Farewell, Peninsular: A Climate Fiction Story Set in Malaysia

What if the Malaysian peninsula began to sink—and no one wanted to admit it?

Not with a bang, but with administrative indifference. The sea creeps in quietly: a landslide in the north, an island gone missing, water in the basement of a coastal hospital. The headlines stay vague. The policies stay delayed. The story never breaks. It seeps.

That was the question that started Farewell, Peninsular—a novel shaped as much by data and policy as it was by lived experience. I didn’t write it from a place of inspiration. I wrote it from the quiet, recurring dread that sits between urban reports, disaster briefings, and unspoken assumptions about who gets left behind when a system bends.

Urban systems fail unevenly. Infrastructure reveals priorities. What we choose to protect tells you who we choose to protect. At the same time, human behaviour doesn’t always follow logic. People delay action not because they don’t care, but because fear and uncertainty often push us toward denial. This story sits in the space between both: where cities begin to bend and people try to look away.

Farewell, Peninsular takes place in a version of Malaysia where the worst-case scenarios have already started—just slowly enough that most people are still pretending it’s fine. At its core, it’s about institutional silence, ordinary people caught in impossible positions, and what it means to do the right thing when everyone else has decided it’s someone else’s job.

The main character, Musa Yahya, is a mid-level civil servant in a disaster management agency. He’s not a whistleblower. He’s not a hero. He’s someone who’s been in too many briefings, written too many memos that never got read. Someone who stayed in the room long after the applause faded. The kind of man who refuses to sign off on a plan he knows won’t work—even if it costs him everything.

I built the story not around spectacle, but around tension: between knowledge and action, loyalty and conscience, public duty and private grief. If you’ve ever filled out a form no one will read, or sat through a meeting where the real issue is never named, you’ll recognise the world Musa moves through.

I first published Farewell, Peninsular on Amazon and Google Books. No grand launch, just the need to make it real. But lately I’ve felt the story belongs closer to home. To the readers who understand what it means to see water rise where it shouldn’t. To live with the feeling that things are unraveling, but still having to show up for work the next day.

I’ve opened a small newsletter. It’s not for promotions. Just a space to share fragments—scenes that didn’t make it into the book, notes from the writing process, reflections on cities, climate, and the weight of holding warning signs that go unread.

If any of this resonates, I’m offering the first 100 copies of Farewell, Peninsular free as an eBook on Google Books. No pressure. No marketing funnel. Just a story for those who might need it.

You can sign up here. Or if you’d prefer, the book is also available in paperback and ebook directly.

Thanks for reading.

—Syuk Bash