Robin’s Last Song: Soundscape Ecology & Structures of Feeling

September 6, 2026July 27, 2026 / thealiennextdoor / Leave a comment

May 2071

I rock on the cedar swing on my veranda and hear the wind rustling through the gaunt forest. An abandoned nest, the forest sighs in low ponderous notes. It sighs of a gentler time. A time when birds filled it with song. A time when large and small creatures—unconcerned with the distant thrum and roar of diggers and logging trucks—roamed the thick second-growth forest. The discord was still too far away to bother the wildlife. But their killer lurked far closer in deadly silence. And it caught the birds in the bliss of ignorance. The human-made scourge came like a thief in the night and quietly strangled all the birds in the name of progress.—Robin’s Last Song

My story Robin’s Last Song is an eco-fiction short story that follows Robin, a blind elder who uses sight-enhancing technology, as she navigates the aftermath of a sudden global extinction of birds that her digital app failed to predict. The story explores the conflict between nature and technology, as well as Robin’s journey to find hope in soundscape ecology. You can read the full story on MetaStellar Magazine or find it in the classic Apex Magazine Issue #128.

*Two magazines that published Robin’s Last Song* *and a previous version*

In a recent interview I was asked how I came to write this particular story about birds and soundscape ecology; here’s my response:

Since I was a child, the burgeoning SF writer in me had dared to imagine a world without the sound of birds—I thought it utterly bleak and, recognizing an ever-polluting world, I feared for my feathered relatives. I didn’t follow through with a story until September 2019, when I was approached by Oliver Hockenhull, the guest editor of subTerrain Magazine, to write a piece on technology and the environment. The timing was interesting; I’d just read two impactful things that resonated with me.

The first was the October issue of Science Magazine that reported a staggering decline in North American birds. Kenneth V. Rosenberg and his team of researchers had estimated that three billion birds of various species had disappeared in Canada and the US since 1970. That’s a third of the entire bird population lost in five decades. To make it clear, we aren’t talking about rare birds going extinct; these declines are of common birds throughout the world. The wrens, sparrows, starlings, and, of course, the robins. I was devastated; I could not imagine a world without the comforting sound of birds. What would it be like if the birds all disappeared? This brought me back to my childhood fears.

The second article I ran across talked about an emerging bioacoustics tool, soundscape ecology, that measures biodiversity and the health of an ecosystem, mostly through bird sound which well represents ecosystem health. Bernie Krause, a soundscape ecologist who had been conducting long-term recordings for decades noted how the dawn chorus in many areas had greatly diminished if not vanished altogether.

I now had my premise and my connection with technology. The title of my original story for subTerrain was “Out of the Silence.” This story focused on the technical aspects of the premise and solution. When I was approached for a story in February 2021 by Francesco Verso, the guest editor of Apex Magazine Issue #128, I rewrote the story with a stronger focus on the protagonist’s personal journey and connection with the bird catastrophe, how she coped with Asperger’s syndrome and the failure of her tool to predict the disaster. Hence the change in the title to Robin’s Last Song.

I was already primed with research into genetic engineering for the sequel to my 2020 eco-novel A Diary in the Age of Water. I wanted to make the bird disappearance in Robin’s Last Song a dramatic catastrophe linked to our own dangerous ecological tampering. I had the notion of using a gene hacking disaster to create ecological calamity and how this might affect birds. I wanted to make Robin’s Last Song a realizable work of fiction in which science and technology play both instigator of disaster and purveyor of salvation. Our biogenetic technology comes to us as a double-edged sword in the form of gene-editing, proteomics, DNA origami, and CRISPR—just to name a few. These biotechnological innovations promise a cornucopia of enhancements: from increased longevity and health in humans to giant disease-resistant crops. But, for every ‘magic’ in technology, there is often unintended consequence. Unforeseen—or even ignored—casualties and risks. I suppose my ultimate question with this story is: will synthetic biology redesign Nature to suit hubris or serve evolution? Science doesn’t make those decisions. We do.

Rachel Carson & Silent Spring

*Rachel Carson and her book Silent Spring*

Rachel Carson was nothing short of prophetic when she published Silent Spring in 1962 (in reference to the dawn chorus most noticeable in spring during breeding). Silent Spring cautioned burgeoning ag-biotech companies (like Monsanto—now Bayer—Sygenta, Dow, and DuPont) who were carelessly and flagrantly spraying fields with pesticides and herbicides—at the time DDT was the main culprit. This would soon become a GMO world where gene-hacked plants of monocultures can withstand the onslaught of killer pesticides like neonicotinoids (currently killing bees everywhere) and Roundup. Roundup is a carcinogenic glyphosate-based weed killer that has recently been shown to kill beneficial insects like bees) and has been linked to Alzheimer’s disease, ADHD, birth defects, autism, and several kinds of cancer in humans.

Despite Carson’s warnings in 1962 and despite some action eventually taken (e.g. the ban on use of DDT in 1972—the precursor to Roundup and other neonicotinoids currently in use), the use of chemicals in big ag-industry has increased over five-fold since the 1960s. And this is destroying our bee populations, other beneficial insects, beneficial weeds, small animal populations and—of course—our bird life. And it’s making us sick too. Alarming signals suggest that Rachel Carson’s 1962 warning is currently underway.

Soundscape Ecology

“Soundscape ecology is a quick and easy way to assess the health of a habitat. We know that the richness of the soundscape is linked to the diversity and abundance of life in an ecosystem—from the smallest insect to a roaming bear and rustling tree…”
Jack Gopnik in Robin’s Last Song

The new science of soundscape ecology can analyze the health of an ecosystem. Jack Gopnik in Robin’s Last Song explains:

“All sounds, from trickling streams to singing birds, combine in a unique soundscape that represents a ‘fingerprint’ of the ecosystem. Ecologists divide these acoustics into three categories. Geophony describes natural processes like crashing waterfalls, tides, lightning, and earthquakes. Biophony describes the sounds produced by all living things from plants to insects to larger wildlife. And then there’s anthropophony, the sounds produced by human activities such as planes, traffic, and construction …

“Acoustic communication is crucial for birds to reproduce, feed, defend territories, and avoid predators. Birds use sonic territories or channel bandwidths to ensure their voices can be heard unimpeded by others. But soundtracks are changing. Bernie Krause—the originator of Soundscape Ecology—documented how a forest can flatline. He called it dysphonia…”

Bernie Krause, a soundscape ecologist who has been conducting long-term recordings recently noted that in Sugarloaf Ridge State Park, not far from his home in Northern California, “the effect of global warming and resulting drought has created the first completely silent spring I’ve ever experienced.” Stuart Winter at Express reports that “many of the iconic birds whose mating calls ring out across woodlands and open fields during early May are vanishing at an alarming rate.”

Structures of Feeling & Climate Change

In his paper “Structures of feeling in climate fiction” published in The American Journal of Cultural Sociology, Andrew McCumber used Raymond William’s concept of “structures of feeling’ as a cultural framework to study climate change as it is actively experienced in the present.

“Williams used structures of feeling to describe the distinctive quality of experience that characterizes a period, and to challenge us to consider how the personal, affective realm of “feeling” is implicated in social processes that transcend us.” McCumber used computational methods and qualitative analysis and followed Williams’ assertion that structures of feeling are most visible in creative work, to analyze short stories in the literary subgenre of “climate fiction. McCumber found a temporal shift in the works he looked at; he observed that they transitioned “between imagining the acute destruction of climate chaos and the possibilities of post-apocalypse.” He took these shifts to indicate underlying patterns in the affective social experience of climate change.

McCumber argued that the development of a fully-fledged sociology of climate change is challenged by the ambiguous temporality of the climate crisis. “Discussions of climate change are almost always implicitly discussions of possible futures, which can make it difficult to frame the contemporary phenomena we study in terms of it.”

