IR CLARKE: Reflections

Who is saved when saving everyone is impossible?

Mon, 27 Apr 2026 22:29:25 GMT

G’day Friends,

In the modern world, when there is a crisis, we assume everyone will be saved. But what if they can't be? In disasters, earthquakes, floods and power failures, we instinctively expect systems to drop back into place, to restore order and protect everyone in equal measure. That assumption depends on abundance, enough time, enough resources, enough capacity for all outcomes to resolve cleanly. Under scarcity, that logic breaks. Recovery becomes selection. And once that happens, a quieter question emerges underneath the noise of emergency: who decides who remains safe, and how are those decisions made?

Scarcity is not just material, it is structural. It doesn’t only appear when there is less food, less water, or less space, it emerges whenever a system can no longer carry all its obligations at once. Under pressure, systems do not simply weaken, they begin to prioritise. Every system under strain becomes a triage system, whether it is designed to or not. What changes first is not capability, but selection.

At that point, decisions are never neutral. They encode values, assumptions, and hierarchy, even when no one explicitly states them. The first priority is clean water. Without water people start dying in days. Without water, nothing else matters. Who is classified as essential, who is moved first, who is left waiting, all of it reflects judgments that are usually embedded long before the crisis arrives. “Fairness” becomes impossible when outcomes cannot be equal, because equality assumes sufficient capacity for everyone to be treated the same way.

In practice, responsibility is often hidden inside procedure rather than held by a person. Forms, rules, protocols and systems distribute decision-making so widely that no single actor appears accountable. This creates the appearance of objectivity, but it is still judgement, only displaced. The illusion of systems is that they remove human decision-making under pressure, but they do not. They relocate it, fragment it, and make it harder to see.

What emerges is not the absence of choice, but the invisibility of it. And when systems are under enough strain, that invisibility becomes its own kind of power.

In the Sidni world, as the waters rise, people are evacuated from cities and moved into temporary camps. At first there is urgency, then coordination, then exhaustion. After a few days, there is no one left to save, and the cities are abandoned, not destroyed in a single moment, but emptied through a sequence of decisions that feel necessary at the time.

Some towns survive longer if they can secure fresh water. Water, food and power become the organising principle of everything that remains. The first priority is to feed the soldiers and keep the systems running, because they are responsible for maintaining order and operating the droids and infrastructure that are meant to save everyone else. Without them, nothing else functions at scale.

Within the camps, families are the safest unit. Anyone alone becomes immediately vulnerable, forced to seek protection or risk death. But as stability weakens, new forms of power emerge. Groups of men, whether bikies, police units, gangs, or even football teams, become dominant because coordination itself becomes a survival advantage. Strength is no longer just physical, it is structural.

Eventually, resources begin to run out. Fuel, food, clean water, maintenance capacity. Soldiers can no longer keep the camps functioning at the same level, and their authority starts to fracture under the weight of logistics rather than conflict. Systems that were designed to scale protection begin to fail.

And when that happens, the question is no longer just how people are saved, but what kind of order replaces the one that collapses.

Moral values do not disappear in chaos, they become rare, uneven, and harder to sustain as different kinds of leaders emerge under pressure. Some are guided by care, others by protocol, others by force or opportunity, and each operates with a different definition of what “necessary” means. The hardest truth is that in prolonged instability, the strongest and most ruthless often prevail, not because they are right, but because they are able to control resources.

The question becomes unavoidable: what is your plan to survive if help doesn’t come?

Author Store. Fancy a signed paperback or an Ebook? Take a look:

Author Store

Sofi’s Journal is there as an eBook and its only US$0.99.

Amazon. The Song of Sidni is now free on Kindle Unlimited, and available to buy on Amazon for US$2.99 for a limited time, so the full story is still easy to access if you want to keep reading. Right here:

Amazon Link

Pre-orders for Daughter’s Wrath are open, the next step in the saga.

Pre-order Daughters' Wrath

Thank you for reading, supporting, and being part of this journey. It genuinely means a lot to see readers connecting with this future world.

Stay the course.
IR Clarke

P.S. Always love hearing from you—hit reply and say g’day anytime.

