Overall I enjoyed most of these stories. The authors are from around the world and offer a different perspective of the climate change problem. Because of the subject matter I found most of the stories very sad. There was not a lot of hope that humans will survive. The stories were well written. Some even offer solutions. Enjoy

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 geoengineering; 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.

The stories in this collection are the result of a competition run by a bookshop and a publisher. Usually when I read a short story collection, I get bored after a few and put the book to one side. Not this time! Some stories obviously appeal more than others, but the standard is so phenomenally high that I couldn’t stop reading. I am therefore especially grateful to NetGalley for providing a free digital ARC for me to read and write a honest review. I wouldn’t hesitate to recommend it to all and sundry; it’s one of the best books I’ve read this year and makes me want to read more short story collections written by multiple authors.

The collection is arranged in alphabetical order by title, which I suppose is as good as any other. Oddly, however, the first story begins with a B; did the editor change his mind, or was it an oversight? Perhaps because the competition is US east coast based, there seem to be a higher number of stories set at the edge of the ever-rising ocean. Whether this reflects the number of submissions using that as part of the storyline or if it reflects the jury’s own concerns, I do not know.

Part of the way through this collection, I realised that the stories that really grab me are truly dystopian scenarios. They often incorporate some hope, where people are building new lives, using survival and gardening skills or building connections and community to give them hope. I even enjoyed the story where the narrator was an individual committing ecoterrorism to save the world from an excess of human beings.

Even though the jury gave the prizes to different stories, the standout ones for me were:
* Blue Cassandra, Douglas Arvidson ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
This was the best written of all so far, with some magical realism thrown in for good measure. The remaining teachers and pupils are struggling to survive on the roof of their school, distilling water, growing a few crops, fishing in the vast sea that has engulfed them. Now a mysterious blue ship has arrived that appears to be unmanned.
* My Dearest Daughter, C.B. Buzz ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
The only way to survive in a world where plants are gone and oxygen is scarce is to dig for ‘scrub cans’ of O2 to fit oxygen masks. Somewhere there are people living under domes with plants and food. A father makes a hard decision to save his daughter.
This was a standout dystopian story for me.
* PLaNT Man, Maura Morgan ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
The narrator is a climate scientist involved in a private geoengineering consortium. As he watched a devastating storm roll in, he remembers the film he’d watched with his climate activist girlfriend, in which the villain randomly kills half the people in the world, though not his own supporters, who are all spared. Now the climate scientist has it in his power to do the same. He believes that the world would be a better place with fewer people, but he wants to save his ex-girlfriend, now married to somebody else and heavily pregnant. This was one of my favourite stories, building and sustaining the tension throughout, then leaving me wanting more.
* The Island, Mary Ethna Black ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
A grandmother takes her grandson to a beach on an island, repeating the idyllic trip she first went with her own grandmother. In the meantime, everything has radically changed in a world poisoned by plastic. Oil has run out and plastic mining has replaced it. No new plastic is being produced and the first organisms not affected by plastic are starting to be born.

The book is the result of a collaboration between Book Bin, an independent bookstore, and Secant Publishing, an independent book publisher. Philip Wilson from Book Bin and Ron Sauder from Secant held a worldwide contest with the idea of creating awareness on the subject of climate change through the power of literary art. The contest elicited entries in a variety of genres, including humour, horror, suspense, satire, science fiction and social realism.

This collection includes 34 of those stories, with authors from 9 countries and 10 American states. Three stories were selected as Gold, Silver and Bronze winners.

Here are the stories I liked:

1) Beyond The Timberline by Olaf Lahayne, winner of the BRONZE medal, started with a bang, sounding a note of warning. Two men, a Swiss national and an Italian, ascend the Alps and see a pine tree growing at a height far above its known range. Both are a little too eager to claim the tree for their own nations. This friendly tussle leads to an amazing conclusion.

Even after their drinking water is over, the first warning sign, they do not learn their lesson. They pull their zippers down and urinate on the tree. All thoughts of something precious, a sacred natural heritage, gone out of their minds.

While we spar, we doom ourselves. Instead of taking pride in our collective achievements, we fight over them. The story pivots on a huge note of hubris.

2) 2100, Remnants of a Thriving World by BE Saunders was a story I really liked. The unnamed narrator, a woman in her 60s, is fleeing Dhaka, capital of Bangladesh, with her daughter and grandchildren after the city is repeatedly flooded, as a fallout of climate change. The destruction of their home sees them heading to an unknown destination to a fate as migrants. The line, “The time had come to succumb to the waves, one way or another,” reminds us that they have no recourse but to consign their future to the waves. They will either be led to a new home or die trying to get there.

3) Adaptive Solutions by Karly Foland: A couple are raising their six-year-old daughter in a horrible nightmare of a world in which all animals, birds and insects have abandoned humans to recede back into the wilderness. Mankind’s failure to practice stewardship and harmony has led to our undoing. Now there is no animal produce in our food, no animals as pets, no animals or birds to be seen or heard. This story was beautifully written, steeped in guilt, defiance and hope.

4) Desert Fish by KM Watson (SILVER medal winner): Valeria, a young immigrant girl from Guatemala, is befriended by Sofia, an elderly woman, herself once an immigrant from Mexico. Valeria’s family has been displaced by climate change, which made agriculture impossible in their home country. Sofia shows Valeria the desert fish which survive and thrive in the smallest pond of water in the desert, setting the girl an example of hope.

