I read a lot of short fiction, but I tend to be a bit wary of climate fiction. Not because it’s bad—on the contrary, there’s a climate-focused story on my favorites list almost every year—but because I see stories praised as brilliant and visionary when the main selling point is the way the world could go wrong. (For the record, I feel the same way about dystopias). There’s plenty of room for rich storytelling, but it’s an area where I often feel like I’m looking for something different than so many other genre readers. So when I was offered a review copy of ECO24: The Year’s Best Speculative Ecofiction, I wasn’t quite sure what to think. But while ecofiction and climate fiction may be related, they are certainly not identical, and I was impressed by the wide range of outlets that had stories selected. And so I decided to take a look at Marissa Van Uden’s curated anthology of ecofiction gems from 2024.
ECO24 consists of 23 stories from a staggering 21 different venues, with only Clarkesworld and Strange Horizons represented twice. The anthology doesn’t publish word counts, but a few of the original magazines do, and the entries fall predominantly within the short story range, the longest approaching 7,000 words and the shortest just a hair under 2,000. It’s also being released by a fairly new imprint, Violet Lichen Books, a sister imprint of Apex Book Company that styles itself as home for dark, literary, and weird books, with a focus on “speculative ecofiction, Weird and New Weird, and moody science fiction with uniquely memorable characters.”
Readers of Apex Magazine will recognize the overall vibe here. And while Apex can sometimes be a touch too grotesque for my tastes, they publish beautiful stories and regularly have entries landing on my annual favorites list. Similarly, while ECO24 is sometimes a bit darker or weirder than I prefer, it’s certainly not an anthology that’s going to sit back on depressing worldbuilding and call it a job well done.
While I review a lot of short fiction, this is actually my first time reviewing a Year’s Best anthology, so be patient while I find my bearings. That said, the first thing I’m looking for in any anthology is a story (ideally more than one) that makes me want to go find friends to shove it at. In ECO24, I got that in the form of A Seder in Siberia by Louis Evans. Originally published by Grist—a climate news organization that is not predominantly speculative—I wouldn’t have even known it existed without the anthology reprint. And it’s a wonderful story, with the layers slowly peeling back on family drama and family sins, all intertwined with a religious ritual that both echoes and reinforces the contemporary narrative. This one’s a gem on multiple levels, and it’s one of those stories that on its own make me glad I have picked up the anthology.
There are a couple other excellent tales from more familiar outlets whose reprints in ECO24 forced me to take a well-deserved second look. While I’ve enjoyed Renan Bernardo’s work in the past, The Plasticity of Being looked like one of those “see how bad the world could be” stories that I often dislike. Instead, it’s a remarkably nuanced and character-focused look at a world in which technological advancement allows people to survive by eating plastic. The lead initially runs PR for the technology, despite objections from her mother, only later returning to those modified people and finding a complicated combination of responses that make the whole thing feel remarkably real.
To Drive the Cold Winter Away by E. Catherine Tobler is another that hadn’t caught my eye when initially published in Strange Horizons, and I was pleasantly surprised at how much I enjoyed it here. It’s an atmospheric, almost dreamlike piece in which the lead returns to her childhood home in hopes of beginning a project of rewilding the land. But while her sharp frustration with how humanity has scarred the natural ecosystem periodically bubbles to the surface, this is less an angry piece about environmental degradation and more a beautiful, mythic tale about setting out on a path that’s bigger than just humanity.
While these stories are the standouts, they’re far from the only looks at their major themes. ECO24 has no explicit groupings of stories, but the ordering tends to cluster small selections of tales that take similar approaches. “The Plasticity of Being,” for instance, is immediately followed by another story about poverty and microplastics, Steph Kwiatkowski’s Batter and Pearl. And “To Drive the Cold Winter Away” is preceded by another striking, vibe-heavy tale of magic and transformation in Kelsea Yu’s Skittering Within. In fact, the latter couplet opens a run of five straight that feel more mythic than scientific, and the anthology returns to the strangely magical transformation theme—on the whole, one of its most consistently compelling subjects—in the finale, E.M. Linden’s Mangrove Daughter. It’s a very nice balance that keeps the anthology as a whole feeling cohesive without ever feeling one-note. There are several approaches to almost every theme, and there’s never a point where it just feels like the same thing over and over. Just because they’re all ecologically-driven doesn’t mean they all have to be hard sci-fi tales of climate doom.
