A Diary in the Age of Water (Inanna Publications, 2020)
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With the imminent release by Inanna Publications of my climate fiction novel Thalweg, I thought it might be fun to review the recognition its predecessor A Diary in the Age of Water has received since it was published in 2020. Both books are set in the same universe (near-future Canada impacted by climate change) and share some of the same characters. Thalweg is expected to release early 2027.
Over the years since it was published, A Diary in the Age of Water has received much attention by literary organisations and scholars.
A Diary in the Age of Water was honoured by the book review site Literary Titan, receiving a silver book award for excellence in literature that year. It also received Foreword’s bronze award for Book of the Year and was short listed for several other awards, including the International Book of the Year and the Miramichi Reader.
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Various photographic exhibitions of Morphology featuring quotes from Nina Munteanu’s “A Diary in the Age of Water” and “Water Is…”(photos by Nina Munteanu)
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Shortly after its publication, A Diary in the Age of Water was showcased in several art exhibits that followed the evolution of a created marsh. The City of Mississauga hosted Morphology, drawing on key quotes from A Diary in the Age of Water, mostly by the limnologist Lynna Dresden.
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Victoria Crozier acknowledged A Diary in the Age of Water as important ‘green science fiction’ work in her 2023 PhD thesis at the Liverpool John Moores University. Entitled: “The Brave New Worlds of Green Science Fiction: Ecocritical Discourse…” Crozier’s thesis explored the rise and impact of environmental science fiction with a focus on Liu Cixin’s The Three Body Problem while recognizing within that New Wave movement that she calls Green SF works other works such as The Waste Tide by Chen Quifan, Memory of Water by Emmi Itäranta, and New York 2140 by Kim Stanley Robinson and my own A Diary in the Age of Water.
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In his 2025 PhD dissertation on “Heterogenous Being” out of the University at Albany, State University of New York, Steven L. Ogden explored the dichotomous narrative separating human with nonhuman, drawing on A Diary in the Age of Water, along with other works of fiction (e.g., Richard Powers’ The Overstory) and nonfiction (e.g., Merlin Sheldrake’s Entangled Life, Robin Wall Kimmerer’s Gathering Moss, and Peter Wohlleben’s The Hidden Life of Trees). Ogden’s thesis was entitled, “Heterogenous Being: The Inhuman and the Creative Scientific Aesthetic.”
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Odgen noted that “Nina Munteanu’s A Diary in the Age of Water brings the seemingly mundane and inconsequential (what Emanuele Coccia refers to as “residual” objects) to the imaginary forefront within creative-scientific writing.”
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A Diary in the Age of Water selling at the Memorial University bookstore
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By 2025, A Diary in the Age of Water had also become required reading at Memorial University for the course Feminist Practices and Global Change taught by Keif Godbout-Kinney. The course examines the connection between feminist theories and activism for social and political change on a global scale.
Praise by book reviewers has been generous. And copious reviews by readers on Amazon and Goodreads celebrate the book:
“If you believe Canada’s water will remain free forever (or that it’s truly free now) Munteanu asks you to think again. Readers have called ‘A Diary in the Age of Water’ “terrifying,” “engrossing,” and “literary.” We call it wisdom.”—LIISBETH
“An exceptional and thought-provoking dystopian fiction.”—LITERARY TITAN
“The prose here is beautiful and purposeful in the tradition of environmentally and socially minded novelists such as Ursula K. LeGuin and Margaret Atwood.”—WINNIPEG FREE PRESS
“A chilling but believable portrayal of what might happen as fresh water becomes scarcer.”—MIRAMICHI READER
“One of the most important books of a generation.”—REEDSY REVIEWS
“Unsettling and yet deliciously readable.”—THE PRAIRIE BOOK REVIEW
“Munteanu excels at extrapolating today’s science into a stark vision of what we face in the next decades.”—PUBLISHERS WEEKLY BOOKLIFE REVIEWS
“A book of genuine power.”—BROKEN PENCIL
“Munteanu has a rare gift of combining precise scientific terminology with rich, sensory descriptions… The prose moves with the fluid rhythm of a river, shifting from tense corporate intrigue to quiet philosophical reflection…A literary triumph that satisfies both the mind and the heart.”—GOODREADS Review
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The novel, told mostly through the diary of a limnologist, describes a world in the grips of severe water scarcity during a time when China owns the USA and the USA owns Canada. The diary spans a twenty-year period in the mid-twenty-first century of 33-year-old Lynna, a single mother who works in Toronto for CanadaCorp, an international utility that controls everything about water, and who witnesses disturbing events that she doesn’t realize will soon lead to humanity’s demise. A Diary in the Age of Water follows the climate-induced journey of Earth and humanity through four generations of women, each with a unique relationship to water. The novel explores identity and our concept of what is “normal”—as a nation and. an individual—in a world that is rapidly and incomprehensibly changing.
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Thalweg is a climate thriller that follows some of the characters from A Diary in the Age of Water (e.g. Daniel and Bobby-Jo). Here is the blurb:
Four homeless people on the run and haunted by loss. One haunted by her brother’s ghost. One by the memory of her murdered daughter. One by the treachery of his colleague. And another by her own treachery. Four haunted souls—lost and chased by a ruthless enemy—all destined to find Water’s thalweg. Each holds a disparate piece to the existential climate-water puzzle. Brought together by arcane forces, they will enact the next stage of humanity’s flowing evolution with water.
Thalweg
With the release of Thalweg, Inanna Publications intends to reissue A Diary in the Age of Water with a new cover, complimenting its partner novel.
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Memorial University, where “A Diary in the Age of Water” is used in courses
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References:
Crozier, Victoria. 2023. “The Brave New Worlds of Green Science Fiction: Ecocritical Discourse in The Three-Body Problem and The Long Earth Series.” Doctoral Thesis, Liverpool John Moores University, UK. April, 2023. 265pp.
Munteanu, Nina. 2020. “A Diary in the Age of Water.” Inanna Publications, Toronto, ON. 328pp.
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.
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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.
Eco-fiction is a burgeoning genre that is finally being recognized and appreciated by readers and literary organizations. As someone who has been writing it and reading it most of her life, I say: it’s about time!
These written works—novels, novelettes and short story collections and anthologies—are bringing our environment and our sense of holistic being closer to us in narrative form. Through intimate dramas, these stories relate how important our environment is, how it is changing—often at our hands—and how that is affecting each of us. As an ecologist and environmental activist, this pleases me greatly.
