fuels is destabilizing both the climate and global security.  Today’s report should come with a warning label: climate chaos is accelerating and delay is deadly,” said Mr Guterres.

The State of the Global Climate Report 2025 is based on scientific contributions from National Meteorological and Hydrological Services, WMO Regional Climate Centres, United Nations partners and dozens of experts.

“WMO’s State of the Global Climate report seeks to inform decision-making. It is in keeping with the theme of World Meteorological Day because when we observe today, we don’t just predict the weather, we protect tomorrow. Tomorrow’s people. Tomorrow’s planet,” said Celeste Saulo.

Desert dreams - a fragile reality

Dubai beach scene.                                                              Photo: C Simpson

Dubai is an extraordinary metropolis in one of the planet’s most hostile environments. But as conflict disrupts the Gulf and Earth’s climate continues to warm, Clive Simpson asks whether this desert city offers a glimpse of humanity’s future – or a warning about its fragility.

The most populous city in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) is built upon some enormous suppositions. That energy will remain abundant. That trade routes will remain open. That aircraft will continue arriving in their thousands. That desalination plants will keep producing water and that the elaborate machinery required to sustain millions of people in a fiercely inhospitable environment will continue humming uninterrupted.

Above all, perhaps, that technology and money can keep nature at bay.

When I visited Dubai for the first time last autumn, those assumptions were difficult to ignore. Here was an exceptional conurbation of concrete and tarmac rising from the desert, apparently insulated from the environmental and geopolitical realities surrounding it.

Less than a year later, some are being put to the test. Conflict across the Middle East has placed extraordinary pressure on the arteries connecting the Gulf to the wider world, exposing vulnerabilities that are easily overlooked when everything is working.

Dubai is an astonishing demonstration of what humanity can build when money, energy and technology come together. It is also a manifestation of just how dependent modern civilisation has become upon all three.

The refrigerated city

By day three in Dubai, I had developed the air-con cough. Not a virus, just the inevitable consequence of living inside a refrigerated cocoon. Step outside and the heat hits like an opened furnace door. Step back in and your lungs tighten in protest at the mechanical chill.

The UAE’s centrepiece city exists almost in defiance of its natural environment. Temperatures routinely climb into the high 40s during summer as the accelerating effects of climate change promise still greater extremes across the whole Gulf. Yet construction continues on an astounding scale. Towers rise as fast as cranes can swing them into place. Whole districts appear to materialise overnight.

Flying towards Dubai, the contradictions begin long before landing. On my Emirates flight we passed over Iraq near Baghdad and skirted the precarious artery of the Suez Canal. As dawn broke, I looked down at oil fields and gas flares burning against the pale sky.

Then came Dubai, the city rising obscenely from the desert like the world of some futuristic sci-fi movie. Outlying villas and settlements sit marooned in seas of sand, the wind-smoothed dunes quietly reminding you who owns this landscape.

Dubai and its environs appear to exist in a mirage of permanence, conjured into being by wealth, engineering and climate control. Even the coastline has been instructed to conform. The iconic Palm Jumeirah – an immense geometric flourish best appreciated from the air or space – was reclaimed from the Gulf, imposing its own geometry on what had once been open water.

Conquering geography

Almost everything required to sustain human life in the city depends upon abundant energy: desalinated water, air conditioning, illuminated towers, transport networks, hotels, shopping malls and the constant movement of millions of people through one of the world's great aviation hubs.

The result can be intoxicating. The beaches are immaculate. Hotels are luxurious. Roads are wide and manicured. Shopping malls become destinations in themselves. There is even, famously, an indoor ski slope. Outside, meanwhile, lies the desert.

The impression is of a gigantic, controlled environment, a city whose inhabitants experience the natural world largely after it has been filtered, cooled, irrigated or otherwise improved at the behest of man.

But that is also what makes Dubai interesting beyond the obvious questions about wealth and excess. Perhaps it isn't an aberration at all. Perhaps it is simply an exaggerated version of the bargain much of modern civilisation has made.

We use technology and enormous quantities of energy to insulate ourselves from environmental boundaries while our collective consumption makes those same limits increasingly difficult to ignore. Dubai merely makes the arrangement spectacularly visible.

When the arteries constrict

Recent events have demonstrated just how quickly those assumptions can be tested. The Strait of Hormuz is not some distant geopolitical abstraction to Dubai. Look at a map. The narrow waterway sits immediately beyond the UAE's coastline, separating the Gulf from the Arabian Sea and the wider world.

For decades it has been one of the principal arteries of the global energy system. Now that artery has constricted.

Shipping movements have fallen sharply during the conflict and energy markets have been disrupted. On 17 September just four commodity vessels transited the strait, compared with a ten-day average of 16.

At the opposite end of the Arabian Peninsula, the advance of Houthi forces along Yemen's Red Sea coast has simultaneously increased concern about shipping through Bab el-Mandeb.

The remarkable thing is not that the system has failed but how quickly geopolitical events can expose the complex infrastructure upon which normality depends.

Dubai's prosperity rests not merely upon oil or gas, but upon connectivity. Its airport links Europe, Asia, Africa and Australasia. Its hotels depend upon tourists arriving. Its businesses depend upon international capital and labour. Its supermarkets depend upon supply chains stretching far beyond the desert.

The city is therefore simultaneously an extraordinary demonstration of globalisation and an unusually concentrated expression of its vulnerabilities.

When the system works, it appears effortless. When it stutters, we suddenly see the machinery on which that effortlessness depends.

A city from the future?

There is a temptation to regard Dubai as something exotic – an extravagant desert playground made possible by Gulf wealth and tax-free living. That lets the rest of us off rather too easily.

Look instead at increasingly hot cities across southern Europe. Look at the growing demand for air conditioning as temperatures rise. Look at water shortages, desalination projects, artificial environments and the energy required to make densely populated places tolerable during extreme heat.

Dubai may be unusual but only because it arrived early. Climate change means more of humanity will increasingly depend upon our ability to make environments habitable.

The question is not whether technology can do this. Dubai proves that it can. The more difficult question is how resilient such systems remain when climate, energy and geopolitics begin applying pressure simultaneously.

Last autumn I stood on my hotel balcony at dusk watching the city emerge from the day’s murky heat. One by one the lights came on across the skyline. Glass towers glittered against the darkening sky and traffic flowed along immaculate highways below. It was undeniably impressive. But was also acutely aware that beyond the illuminated city lay the creeping sand, waiting patiently in the darkness of the desert.

Dubai may be an extreme case, but the bargain it represents is increasingly our own: ever more sophisticated technology and ever greater expenditure of energy to keep environmental limits at arm's length.

Whether that makes it a monument to human ingenuity or a warning about our belief in permanent abundance remains an open question. For now, the towers continue to rise, the lights come on and the desert is kept at bay. And, perhaps most immediately, the air-conditioning keeps purring.

#         #

Editor’s note: this article was updated on 21 September 2026.