Violet Lichen Books and Apex Book Company are delighted to announce the finalists for the inaugural ECO: The Year’s Best Speculative Ecofiction, the first ever best-of anthology series dedicated to ecofiction.
We absolutely loved doing a deep dive into all of the brilliant speculative ecofiction published across hundreds of magazines, journals, anthologies, and collections last year. Speculative ecofiction, which we define as speculative fiction centered on the natural world and our relationship with it, is an incredibly rich and diverse genre, overlapping with many other smaller and larger genres from science fiction and fantasy to horror, New Weird, and magical realism.
From the hundreds of stories read across more than 125 magazines, journals, and collections, series editor Marissa van Uden and fellow judges Rebecca Summerling, Guan Un, and Alana Perrin carefully selected the very best of this genre published in 2024.
The selected stories hit us in the heart, transported us with their uniquely compelling characters and imaginative worlds, and haunted us for days after reading. They are evocative explorations of the myriad ways we either honor our deep connection to non-human life and Earth’s ecosystems, or betray it. Ultimately, they’re about what it means to be a human animal in this complex, fragile, deeply connected natural world.
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The finalists selected for inclusion in ECO24: The Year’s Best Speculative Ecofiction are:
“A Seder in Siberia” by Louis Evans (Grist Magazine)
“Ama's Jungle” by K-Ming Chang (Orion Magazine)
“Batter and Pearl” by Steph Kwiatkowski (Diabolical Plots)
“Birdseed” by Matthew Freeman (Through the Portal: Tales From a Hopeful Dystopia, edited by Lynn Hutchinson Lee and Nina Munteau, published by Exile Editions)
“Bodies” by Cat McMahan (Clarkesworld Magazine)
“Father Time Dares You to Dream” by Trae Hawkins (New Year, New You: A Speculative Anthology of Reinvention, edited by Chris Campbell)
“In the Field” by Shelly Jones (The Future Fire Magazine)
“Love, Scotland” by E.M. Faulds (Nova Scotia: New Speculative Fiction from Scotland Vol 2, edited by Neil Williamson and Andrew J. Wilson)
“Mangrove Daughter” by E.M. Linden (Kaleidotrope)
“One with the Ground” by Guillermo G. Mendoza (Reckoning 8, edited by Knar Gavin and Waverly SM)
“Our Best Selves” by Hiron Ennes (Weird Horror Magazine)
“Parasite's Grief” by Katharine Tyndall (Fatal Flaw)
“Pig House” by Kay Vaindal (Seize the Press Magazine)
“Skittering Within” by Kelsea Yu (Apparition Lit)
“Swarm X1048 - Ethological Field Report: Canis Lupus Familiaris, ‘6’” by F.E. Choe (Clarkesworld Magazine)
“The Colonists” by Jennifer Hudak (Trollbreath Magazine)
“The Ghost Tenders of Chornobel” by Nika Murphy (Apex Magazine)
“The Last Library” by Joshua Jones Lofflin (Astrolabe)
“The Plasticity of Being” by Renan Bernardo (Reactor Magazine)
“The Water Runner” by Eugen Bacon (Ecoceanic: Southern Flows, edited by Tarun K Saint and Francesco Verso)
“Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackened Husk of a Planet” by Adeline Wong (Strange Horizons)
“To Drive the Cold Winter Away” by Elise Tobler (Strange Horizons)
“We the People Excluding I” by Osahon Ize-Iyamu (Lightspeed Magazine)
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A huge congratulations to the selected authors!
And thank you to everyone who submitted and nominated stories this year. We loved reading the field and all of your stories meant something to us, even if they didn’t make it onto the shortlist.
Please keep an eye on our social media or sign up for the Apex Magazine newsletter for our cover release, pre-order details, and future ECO25 announcement.
