There Must Be Wolves Again

Out of the 67 books that I’ve read so far this year, When There Are Wolves Again by E.J. Swift is my favorite. It begins with the pandemic and ends after five decades of climate change, but it is the most hopeful book I’ve read in a long time, and I wish it had continued for another fifty years.

I don’t want to put more weight on E.J. Swift’s wonderful sixth novel than a single book should be asked to bear, but my recurring thought as I read it was: This is what science fiction should be doing now.—Niall Harrison, from his review in Locus Magazine

Earlier this year, I read Terrestrial History by Joe Mungo Reed, which is a less hopeful vision of our future. Both books think it inevitable that humans will inhabit Mars; but Swift’s book, in my opinion, was more realistic. Reed’s book was a circular doom narrative masquerading as hopeful, but is still enjoyable the way 12 Monkeys is; When There are Wolves succeeds with characters. We follow two women, one a nature photographer and filmmaker and the other a young activist, as they weather the next few decades.¹ The chapter skip a few years and alternate, as Hester raises wolf-dogs rescued from Chernobyl, and Lucy protests, sits in, and eventually works in rewilding. Lucy’s Gran and Grandpa are also wonderful, imperfect people, and even the main villain is human and not a caricature.

If you live in the United States—as has been the case since January—you are shit out of luck. Can’t be publishing hope here, when doom and hate and division sells so well. I found a copy through AbeBooks to avoid the wanna-be tyrant’s illegal tariffs; the link I shared above is to Bookshop UK.

As expected from the title, the rewilding of the British Isle with wolves is the ultimate goal. The return of wolves to Yellowstone has had immense benefits to the ecosystem; deer and other animals overpopulate without predators. Even here in the New Jersey Pinelands Preserve, young trees disappear before they can become saplings, browsed by whitetail deer who have no predators except the uncommon coyotes, as hunting becomes less popular. Many parks shut down while hired hunters cull them, around here. Black bears have returned to the northern, more populated part of the state, but they rarely hunt deer. We could use a pack of wolves, or mountain lions.

A fellow bicyclist claimed to spot a mountain lion in Wharton State Forest while I was there; I didn’t see anything. Bobcats and large house cats get mistaken for them all the time around here. I wouldn’t mind mountain lions being around, even if I had to start painting eyes on the back of my helmet.

Swift’s book is based in a lot of fact, and even uses the radiation-eating mold discovered at Chernobyl in its future. Serendipitously enough, that mold was just remarked upon by Sam Matey-Coste in last week’s newsletter of hopeful climate news:

The Weekly Anthropocene, December 10 2025

Wolves get a lot of hate. Some asshole tortured one to death in Wyoming a few years ago, to outrage us, and show us how much he loves molesting livestock. It’s not an American peculiarity, even with our national cowboy fetish. When you follow the threads, what Americans fetishize most is suffering; inflicting it on others, and enduring it as some sort of religious purification that absolves them from the cowardice required to remain under the yoke of the aristocracy. When someone talks about freedom but can’t define it, methinks they doth protest too much…

For any American child, so much of our education is a miseducation…

—Ocean Vuong, in this BOMB magazine interview by Björk

The above-referenced interview was excellent, and I agree a lot with Vuong’s take on how publishing puts people into boxes. It’s very much a back and forth, and Björk has also been boxed in and declared the voice for things she never said she was.

Something I’m deeply interested in, and that I also see a lot in your work, is this recognition that the powers that be are horrible, but if all we do is correct them, then we will always speak second. We will never get to speak first. We’re always cleaning up their mistakes. But in art we can speak first. We can take a wild detour away from whatever is at the smoldering center and find an alternative route.—Björk this BOMB magazine interview

Amanda Royal continues to focus on why the news is mostly negative, and how journalists are often pushed to turn a 99:1 narrative into a 50:50. It’s an important read, to remind yourself why you’re seeing what you’re seeing. It’s the same reason every election is described as neck and neck, and then they spend a month investigating why “they got it wrong,” and “the polls were off.” Maybe you chose polls that fed your narrative?

Why hope isn't mainstream

I’ll be looking for more books by E.J. Swift when I’m overseas. I picked up Wolfish by Erica Berry, which explores our cultural fear and loathing of wolves, and I might read that next. It’s been seven years since Harlan Ellison died, and I finally began reading Can and Can’tankerous, his final story collection. At his best, he sparked wonder like this cover by Leo and Diane Dillon suggests, the caterpillar atop the mushroom in Wonderland:

A writer friend who knew Ellison better than I called him “a complicated man,” which I’ll leave by itself. Though, that is also how Dr. Emily Wilson begins her brilliant translation of Homer’s The Odyssey: “Let me tell you about a complicated man.”

If I had to recommend one story, it might be “The Paladin of the Lost Hour,” which stuck with me the most, or “Repent, Harlequin! Said the Ticktockman,” his most reprinted. Perhaps “Jeffty is Five,” about a man who visits his younger self. Those are more hopeful than the ones he’s best known for, such as “I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream,” which is about the last humans on Earth kept alive to be tormented forever by an Artificial Intelligence which became sentient. Deathbird Stories was my favorite collection, for its tales of modern gods.

Can and Can’tankerous is unpublished works old and new, woven with introductions and afterwords and thoughts from the day he had a stroke, not long before his death. There’s even a line, “I wish I’d lived to see it in print,” though he lived a few years after its publication. Death was on his mind. As it is on mine, as the first anniversary of my mother’s death approaches, like the penumbra of a solar eclipse.

Winter is the time of death; I went for a sub-freezing ride just to see the sun, and hear the woodpeckers—Red-bellieds, and a Northern Flicker—defy the cold as they scolded me for interrupting their peckery. A friend died last week, aged merely fifty, of complications of cancer; she leaves two children and a husband. Her last words were, “I don’t feel good this morning,” and she was gone while her husband called the doctor. I should go to her memorial, but I can’t. I feel my breath catching, just thinking about it.

I could go to a birthday party. Or a pagan ritual where we torch a giant wicker statue to appease the sun. But not a funeral, not now. Maybe once the shadow passes, and the light is waxing rather than diminished.

Red Riding Hood is a winter story. We’ve made the wolf a symbol of our own hunger, of the unforgiving cold itself. I prefer Angela Carter’s take. In these cold times, we can find warmth between the paws of the tender wolf.

1. Pun so very much intended.