The Stilling

The oceans failed. The planet gave us one final warning. We listened; too late. So we locked down the world. Not out of fear. But to survive.

The Stilling is a multi-book, near-future novel set in the aftermath of planetary collapse. It is not science fiction. It’s science consequence.

Told through interwoven stories, each raw, precise, and emotionally charged the book captures what it means to live after the decision has been made. When the oceans are sealed. When movement is limited. When food, breath, and even sound are rationed in service of the planet’s repair.

Verdance is the system that governs what remains. It scores every human action for ecological cost. There are no exemptions. Every person must comply. Not because they are being forced, but because they are being told the truth: the Earth is dying, and this is the only way left.

Across six tightly constructed books, The Stilling explores the reality of that decision, through the lives of scientists, children, rebels, parents, policy-makers, and those simply trying to survive without losing what makes them human. It begins with the creation of the Verdance protocol and ends with a generation who have never known life outside the system.

Each story adds a layer to the world. A different angle. A deeper fracture. A quiet rebellion. A hidden hope.

There are no saviours here. No chosen ones. Only people doing what they can inside a world held together by rules, restraint, and silence.

This is not a collapse fantasy. It is a book about consequence. About how systems survive when humanity almost doesn’t.

It’s a novel written like memory: lean, brutal, and real.

The Stilling is not science fiction. It’s a warning. A mirror. And, maybe, a map.

I researched intensively for my other book Real Food Matter, what I couldn’t ignore what the data was showing. The oceans are failing. Our systems are too slow to adapt. And somewhere deep down, I knew we wouldn’t act in time, unless we were forced.

Instead of another data and warning book I decided to use as much scientific fact as available and create a story that lives the experience. This book imagines that moment. When the warnings end. When humanity is given one final option: stop everything, or lose everything.

It’s not an easy story. I didn’t write it to comfort. I wrote it to tell the truth, to show what ecological collapse might really look like if we chose survival over freedom, compliance over chaos. It’s brutal. But it’s also full of humanity. Of quiet hope. Of children born into a system they never chose, trying to find meaning inside it.

It’s written like a modern classic: stripped, direct, emotionally raw. It doesn’t preach. It shows.

And maybe, just maybe, it helps us avoid becoming the people inside it.

—Scott Pettifer

1. Collapse doesn’t always come with fire. Sometimes it comes with silence.
The oceans didn’t explode. They stopped breathing. The greatest threat to humanity wasn’t war, it was indifference, delay, and the belief that we still had time.

2. Survival is not freedom. It’s sacrifice.
When the world finally acts, it doesn’t feel heroic. It feels like loss. The Verdance system was never designed to be fair. It was designed to prevent extinction. And what it demands is everything.

3. Climate change isn’t an event; it’s a system failure.
The collapse didn’t start with the weather. It started with economics, food supply, political inertia, and our refusal to act without profit. The Stilling shows how the tipping point is social, not just environmental.

4. People don’t break in loud ways. They fracture quietly.
Every character in the novel is trying to survive a system built on control for good reason. There are no clear villains. Only tired leaders, broken parents, forgotten children, and those who chose silence to protect what’s left.

5. The future will not feel like science fiction. It will feel like consequence.
There are no laser guns or AI uprisings here. Only solar rationing, biometric food credits, banned oceans, and shimmer zones that control where you can breathe. All of it grounded in real data and current science.

6. Hope doesn’t come through escape; it comes through endurance.
There are no uprisings. No mass resistance. Because the system isn’t evil, it’s necessary. Hope lives in small moments: human touch, memory, rhythm, courage. The acts of staying human in a world that’s forgotten how.

7. Ecology becomes belief.
Verdance is not just a system, it becomes a sacred structure. As generations pass, compliance turns into reverence. Environmental obedience becomes ritual. The Stilling explores how survival systems evolve into a kind of spiritual framework.

8. You don’t get to go back. But you might learn to go forward.
The world of The Stilling never returns to normal. That was never the point. The lesson is not recovery. It’s responsibility. What we build after collapse is the only answer that matters.