I requested this for consideration for Book Riot's All the Books podcast for its release date. After sampling several books out this week, I decided to go with a different book for my review.

With the caveat that this is a collection of stories from amateur writers and - like all collections I've encountered, professional or otherwise - the quality varies from story to story, I'm so glad this project exists. I was really impressed by the diversity of the authors and their viewpoints, and I think hopeful climate stories are incredibly important. Sometimes, given the news, it can feel overwhelming to work for change, but stories like these help to inspire, give direction, and serve as a beacon for those who are in (or thinking of joining) the fight to protect our planet. It's much needed, and I really appreciate the idea behind this collection.

Very hopeful stories of climate futurism, I think I needed this to be honest. There’s so much climate doom nonfiction and climate apocalypse fiction that it’s nice to read some more hopepunk style stuff around climate.

This is a beautiful anthology ! I really love that it exists and that the cover is so beautiful it will attract readers ! All the stories are on point with the theme : fiction around climate change for future ancestors. They all made me feel like the ancestor I will be and I think this is awesome as it helps us grasp the reality of our impact, the idea that we can start change and begin the momentum future générations will continue.
All the stories are hopeful - wether it be because they explore ways humans changed to thrive or wether we are extinct but the earth thrives and the remains of human culture mingle with earth's créatures.
All beautiful nuggets of thoughts to feed our imagination !

I was happy to try out this sci-fi short story collection, especially since the focus was on climate change and what the future holds for our planet with that in mind. However, while I enjoyed the premise of many of the stories, I didn’t connect to any of them. I think this would be an interesting discussion book for a class about climate science though.

I appreciate this short story collection and the wider project behind it, but some of the stories didn't fully work for me. Plenty did, though, so overall this anthology balanced itself out, at least for me.

Afterglow: Climate Fiction for Future Ancestors is a really beautiful collection of short stories that were submitted to the Imagine 2200 climate-fiction contest, written by authors from all over the world. The thread that ties them all together is that each focuses on what the future could look like when the people and the planet live in harmony. Each story painted a different picture, built a different world from scratch. I liked exploring all of them and losing myself in the thought of what could be. This book left me feeling a way that is hard to explain; hopeful, yearning for connection and change. I wish that these stories will come true in the sense that maybe one day, humans can fix what they have broken, and both us and the world around us can heal together.

The publisher, the New Press, provided me an electronic advanced reader copy to review via NetGalley. Thank you for this opportunity.

Climate change is here. Humanity is at risk. Grist set a global contest where authors from all over the world submitted short stories to envision what our collective future could look like. Some are hopeful, most are haunting, all are different than a future I've dreamed of.

The stories are all interesting. Some of them are better executed that others. Most of them had me thinking about the individuals and stories for days. From a soil reclamation farm to a mystery of tide generation plans, each story asks readers to engage with the idea that we are responsible for our futures and how we build a future on such unstable ground.

From worm farms to trans girls transforming into corals to the last of everything, the stories paint a picture of a world changed, but not gone. If you are looking for a collection of diverse voices talking about the future, this is a good work to pick up.

The focus here is climate, and this is a pretty good set of stories. While I could tell these are not experienced authors, the stories are mostly well done, and hopeful overall. I don't think this will garner a large audience, those that pick it up will likely enjoy it.

I really appreciate the free ARC for review!!

I’m disappointed to say that I did not read this book because I requested based on false advertising. This first reason I won’t label false advertising because it is completely my fault for making an assumption and not checking if that assumption is correct. I assumed that this book would be a graphic novel because the cover looked like graphic novel art to me. But, when I realized that it wasn’t a graphic novel, that didn’t keep me from still wanting to read the book. I still planned on reading and reviewing it.

But here’s the false advertising. This book was labeled under “multicultural interest”, and had a Black person on the cover. Those two things are what intrigued me about the book and got me to look at the synopsis. When reading the synopsis, it is stated that the collection includes Afrofuturism, and Indigenous, Latinx, and Asian voices. However, when I started looking through the table of contents, I took it upon myself to Google the contributors to understand which stories would come from which ethnic backgrounds. To my surprise, I discovered that most of these authors are white. I took this book being labeled as “multicultural” to mean that most of the contributors were authors of color, but that is not the case. There were some authors of color, but, according to Google, most of the authors are white. And that is why I will not be able to read and review this title. I’m very disappointed that I was misled. And I hope that the description will be fixed so that it won’t mislead others.