What I find surprising—but shouldn’t—is that a good number of notable eco-fiction authors are Canadian and live in Canada. Canada is, after all, a country in the north, where environment and land play a significant part of life.
Thomas Wharton, Canadian eco-fiction author of The Book of Rain, expressed in a recent CBC interview the reason why he came to write eco-fiction. It resonated with my own experience:
“I had this feeling that there was something missing [in literature]. I realized that it was everything else … In nature. [Nature] is usually just a backdrop in most fiction or it’s not there at all; fiction is mostly concerned with human society and issues. It became important for me to make [the environment] part of what I write. All the things we do to nature we do to ourselves, because they come right back to us. Everything is so connected, often in ways we don’t even realize. I wanted to acknowledge that and have a place for nonhuman creatures [in story].”—Thomas Wharton, CBC interview
The authors and works listed below feature eco-fiction written about Canada, by Canadians and/or published by Canadian publishers. These books span from the first peoples and settlers to the future in a post-capitalist, even post-Canada, environment: environments that encompass the mega cities of Canada’s south to its rugged coasts, vast prairies and northern boreal forests, muskegs and Arctic permafrost tundra. Important books that define Canadians through our environment, where we live and work.
I collated this list based on my own experience as an eco-fiction author (so, of course, I’ve included my own) and as a passionate eco-fiction reader. Each work has touched me, moved me and made me think more deeply about our current environmental situation, our part in it as Canadians, and what the future might bring to Canada.
*****
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Margaret Atwood is a world-renowned Canadian author, poet, and environmental activist, best known for her dystopian novel The Handmaid’s Tale. Her Maddaddam Trilogy (McClelland & Stewart, 2003-2013) explores the premise of genetic experimentation and pharmaceutical engineering gone awry. On a larger scale the cautionary trilogy examines where the addiction to vanity, greed, and power may lead. Often sordid and disturbing, the trilogy explores a world where everything from sex to learning translates to power and ownership. Atwood begins the trilogy with Oryx and Crake in which Jimmy, aka Snowman (as in Abominable) lives a somnolent, disconsolate life in a post-apocalyptic world created by a viral pandemic that destroys human civilization. The two remaining books continue the saga with other survivors such as the religious sect God’s Gardeners in The Year of the Flood and the Crakers of Maddaddam.
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*****
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Nina Munteanu is a Canadian ecologist/limnologist who writes hard science fiction and eco-fiction, often exploring water scarcity and systematic environmental collapse. A Diary in the Age of Water (Inanna Publications, 2020) and its companion novel Thalweg (Inanna Publications, upcoming Spring 2027) explore the socio-political consequences of corruption in Canada, now owned by China and America as an indentured resource ‘reservoir’, when humanity is plagued by environmental diseases, rising infertility, and increased plasticity in the human genome.
A Diary in the Age of Water (Inanna Publications, 2020) chronicles the lives of four generations of women and their relationship to water in a rapidly changing world of climate change and water scarcity and manipulation. In her work for a global giant that controls Earth’s water, the diarist witnesses and records alarming climate events, water scarcity, and the draconian grip of the national water utility, CanadaCorp in Toronto, Canada. The diarist hears rumours of virgin births and terrible experimentation. Her fear keeps her immobilized; but even that ‘inaction’ causes injury and death.
In Thalweg (Inanna Publications, upcoming 2027), under the veil of a deadly climate disease, four drifters—each gifted with an arcane power associated with water—converge at the largest reservoir in North America, where they plot to free water and evolved ‘water children’ from the shackles of corporate greed and experimentation. The story features Gwich’in scientist Bobby-Jo and her journey of redemptive self-discovery back to her homeland in the Northwest Territories and beyond.
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Gaia’s Revolution (Dragon Moon Press, 2026) is a biopunk, techno-thriller about family, power, and the terrible choices that decide who lives. The climate thriller weaves political intrigue as two warring brothers make divergent choices to save the planet: one unleashes a DNA-targeted plague; the other a sentient virus that fractures reality. It is Book 1 of a trilogy that explores humanity’s evolution with technology and a rapidly changing environment.
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*****
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Michael Christie is a Canadian author living in British Columbia. His novel Greenwood (McClelland & Stewart, 2019) is a multigenerational eco-apocalypse story structured like tree growth rings. Set in 2038, when most of the world has suffered from an environmental collapse, the story follows the life of Jake Greenwood who works as a tour guide on a remote island with 1,000 year-old trees. The book traces her history back four generations—unravelling deep family deceptions and inherited trauma passed down through acts of treachery and sacrifice.
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*****
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Thomas Wharton is a Canadian author from Edmonton, Alberta. He is best known for speculative and literary works dealing with environmental changes. The Book of Rain (Vinage Canada, 2024) is a science fiction novel set in the mining town of River Meadows in northern Alberta, where ghost ore, a new minable energy source much more lucrative than gold can disrupt time and space and slowly make an environment inhospitable. The novel unravels three intertwined stories that flow from the disaster of River Meadows and ultimately gives voice to nonhuman narrators in an “Epic of Gilgamesh” for our times. A profound novel of epic reach, woven through stunning multi-layers that haunt.
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*****
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Michelle Min Sterling is the British Columbia author of climate thriller Camp Zero (Atria Books, 2024). Set in the remote Canadian north, this feminist climate fiction explores a warming climate through the perilous journeys of several female characters, each relating to her environment in different ways. Each woman exerts agency in surprising ways that include love, bravery and shared community. The strength of female power carries through the pages like a braided river heading to a singular ocean. These very different women journey through the dark ruins of violent capitalism, colonialism and patriarchy—flowing past and through hubristic men pushing north with agendas and jingoistic visions—to triumph in an ocean of solidarity. Each woman finds her strength and learns to wield true heroism—one based on collaboration and humble honesty.
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*****
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Christiane Vadnais is a Quebec-based author of speculative fiction. Her eco-horror novel Fauna (Coach House Books, 2018) examines ecological fragmentation and a world ravaged by climate change. Fauna is at once beautiful and terrifying. Vadnais’s liquid prose immerses in a flowing story about change in this Darwinian eco-horror ode to climate change. Biologist Laura navigates through a torrent of rising mists and coiling snakes and her own transforming body with the changing world around her.
