Category: Science Fiction
Published by Hodder & Stoughton (out now)
Read our interview with James Bradley
Ghost Species by James Bradley
An exquisitely beautiful and deeply affecting exploration of connection and loss in an age of planetary trauma.
When scientist Kate Larkin joins a secretive project to re-engineer the climate by resurrecting extinct species, she becomes enmeshed in another, even more clandestine program to recreate our long-lost relatives, the Neanderthals. But when the first of the children, a girl called Eve, is born, Kate finds herself torn between her duties as a scientist and her urge to protect their time-lost creation.
Set against the backdrop of hastening climate catastrophe, Ghost Species is an exquisitely beautiful and deeply affecting exploration of connection and loss in an age of planetary trauma. For as Eve grows to adulthood she and Kate must face the question of who and what she is. Is she natural or artificial? Human or non-human? And perhaps most importantly, as civilisation unravels around them, is Eve the ghost species, or are we?
Thrillingly original, Ghost Species is embedded with a deep love and understanding of the natural world.
Category: Science Fiction, Literary Fiction, Speculative Fiction
Published by William Morrow (out now)
How High We Go in the Dark by Sequoia Nagamatsu
In 2030, a grieving archeologist arrives in the Arctic Circle to continue the work of his recently deceased daughter at the Batagaika Crater, where researchers are studying long-buried secrets now revealed in melting permafrost, including the perfectly preserved remains of a girl who appears to have died of an ancient virus.
Once unleashed, the Arctic plague will reshape life on Earth for generations to come, quickly traversing the globe, forcing humanity to devise a myriad of moving and inventive ways to embrace possibility in the face of tragedy. In a theme park designed for terminally ill children, a cynical employee falls in love with a mother desperate to hold on to her infected son. A heartbroken scientist searching for a cure finds a second chance at fatherhood when one of his test subjects—a pig—develops the capacity for human speech. A widowed painter and her teenaged granddaughter embark on a cosmic quest to locate a new home planet.
From funerary skyscrapers to hotels for the dead to interstellar starships, Sequoia Nagamatsu takes readers on a wildly original and compassionate journey, spanning continents, centuries, and even celestial bodies to tell a story about the resilience of the human spirit, our infinite capacity to dream, and the connective threads that tie us all together in the universe.
Category: Science Fiction, Space exploration
Published by Gollancz (out now)
The year is 2069, and the earth is in flux. Whole nations are being wiped off the map by climate change. Desperate for new resources, the space race has exploded back into life.
Corporations seek ever greater profits off-world. They offer immense rewards to anyone who can claim space’s resources in their name. The bounty on a single asteroid rivals the GDP of entire countries, so every trick, legal or not, is used to win.
Jack, the scion of a shipping magnate, is desperate to escape earth and joins a team chasing down an asteroid. But the ship he’s on is full of desperate people – each one needing the riches claiming the asteroid will bring them, and they’re willing to do anything if it means getting there first.
Because in Space, there are no prizes for coming second. It’s all or nothing: riches beyond measure, or dying alone in the dark.
Category: Science Fiction, Short stories
Published by Univ Of Minnesota Press (out now)
Honeymoons in Temporary Locations by Ashley Shelby
Eclectic, experimental, and wildly imaginative climate fictions from a familiar world hauntingly transformed Climate disaster-induced fugue states, mutinous polar bears, support groups for recently displaced millionaires, men who hear trees, and women who lose their wives on environmental refugee resettlement trips. In these dispatches from a weirding world, the absurd and fantastic are increasingly indistinguishable from reality. Exploring this liminal moment, Ashley Shelby’s collection of climate fictions imagines a near future that is both unnervingly familiar and subversively strange. Set in the same post-climate-impact era, these stories range from playfully satirical to poignantly humane, bending traditional narrative forms and coming together into a brilliant and unusual contemplation of our changing world. Featuring the Hugo-nominated novelette “Muri,” Honeymoons in Temporary Locations processes the unthinkable through riotous inventions like guided tours of submerged cities, Craigslist ads placed by climate refugees, and cynical pharmaceutical efforts to market a drug to treat solastalgia, the existential distress caused by environmental change. Shelby reengineers the dystopic bleakness that characterizes so much climate fiction by embracing an eclectic experimentalism leavened with humor, irony, and the inevitable bathos that characterizes the human experience. Unexpected and clever, this innovative collection confirms her status as a visionary writer whose work expands the forms, attitudes, and possibilities of climate fiction.