This is a reader supported publication. Please consider a monthly or annual Subscription. Subscribers will receive The Song of Sidni paperback (Australia), early chapters from Daughters’ Wrath AND a paperback in 2026. Plus maps, characters, and more!

Reflections from the Future: IR Clarke

Mon, 20 Apr 2026 07:31:00 GMT

Subscribe now

G’day Friends,

I’ve been a bit quiet recently, and focused on The Song of Sidni Saga. The second edition of The Song of Sidni, and the first draft of Daughers’ Wrath are DONE. Finally today, I spent some quality time with Amazon to upload new manuscripts and artwork.

From now on, I won’t be posting free chapters of The Song of Sidni on Substack. Instead, this space will focus on updates, worldbuilding, and occasional early glimpses into what I’m writing, with full access moving into the books themselves.

Amazon. The good news is The Song of Sidni is now free on Kindle Unlimited, and available to buy on Amazon for US$2.99 for a limited time, so the full story is still easy to access if you want to keep reading. Right here:

Amazon Link

Author Store. Fancy a signed paperback or an Ebook? Take a look:

Author Store

Sofi’s Journal is there as an eBook and its only US$0.99. I’ll make the second edition Australian version available there once I work out the details (it needs a new ISBN).

I’ve also opened pre-orders for Daughter’s Wrath, the next step in the saga. Thank you to everyone who’s been following the journey so far. It genuinely means a lot to see readers connecting with this future world. Paid subscribers can keep reading, and will receive a paperback in July.

On a related note, I’ve been thinking a lot about technology lately, not just AI or tools, but how quickly it is reshaping our assumptions. The interesting part isn’t what it can do, but how quietly it changes the way we organise power, attention, and even trust.

Leave a comment

Stay the course.
IR Clarke

P.S. Always love hearing from you—hit reply and say g’day anytime.

The Song of Sidni : Daughters’ Wrath

Tue, 24 Mar 2026 05:45:31 GMT

Subscribe now

G’day Friends,

Here is the first draft of the cover for the second book in the Song of Sidni Saga.

You have three seconds.

That’s the average time a reader spends scanning a book cover on Amazon before deciding whether to click or keep scrolling. Three seconds to grasp genre, tone, and quality. Three seconds to feel something.

Does this face stop you?

That’s what I’m trying to do: stop the scroll. The warrior’s gaze is meant to be a threat and a question at the same time. Who are the daughters? What has she survived? Who is she coming for? What will she do?

Because underneath that face is a story that is still surprising me as I’m writing it.

A mother and daughter fighting to save everything their people have rebuilt. A tech-bro’s legacy reaching across a drowned Pacific to strangle the future. A love that crosses every line that should never be crossed.

Daughters’ Wrath sits right at the collision point of dark fantasy, post-apocalyptic survival, and something that might break your heart before the last page.

The colours — black, blood-red, molten orange, stormy grey, metallic gold — are doing deliberate work: this is premium dark fantasy, female-led, Australian-made. The lava and smoke aren’t decoration. They’re a warning.

The things I’m still deciding: should the silver stay or go in the next iteration? Should The Song of Sidni stand out more?

So I’m asking you: does this cover make you want to stop scrolling and read the blurb? And what does the face tell you before you read a single word?

Tell me in the comments. You’re the three-second test.

Author Store. Fancy a signed paperback or an Ebook? Take a look:

Author Store

Sofi’s Journal is there as an eBook, so if you’d prefer to read on a Kindle or Applebooks, its only US$0.99.

Goodreads: Song of Sidni

Your Thoughts?
What’s your take on Sidni’s future? What stories would you like to discover?

Leave a comment

Stay the course.
IR Clarke

P.S. Always love hearing from you—hit reply and say g’day anytime.

This is a reader supported publication. Please consider a monthly or annual Subscription. Subscribers will receive The Song of Sidni paperback (Australia), the serialised sequel Daughters’ Wrath AND a paperback in 2026. Plus maps, characters, and more!

Protecting Children: IR Clarke Reflections

Mon, 16 Mar 2026 21:35:40 GMT

Subscribe now

G’day Friends,

The Dangerous Fictional World

One of the central themes running through The Song of Sidni is mothers protecting their children, a primal instinct as old as humanity itself. But writing those fictional mothers forced me to look hard at the real world, and what I saw was unsettling. The threats facing children today are more numerous, more diffuse, and more insidious than anything previous generations faced. So what did the real world teach me that I poured into my fictional mothers? More than I expected. And none of it was comforting.