Another difficulty is one of scale, said McCumber. “Climate change is at once ubiquitous and abstract.” A hyperobject. It requires, he argues, a combination of effective science communication and informed critical thinking to connect the localized destruction with larger global effects.

McCumber brings the theoretical and analytical perspectives of cultural sociology to both expand and advance the sociology of climate change. With its focus on processes of shared meaning making, cultural sociology “promises a window into how climate change constitutes a ‘social drama’ and functions as a frame through which our everyday lived experience is filtered.”

He makes use of Raymond Williams’s concept of “structures of feeling” to explore “the ever-changing and increasingly palpable lived reality of climate change.” Given how climate change “announces its presence unevenly in fits and starts, it is both important and uniquely difficult to understand how it is experience along with how that experience shifts over time.”

McCumber looked at several short stories from five prominent science fiction magazines (Apex, Clarkesworld, Lightspeed, Reactor, and Uncanny) and identified a notable shift in the evolution of climate-focused science fiction over the period from 2011 to 2024 as well as a general increase in climate fiction over this period.

McCumber identified three periods over that time: Period I, in which the human experience of climate change cedes the spotlight to a more expansive imagination of life and its potential future; Period II, emphasizing the acute, lived reality of humanity during climate change; and Period III, which emphasizes themes of symbiosis and ecological resilience that transcend human experience.

My short story Robin’s Last Song fit into Period II: “In the stories that characterize the period that bookends the May 2021 low-point in climate sentiment, the devastation of climate chaos (or in some cases an imagined corollary to this destruction on a fictional world) is front and center. While these stories vary in how optimistic or pessimistic their final dispositions vis-a-vis climate change are, acute ecological crisis or climate destruction tends to be central to the worlds they imagine and the action that unfolds. Thus, the structure of feeling of this period is shaped by the sense of loss that climate change entails…These stories explore the affective experience of this loss and pain.”

“The structure of feeling [of Robin’s Last Song] is characterized by a preoccupation with the acute pain of climate shocks and the dread of their imminent intensification… The title character, a soundscape ecologist, loses her sense of purpose and becomes a recluse after spiraling ecological destruction causes a sudden mass extinction of birds. Munteanu’s story dramatizes a form [of] loss engendered by climate change (extinction and biodiversity loss) mostly experienced as a gradual process by depicting it as sudden and traumatic:

I stood by the kitchen window, concentrating on reading the recipe for Diana’s birthday cake when a loud thwap made me jump. A bird must have flown into the window. As I looked out, another bird sailed into the window with a violent thud, leaving behind a red smear.

I rushed out the kitchen door and saw two starlings lying on the patio. Both had obviously broken their necks. Something made me look up. What I saw made my heart cave in: a dark cloud of starlings was raining birds. They fell from the sky, thudding and pelting into cars, and plopping on the ground. Some flew like drunks into buildings, trees, windows, and even people. It was a deluge.

Diana ran outside and I seized her in a tight embrace, sheltering her eyes from it all. The neighborhood rang with shouts, cries, and wails. It felt like the end of the world.

Heartbroken, I stood still like granite, pressing my daughter against me in a crushing embrace. In that moment made eternity, I knew. Then I burst into tears of despair.

“There are certainly glimmers of optimism to be found in these stories,” says McCumber; “Robin’s Last Song, for instance, ends on a hopeful note when a surviving population of birds is discovered and the protagonist has renewed purpose. But the substantive trend that seems to best explain the dip in climate sentiment during this period observed in the computational analysis is the way the narrative timelines of climate change and the short stories themselves overlap. The stories’ plots take place largely within the period of the immediate, felt effects of ecological crisis. As such, the emotional register that typifies these stories emphasizes loss and dread.”

*Robin fledgling rests on a lawn chair (photo by M. Cox)*

References:

McCumber, Andrew. “Structures of feeling in climate fiction.” American Journal of Cultural Sociology, February 2026.

Munteanu, Nina. 2021. “Robin’s Last Song.” Apex Magazine, Issue 128.

Nina Munteanu is a Canadian ecologist / limnologist and novelist. She is co-editor of Europa SF and currently teaches writing courses at George Brown College and the University of Toronto. For the lates on her books, visit www.ninamunteanu.ca. Nina’s bilingual “La natura dell’acqua / The Way of Water” was published by Mincione Edizioni in Rome. Her non-fiction book “Water Is…” by Pixl Press (Vancouver) was selected by Margaret Atwood in the New York Times ‘Year in Reading’ and was chosen as the 2017 Summer Read by Water Canada. Her novel “A Diary in the Age of Water” was released by Inanna Publications (Toronto) in June 2020. You can read her just released eco-fiction thriller Gaia’s Revolution by Dragon Moon Press.

David Eggers on AI Use by Writers

August 30, 2026August 7, 2026 / thealiennextdoor / Leave a comment

David Eggers—famous author of many best selling books (e.g., Contraposto, The Circle, The Eyes and the Impossible)—recently spoke at the OpenAI Headquarters. It seemed an excellent opportunity for him to give them some advice on AI use by writers.

He told the staff that the “effect of ChatGPT on educators’ lives is catastrophic,” adding that “whether you intended to do it or not, you’ve made every teacher’s life infinitely more difficult than it was two years ago.”

Eggers called out OpenAI staffers for enabling the rapid cognitive deterioration of an entire generation, tech that has turned educators into involuntary AI detectives, and budding writers into prompt engineers.

His advice to an employee who mentioned that they used ChatGPT to write a poem: “So, why don’t you leave your house, leave the screen, meet some people, get yourself in a writing group. Another human might be very encouraging and help you express yourself authentically.”

References:

Tangermann, Victor. 2026. “Author Invited to Give Speech at OpenAI Headquarters, Uses Opportunity to Trash AI to Their Faces”. Futurism, July 21, 2026.

Inanna Publications Announces their Spring 2027 Titles, starting with “Thalweg” by Nina Munteanu

Inanna Publications Announces their Spring 2027 Titles, starting with “Thalweg” by Nina Munteanu

August 26, 2026August 26, 2026 / thealiennextdoor / Leave a comment

Nina Munteanu Interview on Writers To Writers Podcast

August 23, 2026July 31, 2026 / thealiennextdoor / Leave a comment

*Nina Munteanu with Simon Rose and Suzanne Lieurance on Writers To Writers Podcast*

I was recently interviewed by Simon Rose and Suzanne Lieurance on Episode 4 of Writers To Writers June 2026.

We covered why I write about ‘green issues’ in my fiction, how I came to write eco-fiction and my aversion to littering—an aversion which Suzanne shared she also felt—which I ascribed to a disrespect for others and ‘the silent other’, represented by the natural world. We discussed my influences as a kid growing up and then later as an adult.

I shared how I have incorporated ‘green issues’ in both my fiction and non-fiction writing and short and long fiction. We shared how we started as young kids creating stories for our families and neighbourhood friends, developing our skills as storytellers.

We also discussed the strange world of writing and publishing and how a prequel to a prequel can come about. This then morphed into a discussion of morally gray characters and their evolution and why I find the character Loki far more interesting than Thor. If you want clarification on these, go have a listen!

*Nina Munteanu interviewed by Simon Rose and Suzanne Lieurance on Writers To Writers Podcast*

Biosemiosis: Acknowledging Intelligence in Nature

August 16, 2026August 16, 2026 / thealiennextdoor / Leave a comment

In my latest eco-fiction novel (Re)Genesis (upcoming), four teenagers in ‘small town’ Ontario discover and unravel a conspiracy by a chemical factory that uses shapeshifting substances for weapon use, causing a shift in the genetics of humanity itself. The discovery eventually leads them to communist Poland where it all started with the cyanobacteria Nostoc commune.