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*****
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Colleen Murphy is a Canadian playwright and filmmaker and two-time recipient of the Governor General’s Literary Award for Drama. The Breathing Hole (Playwright Canada Press, 2020) begins in 1535, when the Inuk widow Hummiktuq risks her life to save a lost one-eared polar bear cub on an ice floe and adopts him. She names him Angu’ruaq. We soon learn that Angu’ruaq is timeless when we encounter him in scenes over the centuries from the Franklin Expedition in 1845 (who he helps by bringing them food) to 2031 when Angu’ruaq—old, hungry, his fur yellowing—returns to the breathing hole where long-dead Hummiktuq rescued him. By then the glaciers have receded and the ground is slush. Murphy’s spare and focused narrative achieves a timeless, dreamlike quality that plays strongly on the emotional connections of the reader; it elicits immense empathy for the Other in a deeply moving saga on the tragic dance of colonialism and climate change.
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*****
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Craig Russell is a Canadian author and playwright. His 2016 climate crisis novel Fragment (Thistledown Press, year) begins with a TV interview of glaciologist Kate Sexsmith in Scott Base Antarctica. The interview is interrupted by what turns out to be four runaway glaciers that have avalanched into the back of the Ross Ice Shelf and a fragment the size of Switzerland surges out into the open sea. The novel explores humanity’s behaviour: from scientists who understand the global significance of this rogue fragment to those who minimize its effect such as the media and tourist industry who wish to exploit this anomaly and self-centred politicians obsessed with protecting their status. Russell’s chapters devoted to the POV of character Ring, a young blue whale also fragmented from his pod, are particularly touching and powerful.
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*****
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Cherie Dimaline is a Metis author and storyteller from the Georgian Bay Metis Community in Ontario. The Marrow Thieves (Cormorant Books, 2017) depicts a futuristic world ravaged by global warming; people have lost the ability to dream, and the dreamlessness has led to widespread madness. The only people still able to dream are North America’s Indigenous people, and it is their marrow that holds the cure for the rest of the world. But getting the marrow, and dreams, means death for the unwilling donors. Driven to flight, a fifteen-year-old and his companions struggle for survival, attempt to reunite with loved ones and take refuge from the “recruiters” who seek them out to bring them to the marrow-stealing “factories.”
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*****
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Premee Mohamed is an Indo-Caribbean scientist and author of speculative fiction who lives in Edmonton. The Annual Migration of Clouds (ECW, 2021) is set in post-climate disaster Alberta, where a woman infected with a mysterious parasite, a mind-altering fungus, must choose whether to pursue a rare opportunity far from home or stay and help rebuild her community.
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*****
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David Huebert is a Halifax author who named his short story collection Chemical Valley (Biblioasis, 2017) after a region in Sarnia, Ont., of plants and refineries. A review reads: “Oil-soaked and swamp-born, the bruised optimism of Huebert’s stories offer sincere appreciation of the beauty of our wilted, wheezing world.” Many of Huebert’s characters make their living from the petrochemical industry, but also see the impacts of climate change. The short stories explore environmental racism, and toxic behaviours through personal dramas.
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*****
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Rebecca Campbell is a Canadian author of speculative, weird, and climate-fiction. Arboreality (Stelliform Press, 2022) is a climate change novella of interconnected short stories set on Vancouver Island that describe a community’s survival through a climate apocalypse, over several decades from 2050 to 2100. Various trees and their unique relationship with climate and change are featured.
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*****
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Claudia Casper is a Vancouver-based Canadian author. The Mercy Journals (Arsenal Pulp Press, 2016) is an unsettling near-future novel set in the wake of a third world war. Runaway effects of climate change have triggered the collapse of nation/states and wiped out over a third of the global population. Mercy, a former soldier, suffers from PTSD and is haunted by guilt and lingering memories of his family. He meets a dancer named Ruby, who breathes new life into his carefully constructed existence. But when his long-lost brother Leo arrives with news that Mercy’s children have been spotted, the two brothers travel into the wilderness to look for them, challenging Mercy’s own moral code about the things that matter amid the wreckage of war and tragedy.
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*****
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Lynn Hutchinson Lee is a Toronto artist / writer. Her novella Origins of Desire in Orchid Fens (Stelliform Press, 2025) explores the tenuous reality of the Romany diaspora living in troubled times on troubled lands. Orchid Lovell is a young Romany woman who settles in a seemingly idyllic northern mining town that she soon understands as rife with unseen cruelty. In the nearby creek, dead girls take revenge on the men who murdered them, luring them into murky waters. After a devastating attack linked to the expansion of the mine, Orchid’s fate is entwined with the panni raklies’ ruthless justice.
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*****
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Waubgeshig Rice is an Anishinaabe author and journalist from the Wasauksing First Nation in Ontario. His apocalyptic thriller Moon of the Crusted Snow (ECW, 2018) and its sequel Moon of the Turning Leaves (ECW, 2023) explore environmental and seasonal collapse themes. Set in a rural Anishinaabe community in northern Canada, both books follow a group after they are cut off from the rest of the world amidst a societal collapse following climate collapse.
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*****
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Catherine Bush is a Toronto-based author and University of Guelph professor whose work explores contemporary climate anxiety and ecological disruption. Her novel Blaze Island (Goose Lane Editions, 2020) is a climate-themed story inspired by Shakespeare’s The Tempest; the story takes place as a Category Five hurricane sweeps up the eastern seaboard of North America. brushing over remote Blaze Island, occupied by a renegade scientist and his daughter Miranda; the storm stirs up secrets and anxieties of the past to reveal a “Brave New World.”
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*****
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Rachel Rosen is a Canadian speculative fiction author and activist. Her novels Cascade and Blight, the first and second books in The Sleep of Reason Trilogy, are eco-fantasy works of climate fiction that take place in a post-apocalyptic Canada.
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*****
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Susan Mayse is a Canadian author of fiction and nonfiction. Her 2023 science fiction novel Shadow Matter is a future recasting of the Orpheus and Eurydike myth that weaves together love, loyalty, and the restorative power of art.
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*****
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Terry Birdgenaw is a Canadian neuroscientist turned fiction author whose Metis heritage and ancestral history serve as the heartbeat of his writing. Cyborg Contact (Cyborg Insect Books, 2026) is a humorous first-contact cli-fi adventure and political satire that touches on issues of climate change and environmental collapse. The series Antunite Chronicles explores human destructiveness and climate issues through the perspectives of non-humans.
