Launching 'Bad Water' N M Browne

 A long time ago, I asked a very well established author what her publishers were doing to publicise her new book. ‘Oh,’ she said with some amusement, ‘I think they might mention it in casual conversation.’

 It was a simpler age.

 Anyway, as it is so difficult to have a casual conversation these days I thought I’d mention it in casual bloggage – ‘Oh, did you know N M Browne has a new book out?’

 

Bad Water is an optimistic novel written by someone pessimistic about the future. Yes, it is unfashionably post-apocalyptic: but in a good way.

 I grew up under the threat of nuclear war, and spent my childhood reading dystopian SF and  my adult life reading about over population, global warming and mass extinction. As I live within  half a mile of the Thames, it is very obvious that a one metre rise in sea levels would wipe out much of the city. So that is the premise of Bad Water: climate change floods cities, brings disease, instability and the unnamed horrors of ‘the Chaos.’ My book is about what happens next. 

 Ollu lives on a custom built barge, ‘The Ark,’ trading recycled material, fixing things, growing herbs and keeping livestock on their trail barges. She is fearful of plague and water-borne diseases, scornful of the idiocy of preekers ( the pre chaos people ie us),  and avoids the toxic aftermath of flooding, dreck rivers where the remains of tall buildings still stand as hazards in the waterscape of her life. These forbidden places constitute Bad Water.

  Obviously, when her mother gets sick, Ollu has to journey into Bad Water to find teck weapons to trade for her mother’s life.

  It’s not an easy task. Ollu frees slaves captured by her own brother and fights them for control of the Ark. She breaks rules and travels to the heart of forbidden territory. My rotting, drowned London is a lively place, festooned with plant covered walk-ways strung between high buildings, buried under the greenery of vertical farms. I imagined goats and chickens, nets of water rats, fishing boats and floating dope farms: a hard place to live where a lot of living still goes on. Ollu has to befriend people who should have been enemies and by the end of the journey she has changed her mind on almost everything she thought she knew.

  I wrote the first draft of Bad Water way back  – so long ago that I can’t even find the email trail.  I was writing historical fantasy and this post-apocalyptic adventure did not fit my brand. Years later, I saw that a small publisher, Kristell Ink, was looking for novels and sent them the draft. It wasn’t immediately accepted, but I reworked it and it finally sees the light of day on Monday. It is a better book for the delay.

  And maybe now is the right time for a book that makes the case for trade over conflict, the hope of globalism over narrow tribalism. Ollu believes in civilisation and does the right thing even when it threatens to cost her everything.

  In the year that Glasgow host the COP 26 summit and climate change is again on the agenda, maybe this book’s time has come?

  I’m an optimistic pessimist: it’s not going to storm the best seller lists, but I hope that those who read it will like it. I’ll take that.

And here's a trailer!