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Multispecies Cities (Paperback, 2021, World Weaver Press) No rating

Cities are alive, shared by humans and animals, insects and plants, landforms and machines. What …

I find the premise of this book really great. The stories may be subdivided in many ways but for me they come in three flavours, the anthropomorphic (e.g. animals we can now speak to and be friends with because of tech), stories that focus more on the agency of being that animals and other species and ecology in general have in their own right, irrespective of how they relate to us, and finally robots.

The latter two are most to my taste. My favourite story is the last one, "The Birdsong Fossil" by D.K. Mok. It is a mindblowing vision of a dying world and a robotic ethnographer trying desperately to save animal culture. It is wonderfully written and the balance between hopelessness for our current trajectory and hope is really well done.

A close second is "The Streams Are Paved With Fish Traps" by Octavia Cade, which is lovely because it's a story that centres how we could change how we look at urban environments as a shared space, in this case, creatively, with eels.