For Immediate Release 6/5/2026
Lexington, KY: Violet Lichen Books and Apex Book Company are delighted to announce the finalists for ECO25: The Year’s Best Speculative Ecofiction!
A huge congratulations to these authors and publications, and to all the authors who made it to the shortlist. The quality of all the stories made for some very tough decisions.
Thank you to all who nominated works and to everyone who writes and publishes ecofiction! We are so honored to read your work.
The anthology will be released this fall - Nov 17, 2026.
ECO25 Table of Contents
(alphabetical order)
“A Hole Cut in the Wall of the World – 29” by Rebecca Campbell,
The Other Shore (Stelliform Press)
“Abatement” by Max Wheeler, Split Lip Magazine
“All That Means or Mourns” by Ruthanna Emrys, Reactor
“All the World is Fog” by DaVaun Sanders, Uncanny Magazine
“Banded Iron” by T.K. Rex, The Sunday Morning Transport
“Butterfly Pavilion” by G. Willow Wilson, Uncanny Magazine
“Exhibition,” by Lu Xu, Saros Speculative Fiction
“greasy luck” by Samir Sirk Morató, Cosmic Horror Monthly
“Herdhunters” by Mike Robinson, Zooscape Zine
“Invasive Species” by Mary Kuryla, Weird Horror Magazine
“Kindling” by Somto Ihezue, Of Enchantment, Enigma, and the Infinite, eds. Jendia Gammon and Gareth L. Powell (Star and Stabers Publishing)
“Lolos Last Run” by E.M. Kerkman, Asimovs Science Fiction
“MALO MALO MALO MALO” by Louis Inglis Hall, The Dark Magazine
“Mothership Comes to the Heart of the Ocean” by Gu Shi, translated by Ken Liu, Climate Imagination: Dispatches from Hopeful Futures, eds. Joey Eschrich and Ed Finn (MIT Press)
“The Order of Soil” by Tara Labovich, Tractor Beam
“Our Continuity, Each of Us Raindrops” by Parker M. O’Neill, Imagine 2200 (Grist)
“Antigone, But With Spiders” by Syr Hayati Beker, What a Fish Looks Like (Stelliform Press)
“The Endstate of History” by Bernie Jean Schiebeling, The Commuter, Electric Literature
“The Iceberg” by Michael Capobianco, Analog
“The Oneiromantic Sheep” by Frank Baird Hughes, Radon Journal
“The Piano Player Has Eight Arms” by Íde Hennessy, Reckoning
“We Used to Wake to Song” by Leah Ning, Apex Magazine
“We Will Not Dream of Coral” by Mário Coelho, Reckoning
“When the Fox-Bells Ring” by Ally Wilkes, The Earth Bleeds At Night, ed. Holley Cornetto (Eerie River Press)
Cover art by Marcela Bolívar.
Cover design by Mikio Murakami at SilentQDesign
Distributed by IPG
The Year’s Best Speculative Ecofiction Series - Panel of Judges
R.L. Summerling (she/her) is a part-time fiction writer and full-time squirrel watcher from Southeast London. She has fiction in the Year’s Best Dark Fantasy and Horror, Volume 5, Interzone, Maudlin House, and Seize the Press. You can find her at www.rlsummerling.com..
Guan Un is an Australian-Chinese writer of speculative fiction based in Sydney. His work has been featured in LeVar Burton Reads, Year’s Best Fantasy Vol 2, Strange Horizons and more. He works as a freelance editor and has now read so much ecofic, his eyeballs are growing slightly mossy. You can find him at @thisisguan.bsky.social or guanun.com.
Alana Perrin is originally from Los Angeles but now drifts from city to city across the US, somewhat like a haint. You can find her hiking with her dog or reading with her cat. She is a slush reader for Apex Magazine.
Colton Kekoa Neves is a gay, Native Hawaiian author who once believed his toy chest could fly him to new worlds and has been chasing that high ever since. By day he’s been a startup entrepreneur, tour guide, bank teller, caregiver, and game designer. By night he’s probably playing too much Magic the Gathering. In between, he writes. Colton is a graduate of the Clarion Writers’ Workshop, class of 2024. He braves the winters in Cambridge, MA with his husband and their monstress-turned-kitty Amelia. Say aloha on Twitter @coltontheshaper.
Ende Mac (any pronouns) is a public defense attorney and slipstream author somewhere out in the Great Plains. You can find them at endewriting.wordpress.com or at their stuffed possum’s Instagram page, @ronanthepossum.
Sasha Brown is a Stoker-nominated author whose work has been called “Creative! But in a bad way.” He’s in lit mags like Passages North and Split Lip, and in genre pubs like Bourbon Penn and Pseudopod. He knows three cool facts about frogs. He’s sashabrown on bsky and sashabrownwriter.com online.
Nichole Lightner is a weird writer and editor living in Ohio. She's teasing out dark hymns from broken records when everyone in the house finally goes to sleep. She would love to talk to you about your niche hyperfocus, especially if it's about abandoned places, ARGs or lost media. She would love to see pictures of your pets. She is the managing editor for Violet Lichen, an imprint of Apex Book Company. You can find more of her work in Maudlin House, 34 Orchard, Inner Worlds, and forthcoming in Cast of Wonders. She lurks at @nicholeon.bsky.social and nichole-l-lightner.neocities.org
Marissa van Uden grew up in New Zealand and now lives in Vermont, in a little cabin in the woods. She loves wild things, night hikes, and eerie forests. Her anthology credits include the Strange Microfiction series and The Off-Season: An Anthology of Coastal New Weird. Her short stories have appeared in Vastarian Literary Journal, Dark Matter Magazine, Zero Dark Thirty, and Los Suelos. She can sometimes be found at @marissavu.bsky.social or IG (@marissa.vu and @violetlichenbooks).