Everything Change, Volume III: Climate Fiction Beyond the End of the World

The end of the world is a misleadingly convenient destination for fiction. It promises a climax after which nobody has to catch a bus, earn a wage or decide who will look after a sick parent. Everything Change, Volume III is more interesting because its worlds keep going. People inhabit catastrophe rather than merely witness it. Their routines become the places where environmental damage and unequal power are felt, negotiated and sometimes resisted.

Edited by Angie Dell and Joey Eschrich and published by Arizona State University in 2021, this third volume brings together ten finalists from the 2020 climate-fiction contest. It is neither a novel nor a uniform programme for saving the planet. Its range encompasses compressed bodily horror, adventure, lyrical interiority, social realism and collective fable. The editors’ introduction asks readers to resist becoming accustomed to disaster. The stories test how that resistance might feel when exhaustion itself has become ordinary.

Preserving the dead, sustaining the living

Amanda Baldeneaux’s ‘Invasive Species’ opens inside a museum diorama. Viviana paints altered habitats around dead animals; a polar landscape has already been revised to show melting ice. Conservation becomes a retrospective art of correcting the background after the specimens have stopped moving. The visual premise is sharp, but the story gains force from everything Viviana must do after work: deliver food to her parents, help finance her father’s life support, and reach a night-nannying job before transport stops.

The monthly restriction on fossil-fuel transport is not represented as an inconvenience shared equally. Viviana’s employers can demand a little more time while she risks losing the income that makes care possible. Gentrification threatens her home; gender transition is constrained by money and other people’s perceptions. None of these pressures cancels the environmental crisis. They establish whose freedom to respond has already been narrowed.

Baldeneaux’s repeated images of arrested movement sometimes make the symbolism explicit. Yet the final movement, from preserved animals to a hungry baby and a child wanting to see a living bear, keeps the story from becoming a diagram. Viviana’s objections to the museum coexist with the possibility that an imperfect representation might still help someone imagine life. The contradiction is more valuable than a clean verdict on conservation.

Bodies without a safe outside

Kathryn E. Hill’s ‘Plasticized’ removes the reassuring distance between polluted environment and protected body. Rachel’s ultrasound shows plastic in the embryo she is carrying. The examination room contains brochures and apparent choices, but neither medical information nor her partner Sean’s optimism can contain her fear. His insistence on happiness increasingly feels like another demand placed on her body.

Hill’s close narration moves through fragments, hypothetical futures and memories of Rachel’s sister. Ordinary materials return as grotesque possibilities inside a child. The accumulating sentences produce anxiety rather than a tidy explanation of the speculative mechanism. The recollection of a stillborn nephew complicates any simple opposition between rejecting a dangerous pregnancy and loving a child. Bodily autonomy, grief and attachment remain painfully entangled.

Mason Carr’s ‘The Lullaby-Dirge’ gives reproductive fear an institutional architecture. Cass, an ambassador negotiating water prices, races home because her wife Gabrielle is in medical danger. Memories reveal a birth draft: reproduction has become a civic obligation. Cass’s professional authority cannot protect her household from that intrusion. The corporate negotiations are comparatively blunt, but their transactional language makes an effective counterpoint to the vulnerability at the hospital door. A cry and a song close the story without a neat explanatory settlement.

Machines that help, promises that conceal

In J.R. Burgmann’s ‘The Drifter,’ Evie descends into the western Pacific in a vessel used to collect carbon-sequestration samples. The repeated downward movement gives way to lyrical attention to deep-sea life. When the vessel fails, that contemplative freedom contracts into panic, a manual, dwindling oxygen and memories of family. A supposedly controlled technical environment suddenly resembles a coffin.

After the machinery restarts, Evie finds a fish trapped in plastic, tearing itself apart. The encounter punctures the corporate promise that emissions can simply be sent somewhere out of sight. Burgmann’s sexualised satire of the carbon pipes is less subtle than the preceding descent; it tells us what the image already suggests. The strongest discovery is emotional: Evie’s decision to contact someone far away exposes the poverty of a saving-the-world job that has displaced living relationships.

Anya Ow’s ‘Redline’ offers a useful complication. In a partly submerged Singapore, Kwok and Security Commander Rai attempt to reach Rai’s sister Sara before heat and humidity become fatal. The story runs on practical constraints: paddling time, shelter, batteries, mosquito-borne illness and exhausted bodies. Its action is legible without an extended lecture on the world’s collapse.

