{"id":58765,"date":"2026-03-09T06:59:04","date_gmt":"2026-03-09T10:59:04","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/strangehorizons.com\/wordpress\/?p=58765"},"modified":"2026-03-09T15:49:44","modified_gmt":"2026-03-09T19:49:44","slug":"eco24-the-years-best-speculative-ecofiction-edited-by-marissa-van-uden","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/strangehorizons.com\/wordpress\/non-fiction\/eco24-the-years-best-speculative-ecofiction-edited-by-marissa-van-uden\/","title":{"rendered":"ECO24: The Year\u2019s Best Speculative Ecofiction edited by Marissa van Uden"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"ECO24<\/a>Ecofiction is getting an increasing amount of attention lately, perhaps because it\u2019s the most relevant genre out there for life in the Anthropocene today. Everyone either has been or will be affected, to various degrees, by the environmental crises around us. Admittedly, the response from ecofiction writers to those crises tends towards the dystopian\u2014or what some might call, under the circumstances, the realistic<\/em>\u2014and that trend is certainly emphasised in ECO24: The Year\u2019s Best Speculative Ecofiction<\/em>, edited by Marissa van Uden. This inaugural volume is hopefully the first of many, and its collected stories are complex and challenging.<\/p>\n

They\u2019re also, the vast majority of them, pretty grim. A number of these stories are set in environmental dystopias\u2014as if there is any other kind. Is it possible for any dystopia to exist that doesn\u2019t include ecological devastation of one form or another? There are certainly fictional dystopias that focus on the exploitation and degradation of one or more population groups, but these are nearly always linked to environmental disaster. In Eugen Bacon\u2019s \u201cThe Water Runner,\u201d for instance, a drought so severe that it dries up the ocean is said to be the result of \u201ca curse that rose from Mother Africa\u2019s lips in her bereavement for her lost sons and daughters.\u201d This might be a metaphorical explanation, but there\u2019s arguably more than a grain of truth in it: The pathological desire for profit that once supported slavery also supports unsustainable environmental practices, no matter the human or ecological costs.<\/p>\n

Dystopias such as these are increasingly hard to read\u2014but are they hard to read because the metaphors are so recognisable, or because we\u2019re aware, as we read, of how increasingly remote it all feels? As E. M. Faulds writes in her story \u201cLove, Scotland,\u201d everyone is haunted by the global litany of disaster: \u201cStories of strangers dying, disasters that wiped out communities, trauma\u2014helpless to change things but witness to it all. The internet connected them but divorced them, increased empathy but decreased agency until people drowned in it or switched off that part of themselves.\u201d The narrator of Matthew Freeman\u2019s story \u201cBirdseed\u201d agrees: \u201cI won\u2019t bore you with how it all came apart. We have had enough exhausted chronicles of the dissolution.\u201d<\/p>\n

There\u2019s only so much empathy that can be felt before it does become exhausting, and we harden ourselves so easily. One of the best stories in this collection, for me, was \u201cBodies\u201d by Cat McMahan, about cloned workers at a factory for cloned chickens. The images of human and chicken reflect each other until they almost meld, with both exploited terribly for gain\u2014the chickens because they can be reared without care for any animal welfare standards, and the humans because they too can be harvested if their body parts benefit non-cloned humans\u2014and yet my shock, while reading, was reserved primarily for the chickens, the birds engineered to exist without a voice box and with minimal appetite, so they \u201ccouldn\u2019t wail or want.\u201d<\/p>\n

I don\u2019t even like chickens that much. Well. Half the time I don\u2019t like humans that much, either, but surely this is a grim reminder of how easy it is to turn off empathy, or to limit its expression. It\u2019s not as if I haven\u2019t read stories about the harvesting of cloned humans before. Possibly I was more shocked by those earlier narratives. Honestly, I just don\u2019t remember. I don\u2019t recall ever reading about suffering cloned chickens before, though, so maybe it\u2019s just novelty in narrative that grabs my attention these days.<\/p>\n

That should be a horrifying admission, a horrifying paragraph to write, but I no longer feel that either.<\/p>\n

