Retreat West : Nothing Is As It Was

I had never heard of Cli-Fi (short for Climate Change Fiction) before I saw Retreat West’s call for stories based around climate change. The resulting anthology ‘Nothing Is As It Was’, named from a story by Nick Ryle Wright, is being sold to raise funds for the Earth Day Network, and will contain a piece of my own, ‘The Window Box’, an excerpt from an ongoing project, The Fourteenth Duke of Plimsoll.

Plimsoll is a project I have been working on for years. It started off as a novel, although a film outline was shortlisted for the Marza Story Circus prize in 2012. After many changes, I finally wrote a complete film script of the story (titled The Duke of Hope) for my MA in Scriptwriting at Bath Spa University in 2014.

Plimsoll Tower is Humanity’s last refuge. Rising from an immense ocean, it is the last dry land left on Earth. The never ending rain, a result of Climate change, keeps the sea-level rising, forcing the Tower’s occupants to build perpetually upwards with stone quarried from far below the waterline, from beneath the Tower itself. Apart from the few fish that circle the Tower, all food must come from the hutches and window-boxes strapped to the Tower’s external wall.

It’s the kind of project that changes every time I think about it, the biggest problem being that I thought of the situation and the ending before coming up with any real characters. However, over the past few months, having had some fresh ideas, thought up some new characters, situations, I now have a new direction. The first finished part of this is The Window Box, soon to appear in the Retreat West anthology. A good omen for its new direction.