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*****
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Su J. Sokul’s novels, Invisible Line and its sequel,Five Points on an Invisible Line are hopepunk speculative stories set in future New York City about political refugees, authoritarianism and survival.
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*****
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Clara Hume is a writer and artist who resides in Nova Scotia.
Clara Hume’s novella Bird Song draws you into a dream-world whose chorus lures you—like the sirens themselves—into a seductive dance of paradox and choice. Taking its cue from Homer’s Odyssey, this contemporary allegorical tale follows the journey of young Thelsie—a schoolgirl in the rough poor district of east Chicago struggling with life-choices. One morning she wakes on a beach of a paradise-like magical island. Feeling safe for the first time, she meets two siren sisters who lure and crash sailing ships to save their world from corruption and despoilment by settlers wishing only to conquer Nature. When the island’s paradoxes force her to make difficult and risky choices, Thelsie finds her voice and her path in life. Bird Song teases apart the extreme voices of mono-cultural colonialism and uncompromising protectionism to find the connective tissue of compassion in the voice of mediation. A beautiful and seductive coming-of-age fairy tale of self-discovery.
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Her Wild Mountain Duology, consisting of Back to the Garden (Moon Willow Press, 2012) and The Stolen Child (Moon Willow Press, 2022) explore communities that must deal with global warming in the future. The series focuses on the journeys of several of “tipping point” survivors—a generation of mountain folk who have experienced the collapse of late-stage capitalism, along with widespread ecosystem degradation from climate change.
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*****
I was also involved in (as writer) and curated (as editor) several important anthologies of excellent eco-fiction short stories by mostly Canadian authors. The three below are worth mentioning. I also include my own collection of eco-fiction short stories:
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Canadian Tales of Climate Change (Exile Editions, 2017; edited by Bruce Meier): an anthology of seventeen culturally diverse Canadian writers who explore various environmental themes of climate change and the impact of a planet in crisis, from rising sea levels to mass migrations and water scarcity. Stories move past simple doomsday warnings to examine human indifference, adaptation, and responsibility.
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Through the Portal: Tales from a Hopeful Dystopia (Exile Editions, 2024; edited by Lynn Hutchinson Lee and Nina Munteanu): This collection is an inspired and fascinating range of speculative storytelling that explores strange new terrains and startling social constructs, quiet morphing landscapes, dark and terrifying warnings, and lush newly-told folk and fairy tales. Each of the over thirty stories uniquely studies our relationship with our environment and climate change and threads a fine strand of optimism through every dark tapestry.
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Water (Reality Skimming Press, 2017; edited by Nina Munteanu): an optimistic speculative fiction anthology of exotic landscapes, at once eerie and beautiful. Each story uniquely explores water and our relationship with its profound and magical properties: melting glaciers in Canada’s north; water’s computing properties and weather control; water as fury and the metaphoric deluge of flood; mining space ice from a nearby comet; water as shapeshifter and echoes of “polywater”. From climate fiction to literary speculative fiction; from the fantastic to the purest of science fiction and a hint of horror—these stories explore individual choices and the triumph of human imagination in the presence of adversity.
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Natural Selection (Pixl Press, 2013). This short story collection by SF author and ecologist Nina Munteanu explores humanity’s co-evolution with our environment and technology. A man uses cyber-eavesdropping to make love. A technocratic government uses gifted people as tools to recast humanity. The ruins of a city serve as battleground between pro-technologists and pro-naturalists. From time-space guardians to cybersex, GMO, and biotech implants, this short story collection is a journey of great scope, imagination and vision. “…a stunning example of good storytelling with an excellent setting and cast of characters.”—Tangent Online
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Elgin marsh on a foggy autumn morning, BC (photo by Nina Munteanu)
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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 latest 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.
Dempster Highway, north of Fort McPherson, NWT (photo by NIna Munteanu)
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In my upcoming eco-fiction novel Thalweg, Gwich’in limnologist Bobby-Jo makes her way back home to Fort McPherson, NWT, after the sudden flood of the Peel River has all but destroyed her Arctic hometown. She starts in Dawson City and takes the challenging gravel Dempster Highway north.
The Dempster is renowned for its remote beauty and driving hazards. Drivers today are cautioned to take sufficient provisions, including a tire-fixing kit and spare tires. By the time Bobby-Jo is driving the Dempster in the 2050s, the permafrost is actively thawing. One of the characters describes it as: “a thin ribbon of shale and mud floating tenuously on an unstable sea of melting ice, slushy rock, and murky water.”
The Dempster is a temperamental gravel and shale road originally built in 1978 when explorers found oil and gas in the deep bedrock of Eagle Plains. The highway roughly follows Jack Dempster’s original trail that he learned from the Gwich’in and old dogsled routes. They used two-metre thick berms of gravel and shale to prevent the road from sinking into the ground; other materials would cause the permafrost to thaw and buckle the road, creating small lakes. When the uunjit discovered that the deposits weren’t large enough to exploit, the Dempster turned into a ghost road. The road to riches turned into the road to nowhere, abandoned to the rugged wilderness of mountains and tundra and the wildlife that inhabit it. The Dempster was left to itself and its people.
Below is a short excerpt of Bobby-Jo’s experience driving the Dempster north from Dawson City:
On a cloudy morning in late August, I drove the North Klondike Highway and turned north on the Dempster as it started to rain. After a few kilometres, the cracked pavement gave way to loose gravel. The car slid along the slick mud like a sled on snow.
The first stretch of the Dempster followed a wide valley of moraines fed by glaciers in the high granite peaks of the southern Ogilvie Mountains. In Tombstone Territorial Park I stopped the car and stepped out into the cold breeze to rest my eyes on the bald sheer towering rock that rose out of a broad sloping alpine valley with peaks sharp enough to cut the sky like a knife.
Gold, russet, gray-green, stunning yellow and purple carpeted the valley floor with impressionistic swirls of lichen, alpine shrubs, cotton grass and blazing fireweed. Dark flecks of stunted spruce trees and dwarf birch and willow added contrast. A fine mist flowed and pooled in the depressions of the lower slopes.
I breathed in the freshness of sub-arctic air and moist earth. It had stopped raining, but the moisture that clung to the air brought out an incredible richness of fragrances, an aria of sweet floral scents mixed with earth and tree pitch. It smelled like home. I inhaled slowly and deeply, filling my lungs with ancestral energy. It resonated deep inside me where this place lay embedded in my soul.