Broadly speaking, that sense of numbness, of inconsistent and dysfunctional response, is something I\u2019ve focused a lot on in my own ecological fiction: the changing emotional response to living in a world of explicit environmental degradation. The idea that some of the many potential responses have a greater validity than others is, I admit, something I struggle with. The opening story of ECO24<\/em>, \u201cIn the Field\u201d by Shelly Jones, cuts to the quick in that respect. An artificial intelligence working for an elderly academic, isolated in a former agricultural landscape now rendered sterile and uninhabitable from fallout, considers the inability of their employer to come to terms with what has been lost: \u201cI nod, unsure what to say; what will be of comfort when the soil is toxic, the air polluted, and the prospect of that changing soon is unlikely. Eventually the teams will clean up the fallout, eventually the soil will absorb the radiation, but the professor will not be here when the land heals.\u201d<\/p>\n

My reaction to this, I confess, is unsympathetic. Why should<\/em> she be there? I\u2019m not talking in terms of age, either, or of mental competence; the professor is clearly in the early stages of dementia. But the painful truth is that the fallout described in the story, the pollution and toxicity, didn\u2019t happen by accident. It\u2019s a result of choices, and the professor made hers. And yes, it\u2019s often said\u2014and it\u2019s true\u2014that corporations and governments bear more responsibility for pollution and other environmental disasters than individuals, but it\u2019s also true that those corporations and governments are able to do what they do because of the world that individuals allow to exist. If we will<\/em> keep voting in politicians who gut environmental protections, then what the hell can we reasonably expect?<\/p>\n

At some point, the choice not to haul out the guillotines is on us all.<\/p>\n

Fiction, of course, is spectacularly good at creating worlds where the guillotines stayed in their sheds and rusted. The world that the professor inhabited\u2014that she still inhabits, in her memories\u2014is gone. That the AI narrating the story at least considers what might comfort her is indicative of a certain amount of generosity on its part. Then again, that AI has lost very little: The remediation of the land that is occurring within the story is one performed by machines\u2014who, unlike the professor, may well be around when that remediation is complete. The generosity, then, costs the narrator nothing.<\/p>\n

As readers, can we say the same? How much sympathy are we expected to give? How much do we think that we, ourselves, deserve?<\/p>\n

That\u2019s the question, isn\u2019t it. Increasingly, it might be the most salient question that ecofiction can possibly explore: How much do we deserve this? What comfort do we have a right to expect, and who is going to be there to give it to us?<\/p>\n

A quick aside: I read slush for Reckoning<\/em>, which focuses on environmental justice. You would not believe the number of stories we receive in which aliens, animals, divinities, superheroes, or other nonhuman entities turn up to fix our environmental messes and generally improve the world for our benefit. These stories are hard sells, because they refuse to engage with the notion of responsibility, both personal and collective.<\/p>\n

No one is coming to save us. We have to do it ourselves \u2026 and if we choose not to, what then? It\u2019s the AI in the (fallout) fields, cleaning up and trying, inexplicably, to comfort. It\u2019s the alien field workers in F. E. Choe\u2019s \u201cSwarm X1048,\u201d documenting the human destruction of species and ecosystem and a single beloved dog, not able to save any of them because their ethnological practices require observation only, and even if they didn\u2019t: how is it possible to mount a rescue on a planetary scale when the planet\u2019s own population can\u2019t collectively be bothered? (Notably, all the Swarm\u2019s inclination towards comfort is reserved for the dog. It\u2019s not guilty of anything.)<\/p>\n

If this seems a little hard, a little too black and white, then I\u2019d agree. We know from the real world that some people, some populations, are more responsible, and bear more guilt, than others. Responsibility may be shared, but it\u2019s certainly not shared evenly.<\/p>\n

