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.

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.

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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.

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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).