# Why I'm Writing About a Future That Hasn't Happened Yet
by Mike King
I sat down last night to edit my novel.
I'm in the middle of Lord of Water Book II, the second instalment in a sci-fi/fantasy trilogy about an immortal guardian whose job is to protect the rare water planets scattered across the universe. Book I is finished. Book II has been in draft for some time. The plan for the evening was simple: read the manuscript, make notes, work through structural problems chapter by chapter.
Three hours later, I had not edited a single chapter.
Instead, I had discovered something I'd buried in my own trilogy without quite realising it — and once I saw it, I couldn't unsee it.
The thing I'd hidden from myself
Book I opens on a planet called Blue-3. The narrator describes it as a place where its people have come through a difficult century, established a moral code, secured world peace, and protected its water for another million years. The narrator is 86 years old, saying goodbye to his grandchildren. He has done good. He lifts gently out of his body and sails across the galaxy to be reborn on the next precious water planet that needs him.
When I wrote those opening pages, I thought I was just setting up a sci-fi adventure. A guardian leaves one planet, arrives at another, the real story begins.
What I'd actually written — and what I only fully understood last night — was an ending.
The good ending. The one where the planet makes it.
What the trilogy is really doing
Here is the structure I now see clearly:
Book I opens with Blue-3 safe. Calibrated. Spared. Then the narrator sails to a new planet and begins his next mission.
Book II is that mission — the cosmic adventure on the new water planet, with all the threats and crew and journeys that adventure entails.
Book III is the story Shane finally tells his captain Gary, sitting on the deck of their ship one evening: "Let me tell you about Blue-3." That story — the spiritual war that nearly destroyed the planet, and how it was resolved — is Book III in full. The trilogy closes by looping back to the opening of Book I.
And the final line of the trilogy — the very last words a reader will read — addresses the reader directly, as a mythic flourish:
"And if you, dear reader, recognise something of yourself in a Lord of Water — you know who you are. Welcome to the calibration."
Why I'm doing this
Here's the part I haven't said out loud before.
I believe fiction shapes how we feel about what's possible. Not as fantasy, not as escapism, but as rehearsal. The stories we tell ourselves about what is possible become the futures we walk toward. Dystopian fiction has done a lot of work over the last century convincing us that collapse is the realistic outcome. I think that fiction has been earning its keep in the wrong direction.
I'm writing a trilogy where Blue-3 survives because I want to write a story where survival is the answer. I want my fiction to do its work in that direction. Hope, deliberately rendered.
The spiritual war I describe in Book III — the forces that want to destroy and enslave Blue-3 versus the majority who want freedom and prosperity for all — is framed cosmically, but the themes are as old as storytelling itself. The "dark beings trapped in machines" in my book are not a metaphor pulled from thin air. They're a fictional rendering of a familiar idea: people who have lost themselves inside systems they no longer control.
Shane's job — disentangling them, restoring them, refusing to destroy them even when they deserve it — is the heart of the trilogy. The Lord of Water doesn't fight the way other guardians might. He calibrates. He restores. That's the work he was born to do.
The reader is the trilogy's final witness
When I realised that the closing line of Book III is a direct mythic address to the reader — that the trilogy is structurally a vast hopeful cosmos populated by many guardians and many planets and many such stories — I understood for the first time what I was actually writing.
I'm not writing entertainment alone. I'm not writing escapism. I'm writing an invitation into a kind of storytelling that takes hope seriously.
If you read all three books and the closing line lands the way it's meant to, you don't shut the book wondering when Book IV comes out. You shut it knowing that the story stays with you because good stories do.
What happens next
I have a lot of work ahead. Book II needs editing. Book III needs writing. The trilogy needs to actually exist as three published, beautifully made books that people can hold and read.
But I know what I'm doing now in a way I didn't yesterday. That changes everything.
The next phase begins with a single closing line, written on the last page of Book III, addressed to a reader who, somewhere, on some quiet evening, will close the book and feel that the story stayed.
Welcome to the calibration.
Mike King is an Australian author. The Lord of Water trilogy is his debut fiction project. You can read the opening chapter free at lordofwater.com.