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Tombstone Territorial Park (photo by Yukon Travel)
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My Experience on The Dempster and The North
My good friend and story consultant Anne accompanied me on my research trip North. We first flew to Inuvik, whose stilted buildings all have utilidors (above ground piping) running among them to prevent the permafrost beneath from heating up. Already, some buildings were sinking and the new hospital developed a small pingo (ice pimple) beneath it; the ice was heaving and cracking the floors. Anne and I got to Inuvik just in time to witness a canoe race from Aklavik along the Mackenzie River, the first in many years. We ate whitefish tacos at Alestine’s, a funky bistro.
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Utilidors in Inuvik, NWT (photo by Nina Munteanu)
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Drummers bring in the canoes during the race from Aklavik, Inuvik, NWT (photo by Nina Munteanu)
Alestine’s Patio, Inuvik, NWT (photo by Nina Munteanu)
The Dakota truck on the Dempster Highway, NWT (photo by Nina Munteanu)
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We rented a Dakota truck and drove the Dempster south to Fort McPherson on the Peel River to meet with my new Gwich’in friends who helped keep Thalweg authentic and respectful: Sharon Snowshoe (head of the Gwich’in Council) and Arlyn Charlie (a gifted writer). The town—which was totally destroyed in my speculative novel—was a small dusty community with one main street, a school, a church, and a few shops.
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Left: Sharon Snowshoe and Arlyn Charlie with Nina Munteanu; Right: main street of Fort McPherson (photos by Anne Voute and Nina Munteanu)
Boats moored on the Peel River, Fort McPherson, NWT (photo by Nina Munteanu)
Black spruce forest and marsh in the morning mist off the Dempster Highway, north of Fort McPherson, NWT (photo by Nina Munteanu)
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Driving the iconic Dempster through spruce forest and tundra / marsh, felt invigorating and humbling at the same time. This remote road to the Arctic North felt steeped in history and many stories. As I write this (three years after our trip) Anne, who was the driver, reminds me that the Dempster was surprisingly smooth; probably the result of a recent resurfacing.
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Tanker truck speeds past us on the newly graded Dempster Highway, north of Fort McPherson, NWT (photo by Nina Munteanu)
Anne stands by the Dakota, taking in the view from the Tuk Highway, NWT (photo by Nina Munteanu)
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The new highway to Tuk, by contrast, was uneven and blemished with pot holes. The drive took us to the Beaufort Sea of the Arctic Ocean, which was surprisingly warm and fresh. I found no lingering marine smell or salt water tackiness to the touch. I then remembered that the Mackenzie River emptied into the Beafort Sea right next to the community. The best place to eat was Grandma’s Kitchen, where we enjoyed muktuk (whale blubber) and dried whitefish. Grandma Joanne served us out of her trailer and we ate overlooking the Arctic Ocean, kept company by ground squirrels looking for a handout.
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Left: muktuk and dried whitefish served by Right: Grandma Joanne, Grandma’s Kitchen, Tuk, NWT (photos by Nina Munteanu)
View of tundra and pingo from Tuk Highway, NWT (photo by Nina Munteanu)
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I felt an abiding sense of home as I brushed through the tundra, among Labrador Tea, cloudberries and bearberries, boots sinking into sphagnum and crowberry, with a stunning view of Ibyuk and Split Pingos in the distance. Tuktoyaktuk sits on the edge of the Arctic Sea; boats of all kinds line the shores. Normally a quiet town, we’d landed there during some festivities, which brought in locals from all around. Anne and I strolled along the main street, talking with friendly Inuvialuit.
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Shoreline of Arctic Ocean at Tuk, NWT (photo by Nina Munteanu)
Kieth Felix stands next to his rack of drying whitefish, Tuk, NWT (photo by Nina Munteanu)
Fireweed and marsh near Inuvik, NWT (photo by Nina Munteanu)
Iconic cotton grass found throughout the north along the Dempster and Tuk Highways, NWT (photos by Nina Munteanu)
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The North is a celebration of contrasts. A wilderness of rugged beauty, often misunderstood. A place, both harsh and desolate yet incredibly rich and beautiful. A wild place that promises infinite possibilities.
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Tuk Highway winds through tundra by the Eskimo Lakes, NWT (photo by Nina Munteanu)
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Climate change is changing all that; the permafrost is thawing. along with the melting pingos, land is sinking and exposing dangerous sinkholes, ground slumping and landslides are increasing, coastlines are eroding to the sea, waterways are acidifying, and wildlife habits are changing:
Climate change and habitat destruction were silently destroying the Gwich’in’s way of life. Though, you’d never think it, looking at the pristine-like wilderness along the Dempster. That was the problem: much of the destruction was invisible. It isn’t seen; it’s felt I could hear Johnny say.
That was the North. More a mindset than a place. For most Canadians the North encompassed this collective myth of vast inaccessibility, and hostile grandeur. Early settlers’ portrayal of the North as hostile and isolated came from their inability to read the land and its rhythms, to know where the animals were and why they were there. The uunjit didn’t feel the land, Johnny kept saying. And because of that they would not know how to adapt to change.
Thalweg releases with Inanna Publications in Spring 2027.
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The Dempster Highway
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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.
A recent MIT study reports that reliance on AI is causing mass ‘cognitive surrender.’ The study revealed that pervasive artificial intelligence usage is fundamentally eroding active learning and overriding intellectual agency.
The report warns that students are falling into what they call “cognitive surrender;” gladly offloading their cognitive skills to AI. The researchers argue that students too easily reach for chatbots, bypassing the ‘productive struggle’ crucial for developing critical thinking.
The researchers argue that this over-reliance has led to an “illusion of learning” characterized by rising homework scores but plummeting memory retention and test performances. The researchers report: “there are early signals that over-reliance on chatbots can have a range of significant negative consequences—diminishing critical thinking, weakening memory, eroding confidence, and undermining mastery.”
The report discusses an isolating shift in campus culture: vanishing traditional study groups and office hours sitting empty as students choose automated chatbot replies over human collaboration. They note that the effects of AI reliance extend far beyond bad grades. Some students, they report, are losing the ability to participate in class discussions.
