Book Review: When There Are Wolves Again by E.J. Swift

The journey from here to there you've been waiting for

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.

Book Review: ECO 24 edited by Marissa Van Uden

A speculative fiction anthology devoted to ecological fiction.

Whether you call it ecofiction, cli-fi, climate fiction or any other of a number of terms, ecological fiction is something that, as editor Marissa Van Uden points out, a type of story that humanity has been told for as long as we’ve been telling stories. From the Bible’s story of the flood, to the Sumerian myth of Utnapishtim, we’ve had stories of flood. The story of Persephone, Hades and Demeter has Demeter make the earth barren in anger and sorry for her lost daughter. While ecological fiction may not have had a name until the 1970’s, these stories have carried from human’s beginnings to Watership Down, to Daphne du Maurier (adapted into the film by Alfred Hitchhock), to Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, and to Kim Stanley Robinson and other contemporary authors.

Marissa Van Uden brings a selection of ecological fiction stories to her anthology, ECO24: The Year's Best Speculative Ecofiction from Violet Lichen Press. All of the stories are reprints and represent what are, to Van Uden, the best of the field. Van Uden’s interest in ecological fiction and nature are formative in what made her an editor in the first place, and so that passion comes through in her editorial role in the selection of the stories. Since Violet Lichen is a small press (and sister press to the better known Apex), there is a real handcrafted feel to Van Uden’s curation. Also, the mission of Violet Lichen press, as they describe themselves is, “Inspired by the mysterious beauty of lichens growing in shadowy woods and the surreal drama of violet shades in nature, Violet Lichen fully embraces the weird, strange, and uncanny. It aims to leave readers feeling a little changed and disquieted, as if they have just emerged from under a strange spell.”

So when you combine ecological fiction with a small press sensibility and pair that with the weird, strange and uncanny, what Van Uden clearly is aiming for is a selection of stories that are ecological fiction, yes, but also all different, odd, unusual and strange. That’s a rather tall order. I know that ecological fiction has been having a moment as our own world’s environment continues to careen and become more unpredictable. However, I wondered, as I was reading the introduction to the book, whether or not there were enough stories to fill such a collection. It emerges that the editor’s plan is to do this sort of volume, yearly. And that, yes, even in a niche like this, there is a wealth of material to be found, curated and selected from.

In reviewing an anthology, particularly with a remit as unique as this one, I like to pay attention to not only what stories the editor has chosen, but particularly the first and last stories, since they open and anchor the collection.

For the opening, we have "In the Field" by Shelly Jones, originally published in The Future Fire. It is a potent, painful story of a researcher helping a very aging professor, a professor who hasn’t quite realized just how badly the world has changed after disaster. It’s a story of memory, and loss, and is poignant. The fact that the researcher is a droid, and the professor is truly alone of human company adds an extra dimension. I didn’t find this story strange and weird so much as somber.

But then that is a theme that goes throughout a number of stories of this collection. "The Water Runner" by Eugen Bacon is a world where the seas have dried up, and there is an almost mystical escape place, New Dodoma. Everyone, including our protagonists, want to get there, but it feels like a mirage, a delusion or a dream. Later in the collection, "Pig House" by Kay Vandal is a story where powered rebreathers are the only way to survive in a poisoned world. And a cross country trip to see what may be the last pig on Earth proves deadly. "The Plasticity of Being" by Renan Bernado is a story where a number of people are engineered in order to be able to eat plastic. It’s a story of exploitation of the poor by the rich, and by corporations, and how much the social cost of late state capitalist really is.

There are stories which are not so downbeat and lack an aura of doom. "Batter and Pearl" by Steph Kwiatkowski is a lovely little story of a really strange and weird world, where harvesting pearls of plastic in the ocean is a way to make a living. There is also a sense of “looking for the big score” to the story, which was totally unexpected and delightful. There is a strange darkness and verve to Jennifer Hudak’s "The Colonists". I could totally see this story in the light of 1950’s science fiction in terms of its theme and plot, but Hudak gives a very modern and literary feel to the story.

"Swarm X1048 - Ethological Field Report: Canis Lupus Familiaris", “6”" by F.E. Choe may be my favorite story. It is a moving story about alien xenobiologists studying the life and story of a dog. While many of the stories in the collection were moving, I was particularly touched by 6’s story and how 6 impacted the researchers who studied him. While many of the stories in this collection touched me, this one particularly resonated with me.

As far as the last story in the collection, we have "Mangrove Daughter" by E.M. Linden. This story to round out the collection has a second person point of view, and a strong sense of place, a slowly spreading grove of mangroves. Like the mangroves themselves are an inhabitant of a liminal space, between ocean and land, this story is a liminal one, using its point of view, and the theme of transformation into liminal space, particularly, to achieve that.

And aside those, there are many interesting and weird stories to read and enjoy. Not all of them are hits for me, even given the narrow and specialized remit of the anthology, the stories vary widely, even more than what I have described in the few I have talked about here. I think that the collection is a strong offering from Violet Lichen that helps showcase what the press and its mission is all about.

In the end, the editor’s hand in choosing and arranging these stories for maximum impact is noted and appreciated. ECO24 is, in essence, a collection that is more than the sum of its parts.

 
--

The Math

Highlights:

• Strong editorial hand from the editor
• Interesting and diverse set of stories
• Weird, unusual and strange, just as it said on the tin.

Reference: Van Uden, Marissa, ECO24: The Year's Best Speculative Ecofiction, (Violet Lichen Press, 2025)

POSTED BY: Paul Weimer. Ubiquitous in Shadow, but I'm just this guy, you know? @princejvstin.