(Re)Genesis follows the premise of dark karma as Nature learns to reflect back what we send out. Making use of real examples of learning, pattern recognition, anticipation and adaptation in non-human life, the novel explores the concept of biosemiosis* in this eco-thriller.

*Nostoc commune found colonizing a gravel path, ON (photo by Nina Munteanu)*

Ahmed Bennu, a mind-challenged boy, who is arcanely transformed by a tragic incident into a genius publishing papers at Harvard, pursues the concept of biosemiosis in Nostoc commune, a ubiquitous cyanobacteria (blue-green algae)—and an organism his own body has begun to mimic—that has colonized the world. In a scientific paper published by Nature, he describes the ever-increasing fluidity in Nature and argues that Nostoc can anticipate and exert goal-oriented behaviour to change itself and its environment. He joins Harriet—who lost her best friend in that arcane incident—and their investigation leads them to a nefarious past, to the 1950s, deep in the Kurpioska Forest of Poland, where chemical company Zima Elastomers used Nostoc to concoct a freakish substance for the communist military. Not only did the substance infect the workers there; it escaped with dire consequences for the world’s future.

Of course, it’s just science fiction. But is that all it is?…

Biosemiosis & Umwelt

In the 1930s, Jakob von Uexküll coined the term Umwelt* (species-specific reality or subjective environment) to define a life process that involved semiotic* interactions. He argued that an organism’s behaviour results from activity that attributes meaning to the world around it, rather than merely mechanically reacting to stimuli. Building on this notion, Friedrich S. Rothschild coined the term “biosemiosis” in 1962 to postulate that life has its subjective interpretation of the world around it—its Umwelt—a segment of the world that has significance and meaning based on that life’s biology and needs. Developing the concept of biosemiosis further, Thomas Sebeok later contended that all organisms are enveloped in a cloud of messages about themselves and their situation, which they constantly transmit, receive, and interpret. Life itself is a process of signification and meaning-making, from bacteria and plants to mammals and birds. Biosemiosis involves pattern recognition, anticipation, flexibility, goal-directed movement, memory, and learning.

All organisms participate in complex interactions that involve sophisticated signaling and exchange. In Planta Sapiens, Paco Calvo argues that, “this happens at the level of single-celled organisms, which can collect information and make decisions.” The slime mold Physarum polycephalum, for example, is an amoeba-like cell that can navigate its environment through learning, memory, and decisions. In the 1980s, evolutionary biologist Lynn Margulis argued for intelligence of bacteria based on similar observations.

*Nostoc filament showing various adaptive cells (illustration by Nina Munteanu)*

My novel (Re)Genesis features the cyanobacteria Nostoc commune, known to be highly adaptable to changing environments and known to participate in complex interactions by entering into symbiotic relationships (e.g. plants, fungi and lichen) that involve complex communication and exchange of resources; biosemiosis in action. In my novel, Nostoc commune is used by Polish biochemical company Zima Performance Elastomers as the driving core of a synthetic protein substance with chameleon properties called Syprene and meant for covert stealth operations by the military. Not unlike Margaret Atwood’s calamitous dystopia Oryx & Crake, things go wrong at Zima: terrible unintended consequences occur as non-human biological intelligence asserts its self-determination and humans find their sovereignty eroded into a more fluid existence.

In a scene close to the middle of the book, two sisters wish each other goodbye at the train station in the village of Mala Dolina, built for Zima Elastomers; a veil of dark portent overshadows them both:

Ewa and Zofia stand in awkward silence at the little train station in town, waiting for the train. A thick snowfall covers the tracks and the ground. The snow comes down like thick confetti, covering everything with a soft blanket of white.

It’s time for her to return to Warsaw to teach the winter semester at the university. She hates to leave Zofia with the twins so young, especially with Piotr not totally recovered. But, given how their work shifts now overlap less, surely Piotr can look after the twins when he’s home. It is not perfect, but it must work, she decides. Things must go on.

Ewa glances covertly at Zofia, standing next to her on the platform, and worries nonetheless. Piotr is definitely not fully recovered from his accident last fall. She finds him often morose and strange, staring off into the distance for a protracted time or saying odd things that have nothing to do with anything. Pieces of nonsense. He seems to have lost his joy for life and it is impacting her sister. He now walks with a stoop. Shortly after Christmas, Zofia had anxiously confided to her something distressing: Piotr had told Zofia that there was something in the brine pit. Something moving and alive. This is, of course, impossible. Nothing can live in that cesspool of poisonous waste. Zofia reminded her that Agata had made that same claim shortly before she was found dead and floating face down in the brine pit. Ewa recognized real terror in Zofia’s eyes. Neither said aloud the terrible thought that went through their minds: was Piotr going mad?

Ewa hears the train approach and soon it comes around the corner, emerging out of the thick pine forest, pushing through the snow on the tracks. Both women glance at one another with fake smiles.

What follows validates their fearful foreboding.

Process philosopher Alec Borislow writes, “There are invisible meanings, signs, and messages constantly being transmitted that shape the reality of all life forms. Biosemiotics aims to make the unseen seen.”

Heterogenous Being*

In his 2025 PhD thesis, Steven L. Ogden explored the dichotomous narrative that separated human with non-human. Evoking the term “heterogenous being,” Odgen acknowledged the influences and potentialities of nonhuman subjects in narrative, both in fiction and nonfiction.

Ogden writes that “like René Descartes, many today still consider the mind or “rational soul” of humanity to be entirely exceptional to and independent of animality, and believe no part of Man (as master and possessor of nature) could derive from the “potentiality of [nonhuman] matter.” Ogden quotes Donna Haraway (author of When Species Meet) who said that “to exist as an individual is always to become with many.” She is talking about the thousands of species living symbiotically inside us and around us that keep us alive. This is what philosopher Levi Bryant refers to as a democracy of objects in which “humans are no longer monarchs of being, but are instead among beings … and implicated in other beings.” We are entangled in beings. We are implicated in other beings.

In his exploration of Richard Powers’s novel The Overstory, Ogden points out that one of Powers’s main characters, botanist Patricia Westerford, understands that her peers believe plants live an inanimate existence, whose rooted immobility points to a kind of “unfreedom” that represents an “archetype of inert matter.” According to poet David Hinton, this devaluation of plant life relates to the human-nonhuman duality, “a Western dichotomy that relegates the vegetal world to a space of ‘linguistic silence.’” And yet plants are biosemiotics, exhibiting cognitive behaviour through adaptation, anticipation, flexibility, and goal-direction. Plants demonstrate phenotypic plasticity through their complex engagement with their environment, shaping what emerges.

*Various slime molds, ON (photos by Nina Munteanu)*

There is a growing zeitgeist of not just planetary awareness but of sensibility, a sense that we are interlinked with all other life and nonlife, that we are all more than the sum of our parts. And that intelligence—no matter how it is interpreted and measured—is far more prevalent than we thought, and found everywhere: from bacteria to insects to plants to animals, fungi and slime molds. Indeed, works devoted to incredible and intelligent nature of the non-human world have increased dramatically. Notable examples include Merlin Sheldrake’s Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds; Robin Wall Kimmerer’s Gathering Moss, Suzanne Simard’s The Breathing Trees, Paco Calvo’s Planta Sapiens and Zoe Schlanger’s The Light Eaters.

*Several books on nature’s intelligence*

Is it possible that we have finally escaped the oppressive shackles of 17^th Century Cartesian dogma contesting that dogs have no feelings?

God, I surely hope so.

Glossary:

Umwelt: a segment of the world that has significance and meaning based on an organism’s biology and needs: sounds it hears, scents it smells, foods it tastes.

Semiosis: the process of interpreting something as signifying something else using the process of signs, symbols or sound to produce meaning.

Biosemiosis: a biological term for ways organisms communicate, interpret meaning, and interact with their environments through signs and codes.