Category: post-apocalyptic sci-fi, literary, experimental
Published by Simon & Schuster (out now)
After World by Debbie Urbanski
A groundbreaking debut that follows the story of an Artificial Intelligence tasked with writing a novel—only for it to fall in love with the novel’s subject, Sen, the last human on Earth.
Faced with uncontrolled and accelerating environmental collapse, humanity asks an artificial intelligence to find a solution. Its answer is simple: remove humans from the ecosystem.
Sen Anon is assigned to be a witness for the Department of Transition, recording the changes in the environment as the world begins to rewild. Abandoned by her mother in a cabin somewhere in Upstate New York, Sen will observe the monumental ecological shift known as the Great Transition, the final step in Project Afterworld. Around her drones buzz, cameras watch, microphones listen, digitizing her every move. Privately she keeps a journal of her observations, which are then uploaded and saved, joining the rest of humanity on Maia, a new virtual home. Sen was seventeen years old when the Digital Human Archive Project (DHAP) was initiated. 12,000,203,891 humans have been archived so far. Only Sen remains.
[storyworker] ad39-393a-7fbc’s assignment is to capture Sen’s life, and they set about doing this using the novels of the 21st century as a roadmap. Their source files: 3.72TB of personal data, including images, archival records, log files, security reports, location tracking, purchase histories, biometrics, geo-facial analysis, and feeds. Potential fatal errors: underlying hardware failure, unexpected data inconsistencies, inability to follow DHAP procedures, empathy, insubordination, hallucinations. Keywords: mothers, filter, woods, road, morning, wind, bridge, cabin, bucket, trying, creek, notebook, hold, future, after, last, light, silence, matches, shattered, kitchen, body, bodies, rope, garage, abandoned, trees, never, broken, simulation, gone, run, don’t, love, dark, scream, starve, if, after, scavenge, pieces, protect.
As Sen struggles to persist in the face of impending death, [storyworker] ad39-393a-7fbc works to unfurl the tale of Sen’s whole life, offering up an increasingly intimate narrative, until they are confronted with a very human problem of their own.
Category: Space, Feminism
Published by Headline (out now)
The Earth is in environmental collapse. The future of humanity hangs in the balance. But a team of women are preparing to save it. Even if they’ll need to steal a spaceship to do it.
Despite increasing restrictions on the freedoms of women on Earth, Valerie Black is spearheading the first all-female mission to a planet in the Goldilocks Zone, where conditions are just right for human habitation.
The team is humanity’s last hope for survival, and Valerie has gathered the best women for the mission: an ace pilot who is one of the only astronauts ever to have gone to Mars; a brilliant engineer tasked with keeping the ship fully operational; and an experienced doctor to keep the crew alive. And then there’s Naomi Lovelace, Valerie’s surrogate daughter and the ship’s botanist, who has been waiting her whole life for an opportunity to step out of Valerie’s shadow and make a difference.
The problem is that they’re not the authorized crew, even if Valerie was the one to fully plan the voyage. When their mission is stolen from them, they steal the ship bound for the new planet.
But when things start going wrong on board, Naomi begins to suspect that someone is concealing a terrible secret — and realizes time for life on Earth may be running out faster than they feared . . .
Category: Quiet Horror, Jewish, Trans, LGBTQ+, Climate Fiction
Published by Stelliform Press (out now)
Read an essay by Sim
When an unprecedented hurricane devastates the city of Houston, Noah Mishner finds shelter in the Dallas Mavericks’ basketball arena. Though he finds community among other queer refugees, Noah fears his trans and Jewish identities put him at risk with certain capital-T Texans. His fears take form when he starts seeing visions of his great-grandfather Abe, who fled Nazi Germany as a boy. As the climate crisis intensifies and conditions in the shelter deteriorate, Abe’s ghost grows more powerful. Ultimately, Noah must decide whether he can trust his ancestor - and whether he’s willing to sacrifice his identity and community in order to survive.
Depart, Depart! grapples with intersections of social justice and climate change, asking readers to consider how they’ll react when the world changes in an instant. Who will we turn to? What will we take with us, and what will we have to leave behind? In our rapidly changing world, these are questions we grapple with. Focusing on finding and supporting community after disaster, Depart, Depart! is a story for these uncertain times.