Danger Is Everywhere. Who Cares?

Danger can come from anywhere now, and that’s what makes it so hard to guard against. Online predators operate invisibly, behind screens and pseudonyms, in spaces where parents can’t easily follow. They are patient, methodical, and expert at finding children who are lonely, unsupervised, or simply curious. Schools, once the safest places outside the home, have become venues for bullying, radicalisation, and worse. Shopping malls, parks, and public spaces that once felt benign now carry an undercurrent of unease that parents feel but struggle to name.

But beyond these specific threats, there is a broader rot. The social norms that once held anti-social behaviour in check are fraying. The unwritten rules of Western civilisation, that adults look out for children, that bystanders intervene, that communities quietly police themselves, are no longer reliably observed. Fewer and fewer people are willing to step in when something is wrong. Whether from fear, indifference, or the paralysis of not wanting to appear judgmental, the instinct to act has been suppressed. We have taught ourselves to look away and call it tolerance.

A child in danger used to be everybody’s problem. Increasingly, it is treated as nobody’s. We have atomised into private lives behind closed doors, and in doing so we have quietly withdrawn the informal protection that communities once provided without even thinking about it. The village that raised the child has packed up and gone home.

In Sidni, Everybody Protects the Tribe

In The Song of Sidni, I put that instinct, and its limits, to the test. Sali follows her son into danger without knowing what she’ll find on the other side. She has no guarantee she can help. She has no certainty she’ll come back. She goes anyway. That, to me, is the truest thing I know about mothers: the calculation isn’t really a calculation at all.

In Daughters’ Wrath, the stakes are raised again. Sali’s daughter, along with other daughters, is placed in terrible danger. The kind that doesn’t announce itself until it’s too late to prepare. The question driving the narrative isn’t simply whether they’ll survive. It’s who will save them, and whether anyone is willing to pay the cost of doing so. Because there is always a cost. Safety is never free.

Sidni itself offers one answer to that question. The Warriors exist precisely because Sofi, long ago, understood that protection doesn’t happen by accident. It has to be built, trained, sustained, and honoured across generations. The Warriors don’t protect the people because it is convenient. They do it because it is their purpose — and because they have been shaped, from the beginning, into people capable of bearing that weight.

The other guilds play their part too. They provide resources, knowledge, and the material support that makes the Warriors’ mission possible. In Sidni, everyone understands, at a bone-deep level, that the safety of the vulnerable is a shared responsibility. No one waits to be told it is their problem. No one looks away.

That world is fictional. But it wasn’t invented from nothing. It was built from thinking about how to survive.

We Built Institutions for a Reason

In today’s world, we need protection more than ever and we need to be honest about where it actually comes from.

It comes from the military, who hold lines most of us never see, in places most of us will never go, against threats most of us prefer not to think about. It comes from police officers who run toward what everyone else runs from, making split-second decisions under pressure that the rest of us will spend months debating in comfort. It comes from institutions that have, embedded deep in their culture, an instinctive understanding of when to act, how to act, and the courage to do so without waiting for permission or applause.

We have spent years undermining those institutions. Questioning their motives, cutting their funding, tying their hands with bureaucracy, and demanding they apologise for the very instincts that make them effective. And all the while, the world has grown less safe, not more.

The mothers of Sidni understood something that we are in danger of forgetting. Protection is not passive. It is not a feeling or a policy or a hashtag. It is a choice, made by real people, at real cost, again and again, every day. If we want our children to be safe, we need people who are trained, trusted, and free to act. We need to remember why we built these institutions in the first place and find the courage to stand behind them again.

Author Store. Fancy a signed paperback or an Ebook? Take a look:

Author Store

Sofi’s Journal is there as an eBook, so if you’d prefer to read on a Kindle or Applebooks, its only US$0.99.

Goodreads: Song of Sidni

Your Thoughts?
What’s your take on Sidni’s future? What stories would you like to discover?

Leave a comment

Stay the course.
IR Clarke

P.S. Always love hearing from you—hit reply and say g’day anytime.

