Eleanor Keisman, New Animal (Broken Tribe Press, 2025) 115 pp. $12.95 Pb. ISBN: 9781965412312.
Eleanor Keisman’s debut novella, New Animal (2025), is an evocative climate science fiction tale of survival that is less about escaping climate distress and more about remembering the importance of relying on one another despite it all. What makes Keisman’s cli-fi tale compelling to an audience interested in science is that it centers on a budding relationship between a lone wolf, self-named Pope, Bill, a Wild Man, and Hume, a wolfdog hybrid. This focus on human-animal relations scaffolds a more than human perspective in storytelling and survival through multi-species communication. Drawing inspiration from Jack London, Keisman begins her text with an epitaph from Call of the Wild (1903): ‘There is patience of the wild – dogged, tireless, persistent as life itself’. True to the inspiration New Animal channels the unified story of wolf and man’s co-dependent survival seen in White Fang (1906) and Call of the Wild (1903); in truth,Keisman’s story blends the wolf and human perspectives until their stories are no longer distinct but mutually evolving. Other contemporary sf/cli-fi texts that take the human-animal relationship (particularly between a wolfdog/wolf and human) as central to storytelling include Anré Alexis’ Fifteen Dogs (2015) and E.J. Swifts’ When there are Wolves Again (2025). As with other climate fiction stories that feature human-dog relations, Keisman’s story offers a fan of hope where there is almost always fire.
New Animal underlines climate collapse through setting the story narrative after the 2081 Great Fire in Yellowstone National territory. This Fire displaces Pope, pushing him north along the Rock Mountain territory. Behind him, Pope leaves his pack, mother and brother – the ‘Druid Pack’ (1). The book opens from Pope’s perspective, and the style of writing convinces the reader of the loss, hunger, and loneliness Pope feels. While certain concepts relate directly to humanness – February, Yellowstone, 2081 – they do not interfere with those markers that human readers imagine wolves see just as well, if not better than, humans. Through a carefully written third-person singular point of view, the reader’s disbelief in entering Pope’s perspective is torn away as they see that ‘the snow had started to melt’ and hear that ‘chickadees were silent’ and hope for ‘new warmth’ (1). In this way, Pope is not anthropomorphized, per se, but is shown and described as a wolf whose experiences Keisman relates through careful indistinguishable markers of his living in a human world to help the story along. Notably, however, in reading Pope’s perspective the reader becomes less aware of what differences exist between themselves and Pope so that those markers of humanness and of living in a human world fall away and become the other in the story and even less important to the fanning of hope amidst the fires of climate collapse.
Along with this perspective, Pope represents a not so popular stance on the question of designer dogs, making the human reader question how they view dogs as pets rather than evolutionary descendants of wolves. While this review is not a place to detour into this debate, it is important to note for those interested in understanding how Pope as a wolf sees our faithful dog companions. Pope considers domestication and its discontents when he comes up to a dog park early in the novella, providing the reader with a unique perspective that centers Keisman’s story as an offer for readers to reconsider domestication all together. Seeing the dogs in the park, Pope remarks, ‘They looked like animals infected with a sickness that struck down not a single life, but an entire line… The husky was him, copied to extinction’ (7). Keisman’s phrasing is at once damning of humans’ interference as well as telling of their mutually assured extinction. While not as hopeful at this point, Pope’s position early on is what sets the novella apart from human-centeredness to destabilize the reader’s assumptions of domestication while simultaneously causing them to rethink the human in the wild.
Bill, the human character, meets Pope at an animal shelter warehouse where he convinces the patron to release Pope to him. He is a wolf but only Bill can recognize them. The focus for Bill as the human member of this fledgling pack stems from his perseverance and drive to seek out wilderness, which is not the expected behavior for humans fleeing raging wildfires. Keisman contends that in this speculative future, ‘A man could learn how to behave around a wolf, and what behaviors and sounds could be threatening. A man could learn, but there were few left who would’ (28). Bill exemplifies the one human who wills the relationship with wolves and wolfdog alike. As the initial chapters of the story take shape readers learn that alongside his convictions, Bill is also politically motivated to liberating Pope from his physical confinement. Readers are introduced to the term, ‘Neo-Abolitionist’ (26). The term denotes a political show of solidarity with animals and signals the wild still alive within modern man. Bill is a self-proclaimed neo-abolitionist who grew up in Queens under police watch and strict regulations that kept all people locked inside reinforced buildings and under police watch due to extreme heat and disease. Keisman paints the dystopic future sans safety from climate through Bill’s childhood flashback: ‘Each child entered the playground one at a time, and over each tiny body, a disinfectant was rained down’ (31). What seems to be important to Bill is to survive outside the oppression of his past and despite the climate of his present. Where the story seems most optimistic is in its depiction of Pope and Bill’s relationship as a microcosm for what is possible when animals and humans see one another as equals who are in a fight for mutual survival.
It seems paradoxical to argue that hope can be found in a post-apocalyptic climate fiction story, but the truth is that Keisman’s message is not what readers expect. New Animal is for readers of science fiction, but it is also for people wondering where hope can be found in a future that seems so ecologically unstable. When I write future it is with a smile because, as Keisman’s story showcases, it can be told mutually alongside animals and maybe any apocalypse is just another animal we must approach tenderly rather than with fear.
Raul Martin IV