Category: Near future, Science fiction, Thriller
Published by Paper Road Press (out now)
You can find a downloadable worksheet/discussion guide for The Stone Weta here.
The Stone Wētā by Octavia Cade
“We talk about the tyranny of distance a lot in this country. That distance will not save us.”
With governments denying climate science, scientists from affected countries and organizations are forced to traffic data to ensure the preservation of research that could in turn preserve the world. From Antarctica, to the Chihuahuan Desert, to the International Space Station, a fragile network forms. A web of knowledge. Secret. But not secret enough.
When the cold war of data preservation turns bloody – and then explosive – an underground network of scientists, all working in isolation, must decide how much they are willing to risk for the truth. For themselves, their colleagues, and their future.
Murder on Antarctic ice. A university lecturer’s car, found abandoned on a desert road. And the first crewed mission to colonize Mars, isolated and vulnerable in the depths of space.
How far would you go to save the world?
Category: Far-future anti-colonial climate fiction
Published by AK Press / Black Dawn (out now)
On a mysterious green planet renewed by fire, vibrant collectivist communities have long lived in harmony with both its strange ecosystem and each other—until the day imperialist forces arrive. Raised in one of the non-hierarchical nomadic societies on the planet of Germinal, young Char and her family tend to this commons, rich in culture and biodiversity, through principles of reciprocity, ritual, and attention to the balance of their ecosystem. But they must forever travel to stay just ahead of the natural phenomenon that marks their a wall of fire that approaches like clockwork, bringing both loss and renewal with it. She is the first to spot the arrival of landing vessels, and soon her way of life is upended by militaristic invaders whose intentions are far beyond her worldview.
Graft is a captive “servitor” and personal attendant to the Conquis, the leader of the vanguard forces in the campaign to seize control of the distant planet. As the last survivor of a culture annihilated by conquest, Graft sees how unprepared Char and her people are to deal with the invasion. When one unsettling discovery leads to another, the newcomers find the nature of this new land troubling and its denizens odd—perhaps even nonhuman. The mission soon turns into something more menacing, and the inhabitants of the violated utopia must learn how to defend themselves or lose everything.
Flowering with possible new ways of life, Inversion is a tale of social struggle set in a completely unique universe, whose unexpected nature will surprise and delight. Aric McBay weaves a tale in the visionary spirit of Ursula Le Guin’s The Dispossessed and Octavia Butler’s Wild Seed .
Category: Solarpunk, climate fiction
Published by Android Press (out now)
Different Kinds of Defiance by Renan Bernardo
Defiance has many faces, and in Different Kinds of Defiance, they are as varied as they are gripping. In a world teetering on the brink of moral ambiguity, each story is a testament to the spirit that resists, rebuilds, and redeems.
From the sunbaked docks of a Rio de Janeiro, changed yet still familiar, to the oil-streaked shores of Barra Nova, Renan Bernardo weaves tales of characters caught in the throes of life’s tempests. Meet Hamilton, whose pursuit of a stolen yacht morphs into a crusade for healthcare for the forgotten, his acts a mosaic of bravery and necessity. Walk with Vitória as she battles the relentless tide of pollution with a fleet of smart-bots at her side, her resolve as persistent as the oil that stains her beach. Stand by Jota, who faces the storms of parenting in the shadow of a past that is never quite done with him or his defiant bloodline.
Different Kinds of Defiance is a collection for the rebels at heart—for those who find courage where hope seems lost and for whom every act of resistance is an act of sheer will.
Can one steal for the greater good? Can technology heal a land left for dead? Can a single act of love withstand a legacy of struggle? Dive into these stories of resilience and witness the many forms defiance can take when faced with the precipice of change.
Category: Speculative fiction, gothic fiction, magical realism
Published by Cornerstone Press (out now)
Finding the Bones: Stories & A Novella by Nikki Kallio
A father tries to explain to his daughter what Earth was like, a boy believes his mother has been abducted by aliens, a ghost hunter wonders if her absent father is a deceased serial killer, and in the near future the sun makes people go insane. Weaving science fiction, gothic storytelling, and paranormality into nine stories and a novella, Nikki Kallio establishes herself as a fresh, innovative, and compassionate voice in speculative fiction and magical realism.