IR Clarke Update : Rookie Error

Mon, 09 Mar 2026 21:27:40 GMT

Subscribe now

G’day Friends,

Behind the Scenes

Last week I realised I’d made a rookie error with Daughters’ Wrath. I created a character who was the perfect Captain to lead a mission across the Pacific : A good leader, educated, sensitive, a good negotiator. But then he resolved all the problems sent his way easily and elegantly. In other words, he was boring. It was obvious he’d prepared well, and would be successful.

So, some major surgery was required before I went any further. I’d written about 70,000 words, and 20 complete chapters, including all the NZ scenes. Now I have three plots for this section of the book :

He was trained to be a Captain and he really good at it
He was put on the boat to keep him out of the way, and is too useless to consider
He is a decent man, but needs a backstop. Then he screws up anyway.

Pretty sure I’m going with option 3 as its much more fun!

Its taken me a week to sort it all out though. Tempted to give all three versions to Beta readers, and see which one they like best…

Hoping some substack subscribers will be early (ARC) readers and give feedback & reviews.

Other News. A couple more stores have stocked The Song of Sidni, so I’m adding Australian readers. Also spent a couple of days researching locations in the Blue Mountains, including the White Palace….

Author Store. Fancy a signed paperback or an Ebook? Take a look:

Author Store

Sofi’s Journal is there as an eBook, so if you’d prefer to read on a Kindle or Applebooks, its only US$0.99.

Goodreads: Song of Sidni

Your Thoughts?
What’s your take on Sidni’s future? What stories would you like to discover?

Leave a comment

Stay the course.
IR Clarke

P.S. Always love hearing from you—hit reply and say g’day anytime.

Iran, and how to Survive the Apocalypse?

Mon, 02 Mar 2026 21:29:25 GMT

Subscribe now

On Apocalypse, Iran and the unglamorous work of rebuilding

G’day Friends,

This post was going to be a reflection of the fragility of the systems which separate our lives from the poverty and squalor which was the lot of most humans, until roughly 1800. Then the real world intervenes and provides live examples.

Does Decapitation Work?

The 1979 Iranian Revolution did not merely change a government. It built a self-replicating machine: the Revolutionary Guard (IRGC) controlling vast portions of the economy, a Supreme Leader constitutionally untouchable, a Guardian Council vetting every candidate for ideological purity before they reach a ballot. The system was designed, consciously or not, to survive the death of any individual within it.

Which makes the current US/Israeli strategy worth examining honestly. Killing Soleimani. Killing Nasrallah. Killing Haniyeh. Eliminating nuclear scientists. Each operation is both tactically precise and strategically ambiguous. The vacancies refill. Sometimes with someone more pragmatic, often with someone more hardline, and occasionally with no one, leaving a hole that something else rushes to fill.

The question being avoided in most foreign policy commentary is the one that matters most: Can a civilised, functional state emerge from repeated decapitation, or does it simply accelerate the collapse into something worse? Iran is not yet a failed state. It has universities, a professional class, urban density and, crucially, a living memory of secular governance that predates the revolution by centuries. And a Royal family ready to take the role of Charles II after Oliver Cromwell. But that window is not permanently open. Something will fill the vacuum. The only question is what.

What Fills the Void: A Short History of Collapse

History has run this experiment several times recently, and the results are not encouraging.

Libya lost Gaddafi and gained two rival governments and a militia economy that persists today. Syria’s partial collapse, where Assad survived but lost territorial control, produced ISIS, Kurdish autonomous zones, Turkish proxy forces, and a humanitarian catastrophe that remade European politics. Lebanon’s long civil war institutionalised Hezbollah, a fully armed state-within-a-state that still rules significant parts of the country. The pattern is consistent: remove the strongman without installing a constitutional successor framework, and warlordism fills the void, not democracy.

The American experience in Iraq is the starkest lesson. The US didn’t just remove Saddam; it dismantled the entire Ba’athist administrative and military class through de-Baathification. The result wasn’t a republic. It was an insurgency, then ISIS, then Iranian-backed militias consolidating power in the ruins. ISIS is worth dwelling on: it emerged from lawless post-invasion Iraq with its own legal code, taxation system, and governance structures. Brutal, yes, but functional as a tribe. It illustrates something uncomfortable: humans will organise, often around the most brutal and ruthless Warrior.

