Everything Change, Volume II: Ten Ways of Losing a World

A drowning city is not necessarily a city in which everyone drowns. In Vajra Chandrasekera’s ‘Half-Eaten Cities,’ seawater enters ordinary bedrooms but refuses to cross the boundaries of concentrated wealth. The impossible event is also the anthology’s most economical recognition: catastrophe does not arrive in an empty world. It encounters property, work, inherited advantage and the habits through which some lives are made more protectable than others.

Everything Change, Volume II gathers ten stories from Arizona State University’s 2018 climate-fiction contest. Edited by Angie Dell and Joey Eschrich, it was first published in January 2019. Its coherence is not a single future or a common technique. It lies in asking what people can still love when the conditions that sustained that love are being dismantled. The answers range from underwater adventure and bureaucratic satire to intimate tragedy, stalled romance and collective prose-poetry.

The argument before the stories

Kim Stanley Robinson’s foreword reads their detailed attention to endangered places as an expression of love. He also notices endings that leap towards hope, sometimes seeming to open longer narratives rather than finish short ones. That observation is an invitation to criticism as much as praise. An open ending can preserve possibility; it can also leave a story’s hardest problem outside its frame.

Dell and Eschrich argue that climate change demands cultural and political transformation, not merely better gadgets. Their introduction foregrounds bodies, reproduction, water and mourning. The fiction makes these concerns palpable, but does not uniformly fulfil the introduction’s public ambition. Again and again, a changed relationship becomes imaginable before a changed institution does. The distance between those achievements gives the collection both its emotional force and its limitations.

Who works to keep the old world available?

Barbara Litkowski’s ‘Monarch Blue’ begins with hunger rather than a planetary panorama. Pregnant Brie remembers foods she can no longer afford; her friend Carmen brings her into manual pollination after insect collapse. Women’s hazardous labour keeps luxury fruit available to customers insulated from scarcity. Prison workers share the employment landscape. Environmental substitution is not simply a technical operation: it is an arrangement of bodies whose exhaustion permits somebody else’s continuity.

The blue colouring makes that arrangement visible. Brie’s longing for fruit, the chemical treatment of flowers and the staining of skin refuse to remain separate categories. Her childhood attempt to save a monarch by enclosing it in a jar becomes a painful miniature of protective possession. The final butterfly vision reverses that gesture: she does not reach out to capture it. The symmetry is moving, though its beauty risks cushioning the exploitation that the story leaves standing. Neither ecological recovery nor a medically specified pregnancy outcome is established by that vision.

‘Half-Eaten Cities’ makes the same unequal continuity grotesquely architectural. Wealth repels water, allowing protected people to claim more dry territory and reinstall supply networks. Meanwhile the inundated population watches television through distant windows. Its criticism of programmes that show the sea only from beaches receives approving online acknowledgment from the privileged. Recognition is cheap; redistribution never follows. The joke exposes not only class insulation but the cultural machinery through which disaster remains somebody else’s scenery.

Chandrasekera’s repeated clauses and collective narrator let the flood accumulate without a single exceptional hero absorbing its consequences. When the community finally develops gills, adaptation is invention and defeat at once. The exposed must transform their bodies while the protected retain their arrangements. The story sacrifices individual characterization for this collective precision. That is a productive formal choice, not a missing conventional protagonist to be supplied by the reader.

Looking is not the same as caring

Sandra K. Barnidge’s ‘The Last Grand Tour of Albertine’s Watch’ opens with sewage smell, immediately spoiling the postcard of a flooded Gulf town. Iphigenia’s brother earns money taking tourists through its decline. Public withdrawal and an exhausted local economy make spectatorship a livelihood, not merely an outsider’s moral failure. The narrator’s mother’s submerged grave belongs to a different geography from the attractions a visitor can purchase.

The near-drowning ending brings the distinction into focus: tourists hesitate between assistance and photography. Yet the local conflict also deserves scrutiny. A disputed appropriation of Indigenous identity and demands on tour income are filtered through Iphigenia’s frightened perspective. Hayden’s rescue complicates that perspective without resolving the narrative’s uncomfortable representation of his family. Survival briefly interrupts antagonism; it does not settle who owes what to whom.

Leah Newsom’s ‘Orphan Bird’ finds a quieter version of extraction in a documentary maker who values a damaged place but withdraws from the pregnant woman living there. Frankie counts birds for work and categorizes Jeremiah’s messages as though intimate abandonment might yield to a sufficiently careful inventory. The parallel is formally exact: numbers can preserve evidence without providing care. Her sister Ashley’s sustained presence matters more than the visitor’s appetite for authenticity.

Newsom’s close narration intertwines bird injury, pregnancy and planetary imagination, including the globe Frankie draws on her belly. The baby’s death makes the concluding return devastating. But the recurring emblems also risk turning a woman’s suffering into a foretold planetary lesson. The story does not establish a clinical pollution-to-stillbirth causal chain. Keeping that distinction intact makes its imaginative connections more, not less, disturbing.

The body cannot leave the landscape

David Samuel Hudson’s ‘Luna’ adds another troubled observer: Lee can converse with an orca through a translating headset, yet cannot reliably know her feelings or protect her. Screens make proximity possible and expose its inadequacy. Luna’s pregnancy, Analeigh’s pregnancy and Lee’s anxiety about parenthood coexist with dwindling food. The animal figurines on Analeigh’s desk suggest a future childhood learning about creatures it may never encounter alive.

