There was a phrase I wrote when signing a copy of Flood Waters Down at the Threekingham 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.
Discussing climate at the Threekingham Literary Festival
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 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 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.
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. 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. Large areas of the Fens exist because generations of people have engineered water out of the land, 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 inspiration for Flood Waters Down
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”
Alongside my journalistic career, I have had 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 climate 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.
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.
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.
Climate change is here already, and we aren’t ready for it
One member of the audience 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 one particularly memorable suggestion: “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? This is no longer a question 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% higher than now, while 92% of existing homes could be at risk of overheating.
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.
Who gets to escape in climate fiction and reality?
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.
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.
The empathy gap and climate inaction
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 at Threekingham Literary Festival, 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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