Humanity has always had a close relationship with the oceans, dependent on them for food and transport until relatively recent times, and equally dependent on their role in oxygen production, climate and habitability in general. It’s perhaps natural that science fiction has explored what might happen if that relationship breaks down - particularly in the light of changing sea levels and new understandings of climate change. In this first of a two part series, I take a look at narratives of drowned Earths in science fiction [1].

The idea that human cities, and the civilisations dependent on them, are vulnerable to natural disaster is nothing new in science fiction. Deluge and flood myths are as old as literature itself, and as scientific studies proved that under-sea fossils could be lifted onto land over time, and perhaps vice-versa, the solidity of the land under our feet was called into question.

Perhaps the most natural explanation for such changes was a huge gravitational effect, which would readers could connect with the observed influence of the Moon on tides. Thus most cosmic impact narratives, which hypothesise comets, asteroids or other astronomical objects colliding with Earth, included discussion of flooded coasts and cities, with examples including Camille Flamarrion’s Le Fin du Monde (1894), Dennis Wheatley’s novel of an impending comet impact Sixty Days to Live (1939) and Balmer and Wylie’s influential When Worlds Collide (novel, 1933; film adaptation, 1951). As the dependence of ocean level on Earth’s climate and deep ocean currents became clearer though, stories of a flooded Earth became both more plausible and more complex, with the flooding now the focus of the story rather than a consequence.

The Kraken Wakes (novel, 1953) is one of John Wyndham’s catastrophe narratives of the mid-twentieth century. A journalist witnesses what appear to be meteorites landing in the ocean. As gradually becomes clear, these are pods carrying an alien life form that colonises and then begins to manipulate the deep oceans. By changing the ocean currents, they direct warm water to the poles and cause the ice cap to begin melting, with subsequent sea level rise.

The novel’s climactic sequences are set in a London whose flood defences are failing, and whose streets are gradually giving way both to anarchy and to the rising waters. Interestingly this is a gradual catastrophe, unfolding over a year or so of narrative time. Much of the story is seen from the viewpoint of the journalist who stays to report on the dying city, so the reader learns first of abandonment of low lying areas, then of conflict over the heights of London’s hills, before the population dwindles out of the city entirely. As Wyndham notes, in a gradual flooding event, the direct loss of life from the water is small, but infrastructure failure and conflict over the limited remaining land and resources result in tragedy. Through the press wires and the radio the characters hear of societal breakdown and chaos first overseas and then in the north of England (to where the government has been evacuated), but the narrative remains focused on the inexorable rise of the water and the profound sense of loss that goes with it.

“A man and a woman on the Empire State Building were describing the scene. The picture they evoked of the towers of Manhattan standing like frozen sentinels in the moonlight while glittering water lapped at their lower walls was masterly, almost lyrically beautiful - nevertheless it failed in its purpose. In our minds we could see those shining towers - they were not sentinels, they were tombstones.” (pg 223/4, Penguin 2008 edition) 

The story ends with the sea levels stabilising, and the isolated survivors hoping to rebuild their society, but before any kind of new world can be established.

 In the same tradition, but set rather later in a similar process is The Drowned World (novel, 1962) by J G Ballard. Another writer with a penchant for catastrophism, Ballard attributes the fall of London to an increase in solar flare irradiation. This raises the mean global temperatures, renders equatorial regions uninhabitable, reduces fertility, and puts temperatures in London at the limits of endurability. As a result, the world’s much diminished population has withdrawn to the poles, and London is drowned in a tropical lagoon. The story follows a group of researchers recording the flora and fauna of the new environment, resisting the arbitrary looting and destruction of a group of scavengers, and embarking on an increasingly detached journey of discovery into their own psyche. Here Ballard parallels London’s decay, societal and moral breakdown with a breakdown in mental barriers and inhibitions. His characters drift through something of a lyrical dream world in which both the planet and the mind of man seems to be retreating towards the simplicity of pre-history:

“In the early morning light a strange mournful beauty hung over the lagoon; the sombre green-black fronts of the gymnosperms, intruders from the Triassic past, and the half-submerged white faced buildings of the 20th century still reflected together in the dark mirror of the water, the two interlocking worlds apparently suspended at some junction in time, the illusion momentarily broken when a giant water-spider cleft the oily surface a hundred yards away.”

The frequent catastrophism of science fiction in the mid twentieth century arose, at least to some extent, from fears of nuclear war and of the rapid rate of societal change. However stories of flooded worlds re-emerged in science fiction at the cusp of the twenty-first century, with the fears of anthropogenic climate change replacing or supplementing earlier concerns. The movie Waterworld (1995, dir. Reynolds) was famously the most expensive film ever made at the time. Kevin Costner featured as an unnamed protagonist dubbed the Mariner, who travelled between floating settlements, eking out survival on a future world in which all land (except perhaps a distant and mythical paradise known as Dryland) is submerged. The reason for the ice caps melting, leading to the sea level rise, is left ambiguous, although both the screenwriter and director intended it to be a cautionary tale about climate change. The film itself focuses on visual spectacle and on a journey of redemption for the anti-hero Mariner character, which parallels the search for Dryland.

