Cuttlefish (32 page)

By 1935, things began to go wrong environmentally, just as the British Empire began cracking under the strain of too many people and too little food, as synthetic ammonia was the basis of much of the fertilizer used in our timeline. The coal-based society was pouring out massive amounts of soot (particulate carbon), causing substantial ice melting in the Arctic, particularly in Russia.

And that led to a methane burst (where methane locked in by ice or pressure reaches a point where a lot of it is released) in the tundra.

Methane is a short-lived (breaking down in the atmosphere) but very effective (around seventy-two times as effective as carbon dioxide) greenhouse gas.

This caused real environmental catastrophe. Massive melting of ice, more outgassing methane, a warmer world. Over seven years average temperatures rose seven degrees.

It proved a disaster for Earth, but the saving of the Empire. Governments failed to cope as heat waves ruined agriculture and their coastal cities and plains were flooded. World weather conditions were very erratic, causing the collapse of already-overstretched agriculture, widespread starvation, wars, mass migration.

Elected governments in many countries failed. Government was suspended, martial law imposed, in the British Empire with authority returning to the royal family. Military intervention was largely brutal and self-serving—except that the British Empire, with more military might and infrastructure than any rival, did a generally better job of restoring order and seeing people at least got some help. More if you were white and British, of course. In India the suffering was terrible. But Commonwealth countries who tried to go it alone—Australia, Canada, South Africa—rapidly became chaotic, soon begging the Crown to intervene and restore direct rule. Which it did, and managed to stabilize things over the next few years (as the weather was resettling, at hotter levels). The Empire had its finest hour—along with some colossal failures, but these were lesser than the disaster's impact elsewhere.

Slowly (by about 1942) things began to return to a new form of normal. A normal where London is largely flooded, but not abandoned. Like Venice, her streets have become canals.

The British Imperial House was not ready to hand back the power it had been given or taken. The Canadian Dominions, with vast new arable lands and new settlements in Newfoundland and Greenland, was a major engine for the Empire. The restive factories of India provided goods for the Empire. In Australia, the western settlements had suffered withering drought and had been abandoned by the Empire, with forced resettlement to the east coast and Tasmania.

At home Ireland seethed. And coal, the driver of the Empire, began becoming more difficult to source and more expensive. In the tunnels and tubes under the drowned city, anti-imperialist republicans and Irish rebels, part of the Liberty—the people who would see a return to older values and free elections—eke out a strange existence. They are served by a fleet of Stirling-engined submarines. After the 1914–1915 War, submarines were outlawed by the Treaty of Lausanne, as the Kaiserliche Marine submarines had inflicted considerable damage on the Royal Navy, and were thus hated. But the revolutionaries, the Underpeople, operate a small clandestine fleet smuggling illegal goods—chocolate, teak, quinine.

The year is 1953. This is when
Cuttlefish
is set.

D
ave Freer is a former marine biologist (an ichthyologist) who now lives on an island off the coast of Australia. Besides writing books he is a diver and a rock-climber and perpetually has his nose in a book when he's not doing those three things. With his wife, Barbara, and his two sons, two dogs, three cats, three chickens, and other transient rescued wildlife, he has lived a sort of “chaotic self-sufficiency and adventures” life, sort of down the lines of the Swiss Family Robinson, only with many more disasters. A lot of Dave's time has been spent (and still is) in small boats, or in water that no one in their right mind would get into, full of everything (sometimes entirely too close) from hippopotami (in Africa) to sharks (he was the chief scientist working on the commercial shark fishery in the Western Cape, once upon a time) and lots of interesting creatures like the blue-ringed octopus and a poison-spined gurnard perch. He's written a slew of fantasy and science fiction novels, some with Eric Flint; being a scientist, he likes the strange creatures and machines he comes up with to work.

You can find out quite a lot more at
http://davefreer.com/