A world under waterThe Cambria Trilogy is set in a world with significantly higher sea level than ours, 200 metres higher, to be exact. The story is that, in the mid-22nd century, earth’s climate was held stable by massive, advanced systems of geoengineering. The Reckoning, which killed almost everyone on earth, some 11 billion people by that point, happened many centuries before the start of The Paschal Moon. After The Reckoning, the systems, mostly automated, carried on for a few decades, but without maintenance and at least some human oversight, they eventually began to fail. The tiny fraction of humans that managed to survive The Reckoning now had to deal with a climate catastophe. The seas rose 200 metres, which killed many more.Centuries later, without human input, the planet settled itself, and the remaining land masses were largely wild and left to nature. Wales, with such a dramatic rise in sea levels, might look something like this: Everything that isnt yellow is now underwater, and what remains is what becomes the nation of Cambria. There are three main land masses: 1) The northern area of Snowdonia (named Highland in the books), 2) The middle block, Cambria, roughly todays Cambrian Mountains, and 3) Brecon, which is largely today’s Brecon Beacons.
England fared rather worse, and our British Isles map, which in the books is the area within The Arc (the advanced technology barrier protecting Cambria from the outside world), looks something like this: Apart from the hilly spine in the north of England, pretty much everything else is gone, except the higher locations of todays Dartmoor and Exmoor in the south west.In the story, Peak Island (todays Peak District) is used for raw material extraction and some industry, but everywhere else outside of Cambria is almost entirely wild. Scotland, for example, is completely uninhabited, and reforestation by Cambrians returned it to the coast-to-coast blanket of trees that it was in neolithic times. |
