David Fell is the author of Visco and creator of The Adventures of Cute and Maggie.
Here’s our Q&A with David
Visco won our Green Novel of the Year in 2020, and it’s continued to resonate with readers ever since. For those new to it, could you tell us what the book is about?
Visco is a utopian novel about two friends, Jo and Miranda, who find themselves starting an alternative community on the Isle of Sheppey. What begins as an experiment in friendship and mutual care gradually expands into a vision for how people might live differently – more sustainably, more attentively, more compassionately. It’s not a manifesto, but a story about how ideas take root in real lives. I wanted to show that tackling the climate crisis isn’t only a matter of technology or policy; it begins with how we treat one another.
The Isle of Sheppey isn’t an obvious setting for a utopia! Why there?
Well, two reasons really. The first is that I didn’t want the book to feel like an abstract “elsewhere”. Sheppey is a liminal place – part of the world, but slightly apart from it, with its marshes, estuaries and big skies. It has a sense of possibility about it, but it’s also real, messy, inhabited – a perfect setting for a community that’s trying to balance idealism and practicality.
The other reason is a bit more personal. I grew up on a river estuary, out on the coast of Essex. It wasn’t just the marshes and the big skies that sank into my bones; it was also the history of the place. Essex was somewhere where there were lots of utopian experiments in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, as people reacted against the Industrial Revolution. So I might have set Visco in Essex, but the islands in the Blackwater estuary, where I still live, aren’t big enough.
It had to be set on an island?
Yes! All utopias are set on islands, ever since Thomas More’s original at the beginning of the sixteenth century. It helps create the sense of somewhere that’s connected, but also separate. Sheppey is in the Thames estuary, just down from London, which made it the perfect place to set the story.
Even though Visco is “utopian,” it doesn’t read like a distant fantasy. The relationships feel lived-in, and the world recognisable. Are those aspects, too, drawn from your personal experiences?
All writers inevitably draw on their personal experiences, of course they do. I prefer to think that the work can stand on its own two feet. I’m a white man from Essex, born in the 1960s. My mother was a cleaner. My dad was an apprentice. I’m sure those facts feed through into my worldview, and into what I write about and how I write it. I suspect my anger at injustice was fuelled by my origins, for example. But I don’t think that should matter. Visco works, I think, not because it in some way represents the voice of a particular author writing at a particular time, but because the characters are convincing and the story moves along at pace. The message of hope is visceral.
On that, how did you approach writing a hopeful story without falling into sentimentality?
Hope is complicated, isn’t it? Especially in the context of climate change. I wanted Visco to be honest about difficulty and doubt, but also to offer a sense that change is possible. The key for me was character. If Jo and Miranda felt authentic, then their optimism could too. The community they build isn’t perfect – it’s improvised, it falters, it argues with itself – but it’s real. I think readers respond to that.
One of the reasons we loved Visco was that it seemed to reimagine what “climate fiction” could be. Do you think the genre has changed in recent years?
Definitely. There’s been a shift from dystopia to what I’d call the practice of hope. Early climate fiction tended to emphasise catastrophe – and of course that has power – but we also need stories that imagine repair, adaptation and care. The climate crisis isn’t only about endings. It’s also about how we might begin again.
You’re now exploring those ideas in a very different form, through your Substack series The Adventures of Cute and Maggie. How did that begin?
Almost by accident! During lockdown, I found myself writing short pieces that mixed mystery, humour, and environmental themes. Out of that came Cute and Maggie, two private investigators who specialise in “eco-crime”. They’re supposed to be tracking down polluters, gas-smugglers, fly-tippers – but they’re distractible, philosophical and sometimes more interested in the poetry of a puddle than the perpetrator. It’s become a kind of extended metaphor for how hard it is to stay focused on the big issues when life, beauty and absurdity keep intervening.
The stories are funny, but they’re also quite poignant. What tone are you aiming for?
Whimsical, but not trivial. I like to think of Cute and Maggie as a literary comic strip – a cross between Moonlighting, a nature diary and an eco-detective series that never quite solves its cases. The humour gives me space to be serious without being solemn. Climate change can feel overwhelming, so sometimes the best response is playfulness: to look at it slantwise, through characters who are both ridiculous and sincere.
Do you see a connection between Visco and Cute and Maggie?
They’re very different in tone, but they come from the same impulse to explore how humans inhabit the world, and how stories might help us imagine better ways of being. Visco looks at community. Cute and Maggie looks at curiosity and care. Both ask what happens when we pay close attention – to each other, to the planet and to our own capacity for change.
How do you find the experience of writing on Substack, compared with writing a novel?
It’s liberating. The rhythm of posting every couple of weeks means I can be more experimental – some instalments are stories, some are dialogues, some are fragments or mini-essays. One was even written in iambic pentameter! It’s like being in conversation with readers in real time. And because Cute and Maggie live in the present, the series can respond to what’s happening in the world. That immediacy feels right for this moment.
Finally, what’s next—for you, for Cute and Maggie, and perhaps for Visco’s world?
I’m thinking of collating some of the Cute and Maggie adventures into a book. There’s a narrative arc buried inside the fortnightly posts, but it might be easier for readers to see it and feel it in a book. And I’ve also begun sketching something that might be a companion to Visco. Not a sequel exactly, but another story about care, community, and the small acts that change everything.
We can’t wait to read both. Thank you for being our Author of the Month—and for reminding us that climate fiction can be hopeful, funny, and beautifully human.
Thank you. That’s all I ever hoped it could be.
