EXCERPT The other day on a drive home from Truro I noticed that the spring tide was only inches from overtopping the edge of the road between Devoran and Perranarworthal. In another eighty years, that stretch of road will be a brackish marsh. The backstory to the Hydroplutonic Conspiracy presented in this book is now our front and future story. We went and turned the world inside out, and look what happened: the water scavenged the metals, which settled in the rock seams; the people pulled the metals out to make machines; the machines consumed the other under-elements, the coal and oil; the excess carbon was cast into the atmosphere; and now the water knows its time has come again. Or, as noted in the epigraph from Pliny the Elder, ‘the things that she has concealed and hidden underground […] are the things that destroy us’.…