294 pages. Published October 1, 2024 by Secant Publishing. Cli-fi.
It was (unexpected and) delightful to find so many quality stories in this collection, stories that made me think and sometimes laugh. There are thirty-four in total, selected from contest entries. Although all cli-fi, settings range from the US to England and Bangladesh; from the possible present, to the far future.
More on the stories: In American Mangroves, a woman planting mangroves comes across an old Gullah Geechee cemetery, and thinks about the against-all-odds survival of the people of that place. Animals and plants leave, fleeing from humanity in the excellent Adaptive Solutions. My Dearest Daughter is a father-daughter love story about plastic miners, while people are slowly turning into … plastic?! in The Island. It’s about a young man who goes with his grandmother for the last time to one of the last beaches.
Leave No Trace is a haunting story that imagines a child with an allergy to the vaccine for deadly n-Zika. (The solution for dealing with mosquitos is super creative!) First Can on Mars is about the most annoying thing imaginable that humans do when they visit a new place; and the protagonist in The Amuse-Bouche is equally infuriating. In Deluge someone’s either trying to bring about human evolution, or has completely lost the plot; possibly both.
There’s more than one story about geo-engineering; there’s one about cannibalism; quite a few explore the possible effects of climate change on human behaviour. That’s the best thing about this collection: the variety of angles and ideas all centred on climate change, a real show of literary creativity.
Anyone who picks up this collection will enjoy it; it’s well worth your time, pretty evenly good, and recommended. Thank you to Secant Publishing and to NetGalley for DRC access.
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Harare Review of Books 
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