Cities Are Forests Waiting To Happen by Cécile Cristofari (book review)

Cécile Cristofari is a new author. ‘Cities Are Forests Waiting To Happen’ is her second published book following ‘Elephants In Bloom’, which is the fifth volume in the ‘Polestars’ series and which won the 2025 British Fantasy Society Best Collection Award. Apart from this, Cristofari’s short stories have featured in several anthologies. Now she gives us ‘Cities Are Forest Waiting To Happen’, which is a novella of 128 pages. Regardless, this seems to be Cristofari’s longest work yet so I suspect she is working up to grander things.

With a title like that, one might reasonably assume some kind of environmental apocalypse as the backdrop to the story and Cristofari does not disappoint. The novella is set in Canada and immediately dates itself as being 164 years ‘post-apocalypse’. Two of the main characters live on the coast and are responsible for reporting destructive incoming storms so that the inner cities have time to batten down the hatches. Rossana is the elder and we soon find out she is a famously experienced explorer. She now manages the outpost with her daughter, Catherine, who describes herself as a digital archaeologist.

This latter is important as Cristofari gives not one apocalypse, but two. The ‘164 years post-apocalypse’ does not refer to environmental collapse but actually refers to a technological singularity where AIs suddenly gained sentience and went thoroughly rogue. In this setting, we gather that AIs are bad news wherever they spring up as they tend to interfere with all digital communication. As such, the human race has become dependant on much lower tech methods of communication such as analogue radio. Humans are even learning to understand whale speech, allowing the whales to transmit long distance communications for the humans. Alas, Cristofari does not dwell long on the latter, which is a shame because while it seems whacky as a concept it is quite attractive, much in the fashion of Anne McCaffery’s dolphins. Ah well, Cristofari has other fish to fry, if you will pardon the pun.

The other main character is Sabrina, who is working as a post-graduate on a research project to use an artificial intelligence programme to understand and even predict the behaviour of chimpanzees. Sabrina’s story starts dated ‘Year 2 pre-catastrophe’. Cristofari interleaves the chapters between the 164 post and 2 pre-catastrophe settings one after the other. Cristofari would not be the first author to tell a story this way and indeed many fine authors have used similar devices but, for this reviewer, this is off-putting. I like my stories to start at the beginning, proceed through and end at the end. However, I shall not hold this against Cristofari because, as I say, she is not the first to use this device.

It seems quite the coincidence that the catastrophe leading to the apocalypse is AI-based and Sabrina just so happens to be working on cutting edge AI. So obviously the reader is expecting the two stories to tie together and, indeed, they eventually do. There is a cute twist right at the end but, alas, I feel Cristofari rather telegraphed this much earlier in the book so I was not terribly surprised when it happened.

Cut back to the `modern’ 164 post-apocalypse setting and we find Rossana summoned to explore an abandoned city to find a rogue AI. Naturally, Catherine tags along as her digital skills may well come in handy. Their contact inland is a man named Ishmael whom Rossana immediately takes a prejudicial dislike to. Cristofari writes Rossana quite effectively here. As the story progresses and Ishamel turns out to be a fairly solid fellow, Rossana eventually realises she has treated him quite unfairly and this says more about Rossana than Ishamel.

It seems that the environmental collapse has driven many of the inlanders, as Rossana thinks of them, to a more agrarian culture. Images of shepherds grazing their sheep on the outskirts of a cities largely reclaimed by nature is quite an effective one. However, it seems that genetically altered ivy has been deployed to stop the abandoned buildings from falling down. This, in itself, seems to have gone somewhat askew as the ivy seems to have grown out of all control with some strains being very fast growing indeed. This is the environment that Rossana is famed for exploring in her youth, so it makes sense that she has been summoned to lead the quest to locate the servers the rogue AI is lurking on. Alas, this reviewer might have liked a bit more technical detail regarding this ivy-used-to-prop-up-buildings as ivy’s naturally binding is usually a double-edged sword with the ivy tending to cause structural failure of its support in time.

There is even a nice link between the ivy and the pre-apocalypse story but I am happy to let the reader find this out as this is slightly more surprising when it is discovered.

While the writing in this novella is competent enough, overall, I found this book to have a similar issue to most short stories. Which is to say there are some interesting ideas that are thoroughly undeveloped. The end paper even features a nicely drawn picture of a whale but they hardly feature in the book at all. This feels like a missed opportunity. Maybe Cristofari has written about whales elsewhere?

Cristofari rightly focuses on the central stories and the character interactions therein. Afterall, this is where the story really is. The post-apocalypse story is in most ways a straightforward enough quest but, the main protagonist Rossana at least goes through a development arc, all be it a short one. The historical pre-apocalypse story is actually more complex with Sabrina interacting with her fellow researchers and balancing this with her flatmate who is initially very antagonistic to her but naturally holds hidden depth once we get to meet her properly.

I think that having previously been an author of short stories, Cristofari is flexing her longer form creativity here. I would hope to encourage her as the novel-length would allow her to develop her attractive ideas a bit more. So, if you fancy a short read with some freshness, then this is recommended well enough but otherwise maybe keep an eye on Cristofari to see if any more substantive works might appear.

Dave Corby

March 2026

(pub: NewCon Press. 130 page A5 paperback. Price: £ 9.99 (UK), $11.99 (US). ISBN: 978-1-917735-06-7)

check out website: www.newconpress.co.uk