Anthologies tend to make less money than novels, yet they keep appearing. And I keep reading them. An anthology offers the chance to read a carefully curated selection, and I love short stories as an art form.

Apex Book Company asked me if I’d like to read an advanced copy of ECO24, The Year’s Best Speculative Ecofiction, and offer a blurb if I liked it.

I liked it a lot. Like every good anthology, the stories offer a range of approaches, including literary science fiction, magical realism, and dark fantasy. Some are set in the present, such as the war in Ukraine, others in the future, and they feature settings around our planet and beyond. Some are grim, many hopeful.

My favorite is “The Plasticity of Being” by Renan Bernardo, which illustrates the paradoxes of offering help to poor people. I also especially enjoyed “Bodies” by Cat McMahon about the dangers of being a clone, and “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackened Husk of a Planet” by Adeline Wong about the emotional weight of being a student, with hints of poetry. But I could go on. There’s the quiet wisdom of “Batter and Pearl” by Steph Kwiatkowski, and the aspiration of “Father Time Dares You to Dream” by Trae Hawkins — and both stories take place near me.

My blurb:

Each author offers us a unique ecological niche to reveal what our present and future could be, ranging from wrenching disasters to elating possibilities of recovery. These stories are personal and lyrical, and the breadth of imagination and styles make this anthology dazzling. Every story is a gem.

A story I translated from Spanish by Ramiro Sanchiz, “Trees at Night” (Árboles en la noche) is in the November 2025 issue of Clarkesworld Science Fiction and Fantasy Magazine. A podcast of the story is read by Kate Baker.

Sanchiz is a Uruguayan writer, and this story is part of his literary project that explores permutations of a universe that revolves around a character named Federico Stahl. You can read “Arboles en la noche” in the original Spanish at the magazine Contaminación futura 8.

In the story, a librarian at a hospital-like sanatorium befriends a young patient named Federico for reasons that eventually become clear.

I recommend this story, among other reasons, as a masterful example of in medias res: beginning a story in the middle of the action or plot. Science fiction often does this, and SF readers are used to it, but I’ve seen readers of mainstream and literary fiction sometimes get so flummoxed that they give up because they don’t immediately understand what’s happening. SF readers have learned that a good story in this style will explain all the things in the end, and the fascination of the story is the discovery.

This haunting work offers a distant echo of the novel Roadside Picnic by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky (which I recommend): aliens come to Earth, and what they leave behind seems incomprehensible to humans.

I wrote this poem as an homage to John Milton and his lost paradise, and it might be appropriate for Halloween. It appeared in Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, April/May 2006 issue. Photo: An illustration of our solar system by NASA/JPL-Caltech.

–

Now that the stars have come within your reach

by calculus of heavenly orbit,

comes my chance to flee this gravity pit

and all I had to do for you was teach.

I urged you turn your eyes to scan the sky

and speculate on worlds you might revere.

Soon, you saw it as your next frontier

and took aim for the heavens. None but I,

my thoughts on freedom and your thoughts to stir,

gave apples both to Eve and Newton, bites

as steps to climb back toward infinity.

I am the morning star — Lucifer.

I fell, and now with you found means to flight.

With you, I will escape captivity.

If you haven’t yet read Usurpation, here’s your chance to buy it at a more economical price. The trade paperback will be released on Tuesday, October 21, available from any bookseller.

This is the third book in the Semiosis trilogy. As you may recall, Stevland, an aggressive, intelligent plant on a distant planet, longs to send his seeds to Earth. In the second book of the trilogy, Interference, he finds a way.

Now Stevland’s descendants grow everywhere, but no one on Earth knows they are intelligent, and humans have fallen into a violent crisis. They need help. But how? Stevland sends advice: “Compassion will give you courage. Love will be ferocious.”