This 2011 anthology is made up of short fiction concerned with climate change, extinction, and environmental collapse. Two contributions, the ones by Lydia Millett and Kim Stanley Robinson, are excerpts from previous novels, while two others by David Mitchell and Paolo Bacigalupi seem to have been advance work for novels they later completed and published (The Bone Clocks and The Water Knife, respectively).

Of the ten stories collected here, three are set in the present or recent past. These are concerned with the futility of protest-based activism against environmental depredation and with the unbalancing of the human mind in the face of non-human extinctions.

Another six stories are set in the relatively near future; 2040 is the specified date for two of the stories, and these seem to be the far boundary of the set. All of these depict varying types and stages of social collapse as a result of environmental exhaustion and climate change, in the (former) UK, US, and Italy. All are plausible, none are cheering, and easily the bleakest is "Diary of an Interesting Year" by Helen Simpson.

The collection concludes with Margaret Atwood's three-page "Time Capsule Found on the Dead Planet," which doesn't offer anything like hope. I was a little galled that this set of narrative fictions held out even less consolation than Roy Scranton's book-length essay Learning to Die in the Anthropocene.

Didn't really grab me. I liked some of the ideas, but overall I wasn't very excited by this collection. It's a worthy cause, but I felt a bit like they were hitting me over the head with it. Can't see that being massively useful for changing hearts & minds. ( )

Short stories relating to imagined environmental catastrophes. Some of them are quite gripping. Sadly, none of them seem far-fetched. ( )

A collection of short stories focusing on climate change, I'm With the Bears boasts an impressive list of writers and supports a worthy mission. Despite its initial promise, I'm With the Bears isn't all that impressive. Some of the stories revolve around an interesting subject, while others disappoint. What really plagues this collection is that almost all of the stories feel incomplete. There are some great sketches or drafts of stories here, but they never quite deliver.

The cover states that royalties from the sale of the book go to reduce CO2 in the atmosphere. I can't help but wonder, however, how much damage was done to the planet to manufacture this lackluster effort? Cut down enough trees to manufacture a first printing, box it up, ship it out to every major book retailer and library across the country and elsewhere. Committed fans of the ten authors represented may buy the book, but it seems unlikely it will sell much more than that. Rip the cover off the unsold copies, send it back to the distributor and throw the remaining 200 pages in the trash bin. Couldn't it at least have been printed on recycled paper or eco-friendly paper alternative? Like the stories themselves, I'm not sure this project was very well thought out. ( )