As a side note to this, I had a recent discussion with Dot, my friend who helps run a local health food store in the village I live in; she sadly related an all-too common experience she had the other day: of a young woman who, upon entering the store, had perfunctorily declined Dot’s offer to help, and instead relied on the chatbots of her smartphone for the information she needed to make a wise purchasing choice. Dot and her obvious expertise was ignored in favour of the girl’s infinitely ‘smart’ chatbot.
To combat students’ over reliance on AI assistance, schools like MIT, and my own University of Toronto, are avoiding unreliable AI detectors and instead rebuilding curricula around human-centric assessments: oral exams, semester portfolios, and mandatory group work, all designed to rescue education by reclaiming the struggle of thinking.
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‘Cognitive Surrender’ A Form of Laziness
Philippe Roi and Tristan Girard, authors of La Théorie Sensorielle
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Philippe Roi, cognitive science researcher and former Editing Director of Le Courier de l’Intelligence Artificielle recently argued that, “The greatest peril posed by artificial intelligence is not that it accomplishes our tasks, but that it spares us the inner transformation required to carry them out.”
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Roi, who co-authored with Tristan Girard La Théorie Sensorielle, noted that a form of laziness is currently spreading around the world. “It is neither idleness nor indolence,” he writes, “but a growing dissociation between the result obtained and the being who should have [trans]formed themselves to achieve it.”
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“AI enables us to diagnose without understanding, to translate a text without mastering the language, to publish a book without having written a single line, to create a work without having conceived it.”
Philippe Roi
Student studying in a library (image by Philippe Roi)
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Roi warns that the term ‘Ignorance’ is changing as a result. “It is no longer merely an absence of knowledge; it is becoming an inability to gauge what one no longer knows how to do. The ultimate danger is that, after entrusting our cognitive tasks to AIs, we will also abandon to them the desire to learn which has made us thinking beings.”
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References:
Ad Hoc Committee on AI Use in Teaching, Learning, and Research. 2026. “AI and Education.” MIT, August 13, 2026.
Blinder, A. 2026. “Universities Sound Warnings About A.I. Even as They Embrace It.” The New York Times.
Kos’myna, Nataliya. 2025. “Your Brain on ChatGPT: Accumulation of Cognitive Dept when Using an AI Assistant for Essay Writing Task.” MIT Media, June 10, 2025.
Tangermann, Victor. 2026. “MIT Report Finds That AI Is Leading to “Cognitive Surrender” Among Students. Futurism, September 19, 2026.
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Field in late fall, ON (photo and rendition by Nina Munteanu)
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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 latest 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.
My guest today is author Simon Rose, who has published twenty-one novels for children and young adults, eight guides for writers, more than a hundred nonfiction books, and many articles on a wide variety of topics. Today he’s here to tell us more about his two latest novels, The Memory Bank – All in the Mind and The Memory Bank – Prisoners of the Prism.
Nina:Welcome, Simon!
Simon: Thank you, it’s a pleasure to be here.
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Nina:Where did you get the idea from to create The Memory Bank novels?
Simon: For these books, I was first inspired by how people often have casts made of a beloved pet’s paw made when their faithful friend passes away. It’s certainly something I’ve done over the years. I then remembered how death masks have been created of notable people throughout history, well before the invention of photography, so that we know what some of these people actually looked like and in some cases the mask closely resembles the person’s face as portrayed in a painting. The ideas began to converge.
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Nina:There are some quite well known people of which death masks were made, aren’t there?
Simon: Yes, there are masks that were made of the faces of Martin Luther, Oliver Cromwell, Mary Queen of Scots, Marie Antoinette, Isaac Newton, Horatio Nelson, John Keats, Ludwig van Beethoven, and a number of others. Perhaps the most notable one for me is Napoleon Bonaparte. Some people dispute whether it’s really him, but the mask does bear an uncanny resemblance to his many portraits. There are links included in both books and here on my website in the Sources of Inspiration page if you’re interested in learning more about this topic.
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Nina:I know that you’ve always been fascinated with different historical eras. We can see that from many of your previous novels. Were the masks something that you’ve always been interested in?
Simon: Yes, I’ve always wondered about them, but I wasn’t sure how I’d ever be able to include them in a story. I was also aware of masks worn at carnivals in Venice, which seemed to be a natural fit as I was putting the story idea together for The Memory Bank.
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Nina:How did the pet souvenirs serve as inspiration for the story?
Simon: Without giving away too much of the story, for the two novels I speculated how in the modern era masks could be made of a person’s face. This would then preserve their memories, as seen through their eyes, for their family members to see on a screen after the person’s death. This would be just like viewing photographs or watching home movies.
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Nina:Sounds incredible. You certainly have a wonderful imagination.Tell me a little bit about your next project.
Simon: I currently have a couple of fantasy projects that I’m working on, so they’ll probably be taking up most of my creative time for the next little while. I’ll also be out there promoting The Memory Bank novels whenever I can. For regular updates, people can subscribe to my newsletter, which goes out on the first day of the month. They can do that on my website at www.simon-rose.com where they can also learn all about my other books.
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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.
The sleepy village of Tuktoyaktuk on the Arctic Ocean, NWT (photos by Nina Munteanu)
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A few years ago, I travelled to the village Tuktoyaktuk in the Northwest Territories on the Arctic Ocean. I was researching my upcoming eco-fiction book Thalweg with Inanna Publications (scheduled for release in early 2027). I drove with my friend Anne Voute; we rented a Dodge Dakota truck and drove the Dempster Highway north from Inuvik and the recently completed NWT Highway 10 (completed in 2017), which provides the remaining 140 km stretch to the Arctic Ocean.
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Black spruce forest along the Dempster Highway north of Fort McPherson, NWT (photo by Nina Munteanu)
Highway 10 to Tuk winds through the tundra and Husky Lakes, NWT (photo by Nina Munteanu)
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In Thalweg, main character Bobby-Jo is a Gwich’in limnologist who grew up in Fort McPherson in the Arctic Circle, land of permafrost.
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Poster Child of Permafrost
Ibyuk Pingo, near Tuk, NWT (photo shot from Cessna 172 by Adam Jones, 2013; Wikipedia Commons)
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The poster child of permafrost is the conical ice-cored pingo, common in the Pleistocene Coastal Plain. Pingo is an Inuit word that means conical hill.