The successful recoveries share a template. Post-war Germany was rebuilt under Allied occupation with a deliberately designed constitutional framework, the Basic Law of 1949. A process started by Churchill in 1942 (think about that…). Japan kept the Emperor as a continuity symbol while Americans drafted a new constitutional order around him. Eastern Europe’s post-communist transitions worked, where they did, because EU accession created an external constitutional anchor: rule of law as a condition of belonging to something larger. The common thread is not goodness or luck. It is a top-down constitutional framework, external legitimacy, retained functional institutions, and time.

Iran currently has none of these guarantors in place.

The Song of Sidni: A Tribe That Spreads Law Instead of Conquest

In my fiction, The Song of Sidni, I’ve been exploring what civilisational recovery looks like fifty years later. The world has no centralised state, no modern economy, competing tribes carving territory. The default that emerges, as in history, is the patriarchal warrior cult. Men with weapons, loyalty to a chief, and the capacity to take what others have built. That, sadly, is the usual adaptation to lawlessness.

Sidni is different. A matriarchal tribe, fragile by conventional measures, that survives not through military dominance but through Sidni Law. This is a rules-based system organised around Guilds: eg Growers, Smiths, Carers, Diplomats. What Sidni exports is not soldiers or tribute. It exports a framework for doing business, resolving disputes, and forming mutual defence, with strings attached. The strings are rule-following. Trade and friendship, but you have to abide by the law to access both.

Sidni doesn’t need to win militarily. It needs to be indispensable.

The question for Iran: which institutions could play the Sidni role? The bazaari merchant class has historically been independent, financially powerful, and politically pragmatic. They backed the 1979 revolution and could anchor whatever comes next. The legal profession carries a civil code tradition that predates the clerical overlay and could be the skeleton of a new framework. The women’s movement, which has already demonstrated it will absorb extraordinary cost for change, operates as a distributed, values-driven network that no single decapitation can destroy. And the diaspora, educated and internationally connected, represents a potential source of constitutional frameworks, capital, and external legitimacy.

None of these groups can win a military confrontation with the IRGC. That is not the point. The point is whether they can build something so functionally necessary for trade, for dispute resolution, for economic survival, that it becomes the framework everyone else organises around, even reluctantly.

Planning for What Comes After

Recovery from an apocalypse does not happen by accident. It requires serious people making hard decisions before the collapse fully arrives. It requires triage: deciding what to preserve when preserving everything is impossible. That is not betrayal. It is the only realistic form of salvation.

Constitutional designers are rarely saints. The German Basic Law was written under occupation. The Japanese constitution was drafted by Americans. Purity of origin does not determine quality of outcome. Sometimes you accept a flawed framework because the alternative is no framework at all and no framework means ISIS, not Jefferson.

What is worth saving in Iran? The idea of Iran as a civilisation, not merely a regime. A Persian legal and administrative tradition among the oldest on earth. The educated professionals prospering throughout the world. The women and young people who have already shown they will pay the price. And the memory, still alive in millions, of what Iran was before 1979.

History does not promise happy endings. It records only what was attempted, and whether anyone had a plan.

Best wishes to all those who wish to see a strong, prosperous, and free Iran and who are doing the hard, unglamorous work of planning for what comes after.

IR Clarke

P.S. Always love hearing from you—hit reply and say g’day anytime.

Check out the author store for signed paperbacks of the Australian first edition of The Song of Sidni.

Author Store

Sofi’s Journal is there as an eBook too, if you’d prefer to read on a Kindle or Applebooks. Only US$0.99.

Goodreads: Song of Sidni

Your Thoughts?
What’s your take on Sidni’s future? What stories would you like to discover?

Leave a comment

This is a subscriber supported publication. Please consider a monthly or annual Subscription. Subscribers will receive The Song of Sidni paperback (Australia), the serialised sequel Daughters’ Wrath AND a paperback in 2026. Plus maps, characters, and more!

Creating Characters: Realistic, Not Predictable

Mon, 16 Feb 2026 21:29:45 GMT

Subscribe now

G’day Friends,

This post is about humans. How we behave and why we behave.

Why Characters Surprise Us

If human personalities are shaped by biology, are our characters truly free or simply predictable biological machines?