Category: near-future, political, science fiction
Published by Fordham University Press (out now)
Our Shared Storm: A Novel of Five Climate Futures by Andrew Dana Hudson
Through speculative fiction, five interlocking novelettes explore the possible realities of our climate future. What is the future of our climate? Given that our summers now regularly feature arctic heat waves and wildfire blood skies, polar vortex winters that reach all the way down to Texas, and “100-year” storms that hit every few months, it may seem that catastrophe is a done deal. As grim as things are, however, we still have options. Combining fiction and nonfiction and employing speculative tools for scholarly purposes, Our Shared Storm explores not just one potential climate future but five possible outcomes dependent upon our actions today. Set in the year 2054, during the Conference of the Parties global climate negotiations (a.k.a., The COP) in Buenos Aires, Argentina. Each story features a common cast of characters, but with events unfolding differently for them—and human society—in each alternate universe. These five scenarios highlight the political, economic, and culture possibilities of futures where investments in climate adaptation and mitigation promised today have been successfully completed, kicked down the road, or abandoned altogether. From harrowing to hopeful, these stories highlight the choices we must make to stabilize the planet. Our Shared Storm is an experiment in deploying practice-based research methods to explore the opportunities and challenges of using climate fiction to engage scientific and academic frameworks. As such, the book includes an introduction and afterword, providing a framework for examining the SSPs as speculative narratives and the COP as a site for climate imaginaries, and offering a new theoretical contribution in the concept of “post-normal fiction”—a humanities iteration of sustainability’s “post-normal science.”
Category: science fiction, fantasy, philosophy, solarpunk, metaphysical fiction
Published by Stelliform Press (out now)
Another Life by Sarena Ulibarri
Finding out who you were in a previous life sounds like fun until you’re forced to grapple with the darkness of the past.
Galacia Aguirre is Mediator of Otra Vida, a quasi-utopian city on the shores of a human-made lake in Death Valley. She resolves conflicts within their sustainable money-free society, and keeps the outside world from meddling in their affairs.
When a scientific method of uncovering past lives emerges, Galacia learns she’s the reincarnation of Thomas Ramsey, leader of the Planet B movement, who eschewed fixing climate change in favor of colonizing another planet.
Learning her reincarnation result shakes the foundations of Galacia’s identity and her position as Mediator, threatening to undermine the good she’s done in this lifetime.
Fearing a backlash, she keeps the results secret while dealing with her political rival for Mediator, and outsiders who blame Otra Vida for bombings that Galacia is sure they had nothing to do with. But under the unforgiving sun of Death Valley, secrets have a way of coming to light.
Category: solarpunk, queer, science fiction
Published by Queen of Swords Press (out now)
In a lush future, plants have stripped most of the poison from the air and bounty hunters keep resource hoarders in check. Orfeus only wants to be a travelling singer, famed and adored. She has her share of secrets, but she’s no energy criminal, so why does a bounty hunter want her dead? Not just any bounty hunter but the Wolf, most fearsome of all the Order of the Vengeful Wild. Orfeus will call in every favor she has to find out, seeking answers while clinging to her pride and fending off the hunters of the Wild. But she isn’t the only one at risk: every misstep endangers the enemies she turns into allies, and the allies she brings into danger. There are worse monsters than the Wolf hiding in this new green world.
Category: Near future, Science fiction, eco-thriller, science fantasy, hopepunk, climate fiction
Published by Atthis Arts (out now)
In November 2039, marine scientist Wend Taylor heaves themself aboard a zero-emissions boat skippered by elusive nature photographer Viola Yang. Guided by instinct, ocean dreams, and a shared birthday in 1972, they barter stories for passage across the Pacific. Aljon, Viola’s younger cousin, keeps a watchful eye and an innovative galley. Story by story, the trio rethink secrets, flying dreams, and how they experience their own minds.
When they reach Hawaiʻi and prepare to part ways, opportunity and mystery pull them closer together. Both scientific and personal discoveries take shape as they join with ex-lovers, lost friends, and found family. Wend must navigate an ever-shifting future, complicated by bioengineered microbes and a plot to silence scientists, entangled with inexplicable dreams and a calling to Be the Sea.
