Doggerland

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Doggerland, the debut novel by Plymouth University creative writing lecturer Ben Smith, is set in a drowned landscape and has just two main characters: ‘the old man’ and ‘the boy’ (who’s not really a boy anymore), who navigate an enormous North Sea wind farm via boat. Although we are given their names, they are generally referred to in the novel as “the Boy” and “the Old Man”. At times, Doggerland reminded me of Megan Hunter’s The End We Start From, which also describes a future marked by rising water levels. The machinery is failing – the farm’s percentage performance slipping inexorably downwards, losing several percentage points in the course of the story. Long-forgotten gods and spirits began to stir in hidden groves and caverns and old traditions found new strength.

The pilot’s pencilled annotations and erasures show “a multitude of floating settlements and trading posts …[and] also faint marks where other settlements had been erased” (p.

First pic - the dogs impatiently waiting in their cage to be allowed to explore their temporary home. Civilization, once so progressive and dynamic, is now, much like this immense, expiring windfarm, corroded and all but unsalvageable.

This involves reading and watching a lot of climate change fiction (cli-fi) and the Fantasy-Hive have kindly given me space for a (very) occasional series of articles where I can share my thoughts and observations.Speculative fiction strongly displays the immediate paranoias and dreads of the time in which it is written; the population explosion fears examined in the work of Harry Harrison or John Brunner during the 1960s are not such modish subjects any more.

With the onset of the Holocene, our current era, Doggerland’s inhabitants were increasingly confronted with climate change and rising sea levels, just as we are today.Doggerland is a superbly gripping debut novel about loneliness and hope, nature and survival – set on an off-shore windfarm in the not-so-distant future.

Soon, stone circles echoed once more with the chanting of ancient rituals and menhirs were again bedecked with wildflowers and presented with offerings of honey and blood. It was a grassland roamed by mammoth, lion, red deer – and their human hunters – but melting ice turned it into an area of marshes and wetlands before it was finally and definitively claimed by the waves around 8,000 years ago. They It is a memorable read and I was fascinated by the exploration of life far away from civilization, the scenes of survival in a harsh setting and the loneliness of living in a confined space at times even felt reminiscent of our lockdown times, albeit much, much worse of course.But when a man's body is discovered in a flooded quarry on Noorö and with illness preventing any of her colleagues attending, Karen has no choice but to head north to investigate. The setting is everything here, and it really feels like Smith has considered how every part of the environment would interact with every other part of it, as well as the effect it has on the characters. Doggerland is an example of how intense and deeply focused the novel can be when examining a closed universe. Trading Address (Warehouse) Unit E, Vulcan Business Complex, Vulcan Road, Leicester, Leicestershire, LE5 3EB.