New Book Sees Future Chiswick Plagued by Giant Insects
Sci-fi novel by David Alan Woods envisages W4 in the year 2417
David Alan Woods and the cover of his book
November 17, 2025
David Alan Woods, who has lived in Chiswick for more than 30 years, has turned familiar stretches of the Thames into the setting for a far-future conflict in his debut novel BRID: Fight or Flight.
The book transposes local landmarks including the nine-hole golf course at Dukes Meadows and Chiswick Bridge into a landscape under siege in the year 2417, when giant genetically modified insects, the Sectz, have tilted the planet’s balance of power and humanity survives in cramped city-colonies.
In one of the book’s most cinematic moments, an attack-helicopter-sized Red Darter dragonfly descends over the river at Chiswick, threatening the protagonists.
Mr Woods says the novel grew from “a mixture of my love of the natural world, my knowledge of Chiswick, and as a warning of what happens when biodiversity bites back.”
The story has an ecological premise catastrophic genetic experiments that have enlarged insects into monstrous lifeforms. The human response is to create hybrid soldiers called Bridz, engineered by combining ferocious animal genes with human DNA. In the eye of that global bioweapons storm, a young schoolboy named Xavier Wish must survive long enough to play a crucial role in the conflict.
The opening pages are available on the author’s website. .
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