0 When Writers Try to Predict the Future - David Thorpe

I'm very excited because this month I am to achieve a long-time ambition of being on stage at a literary festival. Not just any literary festival, but Hay, and not just once but twice! I'm not at all nervous, no.

Both events are part of the festival's 'green' strand.

The first will be about my new non-fiction book The One Planet Life where I will be in conversation with Jane Davidson, director of INSPIRE and a fellow patron of the One Planet Council.

The second will be to do with children's writing and climate fiction, where I will be joined by Saci Lloyd, Jane, and climate change campaigner George Marshall. I hope other members of the Facebook group of cli-fi authors will be there, too.

Saci, plus other cli-fi authors, took part in a week of activity on the Guardian's children's books website last month about writing about ecological and environmental matters for children, culminating in a Twitter chat [#GdnEcoChat] on the evening of World Book Night with Frank Cottrell-Boyce, Kate Kelly, Sarah Holding, Tony Bradman and others.  The Guardian's record of it is here.

One of the questions that was asked was: is cli-fi just a passing fad? My answer, which was favourited a few times, was: 'NO! We've only just begun! One day all books will contain an element of cli-fi. They'll have to.'

It's now recognised by almost everybody that climate change is real and happening and caused by human beings burning fossil fuels. Any story that is set in the future which paints a picture of a world that hasn't been affected by climate change in one way or another will just look daft, especially if read in a few years' time.

It doesn't have to have disasters in it, it doesn't have to be a dystopia and it doesn't have to be science fiction. The lives of any characters, whether living 10, 50 or 200 years in the future, will have been affected in one way or another, whether it is how they get about, what the technology is like, what their home is like, or where they live.

I usually write about the near future. Stormteller and Hybrids both take current trends and extrapolate them, but the former is almost exclusively cli-fi and the latter only contains one tiny nod to it: a description of a swollen River Thames in London.

The novel I'm writing now is set in 2089-2104 and, while it is not about climate change at all, I still have to describe the ways that people get about (in their self-driving electric cars, rapid transit buses, or high-speed trains), the buildings that people live and work in (where attempts have been made, successfully or not, to retrofit them to save and/or generate electricity and to bring nature back into cities), the food they eat and where it comes from, the energy they use (all kinds of renewables), where the coastline happens to be (usually not where it is now) and what has happened to former seafronts.

This is a radical reimagining of life. It's neither dystopic nor utopian, just looking at how life and society might have to adapt in one way or another.

In this election there has been little talk of climate change, but all of the main parties (even UKIP, but with the striking exception of the DUP) recognise the huge contribution the low carbon or clean technology sector already makes to the UK economy, employing as it does close to one million people. Inevitably this contribution will continue to rise. Some parties (LibDems, Greens) attach more importance to the way that green jobs can make life better and improve the economy generally. It's a win-win-win scenario.

Yes, predicting the future is notoriously difficult, but the predictions about climate change have, ever since 1993, been consistent in saying that a certain list of impacts is likely to happen; exactly when is less certain.

We also know that human nature tends to leave everything to the last minute, only responding to disasters when they are imminent or actually happening.

Put the two together and you begin to get an idea of the way things might go; except that climate change is not one disaster but a whole succession of transformations with all sorts of ramifications that will continue for the next few centuries.

In the past, quite a few writers who have tried to predict the future have found life imitating art, such as Ray Bradbury's description of “little seashells… thimble radios” that brought an “electronic ocean of sound, of music and talk and music and talk” in Farenheit 451; John Brunner’s description of electric cars powered by fuel cells and Detroit as an abandoned wasteland in Stand on Zanzibar; tablet computers in Arthur C Clarke's 2001: A Space Oddysey; Google Glass type goggles in Willliam Gibson's Neuromancer; not to mention ubiquitous people watching (CCTV) in Orwell's 1984.

Not written for kids? Actually, almost all of these books I read as a teenager.