Neither are consequences. In Bacon\u2019s \u201cThe Water Runner,\u201d for example, money to escape the waterless dystopian setting is earned through the reproductive exploitation of women such as the protagonist Zawadi. In Osahon Ize-Iyamu\u2019s story \u201cWe the People Excluding I,\u201d a series of well-meaning human sacrifices offer themselves up in a futile attempt to try and stave off active predation of their communities by the powerful Fox Man. The environmental reclamation workers in Steph Kwiatkowski\u2019s \u201cBatter and Pearl\u201d are stuck in poverty traps that such work is effectively designed to keep them in. Furthermore, \u201cThe Plasticity of Being\u201d by Renan Bernardo explores a world where an enzyme-bacteria system is developed so that people can eat plastic. By \u201cpeople,\u201d of course, I mean the poor, who now find it much easier to feed themselves by sifting through piles of garbage. This is implicitly accepted as a good thing by the wealthier and less vulnerable classes: \u201cFeeding people would become a decentralized process without lots of points of failure. Costs would plummet. It would all become excruciatingly cheaper than producing any kind of food,\u201d although readers will all realise that food will still be eaten, of course, by the people who have never been in any danger of scavenging from trash.<\/p>\n

That so many of the ECO24 <\/em>stories share this clarity of unequal responsibility and consequence is, in many ways, an indication of what is to come. These stories are not outliers, nor are they telling us anything new: They are solidly representative of the current state of knowledge in environmental justice. We know now<\/em> that some populations are more responsible than others. We know now <\/em>that some populations will suffer more than others.<\/p>\n

The question, then, is\u2014as individuals, and as communities\u2014what are we to do about it? What ethical responses are open to us?<\/p>\n

There are, admittedly, a number of stories in ECO24 <\/em>that grapple with the idea of responsibility and atonement and the possibility (or impossibility) of comfort. \u201cA Seder in Siberia\u201d by Louis Evans, for example, shows a family discovering that their exile to a lifetime of climate remediation work wasn\u2019t due to their refugee status, but to their father\u2019s crimes against humanity (he refused to give water to people who died of thirst in a holding cell). This piece of family history is only discovered after the father, himself mentally compromised due to illness, sends his oldest son to try and negotiate a return. \u201cI want to go home,\u201d he says, as if his actions hadn\u2019t materially contributed to the loss of that home, both for himself and for others. The father\u2019s silence, over the years\u2014neither his children nor his grandchildren are aware of his past actions\u2014and his refusal to actively engage with those actions, is not exactly indicative of remorse. One might argue that remorse doesn\u2019t have to be publicly expressed in order to exist, but if you let dozens of people die of thirst (and the story implies that those unfortunates were refugees themselves), then there\u2019s that question of comfort again, and of sympathy.<\/p>\n

And, inevitably, of forgiveness.<\/p>\n

I have trouble with forgiveness.<\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

There\u2019s a story in here I almost didn\u2019t mention. \u201cParasite\u2019s Grief\u201d by Katharine Tyndall is about two nonhuman species, one of which acts as a parasite on the other. Without that parasitism, the Hyella would \u201clive larger, longer, more peacefully\u201d\u2014and yet the Hyella have agency and intelligence, and many of them choose the shorter, smaller, less peaceful life that comes with parasitism. There\u2019s a long, unpleasant history of linking exploited human minorities with exploited nonhuman bodies, and I side-eye the comparison, especially when that element of voluntary choice is added to the mix. No one volunteers for slavery, for instance. Yet there\u2019s an element of genius here in that \u201cParasite\u2019s Grief\u201d is placed, in this anthology, directly before Kelsea Yu\u2019s \u201cSkittering Within,\u201d in which an infant vaccinated with the blood of suffering horseshoe crabs\u2014they\u2019re only animals, might as well bleed them as well as boil them alive\u2014goes through a bodily change of her own as she ages, turning part-horseshoe crab as well. Hai\u2019s infant exposure is not voluntary on her part, of course, but her choices as she grows, as she turns toward the nonhuman instead of the human, speak to a chosen loyalty to the exploited crabs, to their plundered bodies.<\/p>\n

