Violet Lichen Books

We are excited to reveal the cover and announce the shortlist for ECO25: The Year’s Best Speculative Ecofiction! 

The cover art is by Marcela Bolívar, with cover design by Mikio Murakami at SilentQDesign.

Our panel of judges read hundreds of ecofiction stories published in 2025 across more than 170 magazines, journals, and anthologies around the world. The nominated stories featured a diverse range of styles, subgenres, and perspectives, and it was difficult to narrow the field down to the 50 front-runners.  

The shortlisted stories were chosen for their compelling writing, thematic resonance, originality, and emotional impact. Congratulations to the authors! 

The stories below are listed in alphabetical order, and the finalists will be announced in the coming weeks. Thank you to all who nominated or submitted!

(ECO25 is distributed by IPG and slated for release Nov 17.)

Shortlisted for ECO25: The Year’s Best Speculative Ecofiction

“A Hole Cut in the Wall of the World – 29” by Rebecca Campbell, The Other Shore (Stelliform Press)

“A Taxonomy of Extinct and Extant Birds of the Twenty-First Century” by A.P. Golub, Reckoning

“Abatement” by Max Wheeler, Split Lip Magazine

“Affinity Gradient” by Miah O’Malley, Phano

“All That Means or Mourns” by Ruthanna Emrys, Reactor

“All the World is Fog” by DaVaun Sanders, Uncanny Magazine

“Ancestor’s Gift” by Chisom Umeh, Tractor Beam

“Banded Iron” by T.K. Rex, The Sunday Morning Transport

“Black Gold” by E.M. Kerkman, Apex Magazine

“Butterfly Pavilion” by G. Willow Wilson, Uncanny Magazine

“Devil’s Tooth” by Jonathan Gensler, Cosmic Horror Monthly Patreon stories

“Down By The River” by Mae Tang, Silk and Foxglove: A BIPOC Erotic Eco-Horror Anthology, edited by Z.K. Abraham (Hedone Press)

“Drosera regina” by A.L. Goldfuss, Lightspeed Magazine

“Drought’s Vengeance” by Wen Wen Yang, Suspect—Singapore Unbound

“Exhibition” by Lu Xu, Saros Speculative

“Funerary Habits of Low Entropy Entities” by Damián Neri, Clarkesworld

“Greasy Luck” by Samir Sirk Morató, Cosmic Horror Monthly

“Half Life of Memory” by L.R. Lam, Tractor Beam

“Herdhunters” by Mike Robinson, Zooscape Zine

“In Every Seed, A Hope” by Christopher Blake, Tractor Beam

“Invasive Species” by Mary Kuryla, Weird Horror Magazine

“Kindling” by Somto Ihezue, Of Enchantment, Enigma, and the Infinite, edited by Jendia Gammon and Gareth L. Powell (Star and Stabers Publishing)

“Lesser Known Months of the Year” by E.M. Linden, Reckoning

“Lolos Last Run” by E.M. Kerkman, Asimovs Science Fiction

“MALO MALO MALO MALO” by Louis Inglis Hall, The Dark Magazine

“Meet Me Under the Molokhia” by Sage Hoffman Nadeau, Imagine 2200 (Grist)

“Mothership Comes to the Heart of the Ocean, Gu Shi, Climate Imagination: Dispatches from Hopeful Futures, edited by Joey Eschrich and Ed Finn (MIT Press)

“Mustard Seed” by James Longine Yu, Tractor Beam

“New Niches” by Jacqueline Roberti, Reckoning

“On the Effects and Efficiency of Birdsong: A Meta-Analysis” by F.T. Berner, Diabolical Plots

“Order of the Soil” by Tara Labovich, Tractor Beam

“Our Continuity, Each of Us Raindrops” by Parker M. O’Neill, Imagine 2200 (Grist)

“Outlier” by R.L. Meza, Clarkesworld

“Rules for Seeking Angels” by L.B. Waltz, BOREAL: An Anthology of Taiga Horror, edited by Katherine Silva (Strange Wilds Press)

“Rust” by David D. Levine, Analog Science Fiction and Fact

“The Barrens” by Octavia Cade, Three-Lobed Burning Eye

“The Blaze of Abadan” by Naseem Jamnia, Iran+100: Stories from a Century After the Coup edited by Fereshteh Ahmadi, Leila Elder & Peter Adrian Behravesh (Comma Press)

“The Brave Sister 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 God of Rust” by Michael Kelly, Weird Horror Magazine

“The Iceberg” by Michael Capobianco, Analog

“The Last Two Gardeners of Mars” by Irene W. Collins, Heartlines Spec

“The Oneiromantic Sheep” by F.B. Hughes, Radon Journal

“The Piano Player Has Eight Arms” by Íde Hennessy, Reckoning

“Truth or Consequences” by N.M. William Hawkins, Tractor Beam

“We Used to Wake to Song” by Leah Ning, Apex Magazine

“Weep When You See Me” by Parker M. O’Neill, Rescuing Curiosity

“We Will Not Dream of Coral” by Mário Coelho, Reckoning

“Wheel Dog” by Parker M. O’Neill, Tractor Beam

“When the Fox-Bells Ring” by Ally Wilkes, The Earth Bleeds At Night, edited by Holley Cornetto (Eerie River Press)

ECO25 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, lived in Germany and Los Angles for many years, and now resides in Vermont, in a little cabin in the woods next to a beaver pond. She is the series editor of ECO: The Year’s Best Speculative Ecofiction and the Strange Microfiction anthologies (Apex Mag), and the editor of 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 loves wild things, night hikes, and eerie forests. You can sometimes find her at @marissavu.bsky.social‬ or IG (@marissa.vu and @violetlichenbooks).

ECO24: The Year’s Best Speculative Ecofiction

Want to check out last year’s volume, ECO24? Pick up your copy at Apex Book Company or wherever good books are sold. Retailers, booksellers and librarians: you can order these titles through our distributor IPG at orders@ipgbooks.com.

Praise for ECO24:

“A triumph. 23 stellar tales offering creative and varied takes on the book’s themes. Every entry is equal parts thought-provoking, insightful, and impactful.”
—Publishers Weekly Starred Review

“The diversity of stories reflects the diversity of the authors and also showcases the indefinable quality of ecofiction. As a whole, the collection challenges our definitions of nature and forces the reader to consider different perspectives.”
—Ben Lockwood Ph.D., ecologist and publisher of the Brief Ecology website

“The collection is a strong offering from Violet Lichen that helps showcase what the press and its mission is all about. ECO24 is, in essence, a collection that is more than the sum of its parts.”
—Paul Weimer, reviewer at Nerds of a Feather, blogger, podcaster, and two-time Hugo Award Winner for Fan Writer and Fanzine (Editor)

“A prescient anthology… The stories range from haunting and poetic to visceral and speculative, offering a rich snapshot of how contemporary fiction grapples with themes of habitat, grief, resilience, and hope.”
—Mary Woodbury, author, editor and founder of Dragonfly.eco