Lee’s anger does not make him the story’s dependable moral authority. His instruction that Luna leave the research area may be an act of care, but her disappearance does not confirm safety. His decision to join Crystal’s permafrost work offers commitment rather than a demonstrated repair. Translation, like tourism or counting, cannot absolve the person who possesses knowledge. Hudson earns uncertainty, although the speaking orca necessarily risks giving a nonhuman life too comfortably human a voice.

Rebecca Lawton’s ‘Tuolumne River Days’ brings ecological injury into the language of sport and public benevolence. A water reporter initially admires a baseball player’s fundraising. His wife’s fictional hydrophilia supports water-use exemptions; philanthropy begins to look inseparable from privileged consumption. The story’s hitting drought and drying river repeatedly exchange meanings, while its bodily imagery turns the admired athlete’s strength into threat.

His sexual attack gives that reversal terrible force, but the abrupt conjunction of predatory entitlement and environmental depletion can feel too insistently allegorical. Lawton’s strongest counterweight is the river itself: precise routes, altered flows, trapped fish and remembered swimming resist becoming generic symbols. When the remaining water and animals disappear, the narrator cannot simply retreat into a restorative nature outside social violence. No such outside survives.

A different shape for surviving

Tony Dietz’s ‘Darkness Full of Light’ changes the register to underwater adventure. Fourteen-year-old Jozette’s certainty that her sisters want her dead is gradually unsettled by dangerous dives, discarded equipment and the failure of her father’s story about their mother. Depth, pressure and finite air give psychological revision a physical form. The discovery of a living surface city breaks the settlement’s official account of the world.

Her return towards her sisters makes hope relational rather than merely geographical: reaching the light is insufficient if freedom means remaining alone. The measured suspense is effective, although some explanations and the concluding moral are heavily signposted. Beside Chandrasekera’s collective transformation, Dietz offers a more conventional but sharply contrasting movement: an isolated favoured child learns to recognize the community she misunderstood.

Jean McNeil’s ‘The Most Beautiful Voyage in the World’ refuses that forward motion. Cruise doctor Knut inhabits prolonged life, automated tourism and a Norwegian landscape whose protected comforts depend on unequal service labour. Memories of his dead lover Alex interrupt his encounter with Linn; announcements and repeating itineraries enclose an existence that technically continues but does not develop. The novel Ice, read within the story, supplies another version of catastrophe against which this overheated future can be measured.

The circular voyage makes longevity resemble arrested mourning. McNeil’s refusal of an easy hopeful departure is artistically valuable, though the workers displaced into service remain more peripheral than the privileged doctor whose paralysis they sustain. The story sees that inequality without entirely escaping its focal hierarchy. It asks whether preserving a way of life can become another way of refusing to live.

Facts, appetite and unfinished responsibility

Mitch Sullivan’s ‘The Office of Climate Facts’ replaces elegy with an unreliable communications officer’s career excitement. Jake’s television opportunity, official reassurance and preoccupation with his tie crowd out a worsening storm. When his colleague dies, personal grief briefly registers, but he still treats questions about manipulation and energy-sector ties as an indecent political intrusion. The interviewer’s reminder of sixty deaths reveals the narrowness of his attention. His unreachable mother remains a source of uncertainty, not a confirmed additional death.

The satire is blunt, and its questioning sometimes sounds like an assembled evidentiary case. Nevertheless, the first-person voice explains something a neutral denunciation could not: institutional falsehood can recruit ordinary vanity and compartmentalized feeling. Jake does not need to announce himself as evil to make denial operational. Clothes, promotion and professional loyalty keep the abstraction comfortable until water enters the lives he notices.

Jean-Louis Trudel’s closing ‘Losing What We Can’t Live Without’ turns extinction into a meal. Nadine’s father serves endangered species intending to confront diners with loss; she argues that consumers without memories of abundance may experience only luxury. An approaching flood places a countdown beneath their extended debate. Evacuation requires choices among seeds, genome samples and living organisms, rather than fidelity to a museum-like enclosure. Release might itself create ecological problems. Preservation is not innocence.

An anthology worth reading against itself

The collection’s range fulfils its editors’ invitation to multiple genres. Its recurring pregnancies and water crises also create pressure: at times an individual body seems asked to carry too much of the planet’s meaning, and exposition announces what an image has already achieved. Yet comparison keeps the book alive. A gill, a television appearance, a rescue, a departing orca and a released seed offer fundamentally different versions of continuing. None should be collapsed into a universal prescription for hope.

These stories are most persuasive when attachment complicates the lesson: care can imprison, witnessing can exploit, and staying alive can preserve an intolerable hierarchy. Read them together, not as ten predictions but as arguments about attention and its obligations. Volume II makes losing a world concrete enough to mourn. Its unresolved challenge is whether that mourning can become something other than a beautifully documented loss.

About the edition and rights

ASU Library records January 2019 publication and ISBN 9780999590270. The anthology’s 2018 copyright and the HTML pages’ 24 January 2019 posting dates are separate facts. Individual story and essay copyrights remain with their respective authors; authorized free access does not make the text public domain. This review paraphrases rather than reproduces extended passages and copies no publisher cover or story illustration.