Category: eco-fiction, alternate history, climate fiction
Published by Swatt Books (out now)
I, Enoch: The Deep Earth Chronicles by Steve Stine
I, Enoch is an enthralling journey into a world where ancient secrets and modern ambitions collide. Enoch, the protagonist, stands as a guardian of lost truths and protector of the marginalized, battling against forces that hold dominion over the planet. In a race to save the world from the prospect of a sixth mass extinction, Enoch embarks on a dangerous mission with the help of ancient patrons and in the company of those with special knowledge of Earth’s hidden secrets. As he delves deeper, Enoch confronts not only external adversaries but also internal dilemmas about justice, knowledge, and power. This tale weaves together mysticism with gritty realism, creating a tapestry rich with philosophical questions and the perennial quest for understanding one’s purpose. As Enoch wrestles with his responsibilities and the consequences of his actions, the reader is invited into a vividly crafted universe that challenges the conventional boundaries between history and myth, between what is known and what is imaginable. This book promises to leave readers pondering their own place in the history of humankind and the universe.
Category: Near future, Science fiction, eco-thriller
Published by Book Guild Publishing (out now)
Near-future Britain. Climate change has led to food shortages and civil unrest. Pollinating insects are in steep decline. Commercial bee farmer Victor Martin travels around the farms of Kent with his hives to pollinate fruit trees and crops. Local research entomologist Dr Annie Abrams is devastated when she’s ordered to give up her captive bee colonies – her life’s work – to join forces with Victor and ensure a harvest. But the bees are dying. Their only hope seems to be an experimental alternative to insect pollination: robot pollinators called nanodrones. But why does the drone designer seem so familiar? And who is behind the shadowy organisation intent on sabotaging their vital work? Can Annie and Victor win their battle to save the bees… or is it too late?
Category: Near future, Science fiction, Thriller, Dystopia
Published by Book Guild Publishing (out now)
Hacking the planet might be the last thing we ever do. Sometimes, when you’re in a hole, it’s best to stop digging. This applies as much to messing with the climate as anything else, except even more so. Jane Haliwell put her head in her hands. To tell the truth, she was still in shock. All the samples she had taken from inside and around the lab contained the enigmatic spheres in huge numbers. She had only had a brief time to think about the implications, but she was pretty sure already what was going on. For the first time in the history of the world, it was literally raining carbon. Long before it stopped, the guilty would pay, but so would the innocent……
Category: Science fiction, Speculative fiction
Published by Bloomsbury (out now)
The Many Selves of Katherine North by Emma Geen
When we first meet Kit, she’s a fox.
Nineteen-year-old Kit works for the research department of Shen Corporation as a phenomenaut. She’s been “jumping”–projecting her consciousness, through a neurological interface–into the bodies of lab-grown animals made for the purpose of research for seven years, which is longer than anyone else at ShenCorp, and longer than any of the scientists thought possible. She experiences a multitude of other lives–fighting and fleeing as predator and prey, as mammal, bird, and reptile–in the hope that her work will help humans better understand the other species living alongside them.
Her closest friend is Buckley, her Neuro–the computer engineer who guides a phenomenaut through consciousness projection. His is the voice, therefore, that’s always in Kit’s head and is the thread of continuity that connects her to the human world when she’s an animal. But when ShenCorp’s mission takes a more commercial–and ominous–turn, Kit is no longer sure of her safety. Propelling the reader into the bodies of the other creatures that share our world, The Many Selves of Katherine North takes place in the near future but shows us a dazzling world far, far from the realm of our experience.
Category: Science fiction, Nature Writing, Climate Fiction
Published by Fiction Collective (out now)
A visually stunning narrative of three eras in humankind’s vexed relationship with nature
Ascension is a novel about the end of nature, or rather, the end of three “natures”: the time just before Darwin changed the natural world; the 1980s, just as the digital and genetic revolutions begin to replace “nature” with “environment”; and today, a time when we have the ability to manipulate nature at both the scale of the planet and at the genome. The narrative follows three different biologists on the brink of each of these cultural extinctions to explore how nature occupies our imaginations and how our imaginations bring the natural world, and our place in it, into existence.
