Algarve observation

 

September, like most months of the year these days, has forgotten its place in the calendar. From the shade of the garden overlooking the bay, Praia da Luz – on the south coast of Portugal – lies below in the fierce, crystalline light of an afternoon that belongs more naturally to the height of summer. 

The temperature has climbed into the low thirties again and the sun seems determined to hold its position, pressing down upon the bay with an almost physical weight. Nothing in the scene suggests summer is preparing to leave.

The garden terrace offers sanctuary. Great palms throw ragged shadows across the stone paths, filtering the sunlight into moving fragments. Pines and a gnarled cork tree lean towards the sea, the latter’s trunk dark and contorted, while succulents and cacti rise from the dry earth with the smug resilience of plants that long ago learned not to expect rain. Beneath them, the ground is dusty, baked hard after another long Algarve summer.

Beyond this shaded oasis is the brightness of the beach, a luminous, picture-perfect arch of sand and sea. Praia da Luz is busy without achieving the indignity of being crowded. Bronzed figures, reduced by distance and heat to anonymous specimens of leisure, wander slowly along the water’s edge while others grill in the rays of the overbearing sun. 

Umbrellas provide splashes of colour and the largely theoretical promise of shade. A few young children jump and splash in the water supervised by their parents. The Atlantic, so often restless, has been subdued into a sheet of serene blue and green, barely distinguishable at the horizon from the bleached sky above it.

My view is not the airbrushed Algarve of the holiday brochure but the lived-in daily rhythm of the coast: beautiful, untidy, functional.

Everything seems slowed by the heat, even the practical paraphernalia of resort life: cafés adorning the cobbled promenade dispensing lunch and cold drinks, giant inflatables on the beach awaiting temporary ownership, jet skis bobbing offshore with the neglected air of expensive toys nobody can be bothered to use.

To the east, the land rises abruptly, the great ochre and rust-coloured cliffs providing a reminder that this gentle bay has been carved in harsher times. Villas and apartments climb the opposite slope in white terraces, the inevitable southern European accretion of concrete, balconies and aspirational sea views, their walls dazzling in the afternoon glare.

And yet there is something slightly disconcerting about the perfection of it all. It is mid-September. The afternoon shadows are beginning to lengthen and evenings arrive earlier. Somewhere in the instincts of generations is the expectation that summer should be loosening its grip. But the thermometer says otherwise. Another day in the thirties. Another afternoon when the air barely moves and shade becomes valuable territory.

Perhaps that is what gives the view its peculiar intensity: the collision between beauty and unease. Paradise is still paradise. It has merely developed a temperature problem.

From beneath the trees, however, such thoughts are all too easily postponed. The sea glitters. Beachgoers continue their slow migration between sand and water. A palm frond stirs briefly. And the first month of autumn carries on pretending to be August.

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.

#         #

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. 

Boston and the politics of denial

 

The Lincolnshire market town of Boston lies at the heart of the Fens, within striking distance of the North Sea. Its church – St Botolph’s, known locally as Boston Stump – dominates the surrounding flatness.

The area, famous as the starting point for the Pilgrim Fathers’ journey to the New World, is today defined by industrial-scale monoculture farming and food processing factories, employing a large immigrant workforce.

Perhaps not surprisingly, its once staunch Conservative political leanings have recently been swayed by the rhetoric of Reform UK Ltd.

This week, a report in The Guardian adds a third dimension, describing a town increasingly defined by flood risk, rising insurance costs and the slow erosion of confidence in the sea and river defences meant to protect it.

The article, ‘Seriously wrong’: flood-hit Lincolnshire residents at odds with Reform MP over climate, by Priya Bharadia and Matthew Taylor, notes that flooding is becoming a regular expectation for residents rather than an exceptional event, something already reshaping daily life.

From The Guardian article:

"Boston, nestled at the northern end of the Fens, is on the frontline of the UK’s flooding crisis, which experts say could lead to some towns being abandoned as climate breakdown makes many areas uninsurable."

"According to the Environment Agency, 91 percent of buildings in the Boston and Skegness constituency are at some level of flood risk – more than in any other English constituency. And the science is clear that winters are getting wetter in the UK due to climate breakdown, with warmer air holding more water vapour, meaning heavier downpours."