In fiction, we say we want complex characters. Yet real people repeat their mistakes. The proud overreach. The anxious hesitate. The peacemaker avoids the necessary fight. Writers chase originality, but human motivation clusters around a few drivers: honour, reward, fear. These were well known to the ancient Greeks.

If we are biological machines, why do we still surprise each other? Why do authors and scriptwriters create characters that DON’T believe in realistic ways?

That’s the tension. Characters must feel unpredictable, yet recognisably human. Too random, and they feel false. Too mechanical, and they feel thin. Somewhere between instinct and choice, lives a compelling character.

Understanding Motivation

Human personalities are varied, but not infinite. Biology shapes temperament: how quickly we react, how deeply we feel, how much risk we tolerate. Over time, those tendencies harden into patterns of behaviour.

One of the simplest and most powerful tools for understanding those patterns is The Enneagram, an ancient system tracing its roots to India. It describes nine core types, each organised around a fundamental fear and desire. Not behaviours. Motivations. That distinction changes everything.

Two characters may perform the same action such as charging into danger, remaining silent or refusing compromise, yet be driven by entirely different internal forces. One seeks honour. Another fears failure. Another craves recognition. From the outside, they look identical. From the inside, they are worlds apart.

Because the system is simple, it is usable. Under stress, types default to predictable patterns: some double down on control, some pursue approval, some withdraw, some attack. For a writer, that predictability creates depth. Conflict stops being contrived. It becomes inevitable.

Beneath these patterns, three motivations dominate most action:

Honour — identity, principle, duty
Reward — achievement, recognition, pleasure
Fear — safety, survival, avoidance of loss

Personality determines which motivation rises fastest under pressure. Context determines which one is triggered. That intersection is where plot ignites.

Characters in Action

In the Song of Sidni Jami slipped into the Harbour, and Mohan rescued him. Observers saw this event in different ways.

Mohan was already on the scene in a canoe, so he moved before anyone else could react. He pulled Jami aboard. Then the current, his fear of Sidni arrows, and perhaps the expectation of a reward from his father, leads him away.

He did not consider risk, he considered only the rewards. As a Type 3, he expected recognition and reward, not criticism. Yet he also acted with honour: fulfilling his duty to protect Jami, with the implicit expectation that his father would return him safely to Sidni. Every decision reflected a blend of motivation intersecting in the heat of the moment. BUT his father had a different personality type and motivations.

In that single event, layered motivations create tension, shape behaviour, and drive outcomes. What might have been a simple rescue becomes a test of character.

Why Understanding Characters Matters

Writing characters isn’t about inventing new personalities. It’s about recognising the patterns already written into us.

When we understand why someone acts their behaviour stops feeling arbitrary. It becomes coherent.

The Enneagram is powerful not because it boxes people in, but because it reveals the invisible forces moving them. In fiction, that creates believable conflict. In life, it creates empathy, understanding and sometimes alignment on shared goals.

Human behaviour will not always be predictable. But it can be understandable.

IR Clarke

P.S. Always love hearing from you—hit reply and say g’day anytime.

Share with Others. If this post will be of interest to anyone you know, feel free to share it.

Author Store. Signed paperbacks are available here.

Author Store

Sofi’s Journal is there as an eBook, if you’d prefer to read on a Kindle or Applebooks. Only US$0.99.

Goodreads: Song of Sidni

Your Thoughts?
What’s your take on Sidni’s future? What stories would you like to discover?

Leave a comment

Please consider a monthly or annual Subscription. Subscribers will receive The Song of Sidni paperback (Australia), the serialised sequel Daughters’ Wrath AND a paperback in 2026. Plus maps, characters, and more!

How to Drown a City : Wait.

Mon, 09 Feb 2026 21:29:59 GMT

Subscribe now

G’day Friends,

This post is about climate change. Not the nonsense you read about from grifters and scientifically illiterate journalists. But the real thing.

The climate has always changed and always will. We know the cave paintings exist. We know humans once watched herds cross the green Sahara, saw lakes where now there is only sand. We know aboriginal people camped in places now kilometres out to sea. We know it intellectually, the way we know the distance to the Moon or the age of sandstone cliffs, as a fact without feeling.