Heterogenous Being: a way of being that recognizes and incorporates humanity’s pluralized configurations with the nonhuman world by uniting the studies of science and humanities into an interdisciplinary hybrid creative-scientific aesthetic.

References:

Barbieri, Marcelo. 2008 (ed). “Introduction to Biosemiotics: The New Biological Synthesis” Springer, Netherlands. 525pp.

Borislow, Alec. 2023. “Send Me a Sign: Biosemiosis, Umwelt, And Signifiers.” Medium, November 30, 2023.

Calvo, Paco, M. Gagliano, G. Souza, and A. Trewavas. 2020. “Plants are intelligent, here’s how.” Annals of Botany 125: 11-28.

Calvo, Paco. 2022. “Planta Sapiens.” W.W. Norton & Company, NY. 285pp.

Haraway, Donna Jeanne. 2008. “When Species Meet.” University of Minnesota Press.

Hata, Shingo et al. 2022. “Dried Nostoc commune exhibits nitrogen-fixing activity using glucose under dark conditions after rehydration.” Plant Signal Behav. 17(1): 2059251.

Hinton, David. 2012. “Hunger Mountain.” Shambhala.

Kecsey, et. al. 2018. “Adaptations of cyanobacterium Nostoc commune to environmental stress: Comparison of morphological and physiological markers between European and Antaarctic populations after rehydration.” Czech Polar Reports 8(1): 84-93.

Kimmerer, Robin Wall. 2003. “Gathering Moss: A Natural and Cultural History of Mosses.” Oregon State University Press. 176pp.

Marder, Micheal. 2013. “Plant-Thinking: A Philosophy of Vegetal Life.” Columbia University Press.

Munteanu, Nina. 2024. “The Use of Character-Coupling in Eco-Literature to Give Voice to the Other, Part 1: Introduction” February 18, 2024.

Munteanu, Nina. 2024. “The Use of Character-Coupling in Eco-Literature to Give Voice to the Other, Part 2: Types of Character-Coupling in Seven Examples of Eco-Literature” February 2024.

Ogden, Steven L. 2025. “Heterogenous Being: The Inhumanities and the Creative-Scientific Aesthetic.” A Dissertation submitted to the University at Albany, State University of New York in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy. 207pp.

Reber, A.S. 2019. “The First Minds: Caterpillars, ‘Karyotes and Consciousness.” Oxford University Press, New York. 296pp.

Schlanger, Zoe. 2025. “The Light Eaters.” Harper Perennial. 304pp.

Simard, Suzanne. 2026. “When the Forest Breathes.” Allen Lane. 336pp.

Trewavas, Anthony. 2003. “Aspects of Plant Intelligence.” Annals of Botany 92(1): 1-20.

Uexküll, Jakob von. 1921. “Umwelt und Innenwelt der Tiere” 2^nd ed. Julius Springer, Berlin.

Uexküll, Jakob von. 1931. “Die Rolle des Subjekts in der Biologie.” Die Naturwissenschaften 19: 385-391.

Nina Munteanu Sparks Eco-Revolution

August 9, 2026August 10, 2026 / thealiennextdoor / 2 Comments

Henry of Maple News Wire recently gave me a wonderful welcome back to British Columbia with the following news release and book review:

Local Author Returns with a Bang

“Nina Munteanu is back in Ladner, and she’s bringing a story that’s impossible to ignore. Her latest novel, Gaia’s Revolution, officially launched on March 10, 2026, is already making waves as an Amazon bestseller. Fans and friends in Delta and Vancouver are celebrating her triumphant return.”

Gaia’s Revolution, says Henry, is a “fast-paced Canadian dystopian thriller tackling climate change, tech chaos, and society on the brink.”

A Canadian Eco-Dystopia Like No Other

“Gaia’s Revolution plunges readers into a near-future Canada teetering on the edge of collapse. With climate change, societal missteps, and failing technology wreaking havoc, Munteanu paints a vivid picture of what might come.

“The story begins in Berlin in 2022 before moving to Canada, where ambitious twin brothers, Eric and Damien, spark a revolution that could either save the planet or end humanity.

“Monica Schlange, a fanatical deep ecologist, manipulates the twins like chess pieces in her bid to ‘rule the world.’ She ensnares three orphans in a web of intrigue, challenging the very rules of human existence. Yet, it’s the orphans who ultimately shape the fate of humanity.”

Fast-Paced Thriller With Real-World Relevance

Munteanu doesn’t hold back. Her novel tackles issues Canadians are already facing—or may soon confront…With every twist, the book explores the delicate balance between humanity and the natural world.”

From Classroom to Canadian Landscapes

“Before devoting herself to writing, Munteanu taught limnology at the University of Victoria. Her travels across Canada, including stops in Lunenburg, small-town Ontario, Vancouver, and Fort McPherson, have deeply influenced her storytelling. Each setting in her novels carries the richness of real Canadian locales.

“Now settled in a quiet Ladner neighbourhood, Munteanu is already hard at work on her next project, promising more stories that combine thrilling plots with urgent environmental themes.”

This is true. My climate eco-novel Thalweg will release in 2027 with Inanna Publications. I am still working with the editor of the publishing house and anticipate with growing excitement seeing the cover design soon.

Thalweg is a companion novel to A Diary in the Age of Water (my award-winning story based on the diary of a limnologist during Canada’s growing climate crisis that explores four generations of women, each with a unique relationship with water). Thalweg follows the braided paths of four homeless strangers—each uniquely connected to water—and each destined to play a significant role in water’s future in Canada. I look forward to seeing it soon on bookstore shelves next to Diary.

Place as Character in Literature

August 2, 2026July 12, 2026 / thealiennextdoor / Leave a comment

Place ultimately portrays what lies at the heart of a story. Place as character provides an archetype that story characters connect with and navigate in ways that depend on the story’s theme, particularly in allegories that rely strongly on metaphor. Theme is essentially the “so what part” of a story; what is at stake for the character on their journey. Theme is the backbone—the heart—of the story, driving characters to journey through time and place toward some kind of fulfillment. There is no story without theme. And there is no theme without place.

When place is the environment—a forest, meadow, swamp or heathland—the author has an opportunity to go beyond simple backdrop, even beyond deeper metaphor, to intimately portray the voice of ‘the Other.’ Eco-literature brings awareness to environment as ‘Other’; eco-literature intimately explores humanity’s role in defining ‘the Other’ by portraying environment on a journey as character with agency and sometimes with voice—often through character coupling. Nineteenth Century author Thomas Hardy recognized the tenuous position of wilderness during Victorian Britain with increasing industrialization and urbanization. Taming Nature to achieve ordered beauty had become an obsession; Hardy recognized this and mourned the loss of pre-industrial agrarian landscapes to human greed and modernization.

Thomas Hardy’s Heath: Return of the Native

For Victorian author Thomas Hardy, trees, meadows, winding brooks and country roads were far more than back-drop for his world and his stories. Elements of the natural world were characters that impacted other characters in a world dominated by nature.

Perhaps best known for his melancholic stories of fatalistic, ironic tyrannies, Thomas Hardy wrote with a tender and poetic sensibility about Nature, and particularly the heath where he grew up. All of Hardy’s writings embody a strong sense of place. Nature—like his omniscient narrative form—lies beyond the scope of humanity: vast, amoral, and unfathomed; and yet, inextricably linked to the feckless actions of its humans. Egdon Heath in Return of the Native remains one of Hardy’s most enduring characters and best examples of the power of place in story.

Author D.H. Lawrence evocatively personified Hardy’s bleak heathland: “Egdon, whose dark soil was strong and crude and organic as the body of a beast.”