This is not some future prophecy. It's present tense. And yet, into this reality steps a populist political narrative that seeks to deny, deflect and diminish the underlying cause.

Mainstream challenge 

Richard Tice, MP for Boston & Skegness and a leading figure in Reform UK, has questioned the extent to which climate change is driving increased flood risk – reflecting a broader stance within the party that challenges mainstream climate science and policy responses.

There is something revealing about this disconnect. Flooding is not abstract. It is not ideological. It is not a matter of opinion. It is water, moving through landscapes according to physical laws – shaped by rainfall, sea level, drainage and, increasingly, by a warming atmosphere.

Boston is already experiencing the compounded pressures of tidal flooding, heavier rainfall and – despite increased spending in recent years – the physical limitations of existing defences. “Flooding is now part of life here,” one resident told The Guardian bluntly.

In practice, climate-driven change rarely arrives as a single catastrophic event. More often, it manifests as a gradual redefinition of what is considered safe, viable or sustainable. It is precisely this gradualism that makes denial politically convenient.

If catastrophe were instantaneous, the response would be immediate and unavoidable. But when change arrives incrementally – another flood, another insurance refusal, another breach of a raised embankment – it can be framed as coincidence, mismanagement or simply bad luck. Anything but systemic transformation.

That framing matters. Because if flooding is treated as an isolated problem, it will be addressed with isolated solutions: higher walls, bigger pumps, more funding for local defences. All necessary – but ultimately limited.

Political narratives 

In contrast, when it is understood as part of a broader climatic shift, the implications become more profound. Who gets protected? At what cost? And for how long?

The Guardian article makes clear that these questions are already pressing in Boston, where concerns about affordability, insurance and long-term viability are no longer theoretical but lived realities. The sense of permanence that once underpinned the town’s housing and infrastructure is beginning to erode.

What is striking – and troubling – in a town like Boston, and elsewhere, is how often political narratives lag behind lived experience.

Residents dealing with repeated flooding and uncertain futures are not engaging in abstract debate. They are responding to material change.

To suggest that the underlying drivers are exaggerated or irrelevant – in the face of mounting local evidence – is not simply misleading. It risks creating a widening gap between political language and physical reality.

There is also a deeper cultural dimension at work. For decades, climate change has been positioned as something distant – geographically, temporally and psychologically. Something that happens elsewhere, or in the future. Reality is eroding that.

The story of Boston is part of a wider national and global shift. Climate impacts are becoming local, immediate and difficult to ignore. They intersect with housing, insurance, infrastructure and identity. They reshape not just landscapes, but expectations.

Understanding the future 

And this is where storytelling – whether journalistic or fictional – becomes important. It's because we are dealing not just with data, but with meaning: how people understand what is happening to them, and what it implies for their communities and their lives.

In my own climate fiction novel, FloodWaters Down, I explore a near-future version of the Fens shaped by many of these pressures – rising water, strained systems, self-interested behaviour and fragmented responses. Increasingly, it feels less like speculation and more like extrapolation.

What Boston illustrates, with uncomfortable clarity, is that the key tension is no longer between alarm and complacency, but between experience and interpretation.

The water is rising, whether we acknowledge it or not. The question is not whether we can stop that entirely – we cannot – but how we respond to it. Whether we align our politics, planning and language with the realities emerging around us – or continue to argue with the tide.

Water does not negotiate. It does not respond to rhetoric. And, in the end, it does not care whether we believe in it.

*          *          *

 

 

 

 

  

Flood Waters Down is released by Cliftop Publishing on 9 April 2026 and is available now on pre-order from bookshops and online. 

It will also be published as an ebook. 

Always support your local independent bookshop where possible! 

For interviews, review copies, book signings, etc, email: books(at)cliftop.co.uk

Climate fiction meets reality

 

On the final day of The London Book Fair last week, a panel discussion featuring Lucy Stone, Founder and Executive Director of Climate Spring, and broadcaster and Climate Fiction Prize judge Simon Savidge offered a timely reflection on the state of climate fiction.

