Tag: Climate Fiction

Call for Submissions

Call for Submissions: What Will Become of Us?

Mandy Webster

Elderfly Press is seeking submissions for a new anthology of stories and poetry exploring an unsettling question: What will become of us?

Submissions for What Will We Become of Us? are open through December 15, 2026.

We are living through a period of enormous uncertainty. The world around us is changing rapidly, and the future can sometimes feel impossible to predict. The institutions we rely on are shifting. Technology is transforming how we work and communicate. Economic pressures affect where and how we live. The environment is changing. Political and social divisions seem increasingly difficult to bridge. At the same time, individuals are constantly navigating their own smaller transformations: growing older, falling in love, losing someone, starting over, becoming parents, leaving home, changing careers, discovering who they are, or realizing that the person they thought they would become is no longer who they are.

So, we want to ask the question: What will become of us?

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Find Your Next Read

9 unsettling novels that imagine the future in ways that feel too close to ignore

Mandy Webster

The future has never felt more intimate—or more unsettling—than in contemporary fiction that bends time, technology, and human behavior into something eerily recognizable. These novels imagine what comes next when memory, bodies, surveillance, climate collapse, and intimacy itself begin to shift beyond control. The result is a collection of stories that don’t just predict the future—they make it feel uncomfortably close.

The cover of the novel Ruins by Lily Brooks-Dalton
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Ruins by Lily Brooks-Dalton

At the center of Ruins is an archaeologist whose fascination with a long-lost civilization places her at odds with accepted history. As she pieces together fragments of a forgotten world, she becomes increasingly convinced that the stories people tell about the past are incomplete—or perhaps entirely wrong. Lily Brooks-Dalton unfolds the mystery slowly, allowing readers to uncover the significance of each discovery alongside the protagonist. The result is a literary novel that rewards curiosity, revealing its larger premise gradually rather than all at once.

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Book Reviews, Find Your Next Read

Make Me Better by Sarah Gailey: A hypnotic look at belonging, control, and the cost of transformation

Mandy Webster

What would you give up to finally belong somewhere—and would you recognize the moment it stopped being your choice? Make Me Better is an unsettling, slow-burn descent into the seductive promise of community, where healing and control blur until they’re indistinguishable. Fans of Wife Shaped Bodies, The Unworthy, or Sorrowland will find something deeply familiar—and deeply disturbing—here.

Get your copy of Make Me Better from my independent online bookstore today!

At the center of the story is Celia, a woman whose longing for connection overrides her sense of self-preservation. She doesn’t just develop crushes—she builds entire imagined lives around men she barely knows. When she recognizes how precarious that pattern is, she redirects that intensity toward the idea of motherhood. A baby, after all, would be hers in a way no one else ever has been. That same vulnerability makes her the perfect target for something like Kindred Cove.

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