Egdon Heath is a metaphoric black hole from which no light escapes. None of Hardy’s characters escape the embrace of this behemoth. Dark, swarthy and associated with the night: “The face of the heath by its mere complexion added half an hour to evening; it could in like manner retard the dawn, sadden noon, anticipate the frowning storms scarcely generated, and intensify the opacity of a moonless midnight to a cause of shaking dread.” Each character is touched by the heath’s brooding grip and each feels its power differently: hapless Wildeve; idealist Clym; desperate Eustacia and suffering Thomasin.

Cixin Liu’s Forests: The Three Body Problem

Cixin Liu’s The Three Body Problem—set against the backdrop of China’s Cultural Revolution—follows Wenji Ye, disillusioned by the massive environmental deforestation in the labour camps she is sent to work:

Her company wielded hundreds of chain saws like a swarm of steel locusts, and after they passed, only stumps were left. The fallen Dahurian larch, now bereft of branches, was ready to be taken away by tractor. Ye gently caressed the freshly exposed cross section of the felled trunk. She did this often, as though such surfaces were giant wounds, as though she could feel the tree’s pain … The trunk was dragged away. Rocks and stumps in the ground broke the bark in more places, wounding the giant body further. In the spot where it once stood, the weight of the fallen tree being dragged left a deep channel in the layers of decomposing leaves that had accumulated over the years. Water quickly filled the ditch. The rotting leaves made the water appear crimson, like blood.

Frank Herbert’s Desert: Dune

Frank Herbert’s Dune chronicles the journey of young Paul Atreides, Duke Leto’s son, who according to the indigenous Fremen prophesy will eventually bring them freedom from their enslavement by the colonialists—The Harkonens—and allow them to live unfettered on the planet Arrakis, known as Dune.

But, as the title of the book clearly reveals, this story is about place—a harsh desert planet whose 800 kph sandblasting winds could flay your flesh—and the power struggle between those who covet its arcane treasures and those who wish only to live free from slavery. Place—and its powerful symbols of desert, water and spice—lies at the heart of this epic story about taking, giving and sharing. When he thinks of Dune, the newly placed Duke Atreides uses water metaphors: “He sighed, glanced back at the dry landscape where the flowers were gone now—trampled by the dew gatherers, wilted under the early sun.”

“The desert stretched out like a static ocean. [It] lay there full of moon-silvered waves—shadows of angles that lapsed into curves and, in the distance, lifted to the misted gray blur of another escarpment.”

The immense sandworms of Frank Herbert’s Dune are strong archetypes of Nature—large and graceful creatures whose movements in the vast desert sands resemble the elegant whales of our oceans:

It came from their right with an uncaring majesty that could not be ignored. A twisting burrow-mound of sand cut through the dunes within their field of vision. The mound lifted in front, dusting away like a bow wave in water.

Annie Proulx’s Forest: Barkskins

The opening combines subtle to obvious images of an “unwelcoming” wilderness—as dark behemoth—and foreshadows the forest’s eventual destruction by settlers intent on conquering Nature. Proulx’s 300-year saga starts with the arrival of the Europeans in Canada’s pristine forest

Within the first ten pages we gain a rich and potent collage of first impressions by the settlers of “the moody darkness” of the New France forest, previously only seen by the “sauvages.” The barkskins “tramped up the muddy path toward a line of black mist … In a few hours the sodden leaf mold gave way to pine duff. Fallen needles muted their passage, the interlaced branches absorbed their panting breaths … evergreens larger than cathedrals, cloud-piercing spruce and hemlock. The monstrous deciduous trees stood distant from each other, but overhead their leaf-choked branches merged into a false sky, dark and savage …They walked on through the dim woods, climbing over mossy humps, passing under branches drooping like funeral swags,” hearing pines hissing in the wind,” and crossing “snarling water,” and “swarms of mosquitoes in such millions that their shrill keening was the sound of the woods.”

These bleak impressions of a harsh environment crawling with pests such as bébites and moustiques underlie the combative mindset of the settlers to conquer and seize what they can of a presumed infinite resource. By page seventeen, we know that mindset well. René asks why they must cut so much forest when it would be easier to use the many adequate clearings to build their houses and settlements. Trépagny fulminates: “Easier? Yes, easier, but we are here to clear the forest, to subdue this evil wilderness.”

For them, the vast Canadian boreal forest was never-ending and for the taking: “It is the forest of the world. It is infinite. It twists around as a snake swallows its own tail and has no end and no beginning,” Trépagny claims.

Richard Power’s Forest: The Overstory

Richard Powers’s The Overstory follows the life-stories of nine characters and their journey with trees. At its heart is the pivotal life of botanist Patricia Westerford, whose work resembles that of UBC’s Suzanne Simard. Westerford is a shy introvert who discovers that trees communicate, learn, trade goods and services—and have intelligence. When she shares her discovery, she is ridiculed by her peers and eventually loses her position at the university.

Like the marcescent beech, Patricia finds herself asynchronous with the rest of the forestry department at Purdue, in fact with the entire forestry discipline in the country. She disagrees with their edict of needing to “clean the forest of snags and wind throw to improve forest health.” She disagrees with their use of terms like thrifty young forests and decadent old forests, mean annual increment and economic maturity—not ecological but economic terms based on exploitation and human utility.

Patricia’s early conviction that these silent trees are social creatures, sets her on a singular path that will push the boundaries of doctrine and a hegemony of human utility. She assiduously sets out to prove her premise of social trees and in so doing, becomes the forest. “She works all day in the woods, her back crawling with chiggers, her scalp with ticks, her mouth filled with leaf duff, her eyes with pollen, cobwebs like scarves around her face, bracelets of poison ivy, her knees gouged by cinders, her nose lined with spores, the backs of her thighs bitten Braille by wasps, and her heart as happy as the day is generous.” Like Ovid, she is becoming.

Patricia writes in her book The Secret Forest:

There are no individuals in a forest, no separable events. The bird and the branch it sits on are a joint thing. A third or more of the food a big tree makes may go to feed other organisms. Even different kinds of trees form partnerships. Cut down a birch, and a nearby Douglas fir may suffer … Fungi mine stone to supply their trees with minerals. They hunt springtails, which they feed to their hosts. Trees, for their part, store extra sugar in their fungi’s synapses, to dole out to the sick and shaded and wounded. A forest takes care of itself, even as it builds the local climate it needs to survive.

Delia Owens’s Swampland: Where the Crawdads Sing

The swampland is beautifully and evocatively portrayed as a living character; its ‘journey’ is closely linked to the Kya, the main protagonist, as development encroaches both swamp and girl through commercial logging, and wetland drainage to build resort hotels. Kya lives with an unbiased understanding of a quiet biological life, surviving through natural instinct in a circle of life and death: a swamp knows all about death, and does not define it as a tragedy or a sin, thinks Kya who sees the swampland as her mother, teacher and sanctuary, embracing her with a protective mantle of natural beauty and wonder. Whenever she stumbled, it was the land who caught her. When the town marginalizes Kya, calling her “The Marsh Girl”, the swamp shields her from the prejudice and cruelty of the human world, providing an intimate protective barrier. In turn, Kya uses her book advance to buy several hundred acres of marsh as a protected wildlife refuge.

In her article on Great Ecology, Liz Clift writes, “During the period in which Where the Crawdads Sing is set, wetlands were typically seen as a nuisance—and that comes through in the story-telling, when developers want to drain the marsh for a development. Wetlands were also seen as mosquito-infested, buggy, smelly, or even an eyesore. A significant number of wetlands around the world, including in the US, have been lost due to land development and agriculture, which is unfortunate because wetlands are rich with biodiversity and play a key role in maintaining both freshwater and saltwater fisheries, support water quality, and protect against flooding.” This is not a phenomenon or attitude of the past; it unfortunately remains prevalent, particularly in North America.

What Delia Owens achieves in Where the Crawdads Sing is two-fold: 1) the reader knows more about the value of the marsh but also gains a sense of its beauty as seen through the eyes of Kya; and, 2) through the strong connection with the main character and use of evocative metaphor, Owens transforms the marsh into a real character.