I will leave you with two thoughts: encouragement to contemporary writers not to ignore developments that are consistent with a world predicted by climate science, and the infographic below that I discovered, which records many predictions made by writers that have come to pass.

David Thorpe is the author of cli-fi YA fantasy Stormteller and the YA SF Hybrids.

Detail: When Writers Try to Predict the Future - David Thorpe

0 The inspiration for my new novel - David Thorpe

My first novel in several years is out this week – Like Hybrids it's still YA, it's still set in the future, but it's very different in subject matter. I thought it might be interesting to talk about why I wanted to write it.

I lived in mid-Wales, where Stormteller is set, for nearly 20 years. After separating from my first wife I eventually landed up in Taliesin, partly because I was attracted to a place named after Wales' legendary bard.

I know the landscape almost as well as I know my back garden now, having walked over much of it. I always felt when I moved to this edge of the British Isles from London that here, unlike most places, the skin of the present is thin: you can feel the vibrations from the past still reverberating down the centuries like thunder beneath your feet.

Just inland from Taliesin village is a collapsed dolmen that is given the name 'Taliesin's grave' – though it is much older than that.

Between my house at that time and the sea, lies Borth bog: you may remember the images in the media last winter when flames were leaping across it from burning peat despite the snow: spooky.

And then Borth itself: a long sliver of a town that shouldn't be there, streamed onto a spur of land against the glint of the sea, on a section of coast that is the most vulnerable in the whole of Wales to storm surges. Again, it was in the media last winter when it was attacked by giant waves.

The spur continues to Ynys Las, a nature reserve of sand dunes opposite the Dyfi estuary from Aberdyfi – a colony of English retirees and yachting people largely immune to the influence of the past.

Above it, however, by the Bearded Lake, is allegedly a footprint left by King Arthur when he passed this way, and north of there the mountain Cader Idris, Welsh for Seat of Arthur.

But the real stories that come from this area are older than Arthur's: the birth of Taliesin and Cantr'er Gwaelod, which is the tale of how the land that now lies beneath Cardigan Bay was drowned by the sea.

It's these, and the beautiful, wild and dramatic landscape, that sparked my imagination to write this novel.

Let me tell you the beginning of the first story: a mother had two children – a beautiful girl and a hideous boy with a hunched back. The girl wasn't a problem, she's not even part of the story, probably got married off to a Prince.

But the boy... the mother felt sorry for him. Perhaps the gift of wit and wisdom might make him popular so she could get him off her hands. So she laboured a year and a day to make a magic potion for him, but on the last day she left the servant boy, Gwion, in charge while she popped out. "Just stir: don't taste," she told him.

You can probably guess what happened next. The long and the short of it is that Gwion got to sample the potion and he received all the gifts intended for the son. He was the one who became Taliesin.

Nowadays, Taliesin is revered in Wales and beyond for his poetic and shamanic genius. But his talents should have belonged to someone else – the son, whose name is Afagddu. No one remembers him now, but Taliesin has a village and even an arts centre named after him.

So I thought: how would Afagddu feel? What would he want?

And this is a starting point for Stormteller.

As a rebirthed baby, Gwion floated down the Dyfi river to Ynyslas where he was found by a local prince, who named him Taliesin. That leads into the second story....

...with a tragic ending – the flooding of the land – that it seemed to me has echoes of the threat that Borth and the whole coast of Britain faces now and in the future: rising sea levels, more storms and extreme weather caused by climate change.

We all feel threatened by climate change. We feel powerless to do anything about it. So I wanted the novel partly to be about giving some degree of optimism. It's trying to look at the question of rewriting the endings of stories: ours – about climate change – and these two old legends.

It's easy to give into a sense of fatalism. I believe that we can all rewrite our stories, we at least have the power to do that. And this is true for the teenagers in the novel. But, as in life, there are always sacrifices to be made...

You can find out more about the background to the novel here.

Detail: The inspiration for my new novel - David Thorpe