Pingos form when a mass of water is trapped beneath permafrost under pressure. Also called hydrolaccoliths, these huge mounds of earth with ice cores can reach up to 70 meters in height and 600 meters in diameter. Pingos usually grow a few centimeters a year, with the largest having taken decades or even centuries to form. Pingos eventually break down and collapse. They collapse when the ice core melts. This may happen when cracks form on the sides of the pingo that may reach down as far as the ice core, exposing the ice to warm air and sunlight. Once the core completely thaws, what remains is a doughnut-shaped ring of raised tundra enclosing a small round lake. Evidence of collapsed pingos in an area suggests that there was once permafrost there.
Hydrostatic (closed-system) Pingo (illustration by E. Ginn, 2021)
Development of closed-system pingo (illustration by Encyclopedia Brittanica)
Map of major pingos in the Tuk area, NWT (pingos marked with black semi-circle)
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One quarter of the world’s pingos, more than fourteen hundred of them, are in the Tuktoyaktuk Peninsula, part of the Mackenzie Delta of the Northwest Territories of Canada. The Inuvialuit and their Thule ancestors used these cone-like hills as navigational landmarks or lookouts when looking for caribou or whales. Hunters also used hollow pingos to freeze meat.
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Ibyuk and Split Pingos (photos by National Air Photo Library, Ottawa)
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Pingo National Landmark protects eight pingos with the most famous being Ibyuk and Split. Ibyuk is about 50 meters high; it is the tallest pingo in Canada and the second tallest in the world and estimated to be more than 1,000 years old. It is also the world’s largest growing pingo, up to recently growing at a rate of about half a centimeter per year. With ongoing climate change, this is also changing. A local information sign in Tuk mentioned that Ibyuk Pingo has stopped growing and is beginning to slump, which is changing its shape. Kilutqusiaq—Peninsula Point—is a pingo on the coast that is almost completely eaten away by erosion: having eroded about 35 metres since 2004.
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Pingos viewed across tundra near Tuk, NWT (photo by Nina Munteanu)
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Climate change in the Arctic has caused some permafrost thaw slumps on lake shores, rivers and coastlines; shoreline erosion and sea level rise has swallowed buildings and cultural sites in the Tuk area. Kilutqusiaq—Peninsula Point—is a pingo on the coast that is almost completely eaten away by erosion: having eroded about 35 metres since 2004.
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Tuk sign on warming climate impact on pingos
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In the time of my novel Thalweg—2050s—hundreds of pingos near Tuktoyaktuk are caving in and forming circular ponds due to climate change. Giant ice-pimples are exploding as methane-rich gas hydrates decompose and form pressure bombs of combustible methane. The subsidence creates huge sink holes as wide as a house and deeper than hell.
Ibyuk Pingo seen from nearby sandspit, NWT (photo by Nina Munteanu)
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During her travels, Bobby-Jo thinks of her Inuvialuit friend Mary Steen in Tuk where giant pingos are thawing and exploding—thanks to climate change and permafrost thaw.
When we were kids, Mary took me up the Ibyuk Pingo, the giant cone mountain over a thousand years old. It’s the second highest in the world at forty-nine metres high and three hundred metres across and was still growing a few centimeters a year at its centre—despite the warming climate. Ibyuk is a hydrostatic pingo, which means it formed in an area of continuous permafrost and grew up from a large thermokarst lake. Expelled pore water from permafrost aggradation pushed up the old lake silts and sands from below, and the ice-mountain rose up like a giant frozen pimple above the ancient drained lake flats.
Ibyuk Pingo from a nearby spit of cottongrass and marsh grass, NWT (photo by Nina Munteanu)
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We shouldn’t have been there; regrowth from trampling is extremely slow, often taking over half a century. The tundra moss, lichen, shrubs and krummholtz help insulate the pingo against ice core melting. When the ice core of the ice-cone is exposed, particularly if the vegetation blanket has broken open by dilation cracks or through erosion, the ice thaws and the mountain eventually collapses. During our climb, Mary and I noticed deep furrows in the vegetated soil layer. They cut down the slope as if a giant bear had clawed it and revealed the pingo’s icy sores.
When Mary and I returned to Tuk from our adventure, she got into trouble with her parents; someone had spotted us climbing the ice mountain and told them. I got a lecture and Mary was grounded for a week.
Because I was visiting, I was grounded alongside her. Pingos are living things, her parents told us sternly. They breathe, they grow, they shrink, they ebb and flow like water; they pulsate vertically. And we’d been in great danger. The Ibyuk Pingo was unstable—not just from a warming climate but from yahoos sliding down its steep sandy slopes and kids climbing where they shouldn’t. Did we know that the depth to its ice crust under the crater pond was shallow and fragile? When we were at the summit, the crater could have collapsed with sudden drainage of the pond and we would have disappeared in a roiling black sink hole!
When I last spoke with Mary five months ago, she told me that the area was starting to look like a moonscape, with craters everywhere. I thought of our little adventure on Ibyuk and decided that my analogy of a pimple or boil was appropriate given that pingos ruptured and flung their icy guts outward with explosive force. Mary admitted in a voice trembling with emotion that Ibyuk, the giant pingo we’d hiked up, had finally collapsed from massive coastal erosion and sea level rise. But not before it exploded.
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Thalweg releases with Inanna Publications in Spring 2027.
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Road through tundra to Tuk with pingo in background, NWT (photo by Nina Munteanu)
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Glossary:
Pingo: A dome-shaped mound consisting of a layer of soil over a large core of ice in a permafrost area. Pingos form when a mass of water is trapped beneath permafrost (ground that is frozen for at least two years) under cryostatic or hydraulic pressure. One quarter of the world’s pingos are in the Tuktoyaktuk peninsula, more than fourteen hundred. Most are closed-system hydrostatic pingos, pingos formed in an area of continuous permafrost from pore water expulsion caused by permafrost aggradation at the bottom of a drained lake.
Permafrost Degradation: A naturally or artificially caused decrease in the thickness and areal extent of permafrost (Jorgenson, 2013). Widespread degradation of near-surface permafrost (40-80%) is projected by 2100 (Abbott & Jones, 2015). Release of greenhouse gases from thawing permafrost is likely the largest terrestrial feedback to climate change and one of the most likely to occur (Abbott & Jones, 2015). Degradation of permafrost soils can lead to the collapse, drainage and disappearance of water bodies (Vincent et. al., 2011). Jorgenson categorized twenty-three types of permafrost degradation based on dominant ice type, hydrologic regime, heat source and mass transfer.