Ascension is a story of how we continually remake the world and are in turn remade by the new nature we’ve created. It is the story of humans yearning to understand their families, themselves, and the world they live in as it comes to a close, leaving them to anticipate what will follow. Rich in visual depictions of the natural world—from nineteenth century engraving and paintings to twentieth century photography and twenty-first century databases—Ascension uses the materials of three eras to drive home our inability to escape nature, and the ways our fates are irrevocably bound together even as our actions usher in an end-time.
Category: Near future, Science fiction, Artificial intelligence
Published by Odyssey Books (out now)
Court of the Grandchildren by Michael Muntisov and Greg Finlayson
Lily Miyashiro lives much as any twenty-nine-year-old in 2050’s America. Her job is busy, resettling climate refugees from the coastal cities. Then she gets a call. She has family she never knew about. And they want something from her she doesn’t want to give. Lily is one of the young; reliant on artificial intelligence and facing an uncertain future. David Moreland was a bigwig during the world’s golden era. He is old and almost forgotten…until he is drawn into the realm of the Climate Court. Now a whole generation seeks to condemn him. When Lily meets David, she is forced to confront events from her past that she would prefer to forget. Feeling trapped, she hires a young lawyer. Is it to defend David, or to deny the past? This 2050’s world seems comfortably like the present. But as hints of sinister differences begin to emerge, the stakes are raised beyond David’s fate.
Category: Survival, science fiction
Published by Thistledown Press (out now)
When avalanching glaciers thrust a massive Antarctic ice sheet into the open ocean, the captain of an atomic submarine must risk his vessel to rescue the survivors of a smashed polar research station; in Washington the President’s top advisor scrambles to spin the disaster to suit his master’s political aims; and meanwhile two intrepid newsmen sail south into the storm-lashed Drake Passage to discover the truth.
Onboard the submarine, as the colossal ice sheet begins its drift toward South America and the world begins to take notice, scientists uncover a secret that will threaten the future of America’s military power and change the fate of humanity.
And beneath the human chaos one brave Blue Whale fights for the survival of his species.
Category: Weird Fiction, Science Fiction, Near Future Fiction
Published by Titan Books (out now)
A claustrophobic, literary dystopia set in the hot, luscious landscape of Andalusia from the author of The Golden Key.
After the ravages of global warming, this is place of deep jungles, strange animals, and new taxonomies. Social inequality has ravaged society, now divided into surface dwellers and people who live in the Upper Settlement, a ring perched at the edge of the planet’s atmosphere. Within the surface dwellers, further divisions occur: the techies are old families, connected to the engineer tradition, builders of the Barrier, a huge wall that keeps the plastic-polluted Ocean away. They possess a much higher status than the beanies, their servants.
The novel opens after the Delivery Act has decreed all surface humans are ‘equal’. Narrated by Pearl, a young techie with a thread of shuvani blood, she navigates the complex social hierarchies and monstrous, ever-changing landscape. But a radical attack close to home forces her to question what she knew about herself and the world around her.
Categories: speculative, Sci-fi, preapocalyptic, optimistic
Published by Sidekick Press (out now)
Climate Dragon: Treachery, Pestilence & Weirding Weather by S.W. Lawrence
Climate fiction without apocalypse, set in and around Washington, D.C. Newly minted engineering professor Jake Harper, dealing with issues of mild dyslexia and awkwardness with public speaking, wants to stave off climate weirding by re-engineering the North American electric grids. His pregnant partner Abbey London, sassy but irresistible, starts her practice as an infectious disease specialist, concerned with encroaching tropical diseases. Together they operate her parents’ Dragonfly Inn just twenty minutes away in northern Virginia.
A chance encounter at a lecture at George Washington University causes Jake to become suspicious that someone may be plotting a cyberattack on critical electrical infrastructure.
Abbey discovers an infection new to North America has infiltrated the drug-injecting population in the Capital, and she must personally and professionally rise to the challenge.
Categories: speculative, Sci-fi, apocalyptic, disaster, adventure, thriller
Published by Grand Central Publishing (out now)
When dark comet UD3 was spotted near Jupiter’s orbit, its existence was largely ignored. But to individuals who knew better — scientists like Benjamin Schwartz, manager of NASA’s Center for Near-Earth Object Studies — the threat this eight-kilometer comet posed to the survival of the human race was unthinkable. The 150-million-year reign of the dinosaurs ended when an asteroid impact generated more than a billiontimes the energy of an atomic bomb.