This story reminds us of the social cost of climate change. The descriptions here were so beautiful that I could actually imaging the desert setting.

5) In Times of Change, Root Down to Rise Up by Jessica Marcy: This story was written from the PoV of an old oak tree. It tells us about the history of the land in which it is rooted. The tree has the voice of an old African tree, immersed in the pride of Black heritage and the sufferings of black people, tied in with the issue of climate change.

6) Leave No Trace by Lee Clontz: In a world in which the nZika virus is fatal, a father’s attempt to celebrate his vaccine allergic 10-year-old son’s birthday with a camping trip nearly ends badly. I liked this one.

7) Noah’s Great Rainbow by AA Rubin (GOLD medal winner): The skies have turned grey on account of a stratospheric injection to dim the sun’s heat and deflect it into space, The narrator, a painter, has been tasked with painting the ceiling of the town hall. He paints it in the colours of Noah’s rainbow to symbolize a commitment never to do anything to harm the earth again.

8) Sea Burial by Lee Nash: A beautiful story about a family torn apart and how it sews itself, with one stranger disrupting the family, and another healing it.

9) The Amuse-Bouche by Dean Engel: The Amuse-bouche sees the only surviving member of a protected oyster species sacrificed for a conservationist’s libido. The amount of detail in this story was amazing.

10) First Can on Mars by VM Sawh: An influencer, hailing from an ultra-rich family, rushes off to Mars, seeking to build her brand even from there.

Stories that were good but could have been improved:

1) American Mangroves by Paul Briggs is set in the 2060s, when the world's mangroves have been washed away to sea. The world has woken up to the need to cultivate mangroves as a way to safeguard nature's legacy and the future of mankind. Unfortunately it is already too late, as is evidenced by the evidence of hidden graves found in the dead forest, proof that mankind's future will echo its past, unless something is done. Against this potential disaster is framed the condition of the black community, enslaved by white plantation owners, literally trapped between the devil and the deep blue sea. I thought this story could have been improved. there was no immediate connection apparent between the loss of the mangroves and the protection of the gravesites.

2) Bitter Almonds by Andrea Dejean: As a result of climate change, the growth patterns of plants and the behavioural patterns of animals are both altering. This story, though nice, was too short to make its point.

3) Blood by PH Zietsman: The earth has stopped yielding a harvest of any kind. Hungry and increasingly desperate, the world is grappling with violence and a decline of the social order. The media supports Big Pharma’s drive to profit off this nightmare.

4) Blue Cassandra by Douglas Arvidson: After a spate of storms have battered a portion of the mainland into an island, a few school children and their teachers are surviving on the roof of the school building. When an unmanned boat approaches, it raises their hopes.

5) Brownian Motion by Cedric Rose: The story started well and the descriptions were beautiful but it seemed to end abruptly, not only with no conclusion, but without even addressing the threatened conflict.

6) Dislocation by Clare D Becker: The encroachment of the sea into the land has downgraded real estate prices and affected families and marriages everywhere. Venice has completely gone underwater. In Boston, Dante Bartolomeo hopes he can win the Boston Canals Gondola Race, and that the prize money will convince his wife, Aida, not to leave. In the end, no amount of prize money can stave off destruction.

I liked this line: Humanity cannot imagine its own extinction.

7) Landslide by Catherine Chaddic: An earth-shattering event in Austria, her birthplace, forces a woman to reconsider her choice of career.

8) Planet Suite by Martin Phillips: The story consisted of vignettes in the lives of three sets of characters whose lives have been upended by climate change. Dominic, a successful baker in Brittany, France, finds his business ruined on account of frequent floods. Patti and Hank Roberts and their friends in Oregon find themselves homeless on account of wildfires. Keida Kater in Northern Mali finds his entire life upended by a severe drought.

9) PLaNT Man by Maura Morgan: Nate, a climatologist, employs unconventional and illegal methods to address the problem of climate change.

10) Raymond and Ruby by Ian Inglis: This story blended the problem of climate change with crime. Raymond, unhappy in his marriage with Ruby, decides to kill her. Both of them have become irritable on account of the increasing heat. This story leaned more on the side of crime rather than climate change.

11) Symbiosis by Brian Brennan: Symbiosis is about a future civilization in which the rich and powerful justify the breeding of the babies of the poor in order to serve their nutritional needs. A good story. But given the amount of world building, this has the potential to become a novella.

12) The Captain of the Fleet by David Poyer: This story blended the climate change element with horror. Unfortunately, neither genre was very strong.

13) When the Water Starts to Rise by Jennifer Gryzenhout: This story was well written, but it ended abruptly.

14) Wildfire by Nicola Billington: An impactful story in just two pages.

Won't be giving feedback as didn't finish but form won't let me say so. Putting 5 stars anyway because what I did manage to read i enjoyed.

The narratives detailing the impact of climate change worldwide are compelling. It is disheartening to learn about the changes our climate is inflicting on our world and how we have the means to help but often fail to do so.

An outstanding collection of climate change outcomes and a bleak, grey prophecy for human beings in many cases. Whether our existence will continue or cease, no one can foretell but...