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Cottongrass field with black spruce behind, off the Tuk highway, NWT (photo by Nina Munteanu)
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References:
Abbot, Benjamin W. and Jeremy B. Jones. 2015. “Permafrost collapse alters soil carbon stocks, respiration, CH4, and N2O in upland tundra.” Global Change Biology 21: 4570-4587.
Jorgenson, M.T. and T.F. Osterkamp. 2005. “Response of boreal ecosystems to varying modes of permafrost degradation.” Can. J. For. Res. 35: 2100-2111.
Jorgenson, M.T. 2013. “Thermokarst Terrains.” In: John F. Shroder (Editor-in-chief), Giardino, R., and Harbor, J. (Volume Editors). Treatise on Geomorphology, Vol 8, Glacial and Periglacial Geomorphology, San Diego. Academic Press. pp. 313-324.
Harris, S.A.., French, H.M., Heginbottom, J.A.., Johnston, G.H., Ladanyi, B., Sego, D.C., van Everdingen, R.O., (eds.). 1988. “Glossary of permafrost and related ground-ice terms.” Technical Memorandum 142, Permafrost Subcommittee, National Research Council of Canada.
Mackay, J.R. 1998. “Pingo growth and collapse, Tuktoyaktuk peninsula area, western Arctic coast, Canada: a long-term field study.” Geographie Physique Quaternaire 52(3): 1-53.
Munteanu, Nina. 2027 (upcoming release; in press). “Thalweg.” Inanna Publications, Toronto, ON.
Vincent, Warwick F., et.al. 2011. “Ecological Implications of Changes in the Arctic Cryosphere.” Ambio 30: 87-99.
Ibyuk Pingo seen from nearby grass-covered sandspit, NWT (photo by Nina Munteanu
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Scenes from in and near Tuk: top left, cottongrass; top right, ground squirrel; bottom, tundra scattered with spruce trees along Highway 10, NWT (photos by Nina Munteanu)
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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.
Our current world—under the final shadow of climate calamity and environmental destruction—is steadily polarizing: politically, socially, and environmentally. Wealthy vs. poor. Privileged vs. indentured. Right vs. Left. Educated vs. illiterate. And so on.
This is the opposite of what we need—particularly to deal with the hyperobjects of climate change and environmental destruction; these require a united global intelligence and effort to address and overcome. Oddly enough, the hyper-destructive forces that we’ve unleashed are only intensifying our polarization as our capitalist paradigm encourages separation, segregation, and ‘othering.’ As more things go wrong, some look to lay blame. There is always the ‘Other.’
As there appears less to share, some greedily disparage ‘the other’ and take what they consider theirs in a version of Sonderweg—an elitist’s special and privileged path.
Polarization leads to lack of consensus, greater misunderstanding, violence and eventually to outrage. Polarization breeds fanaticism. Borne of deep frustration and fueled by relentless passion, fanaticism sparks violent change. We are seeing some of this today throughout the world: unhinged fanaticism, fed by growing polarization and exclusion. In Germany, the far-right fascist Reichsbürgers movement violently rejects the legitimacy of the modern German state. In the USA, far-right white supremacists and Christian fundamentalists incite domestic terrorist violence fueled by nativism, populism, anti-communism, and ultra-nationalism.
Eco-terrorism—from mild civil disobedience to destructive violence—is increasing in tandem. Eco-terrorism has increased by over 22% since 2017 as acts of radical environmental activism have steadily escalated into environmental warfare.
Amid all this violent foreplay between fanatics, the rest of us slide into a solipsistic brain coma as we stare mesmerized at our phones expecting godlike answers delivered uniquely to us by chatbots.
I recently read on Locus Magazine a commentary by Canadian author Cory Doctorow called “Hell is Other People” in which he characterized our AI-infatuated oligarchy:
A subset of humanity is committed to a world where everyone else takes orders from them. We have different names for these people. We call the majority of them “toddlers,” but we call the others “bosses” or “tyrants.” These latter two groups – who, unlike toddlers, are unlikely to outgrow their belief that everyone else should shut up and do as they’re told – are also among the people most excited about AI. What’s more, the more powerful these people are, the more credulous and enthusiastic they are about AI.
Among bosses, the most enthusiastic boosters are tech overlords. These billionaires will not shut up about AI, and, tellingly, the thing they’re most excited about is the fact that AI might let them fire programmers and replace them with chatbots.
While tech bosses look forward to AI replacing workers, social media bosses (like Mark Zuckerberg) look forward to AI replacing friends. How many of us are already relying on AI (which uses the first person narrative) to answer almost every question?
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According to Doctorow, “Zuckerberg hopes that bots will produce a social media service without socializing. If he can imprison you in a mirror-palace of chatbots, he can order them to say the things they calculate will make you keep scrolling, and he will owe them nothing.”
This, of course, aligns with the oligarch’s puppet regime, whose first directive is to remove opposition provided by independent-thinking people. Doctorow pithily describes it:
The broccoli-haired brownshirts from DOGE laid waste to the civil service, indiscriminately firing skilled workers who do things that America needs done. When asked to justify this vandalism, they said that those fired workers were superfluous to requirements, because “General AI” was just around the corner. The idea of creating and enslaving an artificial god is so attractive to them because it allows them to realize the fascist dream, in which every whim of their cult leader is instantaneously translated into action – without having to pass through the filter of skilled people who understand how things work.
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Ink cap mushrooms curling and deliquescing (photo by Nina Munteanu)
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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 latest 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.
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Acorns line up beneath a red oak, Jackson Creek Park, ON (photo by Nina Munteanu)
Reviews of my climate thriller Gaia’s Revolution continue to trickle in. The latest is by Canadian speculative author Noah Chinn:
“When choosing what to read, it’s important to sometimes go out of your comfort zone. This is one of those times…This is not a story I would read for fun. But it is an important story that should be read.”
Noah Chinn, author of Lost Cargo
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CANREADS Review of “Gaia’s Revolution”
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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 latest 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.Her latest eco-fiction novel Gaia’sRevolution was released by Dragon Moon Press in March 2026.
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.”
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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.”
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References:
Tangermann, Victor. 2026. “Author Invited to Give Speech at OpenAI Headquarters, Uses Opportunity to Trash AI to Their Faces”. Futurism, July 21, 2026.
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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 latest 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.