The theme was paralleled in the same year by the television series Sliders, which followed the adventures of a small group of people travelling from one alternate history of Earth to another, trying to find the original, or Earth Prime, world. The episode “Summer of Love” (1995) ended with the sliders arriving in a world in which San Francisco is about to be engulfed by a giant tsunami. The following episode “The Prince of Wails” (also 1995) shows the aftermath and the sliders speculate that the tidal wave may have been caused by ice cap melting. If melt water accumulates behind an ice barrier a lake can grow until it breaks through in a mega-tsunami-scale flow. This is believed to have happened in North America at the end of the last ice age.

A slightly weirder and more wide-sweeping perspective was provided by experienced science fiction writer Robert Silverberg in The Millennium Express, a short story published in the January 2000 Millennium edition of Playboy magazine. This looks back from a distant future at the turn of the fourth millennium, in which famous men of the past are revived in the form of clones. Their opinion of the now-present is scathing:

“Civilization,” says Hemingway, “gave us the Great Warming. There was ice up here once, you know. There were huge ice packs at both poles. They melted and flooded half the planet. The ancients caused that to happen. Is that something to be proud of, what they did?”

 As a result, they are intent on destroying the relics of the past. The focus here is on starting the new millennium with a clean slate, but it also speaks to madness, the future of civilisation and the value of holding onto things of value. A similar critique of nostalgia is seen in other science fictions of the time, including the rather over-sentimental A.I. Artificial Intelligence (2001, dir. Spielberg) which is set against a world in which sea-level rise has destroyed coastal cities and depleted the world’s population. This background premise appears elsewhere too, as, for example, in Margaret Attwood’s Oryx and Crake (2003) amongst many other near-future novels.

By this point the exaggerated inundation of Waterworld was looking less like a very distant future and more like an immediate danger. Stephen Baxter’s novel Flood (2008) and its sequel Ark (2009) exaggerated anthropogenic climate change by coupling it with a release of water from vast reserves trapped under the seabed. He has this flood topping Mount Everest by 2052 and bringing humanity to the brink of extinction, its hope invested in a collection of ‘ark’ projects designed to preserve a remnant of the species.

Curiously enough, arks also featured in one of the same year’s blockbuster movies. 2012 (film, 2009, dir. Emmerich) imagined a series of world-ending catastrophes, including earthquakes, tidal waves and floods, apparently caused by the influence of a new type of solar neutrino (unlikely!). Towards the end of the film, the land is drowned by a general inundation, and the survivors take to a series of gigantic arcs constructed by the world’s wealthy nations. As with so many apocalyptic movies, the film’s focus remains on the survival of its protagonists and the emotional impact of their losses, but the film’s imagery of a giant wave sweeping towards New York remains memorable.

Kim Stanley Robinson also focussed on the Big Apple in his novel New York 2140 (published 2017), which described a city permanently inundated by a fifty foot sea-level rise. This leaves the upper parts of Manhattan dry and the preserve of the affluent, while the lower parts are occupied by those living in the upper stories of tall buildings and navigating the streets of New York by boat. Only those who cooperate and act together can hope to survive. By contrast, Ken Liu’s lyrical short story Dispatches from the Cradle: The Hermit - Forty-Eight Hours in the Sea of Massachusetts described a deeply submerged Boston.

“It was an ancient citadel of learning. A legendary metropolis where brave engineers had struggled against the rising sea for two centuries before its massive seawalls finally succumbed, leaving the city inundated overnight in one of the greatest disasters in the history of the Developed World.”

In the story, Boston’s flooded centres of learning are now a tourist attraction in a world, centuries hence, where the centre of solar system culture floats in the clouds of Venus, survivors on Earth live in domed cities or vast raft complexes, and the process of terraforming Earth to restore its habitability is expected to take longer than terraforming Mars. This is just one possibility explored in the climate change anthology, Drowned Worlds (2016, edited by Jonathan Strahan) which also includes stories on this theme by Kim Stanley Robinson, Paul McAuley and others.

Of course, it’s not just London and the east coast of the US that would be affected. Children’s animation Thunderbirds Are Go (set in the mid-twenty-first century) features an episode “City Under the Sea” (2016) in which the submerged ruins of Bay City (implied to be San Francisco) have become a tourist attraction for families in submersible vehicles. As the father of one family tells his children:

“It sunk. The sea levels kept rising until the city’s walls burst. They were lucky to get everyone out in time. Now it’s an underwater ghost town.”