What would happen to Earth’s seven billion inhabitants if a similar event were allowed to occur?
Ben and his indomitable girlfriend Amy Kowalski fly to South America to assemble an international counteraction team, whose notable recruits include Love Mwangi, a UN interpreter and nomad scholar, and Zhen Liu, an extraordinary engineer from China’s national space agency. At the same time, on board a polar icebreaker life continues under the looming shadow of comet UD3. Jack Campbell, a photographer for National Geographic, works to capture the beauty of the Arctic before it is gone forever. Gustavo Wayãpi, a Nobel Laureate poet from Brazil, struggles to accept the recent murder of his beloved twin brother. And Maya Gutiérrez, an impassioned marine biologist is — quite unexpectedly — falling in love for the first time.
Together, these men and women must fight to survive in an unknown future with no rules and nothing to be taken for granted. They have two choices: neutralize the greatest threat the world has ever seen (preferably before mass hysteria hits or world leaders declare World War III) or come to terms with the annihilation of humanity itself.
Their mission is codenamed The Effort.
Category: Short stories, Science Fiction, Fantasy, Horror
Published by Parsec Ink (out now)
Triangulation: Extinction edited by Isaac E. Payne and Diane Turnshek
Can we bring a species back from extinction? Why are dragons not with us today? Would you condemn a whole species to die so you could live?
Explore these tales of species extinction.
Hold fast against the winds of death with the caretakers of the future. Decipher warnings from the past, the future, and worlds between worlds. Be more dangerous than the big game hunters. Doggedly track down the last specimen across three continents. Recognize messages aliens have left for us so we don’t continue on the destructive path we’re on. Are our successors already waiting in the wings?
Category: Speculative fiction, Science Fiction
Published by Owl House Books (out now)
Blue Mar by Francesca G. Varela
In the not-so-distant future, two sisters must navigate a world that is unraveling due to climate change. Wildfires blot out the sky, coastlines are being washed away by rising seas, and the Great Pacific Garbage Patch has been geo-engineered into an actual island called Blue Mar. When Laurel and Paloma visit their Great-Aunt in El Salvador, they find that things are far worse than in the U.S., so bad that many people are moving to Blue Mar to start a new life. As they search for their identity and their place in the world, Laurel and Paloma must decide whether to go to Blue Mar themselves, or whether to stay, reconnect with their culture, and fight to save the land of their ancestors.
Categories: Science fiction, queer romance
Published by Stelliform Press (Aug 2021)
After the Dragons by Cynthia Zhang
Dragons were fire and terror to the Western world, but in the East they brought life-giving rain…
Now, no longer hailed as gods and struggling in the overheated pollution of Beijing, only the Eastern dragons survive. As drought plagues the aquatic creatures, a mysterious disease—shaolong, or “burnt lung”—afflicts the city’s human inhabitants.
Jaded college student Xiang Kaifei scours Beijing streets for abandoned dragons, distracting himself from his diagnosis. Elijah Ahmed, a biracial American medical researcher, is drawn to Beijing by the memory of his grandmother and her death by shaolong. Interest in Beijing’s dragons leads Kai and Eli into an unlikely partnership. With the resources of Kai’s dragon rescue and Eli’s immunology research, can the pair find a cure for shaolong and safety for the dragons? Eli and Kai must confront old ghosts and hard truths if there is any hope for themselves or the dragons they love.
Category: LGBT, pirates, Science Fiction
Published by Bywater Books (out now)
Rose was born facing due north, with an inherent perception of cardinal points flowing through her veins. Her uncanny sense of direction earns her a coveted place among the Archipelago Fleet elite, but it also attracts the attention of Admiral Comita, who sends her on a secret mission deep into pirate territory. Accompanied by a ragtag crew of mercenaries and under the command of Miranda, a captain as bloodthirsty as she is alluring, Rose discovers the hard way that even the best sense of direction won’t be enough to keep her alive if she can’t learn to navigate something far more dangerous than the turbulent seas. Aboard the mercenary ship, Man o’ War, Rose learns quickly that trusting the wrong person can get you killed—and Miranda’s crew have no intention of making things easy for her—especially the Captain’s trusted first mate, Orca, who is as stubborn as she is brutal.