Climate change operates on the same principle: real, complex, continuous, unfolding across timescales ten times the human lifespan. Populists rage about the weather: its too hot, too cold, too wet, too dry. Predictions always wrong, easily dismissed. Feelings without facts. Meanwhile, the actual threat moves with glacial inevitability. Literally.

Sea level rise isn’t a debate about if anymore. The ice is melting in the Alps, the Andes, at both poles. The only questions left are how much and how fast, and whether we’re psychologically prepared for a world where the maps change within a single human lifetime. We aren’t.

The Maths

The maths is almost simple, which is perhaps why we refuse to believe it.

Earth holds roughly 27 million Gt of ice. Ninety percent sits in Antarctica, excluding sea ice, which already displaces its own mass so doesn’t raise levels when it melts. The Antarctic ice sheet is vast: it covers 14 million square km, larger than the United States or Australia, averaging two km thick. On a continent that was once covered in rainforest.

Each year, Earth absorbs around 20 zetta joules of excess energy from the sun, ninety percent into the oceans. This varies, and each year more CO2 pushes it a little higher. To put that in human terms: it’s the energy equivalent of five thousand ICBMs detonating. Fifteen per day. Every day. Every year. Growing a little every year.

If all that heat melted ice, it would liquify 60,000 Gt annually, raising sea levels by 17 cm / inches. It doesn’t. Currently, about 600 gigatonnes of land ice melts each year, contributing roughly 2mm to sea level rise, with another 2mm from thermal expansion. And remember, the excess energy is still increasing, until global emissions reach net zero, which won’t happen this century.

Four millimeters each year. Inconvenient, but manageable, easy to dismiss.

But extrapolate forward, and the maths becomes biblical :

The mismatch isn’t between science and politics. It’s between the human lifespan and planetary systems. We think in days, weeks, years. A few of us (Elon, maybe), think in decades. Gaia acts over millenia.

Except when an author can imagine…

The “minimum time” column represents accelerated melt: massive volcanic activity, earthquakes, positive feedback loops, cascading ice shelf collapse, methane release from permafrost. Not likely. But not impossible.

The Song of Sidni

So, For The Song of Sidni, I didn’t need to invent much. I added an improbably accelerating melt, a tsunami to destroy incomplete flood defenses, and let human nature, war, chaos and collapse handle the rest. Here is the drowned Sidni.

Fifteen percent ice melt. Thirty metres of sea level rise. Within a human lifetime.

New York, London, Washington, Beijing, Auckland: all gone. The Netherlands and Denmark almost disappear. Sydney fractures into islands where new tribes form and soon forget what was lost:

“Sali soon passed the old Parliament Building. Its roof had collapsed, beams resting at odd angles over the walls, and the broken bricks were darkened with moss. Sali recalled her grandmother Sofi’s trembling voice as she told the stories. Before the Wave, it had been a Council Hall crowded with men who shouted at one another and failed to act for the people. The men had argued while the water crept closer, and then the Wave swept them all away.”

The Real World

Here’s the uncomfortable truth: with current policy settings, the world depicted in The Song of Sidni isn’t extreme science fiction. It’s inevitable physics.

The only fictional choice I made was time compression. By moving the consequences close enough that they become visible, visceral, felt within a single human lifespan. Close enough that Sofi can remember the Old Times. Close enough that some technology survives. Close enough that we can’t dismiss it as someone else’s problem.

Because that’s the real challenge, isn’t it? Not the science. Not even the politics. It’s the imaginative failure, our inability to feel what we know intellectually. To look at a map of our coastal cities and truly internalise that they are already, in geological terms, underwater. Just waiting for the timeline to catch up.

We know the ice is melting.

We know the seas are rising.

We know the maps will change.

Is the distance between now and 700 to 7,000 years close enough to make us care about future civilisations?

The sea doesn’t care about our timescales. It just rises. Year by year.

IR Clarke

P.S. Always love hearing from you—hit reply and say g’day anytime.

Author Store

Sofi’s Journal is there as an eBook, if you’d prefer to read on a Kindle or Applebooks. Only US$0.99.

Goodreads: Song of Sidni

Your Thoughts?
What’s your take on Sidni’s future? What stories would you like to discover?

Leave a comment