Glass Current
Author: Noah Keane (author page)
The river looks better on a slide than it does in the water.
Price: $ 5.99
Blurb
The river looks like it’s recovering. The numbers say so.
Erin Calder is a field biologist working on the Lifeline River, part of a high-profile restoration project held up as proof that environmental repair is possible. Glass eels are counted, graphs are drawn, and progress is presented to funders and officials. From a distance, the story is reassuring.
Up close, it isn’t.
As Erin traces the data back to traps, logbooks, and code changes, small inconsistencies begin to surface—nothing dramatic enough to halt the project, but enough to raise questions no one wants asked. Around her, chefs, students, activists, and civil servants make their own quiet decisions about what they are willing to serve, publish, archive, or pause.
Glass Current is a novel about how environmental truth is produced, shaped, and sometimes softened to keep systems running. It follows the slow, careful work of watching a river honestly—and the cost of insisting that what is shown to the public still has a spine of truth.
Story
(Excerpt from “Glass Current” Noah Keane)
He clicked. The next slide zoomed in on the last five years. The y-axis now started close to the current values, making the tiny bumps look like hills.
“Here,” he said, “we see no statistically significant decline in recent years. The confidence intervals overlap. In some years, numbers are slightly higher than the previous. It would be irresponsible to claim we are ‘out of the woods’, but it’s equally misleading to say that nothing is working.”
Erin felt her nails dig into her palm.
He skipped quickly past the older years. The spike he’d constructed for the Brussels report hung there for less than a second before he clicked on.
“A word on methodology,” he said. “All data are collected according to standardised protocols. Quality control is ongoing. Where anomalies appear, we investigate thoroughly. There is currently an internal review of server logging procedures to ensure full traceability, but we have no evidence of systemic errors that would change the overall picture.”
Format: Ebook
Paperback: Coming soon
Length: Full-length novel, approx. 132 000 words · 380 pages
Genre: Contemporary literary fiction / Environmental fiction
Story scope: Book one in The Vanishing Currents Series
Tone: Quiet, precise, ethically tense; grounded rather than dramatic
Facts
Good to know: The story centers on river restoration, eel ecology in near future, and the politics of data, told through fieldwork, meetings, and public process rather than action-driven plot.
Explore further
More titles by Noah Keane are available on the
books page.
Ideal for readers who like: Realistic environmental storytelling, science under political pressure, slow-burn tension, and narratives about responsibility within large systems.
Content note: Themes of ecological decline, institutional pressure, public conflict, and moral stress; no graphic violence.