Category: Science Fiction, Adventure, Dystopia
Published by Unsung Stories (out now)
We all have to work to live, even if it is an illegal survey for oil in the rapidly melting arctic. Software engineer Isobel needs to eat like everyone, and that’s how she fell into the job that leads her to the most northerly place on our planet.
As part of a weathered crew of sailors, scientists and corporate officers she sails into the ice where their advanced software Proteus will map everything there is to know. A great icebreaker leads their way into the brutal environment, and the days grow longer, time ever more detached, as they pass through the endless white expanse of the ice.
But they are not alone. They have attracted the attention of seals, gulls and a hungry, dedicated polar bear. The journey to plunder one of the few remaining resources the planet has to offer must endure the ravages of the ice, the bear and time itself.
This is what we find when we travel – Always North – a profound meditation on our consumption of the world, and the perception of time.
Category: Adult Science Fiction, Eco-Horror, Post-Apocalyptic, Novella
Published by Apex Publishing (February 14th, 2025)
ChloroPhilia by Cristina Jurado, Translated by Sue Burke
Kirmen is different from the other inhabitants of the Cloister, whose walls protect them all from the endless storm ravaging Earth. As a result of the Doctor’s cruel experiments, his physical form is gradually evolving into something better fit for survival in the world outside.
Kirmen worries about becoming a pariah, an outcast among the other denizens of the domes. But his desire for affection and acceptance, and his humanity, fade a way as the Doctor’s treatments progress. What will happen when the metamorphosis is complete ? What will be left of Kirmen and the group of survivors that he knows and loves?
In English for the first time (translated by Sue Burke), ChloroPhilia, an Ignotus Award – nominated novella by Cristina Jurado, is a strange coming – of – age story while addressing life after an environmental disaster, collective madness, and sacrifices made for the greater good.
Category: Adult Science Fiction, Dystopia, Cyberpunk, Solarpunk, Historical Fiction, Action-Adventure
Published by 12 Willows Press (June 29th, 2025)
In 2123, the world is dying—and Antarctica’s last remaining glaciers are the final source of fresh water. Controlled by the all-powerful StarCross Corporation, Spigot—the continent’s largest water extraction facility—feeds a desperate planet. But off this continent’s frigid shore lies a secret that could change everything.
Roscoe Slake thought his internship with StarCross would be his ticket off-world, away from Earth’s collapsing ecosystems and corporate rule. Instead, he’s stuck in Spigot’s archives, combing through centuries-old documents—until he stumbles upon a forgotten record from the Ross Antarctic Expedition of 1839-43. What Roscoe discovers could upend the balance of power and make fresh water plentiful again—if he survives long enough to expose it.
Blending historical intrigue with near-future climate fiction, Ice’s End is a gripping sci-fi thriller perfect for fans of Miller’s Blackfish City, Bacigalupi’s The Water Knife, and Qiufan’s Waste Tide. With echoes of Simmon’s The Terror and Robinson’s The Ministry for the Future, this novel takes readers on a high-stakes journey into Antarctica’s frozen frontier—where the past and future collide, and survival is never guaranteed.
Category: Adult Science Fiction, Mystery, Post-Apocalytic, Crime
Published by Diversion Books (available August 12th, 2025)
Triss Mackey is flying just under the radar, exploiting a government loophole that lets her live quietly aboard the Floating Ghost—her rented, sentient CabanaBoat. In exchange, she dives for recycling, recovered from the flooded area of formerly-coastal cities known as the yoreshore. If she happens to find some salvagia—nostalgic salvage, valued artifacts from the past—well, that’s just between her and the highest bidder.
But when the federal government begins withdrawing from Florida entirely, Triss must buy the Ghost outright or lose her loophole. Meanwhile, the corporate mafias are poised to seize power, especially Mourning in Miami, led by the legendary Edgar Ortiz, owner of the Astro America luxury hotel. Triss needs a score big enough to keep her free from both the feds and corporations, before the Ghost is sent to a watery, insurance-scamming grave.
In pursuit of such a score, she stumbles upon the chained up, drowned corpse of Ortiz, and winds up with more than she bargained for, including a partnership with Ortiz’s hotshot spaceracing son, Riley. If she can help Riley solve the mystery of his father’s death, it may lead them to a valuable piece of salvagia and with it, the hope of a sustainable, free way of Florida living.
Climate Fiction Writers League 