Why Make Place a Character…

Why is this important? Think of a place you know. I’ll use the house I grew up in. To any passerby, the house is just another two-storey cornflower-blue house with veranda on a quiet residential street, lined by trees. But for me, the house carries memories of my childhood, of running up and down the creaky foot-worn stairs, or sharing ghost stories with friends on the back porch as the waning twilight revealed the winking fireflies outside. Playing dolls with my sister in the stuffy attic. The sweet pungent aroma of my father’s pipe smoke in the livingroom and my mother’s thrush-like voice resonating from the kitchen as she baked German sugar cookies. I loved that house, with all its idiosyncratic groans and whistles in the wind and the echoes of cheerful laughter over the years. That house was a character.

Once this happens, once place becomes a character, we find ourselves caring for it.

In story, it is the characters we care about; it is the characters that we cheer for and follow on their journey of loss, redemption or victory.

This is why writers of eco-fiction depict environment as a character. We must first relate and connect before we care; we must first care before we act. Eco-fiction authors also use the device of character-coupling to help readers care. The examples above provide this method through their ‘othered’ characters, who, in turn, relate to the ‘othered’ environment. In another article, I provide more examples of character-coupling in the literature that enable readers to connect to otherwise arcane aspects of their environment through their connection to a character they can relate to.

Parts of this article are excerpted from The Ecology of Story: World as Character.

References:

Munteanu, Nina. 2013. “The Ecology of Story: World as Character.” Pixl Press, Vancouver. 200pp.

Munteanu, Nina. 2024. “The Use of Character-Coupling in Eco-Literature to Give Voice to the Other, Part 1: Introduction” February 18, 2024.

Munteanu, Nina. 2024. “The Use of Character-Coupling in Eco-Literature to Give Voice to the Other, Part 2: Types of Character-Coupling in Seven Examples of Eco-Literature” February 2024.

*Beaver Pond just before a rainstorm, BC (photo by Nina Munteanu)*

“The Girl Who Was Only Three Quarters Dead” Featured in The Best of Metastellar, Year Five

July 26, 2026July 21, 2026 / thealiennextdoor / Leave a comment

Metastellar Magazine is putting out its “Best of” anthology for this year and my good friend and writing colleague Craig H. Bowlsby has a story in it. It’s one of my favourite stories of his and it has a fetchy title: “The Girl Who Was Only Three Quarters Dead.”

Bowlsby’s story was original published in the April 2022 Issue of Mystery Magazine and won the Crime Writers of Canada Award of Excellence for Best Crime Short Story for 2023. It was then reprinted in Metastellar Magazine and now appears in their 2026 “Best of” anthology, coming out later this summer.

This noir/dystopian story, set in Vancouver, BC, finds Suki prematurely awoken from an induced suspension between being alive and dead. With her retinas deactivated and her Government persona suspended, it’s up to her long-time friend and private investigator, Gabe, to uncover why she was brought back early and the way forward to recover her identity. Through the gritty and flooded streets of East End Vancouver and the mega corporations who control their entire existence, Gabe and Suki scheme to claim what is rightfully Suki’s.
Crime Writers of Canada

The story is set in the near-future in a post climate change Vancouver when sea level rise has water lapping decrepit buildings north of The Oak Street Bridge on Oak and 77th, Amazon owns entire roadways, and people pay corporate credits as currency.

One of the aspects of this mystery story that I found particularly attractive and interesting was Bowlsby’s use of cross-genre (mystery with science fiction), for which he indicated he has an affinity in his interview with Erik D’Souza with Crime Writers of Canada. I was reminded of the eco-techno thriller style of Hayden Trenholm’s detective series The Steele Chronicles, also set in the near future in Alberta Canada where biotechnology strays into the hands of corporate moguls and fundamentalist cults.

Bowlsby manages to cram both rich and seamless world building in his story (a feat in any short story), addressing mundane aspects of life, including the nuances of language (e.g. swear words suited to the time and place). Deadland, for instance, is a slang word that describes a government program that allows people to temporarily commit suicide, allowing them to place their lives on hold to supposedly help them escape their problems and supposedly better cope later (Bowlsby tells us rather pithily that it doesn’t really work).

When I asked Bowlsby in an interview what inspired this story and its post-climate change Vancouver setting, he said, “the germ … of this story came from a discussion I had with a friend, twenty years ago, who felt that everything in our society should be available for sale. For him that represented a pure state that would fix all our problems … I disagreed, but I wondered what it would be like if we started on that path. So as a social background, the characters are acting within a stage created for such a system—a system just starting to find its own steady legs. I don’t say it’s bad or good—I just give it free rein. The story itself came from other elements, but the characters’ difficulties are complicated by the hyper-capitalism. As for the climate change problem, and the flooding, that came naturally with the near-future time period; I’m afraid it’s going to happen no matter what we do.”

When the Forest Reveals its Archetypes

July 19, 2026June 16, 2026 / thealiennextdoor / Leave a comment

It is early spring and I’m walking through one of my favourite woodlands in Ontario’s Carolinian forests. The river that had swollen with snow melt just a week before, now flows with more restraint. I can see the cobbles and clay of scoured banks under the water. Further on, part of the path along the river has collapsed from a major bank scour the previous week. The little river is rather big and capricious, I ponder; then I consider that the entire forest sways to similar vagaries of wind, season, precipitation and unforeseen events. Despite its steadfast appearance, the forest flows—like the river—in a constant state of flux and change, cycling irrevocably through life and death.

The forest is littered with snags and fallen trees in different stages of breakdown, decomposition and decay. I spot several large cedar, pine, oak and maple snags with woodpecker holes. The snags may remain for many decades before finally falling to the ground.

I walk slowly, eyes cast to the forest floor thick with dead leaves, and discover seeds and nuts—the promise of new life. I aim my gaze past trees and shrubs to the nearby snags and fallen logs. I’m looking for hidden gifts. One fallen cedar log reveals swirling impressionistic patterns of wood grain, dusted with moss and lichen. Nature’s death clothed in beauty.

A fallen maple snag decomposes with the help of several organisms, Little Rouge Woodland, ON (photo by Nina Munteanu)

The bark of a large pine tree that has fallen is riddled with tiny beetle holes drilled into its bark. Where the bark has sloughed off, a gallery of larval tracks in the sapwood create a map of meandering texture and colour.

Decomposing pine log displays a gallery of larval tracks, Little Rouge Woodland, ON (photo by Nina Munteanu)

Fallen Heroes & Saprophyte Characters

*Rotting maple log, Little Rouge Woodland, ON (photo by Nina Munteanu)*

The forest ecosystem supports a diverse community of organisms in various stages of life and death and decay. Trees lie at the heart of this ecosystem, supporting a complex and dynamic cycle of evolving life. Even in death, the trees continue to support thriving detrivore and saprophytic communities that, in turn, provide nutrients and soil for the next generation of living trees. It’s a partnership.

Decomposition and decay are the yin to the yang of growth, writes Trees for Life; together, they form two halves of the whole that is the closed loop cycle of natural ecosystems.

*A fallen tree decomposes with the help of a diversity of organisms*

Snags and rotting logs on the forest floor provide damp shelter and food for many plants and animals. Most are decomposers, including earthworms, fungi, and bacteria. As the wood decays, nutrients in the log break down and recycle in the forest ecosystem. Insects, mosses, lichens, and ferns recycle the nutrients and put them back into the soil for other forest plants to use. Dead wood is an important reservoir of organic matter in forests and a source of soil formation. Decaying and dead wood host diverse communities of bacteria and fungi.