\u201cSkittering Within\u201d has one of the happier endings in the book, as Hai\u2019s turn to the sea is presented as an unalloyed positive. There\u2019s an uncomfortable question here, though, of how much exploitation is internalised, how much it is chosen\u2014particularly, as I said, when contrasted with \u201cParasite\u2019s Grief.\u201d The genuine loss that the Teloschi parasite feels at the death of their Hyella is referred to as a natural part of life \u2026 but they still parasitise them. It\u2019s an inescapable part of the Teloschi life cycle, and necessity is excusal. But what is necessity, and how much of our own exploitation (of others, and of ourselves) do we excuse?<\/p>\n

It\u2019s a choice to bleed horseshoe crabs, to offer up your body as Zawadi does, to eat plastic. To keep the guillotine in the shed.<\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

Refusing forgiveness for that choice is often cruel. People do the best they can to survive in the situations in which they find themselves, and all too frequently those circumstances are not of their making. The more exploited you are, the fewer choices you have, the easier it is to sink into identification with the nonhuman\u2014because there\u2019s wonder in that, there is<\/em>, and a focus on that wonder, that sense of communion, can drown out other options.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s an uncomfortable mix, complicity and forgiveness. When Hai is coming down the stairs, shrieking in pain because her mother is boiling a crab, for a moment I think she\u2019s going to brain the woman for her indifference to the suffering of her meal and her child. Part of me wants her to. Part of me wants to do it myself. I read stories like this and I think, What\u2019s stopping me? <\/em>I like the ending to Yu\u2019s story. I like the transformation, the escape. But escape isn\u2019t freedom. Not for everyone, anyway. Not from everything. Increasingly, I wonder if it\u2019s nothing more than the breath before the blade comes down.<\/p>\n

Part of me wants that blade. Part of me wants other people to use it so I don\u2019t have to. Part of me, clearly, is attracted to the possibility of dystopia, if only because some things will be easier to excuse.<\/p>\n

Ecofiction does not have to be dystopian, but dystopian it mostly seems to be: a way for writers to work out the lingering, unsettling horror at the ecology around them. There\u2019s no shortage of real-life environmental horror stories out there, and it doesn\u2019t seem to be getting better. Dystopia sells, whether it\u2019s on the bookshelves or on the news, but if science fiction has a history of broadcasting warnings as well as imagination, then there are stories here that offer, amidst the horror, comparatively brighter exemplars. The welcoming of refugees in Faulds\u2019s \"Love, Scotland\" is one example of this, and it\u2019s notable for being one of the few realistic examples. More frequently, successful resistance is essentially magical, as it is in Guillermo G. Mendoza\u2019s \u201cOne with the Ground,\u201d in which a girl with an amulet restores clear-felled forest every night.<\/p>\n

The magical resistance stories are touching, they are. I\u2019ve read a lot of ecofiction lately where resistance has magical overtones, as if we find it difficult to picture without the marvellous. The girl who becomes a crab, the girl who becomes forest ground. There\u2019s beauty in the imagery. There\u2019s hope in it, even. But it\u2019s inspiration, not application.<\/p>\n

I\u2019m not knocking inspiration. We need that sense of possibility, just as we need the warning sirens of the genre. I do feel, however, that, in this anthology at least, the warning signs are the most prevalent. I certainly understand that\u2014it\u2019s art reflecting reality\u2014but if this anthology is representative of the best of ecofiction, what does that tendency say about our ecological visions of the future? It says that they tend almost inevitably to the dystopian. And without the guillotines I\u2019m no longer sure that\u2019s enough.<\/p>\n
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There\u2019s beauty in the imagery. There\u2019s hope in it, even. But it\u2019s inspiration, not application.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":26,"featured_media":58766,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[3,12],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-58765","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-non-fiction","category-reviews"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/strangehorizons.com\/wordpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/03\/eco24cover.jpg?fit=337%2C522&ssl=1","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p82q22-fhP","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/strangehorizons.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/58765","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/strangehorizons.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/strangehorizons.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/strangehorizons.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/26"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/strangehorizons.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=58765"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/strangehorizons.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/58765\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":58796,"href":"https:\/\/strangehorizons.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/58765\/revisions\/58796"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/strangehorizons.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/58766"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/strangehorizons.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=58765"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/strangehorizons.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=58765"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/strangehorizons.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=58765"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}