Like the end of Boston in Ken Liu’s narrative - the flooding in this area appears to have been relatively rapid; the plot of the episode revolves around a set of architectural plans left in an office safe in one of the buildings when it was abandoned. Despite this, the Thunderbirds scenario is fundamentally an optimistic one, in which technology has enabled both society and ordinary people to adapt to the changing environment without obvious distress.

Unfortunately such optimism is very much the exception to the rule. John Lanchester’s The Wall (novel, 2019) projects contemporary concerns over immigration and climate change to a logical extreme, with the whole UK surrounded by an enormous concrete defence structure - meant in equal part to resist the sea and the desperate refugees it carries.

And returning closer to the cosy catastrophes of John Wyndham that we started with, the recent BBC radio drama series No Place But the Water (three series, 2020-2022, written by Linda Marshall Griffiths) imagines a small family group trying to make a new start in a deserted hill-top (now island) hotel after a series of “surges” (tidal or storm-driven sea-level rises compounded by climate change) inundated England and destroyed the world as they knew it. The story is told largely from the point of view of the family’s teenage children as they adjust to the new reality and the constant threat to it:

And just lately, the water keeps coming. day after day. The rain never stops. There’s no place but the water and there’s something wrong. Because as I walk up the stairs of the hotel and I look back down into the reception, I see the water slide under the door. That's not right.

The narrative here is overtly environmentalist, with the denouement veering into semi-mythological territory which asserts the need for a tangible connection between human and nature if either is going to survive.

The themes of drowned world fiction, then, have remained remarkably consistent over almost a century. First and foremost they highlight the vulnerability of our coastal cities and societies to incoming water - whether in the form of dramatic waves or more gradual sea-level rise. As transport and communications infrastructures have moved further away from ocean-dependence, the reasons that gave rise to that coastal positioning have become less apparent, and the threat clearer. The possible faces of that threat have certainly changed, from natural catastrophe, through alien intervention, to settle firmly in the ongoing dialogue regarding anthropogenic climate change. However the basic premise that some cities will likely be abandoned, while others adapt, remains.

The consequences of city and resource loss in terms of societal breakdown are constant themes. What also remains clear is that not all humans will suffer equally from such flooding - the affluent and/or amoral take some form of power in most of the catastrophe stories, and in a good number of the narratives of more gradual decay. By contrast ordinary people struggle to survive and find a new place in the changed worlds. Their stories are ultimately narratives of loss - equally of lives, heritage and future opportunity. 

It’s interesting to note that in none of these cases is the flooding considered to be reversible, or even preventable in the long term. The sheer scale of the Earth’s oceans, the degree to which their depths remain unknown and - to many - frightening, the simple mass of the waters they can throw behind inundations, all present a truly irresistible opponent to human civilisation. Perhaps equally frightening is its sheer indifference - the oceans do not care about the land they inundate or the people displaced.

Of course, many of the narratives considered here represent exaggerations. Given our current understanding of the Sun, there’s no imaginable way that heating such as imagined in Ballard’s Drowned World could occur [2]. The toxic neutrino scenario of the film 2012 is also wildly implausible. As far as we know, no water is going to come surging from below ground as proposed in Baxter’s Flood. The threat of rising oceans is nonetheless very real.

Particularly in the modern era, science fictional narratives form an important channel for the communication of climate science, but is this itself a problem?

As many have noted, even release of all known ice reserves due to climate change (of whatever origin) will lead to sea level rises of less than 50m, far short of drowning tall buildings, let alone mountaintops. In most cases the authors have shown that they were well aware of this. On the other hand, such exaggeration makes a serious point: even the few metres of sea-level rise that are expected due to climate change may well be enough to render low lying areas (including major cities) uninhabitable. Exaggerating the visual impact does not change the ultimate result, but might risk the more sceptical using the exaggeration as an argument against action. If the situation won’t be as bad as the films show, and the worst outcomes can be described (with some validity) as science fictions, there is a chance that some might be encouraged towards inaction rather than making difficult changes in lifestyle.

Climate-oriented science fiction (or cli-fi) is a growing subgenre. The terrifyingly dramatic temperature extremes recorded across the planet over the last year, and the increasing frequency of extreme weather events, suggest that such fiction will only become more common… and ever closer to reality. Already, around the world, cities are working on their flood defences and governments are acting to try to limit sea-level rise.

Whether any of these efforts meet with success, or whether the fiction of drowned cities fulfils its prophetic potential, remains to be seen.

The title of this blog entry and the following one are drawn from The Rime of the Ancient Mariner by Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1798):
Water, water, every where, And all the boards did shrink;
Water, water, every where, Nor any drop to drink.