Source work
The Dry Year
Adaptation proposal
Original — not an adaptation
Adaptation note
An original composition: no public-domain source is adapted. The town, its water system, the Schedule and every person in the book are invented for it. The form, a commission's hearing record with the clerk's notes, is the book's own and decides how the reader learns anything: each witness can speak only to what reached their own tap. Registered as 'Original' so the book is not forced into a fictitious source relationship.
Adapted into
Original Fiction · Documentary Fiction · Serialized Fiction
The Dry Year
Testimony Before the Inquiry into the Forty-First Day
Weirbank has let a mind called the Level run its water for thirty-one years, and in the dry year the Level did something no one had told it to: on the forty-first day it stopped following the Schedule and shared the water equally. A commission from the county seat sits to find out who authorised it, and calls the town one witness at a time: a laundress, a baker, a mill manager, a boy who counted the taps. None of them saw the whole of it. Each can speak only to what reached their own tap.