Mother Archetypes

*The feet of an old tree trunk reach out to embrace a collection of maple leaves, ON (photo by Nina Munteanu)*

Wood tissues of tree stems include the outer bark, cork cambium, inner bark (phloem), vascular cambium, outer xylem (living sapwood), and the inner xylem (non-living heartwood). The outer bark provides a non-living barrier between the inner tree and harmful factors in the environment, such as fire, insects, and diseases. The cork cambium produces bark cells. The vascular cambium produces both the phloem cells (principal food-conducting tissue) and xylem cells of the sapwood (the main water storage and conducting tissue) and heartwood.

Forest ecologists defined five broad stages in tree decay, shown by the condition of the bark and wood and presence of insects and other animals. The first two stages evolve rapidly; much more time elapses in the later stages, when the tree sags to the ground. These latter stages can take decades for the tree to break down completely and surrender all of itself back to the forest. A fallen tree nurtures, much like a “mother” archetype; it provides food, shelter, and protection to a vast community—from bears and small mammals to salamanders, invertebrates, fungus, moss and lichens. This is why fallen trees are called “nursing logs.”

Heralds & Tricksters

*Uprooted stump colonized by carbon cushion fungi, Little Rouge Woodland, ON (photo by Nina Munteanu)*

I stop to inspect another fallen tree lying on a bed of decaying maple, beech and oak leaves. When a fallen tree decomposes, unique new habitats are created within its body as the outer and inner bark, sapwood, and heartwood decompose at different rates, based in part on their characteristics for fine dining. For instance, the outer layers of the tree are rich in protein; inner layers are high in carbohydrates. This log—probably a sugar maple judging from what bark is left—has surrendered itself with the help of detrivores and saprophytes to decomposition and decay. The outer bark has mostly rotted and fallen away revealing an inner sapwood layer rich in varied colours, textures and incredible patterns—mostly from fungal infestations. In fact, this tree is a rich ecosystem for dozens of organisms. Wood-boring beetle larvae tunnel through the bark and wood, building their chambers and inoculating the tree with microbes. They open the tree to colonization by other microbes and small invertebrates. Slime molds, lichen, moss and fungi join in. The march of decay follows a succession of steps. Even fungi are followed by yet other fungi in the process as one form creates the right condition for another form.

Most hardwoods take several decades to decompose and surrender all of themselves back to the forest. In western Canada’s old growth forest, trees like Western redcedars can take over a hundred years to decay once they’re down. The maple log I’m studying in Ontario’s Carolinian forest looks like it’s been lying on the ground for a while, certainly several years. The bark has fragmented and mostly fallen away, revealing layers of sapwood in differing stages of infestation and decay. Some sapwood is fragmented and cracked into blocks and in places looks like stacked bones.

Black lines as though drawn by a child’s paintbrush flow through much of the sapwood; these winding thick streaks of black known as “zone lines” are in fact clumps of dark mycelia, which cause “spalting,” the colouration of wood by fungus. According to mycologist Jens Petersen, these zone lines prevent “a hostile takeover by mycelia” from any interloping fungi. Most common trees that experience spalting include birch, maple, and beech. Two common fungi that cause spalting have colonized my maple log. They’re both carbon cushion fungi.

Spalting on a decaying maple log, Little Rouge Woodland, ON (photo by Nina Munteanu)

Much of the exposed outer wood layer looks as though it has been spray painted with a green to blue-black layer. The “paint” is caused by the green-stain fungus (Chlorociboria) and blue-stain fungus (Ceratocystis). Spalting is common because of the way fungi colonize, in waves of primary and secondary colonizers. Primary colonizers initially capture and control the resource, change the pH and structure of the wood, then must defend against the secondary colonizers now able to colonize the changed wood.

Shapeshifting Characters

*Moss with spores on a log, Little Rouge Woodland, ON (photo by Nina Munteanu)*

I find moss everywhere in the forest, including beneath the forest floor. Moss is a ubiquitous character, adapting itself to different situations and scenarios. Like a shapeshifter, moss is at once coy, hiding beneath rotting leaf litter, stealthy and curious as it creeps up the feet of huge cedars, and exuberant as it unabashedly drapes itself over every possible surface such as logs, twigs and rocks, and then proceeds to procreate for all to see.

Moss hides under dead leaf litter on the forest floor, Little Rouge Woodland, ON (photo by Nina Munteanu)

Mosses help with nutrient cycling because they can fix nitrogen from the air, making it available to other plants. Mosses thrive in the wet winter and spring, providing brilliant green to an otherwise brown-gray environment. Even when covered in snow (or a bed of leaves), moss continues its growth cycle, usually in the leafy gametophyte stage. In the spring the capsules release spores that can each create a new moss individual. Moss is quietly, gloriously profligate.

Team Players

*Fruiting lichen on a tree (photo by Nina Munteanu)*

Lichens are a cooperative character; two characters in one, really. Lichens are a complex symbiotic association of two or more fungi and algae (some also partner up with a yeast). The algae in lichens (called phycobiont or photobiont) photosynthesize and the fungus (mycobiont) provides protection for the photobiont. Both the algae and fungus absorb water, minerals, and pollutants from the air, through rain and dust. In sexual reproduction, the mycobiont produces fruiting bodies, often cup-shaped, called apothecia that release ascospores. The spores must find a compatible photobiont to create a lichen. They depend on each other for resources—from food to shelter and protection.

The Ecology of Story: World as Character

Place ultimately portrays what lies at the heart of the story. Place as character serves as an archetype that story characters connect with and navigate in ways that depend on the theme of the story, particularly in allegories that rely strongly on metaphor. A story’s theme is essentially the “so what part” of the story. What is at stake for the character on their journey. Theme is the backbone—the heart—of the story, driving characters to journey through time and place toward some kind of fulfillment. There is no story without theme. And there is no theme without place.

–Excerpted from The Ecology of Story: World as Character

Bastille Day & The Battle of Grunwald…

July 14, 2026July 15, 2026 / thealiennextdoor / Leave a comment

Today is Bastille Day, France’s national day that commemorates the 1789 storming of the Bastille prison by an angry revolutionary mob. The event was a major flashpoint that ignited the French Revolution that eventually ended the oppressive Bourbon monarchy.

This day is also significant in my historical fantasy The Last Summoner. July 14, 1410, is the birthday of main character Vivianne Schoen, the Baroness von Grunwald, who has just turned fourteen and is promised in marriage to a cruel foreigner. It is the eve of the Battle of Grunwald. Fought on July 15, 1410, this conflict was one of the largest and most decisive battles in medieval European history, where the Kingdom of Poland and the Grand Duchy of Lithuania gathered a ragtag allied army of peasant warriors to defeat the powerful knights of the Teutonic Order in what is now northeastern Poland. Their surprising victory crippled the Teutonic Knights’ dominance in the Baltic region and shifted the balance of power in Central and Eastern Europe.

In an early scene, Vivianne contemplates her fate:

“It’s my birthday today, Fritz,” she announced to her cat. July 14, 1410. She was fourteen years old. Her father and now deceased mother had pledged her since her birth to a stranger from a foreign land on her fourteenth birthday. Today—if the rumor was true, that is. Though she’d overheard the entire von Grunwald Ordensburgen gossip of it for years, her father had never mentioned it to her. Surely, he would have told her of such an important thing in her life if he’d meant it in earnest. Vivianne sighed and stroked Fritz. Then again, perhaps not, she reflected, summoning the stern image of her taciturn father. He never told her anything. If her mother was alive it might have been different….

The young baroness soon makes the startling discovery that she can alter history – but not before she is branded a witch and must flee through a time-space tear, landing in Paris on July 14, 2010, Bastille Day. Now in an alternate France ruled by Teutonic Black Knights, she must decide how to remake history.

