The journey from here to there you've been waiting for
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| Cover Artist: Jack Smyth |
I write this review the weekend after
When There Are Wolves Again won the BSFA prize for best novel of 2025 (published late Oct 2025 in the UK and Mar 2026 in the US). I had been on UK radio the week before telling people it was going to go on and win a load of prizes. I’m glad to have been right.
So you can stop there if you wish.
When There Are Wolves Again is a triumph of a novel – you should go read it.
For those of you who remain, here’s a more detailed review of this exceptional novel.
When There Are Wolves Again follows two women from 2020 through to 2070. Both women are young at the beginning and we travel with them through one version of the energy transition and how a society wrestles, successfully, with the consequences of climate change.
Yes. This is a speculative climate novel. It is also
the speculative climate novel I’ve been waiting for, for a decade since I spoke at a conference in London and gave a speech saying that climate fiction was following behind the science and there were no great stories about climate yet.
Why it sits in this space for me is threefold.
Firstly, this isn’t dystopia and nor is it hopepunk (if we can accept such a classification). This is a contemporary speculative novel that is about science and hope. It is classic SF in the sense that it posits the use of science to solve our problems and presents us with a roadmap that outlines what that could look like in one version of this world.
Yet it departs from golden age, NASA sponsored vibes in several key ways. It is about community, it is also about ordinary people who are struggling to make sense not just of the world but of themselves and out of their struggles we see choices that impact the world around them.
This centring on a journey through the troubles rather than existing in the aftermath of failure or in some far distant world where all our problems have been magically solved is central to why this feels like what will come to be seen as the defining text of climate fiction.
Secondly, this story is situated. Most importantly, it isn’t situated in America and it very definitely has no sense of destiny of exceptionalism to it. Swift writes of the UK with a deftness that captures the heart of Britain in the 2020s but extrapolates what this looks like across the next 50 years with a delicate touch. This lightness in the face of catastrophe exists because she has chosen to follow two women, Lucy and Hester, as they live through these times. These women aren’t chosen ones, they’re not technocrats or genius techbros – they’re ordinary people who have (extra)ordinary lives whose choices where they are situated make the difference. It’s clear all the way through that Hester and Lucy are a microcosm of the UK, that millions of others are acting, changing, choosing, that community is central to what allows hope to flourish and the challenge of transition to be met. I think this story could be told across a number of European countries with similar characters, but I do not think this story would survive in this form with these sentiments if situated elsewhere. This is no criticism of other places, just that Swift has localised her narrative in the most successful way possible – the UK is essential to the story she’s telling.
Third and far from final – this is a generational novel. Unlike Kim Stanley Robinson’s
The Ministry for the Future, this sits with just two people and it’s as concerned with their lives as it is with anything else. Technology here, politics, utility, they are all secondary to how two women navigate a world they want to live in. There’re no grand gestures, no sweeping social policies or discoveries that these two enact. They simply live and we follow them. It’s generational specifically in the relationships Lucy and Hester have – from grandmothers to wolves to brothers and strangers, to found family and networked community –
Wolves is about how human networks make the difference, not science on its own. You could argue that human networks are the substrate for politics and, sure, but the politics in Swift’s story is the thing you and I do from day to day to lift up the people around us, not what our voted representatives do in their grand palaces.
More than this, the story decentres humanity as part of its narrative. We don’t get points of view of animals or anything so cliché. Instead we see a humanity on a journey to reclaim the truth that it is part of this world, not over and above it, not to one side. It is a decentring that brings into focus the damage of an exploitative capitalism and questions our willing collaboration in myths that elevate humanity above everything else – including that which allows us to live in the first place.
Swift, in decentring humanity has written something uniquely humane and hopeful. This is a tremendous novel that treads lightly and doesn’t trumpet its achievements because to do so would be anathema to the world she is writing into being. I have been reflecting upon it in the weeks since I finished it and keep coming back to this: it’s a world I would actually want to live in and that, for speculative fiction, is extremely rare.
--
The Math
Highlights:
- Wolves!
- Hope and science
- Two women making choices that change the world for people around them
Nerd coefficient: 9/10, a meditative hopeful story that stares the challenges ahead of us in the face and offers a hopeful solution to the journey we have to make.
Reference: Swith, E. J.,
When There Are Wolves Again [Arcadia 2025].
STEWART HOTSTON is an author of all kinds of science fiction and fantasy. He's also a keen Larper (he owns the UK Fest system, Curious Pastimes). He's a sometime physicist and currently a banker in the City of London. A Subjective Chaos, BSFA and BFA finalist he's also Chair of the British Science Fiction Association and Treasurer for the British Fantasy Society. He is on bluesky at: @stewarthotston.com.