The groupings aren’t always clear, but there are often throughlines connecting one story to others around it. A set of six consecutive stories covering roughly the second quarter of the anthology includes a tale about ghosts, war, and trans identity (Nika Murphy’s The Ghost Tenders of Chernobyl), a sci-fi dog story that’s also a friendly-bot story (Swarm X1048 — Ethological Field Report: Canis Lupus Familiaris, “6” by F.E. Choe), a piece from the perspective of a clone with limited privacy rights facing a lot of discrimination (Bodies by Cat McMahan), and a small handful from the perspective of those still living after Earth’s surface has gotten much less livable. They come from different subgenres and focus on different themes, but all six include characters seeing a world of destruction and turning their attention to one thing—a project, a person, a fascination—that gives them focus, and perhaps a bit of hope. Some of them are designed to tug on your heartstrings (sci-fi readers do love them some dog stories), whereas others feature much less sympathetic leads, but they’re interesting to consider as a group of quite different tales that set out in such different directions that yet have that major thread of commonality. For me, it’s “Bodies” with the emotional and thematic depth to really stand above the crowd, but all six are well put-together, with something to offer the right audience.
Interspersed in the anthology are a scattering of ecological dark fantasies, the obligatory tale of climate refugees, and even a couple that abandon the terrestrial setting for tales in other worlds. Parasite’s Grief by Katharine Tyndall is fascinating story from the perspective of alien creatures with a strange lifecycle that evokes meditations on grief, guilt, and dependence, and The Colonists by Jennifer Hudak is an alien encounter tale that grabs the reader’s attention early and never lets it go in building to the inevitable conclusion. Every story hits the ecological theme, but it’s extremely far from a one-note anthology.
Of course, as someone who read a lot of short fiction in 2024, I have my own opinions about what was truly the best of the year. Dan Musgrave’s “A Move to a New Country” was one of my favorites and would’ve fit wonderfully alongside other tight family tales involving involuntary relocation (like “A Seder in Siberia”). Leah Andelsmith’s “Within the Seed Lives the Fruit” would’ve paired perfectly with the magical realism-flavored transformation stories like “Skittering Within” or “To Drive the Cold Winter Away.” Then again, both of those stories were published in Reckoning, and including both would’ve given the publication more entries than any other source of fiction anthologized here. I may quibble about which Reckoning story was truly the best of the year, but the anthology’s diversity—both of original publishers and of varied approaches to the major theme—is one of its biggest strengths, and it would have been undercut by leaning too heavily on any one venue.
Another thing I love about this anthology is the inclusion of a 15-item Recommended Reading section at the end. As of yet, I’ve only read two of the fifteen included, so I can’t comment much on the quality of recommendations—even if I grouse slightly about not seeing “A Move to a New Country”—but the additional recommendations come from sources just as varied as the ones that made it into the anthology, and for fans of the curation of ECO24, the list will undoubtedly be a rich source of further reading.
On the whole, Marissa van Uden’s tastes lean a little darker and stranger than mine do, so ECO24 isn’t loaded front-to-back with Stuff Tar Vol Likes. However, the entries are invariably well-crafted and often beautiful. Even when they’re not my thing, it’s clear that they’re somebody’s thing. Combine that with the balance of unity and diversity in the anthology’s theming, the remarkable range of sources, and a trio of fantastic entries that I never would have otherwise read, and this is an anthology that was exciting to read and is easy to recommend.
Recommended if you like: dark, strange, ecological short fiction.
Can I use it for Bingo? It’s hard mode for Five Short Stories and is Published in 2025.
Overall rating: 16 of Tar Vol’s 20. Four stars on Goodreads.