Bogs, Books, and Magic Boxes: Review of Alston Moor and Woman, Wolf, Carbon Capture

So Mayer Under Review:Alston Moor. Anne Charnock. Gold SF, September 2026.Woman, Wolf, Carbon Capture. Noelle Catharine Allan. Black Lawrence Press, September 2026. It feels strange to proffer character-led summaries of these two narratives; as their titles make clear, they focus to a significant extent on displacing the human from the center of the story. Anne Charnock’s Alston Moor has several point of view characters of different ages and genders across two time periods, but one living location: Alston Moor, a remote stretch of moorland in Cumbria and its local market town of the same name. Noelle Catharine Allan’s Woman, Wolf, Carbon Capture takes place in Seattle, in one point of view—that of Tiny, so named “because she was anything but”—but is, like Charnock’s novel, about rewilding on a massive scale. With When There Are Wolves Again by E.J. Swift winning this year’s Arthur C. Clarke Award for science fiction, the possibilities of rewilding are coming to the forefront of…