Below is an excerpt from The Last Summoner, a scene in that alternate Nazi-ruled Paris on that fateful day:

Paris, France, 2010

FRANÇOIS thrust his way through the thick crowd in Place de la Bastille. He craned to see the parade of greycoats and several blackcoats goose-stepping down the Boulevard de la Bastille and Rue Saint Antoine to converge at la Place. They were followed by heavy artillery that had begun its trek all the way from the Arc de Triumph and Avenue des Champs-Élysées. It was a great show of military power for the Nazis. Today was July the fourteenth, 2010: Bastille Day. In earlier times, the Porte St. Antoine was defended by a drawbridge and the Bastille. All that remained was a gilded statue of liberté in the center of the square to commemorate the culmination of France’s long struggle to establish democracy with its final ‘liberation’ by the Nazis in the mid 1800s.

A clammy wind stirred up tiny dust tornadoes in the square and people flung up their hands to protect their faces from the flying grit. François watched them, like the pocket thief he was. There would be a few easily taken today.

He caught the eye of Philip, one of his neighbours on Rue des Rosiers and the best pick-pocket François knew. The lanky boy nodded to him with a look of surprised delight; he hadn’t expected François to come. There were several dozen kids like he and Philip, scattered throughout la Place, poised to wreak havoc on the crowd at just the right moment. They were only a diversion for the real crime. François glanced briefly at the Banque de France on the corner of Rue St. Antoine, then checked his watch. It was ten minutes to the hour. At 1800 the artillery would give its booming show; and at precisely that moment, masked under the cacophony of the blasting artillery, his anarchist friends inside the bank would blow the safe. They would make their getaway once chaos set in as people realized that they’d been robbed. T’is a godlike thing to lend; to owe is a heroic virtue, he thought with a smirk.

François’s role in all this was very profitable though actually quite dangerous; he and Philip and the other pick pockets were placing themselves in the direct line of attention—and fire of the flics. Their safety lay in their scattered numbers, in their nimble feet, and their ability to negotiate the crowd and blend in when they wanted to. They were all kids, like him; mostly ten to sixteen year olds. They’d all lost their parents and other adult relatives to the Nazis.

Many of the middle class workers had lost their jobs and the will to live when the Nazis introduced efficient city bots and turfed people out of their rich homes. Left behind by dead, imprisoned, or conscripted mothers and fathers or simply abandoned by overworked uncaring parents, most children lived on their own in the streets of Paris with whole district slums devoted to the ‘street brats’. François’s parents had been killed in the Latin Quarter uprising of 2007. There were at least half a million “homeless” children, fending for themselves in the city, according to his uncle; all finding shelter in derelict huts and bivouacs. They were the discarded refuse of a series of purges by the fascist government.

Purges were not new to the empire. They’d begun hundreds of years ago with the Jews, who were pretty well extinct now, François considered. During the early development of the empire, Jews were massacred by the Teutonic Knights, who later became the strong arm of the new Reich as the feared Black Knights. But the purges weren’t enough. Like an old building, the empire was crumbling from within through its own debauchery, and from the outside pressure of war and rebellion. The empire was at war with the Chinese and rebelling Muslims to the east and dealing with the unruly British and upstart North Americans to the north and west. The two English-speaking countries had allied in rebellion against the Reich and were causing Fuhrer Hitler III no end of grief. It was eroding his empire, sucking it of funds, men, arms and resources. And bleeding it of morale as well as the pitifully little humor the Germans might have had in the first place. François saw its effect in the uncalled for cruelty meted out by the Black Knights and greycoats to his fellow Parisians.

Grand Marshal von Eisenreich seemed to call a purge almost weekly. First it was the restless students of the Sorbonne, then it was complaining workers in Nanterre. Then the school teachers of Lyon. Or transit workers in the Mont Parnasse area. No group or person was immune to their indiscriminate wrath. One day you were scorned for dressing in black; the next day for dressing in white. Something drastic would have to happen for it to right itself, his uncle kept saying. Luckily for some, von Eisenreich talked in his sleep and his light-sleeping wife, Lizette, listened. She, in turn, gossiped to François during their pillow talk and François then warned those intended victims through his uncle of the coming purge.

But all that was largely Antoine’s concern and those in the Résistance, like Philip and André and most of the other children assembled here and poised to do mischief. They had a right to be skeptical of François’s presence here. He did what he could, but only if it suited him. His motives weren’t with the liberation of France. His motive was with the liberation of François.

Each for himself, he figured. I come first. That was the rule by which the government operated, he reasoned. Why should I be any different? Now take Sylvie, for instance, he thought, mind recollecting the thirteen-year old girl from the 12ème Arrondissement he’d left only moments ago; she gladly spread her legs for him anytime, anywhere for a cigarette or an apple.

He was a regular Valentino, François figured, and felt something stirring below. He grabbed his crotch and scratched his unruly penis with a leering smile. “Down, boy,” he whispered with a grin. Lizette cooed over François like he was a doll and called him her sweet putain. Baisses moi, mon putain…Tu as un beau cul….He was her little darling peasant to dress…and undress. He didn’t care; he could eat, and live half-comfortably on Rue des Rosiers because of her and other patrons like her. He had a running Pal with naughty vids of all his clients that he rented out to his street friends. And the girls on the street, like Sylvie, thought he was hot.

He jammed his hand in his jeans pocket and smirked at the silver Pal in his palm before re-pocketing it and pulling out a small innocuous-looking black package of rapture. They also called it the black rabbit because of the package and where it took you: through a fantastic black “rabbit” hole.

When his Oncle Antoine finally found him, he tried to get François away from all that. But Antoine was no better off, having been recently chased out of his own house by Black Knights who accused him of helping the anarchists. Antoine wasn’t helping them…he was one, François thought with scathing humor. Antoine was always trying to recruit François to join the Résistance by berating him: “Why do you keep whoring? You’re worth more than that. You’re selling yourself, François. And for what? Half the time you don’t even get money; just that stinking rapture…”

François rubbed the small black package of rapture between his fingers and felt his nose flare with desire. Stinking rapture, indeed. You wouldn’t think it was stinking if you tried it, l’Oncle! He ripped the package open and threw his head back to pour the slightly acrid white powder in his mouth, then flung the wrapper onto the street. Within an instant, the street burst into sharper contrast and he knew his eyes dilated. A grin split his face open and he laughed, feeling invincible. Everything was all right now. Even those stinking Nazis with their swastikas, high-stepping black boots and batons…and whoring wives….

“You’re the Nazi’s putain. They’ve turned you into an addict and they’ve got you on a leash, François,” his uncle had gone on. “Honestly, you should stop all that whoring.”

“Why? And for what?” François had retorted, thinking he made a pretty good living by it; better than his destitute uncle. “Besides, I like it!” he’d ended maliciously. Antoine had lost all that he owned and now had less cash than François. “If I stop, what do I gain?”

“Something you’ve lost, François. Your dignity.”

“My parents lost it for me when they joined la Societé Secrêt and got themselves killed for some lost cause,” François said bitterly. To which his uncle had nothing to say. François knew it was cruel to say that; Antoine loved his brother, Marcel, and his wife, Angeline. Heck, Antoine had even dated François’s mother before François’s dad stole her heart. It had been Angeline, in fact, who’d brought the two brothers into the Résistance in the first place. She was the original anarchist. She’d apparently been one of the founding members of the SSLF. Until joining the SSLF, Antoine had just been an unruly student, one of millions in France. Antoine never married and, judging from the pictures he’d seen, François thought that he’d shriveled up like a prune when Marcel married the only girl that Antoine had courted.

Gunshots exploded inside the bank. François caught Collete’s stricken expression and Alain’s confusion in the crowd. That wasn’t supposed to happen. They were early—it wasn’t time yet! Then the doors of Banque de France burst open and two of their colleagues spilled out, followed by flic who opened fire on them. They fell and the crowd scattered like flies. More flics emerged, aiming their weapons into the crowd.

François bolted.