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In “Stillicide,” the through-line is an iceberg headed for London.

By highlighting passing moments of connection, “Stillicide” feels more true to life than most science fiction, as one character implies: “People get on with it. People have always got on with it. Dystopia is as ridiculous a concept as utopia.”

Cynan Jones’s climate-crisis novel “Stillicide,” which was originally written as a BBC Radio series, arrives just as the bar has been raised for world-building.

The word “stillicide,” which an epigraph defines as “a right or duty relating to the collection of water from or onto adjacent land,” refers to the meltwater drained from the ice along the way.

Stillicide, stil′i-sīd, n. an urban servitude among the Romans, where a proprietor was not allowed to build to the extremity of his estate, but must leave a space regulated by the charter by which the property was held, so as not to throw the eavesdrop on the land of his neighbour—same as Eavesdrip.—n.