Cynan Jones's Waterless World

In Cynan Jones's novel Stillicide (Catapult, 2020), water is scarce and sea levels are rising. Amid the calamity, a nurse, an engineer, a former soldier, a corporate executive, and other characters go about their daily lives, each privately grappling with the fragility of human relationships.

With prose so sparse it reads like poetry, Jones sketches a complex emotional landscape, but it's scattered with details that hint at physical deprivation: "alcowash" (no one showers), tooth lozenges (no one brushes their teeth), and shift rations (water is limited at work).

Originally composed for a radio series, Stillicide reads like a collection of short stories, with almost every chapter introducing a new character. It takes work to make sense of so many fresh starts, but the fragments gradually coalesce into a larger narrative. The real main characters aren't people but forces, natural and human-made—the 200-mile-an-hour train that carries 10 million gallons of water into the dry and dusty megacity; the massive chunks of melting glaciers towed from the north to satiate thirsty urban centers; the ice dock, under construction and displacing residents to bring in even bigger glaciers; and the corporate power that profits from these arrangements.

It's a grim but not wholly disheartening vision of the future. Nature is diminished but not defeated—it survives on rooftop gardens, around a mountain reservoir, and near an old, buried waterway.

The people soldier on too. "Dystopia is as ridiculous a concept as utopia," says the corporate executive. "Ultimately, we're animals. . . . And animals find ways."

This article appeared in the November/December 2020 edition with the headline "Waterless World."