An old aircraft matters not because it restores the vanished world of flight, but because its air recyclers can keep three people alive. Technology is not rejected; its purpose is changed. Rai brings a battery, Kwok contributes repair skills, and Sara’s knowledge helps them make the machine work. The rescue earns its hope through collaboration. Sara’s eventual recovery is not guaranteed, and Kwok’s closing return to delivery work leaves the dangerous system intact.

Distance, language and the terms of survival

Scott Dorsch’s ‘Driftless’ turns wind-ravaged rural Wisconsin into an almost absurdly inhospitable domestic landscape. Widower Rai Olmstead discovers Norma Mild across a valley after trees disappear. Their binoculars and cardboard signs create a fragile courtship: bad handwriting, limited supplies and jokes survive alongside bereavement. This Rai is a different character from Ow’s commander, in a separate fictional world.

The pared-down exchanges are a formal achievement. They make communication materially expensive while allowing flirtation to remain funny. The later struggle across the storm is more extravagantly dramatic, but its improvised equipment grows out of the farm’s accumulated objects. Dorsch does not pretend a new attachment erases the dead wife. Memory accompanies the movement towards another person rather than remaining locked inside the disappearing house.

Sigrid Marianne Gayangos’s ‘Galansiyang’ also restricts speech, but by political rule rather than weather. Amihan’s community values precise, minimal ‘proper language’; her grandmother Lola preserves words and stories from the lost world. Grieving Lola while learning to work beside Kat, Amihan finds that approved language cannot hold her experience. Survival has been purchased partly by shutting down what survival is for.

The distinction is not simply between bad authorities and good memory. Amihan recognises why exhausted people might suppress painful thought. Kat’s care exceeds her initial conformity, and the revelation of her fuller name, Katha, gives intimacy a linguistic dimension. The returning starlings connect a remembered word to living presence. The hopeful ending is emphatic, but the story has earned its insistence that ecological recovery and cultural memory belong together.

Who gets to explain catastrophe?

Barakat Akinsiku’s ‘The God of the Sea’ follows a child in a Nigerian coastal community through flooding, an attempt to learn survival by imitating fish, and the opening of access to school. A visiting educator’s warning about plastic subsequently unsettles the father’s religious explanation of a beached whale. Hungry neighbours butcher the animal while bottles lie in the sand. The closing questions preserve the child’s uncertainty; the story does not establish a forensic cause of death. Its educational movement is clear, occasionally too clearly signposted, but hunger prevents enlightenment from becoming an easy victory.

Natasha Seymour’s ‘Field Notes’ is less willing to separate knowledge from complicity. Olan earns money guiding tourists to an uncanny, apparently living crater in Turkey. The entries juxtapose marketed ecological feeling with family obligations, Kurdish political struggle and a relationship with Amraz. Visitors want an experience of catastrophe they can take home. The guide knows the story being sold is misleading, but needs the wage. When a feverish mother leaves an infant in Olan’s care, an abstract duty to the planet becomes a frighteningly immediate responsibility.

Jules Hogan’s ‘Those They Left Behind’ widens responsibility into a polyphonic account of people remaining on Earth after the Ascents. Lists of discarded goods alternate with Masha’s caregiving, Nandita’s salvage-based art and Naoko’s inventions. The author acknowledges a syntactical debt to Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried. Its inventory form makes technological inheritance inseparable from waste. Yet the communal resolution is smoother than some individual hardships warrant; the alternative suggestion that the Ascents were only a dream usefully disturbs that smoothness.

An uneven, necessary argument between stories

Across the collection, threatened children, injured marine life and compromised breath recur so often that the imagery can feel overdetermined. Climate fiction risks reducing characters to arguments, especially when an explanatory passage tells us what a scene has already made palpable. Here the most successful pieces allow conflicting desires, awkward humour or unfinished grief to interrupt the lesson. Their settings are not interchangeable: a Nigerian beach, Singapore’s infrastructure, a Philippine community and Wisconsin farmland distribute vulnerability differently.

The volume does not supply a credible comprehensive transition plan, and its moments of solidarity should not be mistaken for one. Its literary achievement is smaller and more durable: it makes the question of staying alive inseparable from the question of staying human to one another. Read the stories comparatively, noticing where a device buys time and where only a changed relationship makes that time worth having. The world does not end neatly here. Neither does the work of imagining how to inhabit it.

About the edition

This review covers Volume III only. ASU’s complete legal HTML edition includes the ten stories discussed above, the editors’ introduction and contributor biographies. Its copyright page identifies the 2021 edition and ISBN. The original artwork remains the property of its credited creators; this page uses a separately created text-only editorial illustration instead of copying the publisher’s cover or story illustrations.