SLOW WATER

2038, the Driftless hills of Wisconsin. The Ancelets were citrus farmers in Plaquemines Parish, Louisiana, until the slow water (sinking ground, rising sea, salt crawling up the Mississippi, and the paper collapse that finished what the water started) pushed them a thousand miles upriver. Now they farm a hillside where oranges were never supposed to grow, in a country that has quietly come apart into compacts and trade agreements.

Del, seventeen, tells the story of one make-or-break growing season: her father (a robotics engineer who keeps a valley of orphaned machines alive), a first-of-its-kind cold-hardy citrus crop, a data-center consortium buying up the water, and a super-El-Niño year that means drought first, flood after. Around the fire each week, the grown-ups tell how it all happened. Del writes it down.

Slow Water is a hard-science novel being drafted in public, chapter by chapter: the timeline extrapolated from real ice-sheet, methane, and El Niño research, the machines from real farm robotics, the politics from real interstate compacts. Where it speculates, it says so. Your feedback while it's being written genuinely shapes the book. Select any passage on a chapter page to leave a margin note or suggest a source, like commenting on a shared doc.

2029 the Crash · 2032 the Quiet Year · 2033–34 the Super El Niño · 2035 the Gulf Coast breaks · 2035–37 the Hollowing · 2038 this story