High summer greetings all! This eclipsing month we share three summer offers from the Dark Mountain bookshop; our twin Issue 25 and Issue 26 anthologies from land and sea, plus a limited offer on Issue 8: Technê as part of our new series about technology and its effect on human culture. You’ll also find the latest from our online edition, plus this month’s featured mountaineer,
As the moon slips across the face of the sun over parts of Europe today, we open this month's newsletter with an image of that same burning star in close detail from Issue 8 – Technê, a gem from our archive now on offer for paid subscribers.
We are at a strange moment in human history. Things that once belonged to the outlandish fantasies of science fiction – from killer robots to nanomachines – are becoming reality. At the same time, the ecological and social costs of this technological revolution are becoming clearer each day.
Through essays, artwork and how-to guides, this issue confronts the difficult questions of our time: Where are these tools and technologies leading us? What does it mean for the natural world and our own humanity? And how do we live through this?
Check out some of its digital pages, including an essay by Maeve Reilly exploring how simple activities done by hand can help resist the mechanisation of our humanity; ‘As the Mammon of mechanised greed continues to transform our world into a vast machine, how do we not fall into the machinery ourselves?’. And do take a peek at Portrait of an Edition, in which art editor Charlotte Du Cann presents some of the book’s striking black and white photography.
This special offer is for paid subscribers to our Substack edition, available in our online shop here. It is a very limited edition. The book is also available for everyone as a PDF.
Meanwhile, we’re still running our summer offers on two recent anthologies from land and sea. Don’t miss!
Issue 26: Dark Ocean (£13.99) is a collection of essays, stories, artwork and poetry, praise song and meditation, based on a Dark Mountain residency aboard a boat called Merlin in the Outer Hebrides. Dip into its pages with search and rescue operative Alexander McMaster’s harrowing piece, Paper Boats, followed by on selkies and shapeshifting coastlines, a re-imaginative charting of Cape Cod by Sarah B. Cahalan and a modern changeling story by M. Rose.
Dark Mountain: Issue 25 (£12.99) is a hardback anthology of non-fiction, fiction, poetry, interviews and artwork inspired by the struggle for land rights, and by the living land itself. Step into Issue 25 with Damian Le Bas's story about how moving to the city severed him from his Romani language, followed by Susan Raffo's illuminating essay on the aliveness of the land and the language that it speaks.
Journeying between polar lands, wildfire, and ‘la technique’ in this month’s posts
This month’s online edition began with Thaw, where artist Richard Koscher joins The Arctic Circle residency for a 16-day expedition through Svalbard, documenting his thermochromic painting project, Ghosts of the Ice. In her Antarctic-based essay The Prophet, Stephanie Krzywonos follows the tracks of a solitary bird into the interior of a ‘graveyard full of bones’, into her own landscape of loss and grief, and then the world’s. Next, Ersun Augustinus Kayra explores the life of the Greenlandic people through his imagination, and how their deep interrelationship with place is shaped by language: ‘Geography, in this way of seeing, is not a stock of features to be inventoried but a web of relations to be lived inside.’
In Fine Particles of Brilliant Forests, Burning, Charlotte Du Cann reflects on recent wildfires close to home, republishing a lament from our 2019 ‘fire issue’ for the wild lives burned in the Californian forests, alongside another it inspired from the Australian bush fires. In Never Mind Where, So Long As It’s Fast, we transition from ice and fire to the Promethean world of modern technology, beginning this month’s tech series with an essay based on an interview with ‘techno-sage’ Jacques Ellul, by artist and filmmaker Jan van Boeckel. Stay tuned for more!
This month’s featured mountaineer is Tom Smith, a researcher, writer and editor from Ireland, based in the north of Spain. He is a member of the Community Economies Institute (CEI) and has written widely on topics related to degrowth, economic localisation and postcapitalism. Tom first contributed to Dark Mountain with an essay titled The Focal and the Flask in Issue 6, and went on to edit four Dark Mountain books (Issues 8, 9, 13 and 16). An interview he conducted with Chellis Glendinning appears in Walking on Lava: Selected Works for Uncivilised Times.
Check out some of Tom’s pieces for Dark Mountain, including Fighting for the Earth, in which he reviews 'How to Blow Up a Pipeline' by Andreas Malm, and Who Stands With the Bears? A defence of ‘Planet of the Humans’, a piece on a documentary that sparked controversy within the environmental movement for its depiction of a destructive renewable energy industry.
Dark Mountain: Issue 29 (£19.99)
Our Spring 2026 anthology is a hardback collection that steps outside the human bubble and puts animals at its heart. Order from our website or take out a subscription to future issues of Dark Mountain and get Issue 29 for only £14.99.
Subscribe to Dark Mountain's Books
The Dark Mountain Project is an entirely reader-funded organisation. If you enjoy these newsletters or posts, please consider supporting our work by visiting our shop or becoming a subscriber to our books and/or our online weekly edition on Substack. All back issues in the archive are available both in print (Issues 21, 22, 25-28) and PDFs (from £5). Many thanks!
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