When There Are Wolves Again

By E J Swift

Near Future

Review by Ant

As you might expect, given the state of the world right now, there has been a great deal of climate fiction doing the rounds these last few years. Some, like Jeff VanderMeer's Hummingbird Salamander and Charlotte McConaghy's Migrations, have used it as a backdrop to tell a different story, treating it as an inevitable, dystopic path of our near future. Others, like Neal Stephenson's Termination Shock and Kim Stanley Robinson's The Ministry for the Future treat the changing climate as the focus and offer examples of how we might survive (or not) in a rapidly changing ecosystem.

Most are pessimistic, veering towards disaster (at least for humanity) and look at this problem on a global, or often American, perspective. When there are wolves again feels like a counterpoint to many of these. It's set in the UK and viewed over the span of many years. It's also, more importantly, a little optimistic about our eventual future. When I say optimistic, that doesn't mean it's naive. It doesn't pretend everything is just going to turn out fine if we continue to bury our heads in the sand (or to be distracted by small boats landing on our shores) and admits we've got some real rough times ahead. It does suggest, however, that we might survive such a climate-changed land if we are sensible and make changes. It's upfront about the hard times; it doesn't pretend that the next five decades are going to be easy. And yet, Swift argues, after all the struggles, perhaps our children, or at least their children, may learn to live in a changed land.

It's a true climate-scifi story that does what science fiction does best, examines a possible (or likely) future and suggests, with scientific emphasis, how we might navigate through it. It's all about the little choices we make collectively that may help turn the tide, if not to prevent climate change, at least to learn to live with it. The story is told through the lives of Hester and Lucy and describes the fifty-year journey from the COVID pandemic through to 2070 Beltine. The perspective is a little unusual in that it switches between first-person past-tense and second-person perspectives. I must admit it took me a while to get used to the second-person narration, but it's undoubtedly effective.

Hester is a documentary filmmaker. She was born, in a slightly on-the-nose but effective coincidence, on the day of the Chornobyl disaster, and in 2021, she travels to the exclusion zone to film a documentary about the semi-feral dog population that has made its home there in the decades since. While she's there, she rescues a wolf-dog pup and names her Lux, and this encounter, rather than any consciously made decision, sets the course of the rest of her life. Lucy, our second narrator, is five years old at the start of the book, packed off to her grandparents' house during the first COVID lockdown, where her grandmother teaches her to recognise the swifts that nest in the box outside the kitchen window. The two women's lives, on the page, do not properly intersect until those closing chapters in the Cairngorms in 2070, but the book is, in a sense, the story of how they each, in their separate ways, help to bring a different Britain into being.

Between those two endpoints, a great deal happens, but I'm not going to spoil that journey for you. Suffice to say, I'd love it if King Charles read it and got an idea (or two).

What makes the book work, for me, is that none of this is presented as inevitable, or worse, as easy. Swift is quite clear that the future she is sketching only comes about because particular people, in particular moments, make particular choices, and that those choices cost them something. Lucy's antagonist for much of the book, a right-wing provocateur who goes by the screen name Britannia1412 and lives off the rage of his audience (and who, let's be honest, you can probably picture without much help from me), is not vanquished by reason or by argument. He is outlasted, the way these things usually are, by a generation that decides to do something else instead. The novel's quiet thesis, that change of this scale happens through patience, organisation, and an awful lot of compromise rather than through any single heroic act, is one that the book's structure itself enacts. Fifty years of small decisions, told in fragments, with no single chapter quite carrying the weight of the whole.

A few things worth mentioning. This is Swift's third major engagement with climate fiction, after the Osiris Project trilogy and 2022's The Coral Bones, the latter of which was shortlisted for both the BSFA Award and the Arthur C. Clarke back in 2023. Wolves has eclipsed that, taking the BSFA Award for Best Novel of 2025 and the Arthur C Clarke Award 2026, with the Guardian also naming it among their best science fiction books of the year.

Structurally, it uses the trick The Coral Bones used (multiple women, separate lives, slowly woven together) but does so across a single timeline rather than across the centuries, and, to my mind, is the better novel for it. It also has the genealogy of a short story, "The Endlings Market", which Swift published in the 2084 anthology back in 2017, and which fans of that piece will recognise as a sort of seed crystal here. Strange Horizons' Paul March-Russell, in a review that has itself been shortlisted for the BSFA Short Non-Fiction Award, makes the case that Wolves is to the climate crisis what A.J. Cronin's The Citadel was to the case for an NHS: a piece of popular fiction urgent and accessible enough to actually shift the public conversation. That's a tall claim, and I'm not entirely sure I'd put my full weight behind it, but I understand the temptation.

Optimism is a difficult register for fiction. Pessimism is easy. Disaster has a shape, a structure, a recognisable third act. Hope, by contrast, has to be earned line by line, or else it reads as wishful thinking, and most attempts at hopeful science fiction collapse somewhere around chapter four under the weight of their own good intentions.

Swift, miraculously, doesn't collapse. She has written a book that allows for grief, allows for loss, allows for the genuine possibility that none of this might work, and still, by the end, makes you believe some version of it might. Having already taken the BSFA, and now the (40th) Arthur C Clarke Award, which I was honoured to be a part of; it deserves to be anywhere and everywhere they hand out prizes for science fiction this year.

More to the point, it sits, for me, on the shelf alongside Robinson's The Ministry for the Future and James Bradley's Clade, except that where those books make me want to read more science fiction, this one makes me want to plant something.

Written on 13th August 2026 by Ant .