It came just ahead of the announcement (18 March) of the Climate Fiction Prize shortlist on – a moment that increasingly feels less like a niche literary event and more like a marker of where contemporary storytelling is heading.

What emerged from the discussion was not simply that climate fiction is growing, but that it is changing.

A decade ago, much of what we might have called climate fiction was rooted in warning – speculative futures designed to jolt readers into recognising the scale of the crisis. Those stories had a clear purpose and, arguably, played an important role in helping to translate abstract science into something more tangible and human.

But as both speakers made clear, that distance between fiction and reality has narrowed, perhaps to the point of disappearance.

Climate fiction is no longer primarily about imagining what might happen. It is increasingly about exploring what is already happening – and what it feels like to live through it.

This shift changes the tone as much as the subject matter. While there are still dystopian elements, the books being discussed from the longlist are not uniformly bleak. What stood out was their emotional range: anger, certainly, but also hope, resilience, even moments of humour and tenderness. These are not simply stories of collapse, but of people navigating systems under strain – social, environmental and technological.

That human focus is key. As Stone suggested, fiction has a unique capacity to answer a question many people are now asking, often implicitly: what does this mean for us? Not in terms of policy or targets, but in terms of daily life – relationships, communities, choices.

Savidge echoed this from a reader’s perspective, noting that many of the longlisted works resist being didactic. The most effective climate fiction does not preach. Instead, it reveals – drawing readers into situations where the implications of climate change are lived rather than explained.

Another striking aspect of the discussion was just how broad the field has become. Climate fiction is no longer a clearly bounded genre. It now cuts across literary fiction, speculative work, thrillers, even elements of romance and historical narrative. In that sense, it is less a category than a lens – one that increasingly shapes how stories are told, regardless of form.

Certain themes do recur. Questions of inequality and access – who is able to adapt, and who is left exposed – are central. So too is the idea of community: how people come together, or fragment, under pressure. Technology, particularly artificial intelligence, is beginning to intersect with these narratives in interesting ways, raising questions about control, agency and dependency.

And underpinning much of it is a shifting relationship with the natural world. Not nature as something separate, but as something we are inextricably part of – a perspective long understood in other traditions, now reasserting itself in contemporary fiction.

What is perhaps most significant is that none of this feels imposed. Many of the writers being discussed did not set out to write “climate novels” as such. Rather, as the conversation suggested, the climate crisis has become impossible to exclude. It sits within the fabric of storytelling, just as it now sits within the fabric of everyday life.

For those of us who have spent years writing about climate, science or technology in a journalistic context, this evolution feels both inevitable and necessary. Journalism remains essential in explaining what is happening and why. But fiction operates differently. It allows us to inhabit situations, to test emotional and ethical responses, to experience – however briefly – the texture of a changing world.

In that sense, the rise of climate fiction is not simply a literary trend. It is a cultural response to a shifting reality.

As the shortlist for the Climate Fiction Prize is announced, it offers a snapshot of that response – a set of stories attempting, in different ways, to make sense of where we are.

And perhaps that is the point. Not prediction, but recognition.

Because if there is one thing the discussion at the London Book Fair made clear, it is this: the future climate fiction once warned us about is no longer approaching. We are already inside it.

It is a perspective I’ve explored in my own forthcoming novel, Flood Waters Down, set in a flooded version of the English Fens – a landscape that, like many others, may be closer to that future than we would like to think.

 #          #

Climate Fiction Prize 2026 longlist

Dusk by Robbie Arnott (Chatto & Windus, Vintage); Every Version of You by Grace Chan (VERVE books); The Tiger’s Share by Keshava Guha (John Murray Press, Hachette); Helm by Sarah Hall (Faber & Faber); Albion by Anna Hope (Fig Tree, Penguin Random House); Awake in the Floating City by Susanna Kwan (Simon & Schuster); The Price of Everything by Jon McGoran (Solaris, Rebellion Publishing); Hum by Helen Phillips (Atlantic Books); Endling by Maria Reva (Virago, Little, Brown); The Book of Records by Madeleine Thien (Granta Books); Juice by Tim Winton (Picador, Pan Macmillan); and Sunbirth by An Yu (Harvill, Penguin Random House).