Celebrating Canadian Eco-Fiction Authors & Their Works

November 8, 2026October 27, 2026 / thealiennextdoor / Leave a comment

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.

*****

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.

*****

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.

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.

*****

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.

*****

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.

*****

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.

*****

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.

*****

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.

*****

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.

*****

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.”

*****

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.

*****

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.

*****

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.

*****

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.

*****

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.

*****

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.

*****

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.”

*****

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.

*****

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.

*****

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.

*****

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.

*****

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.

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.

*****

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:

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.

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.

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.

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

*Elgin marsh on a foggy autumn morning, BC (photo by Nina Munteanu)*

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.

Solving The Polywater Equation in German and English

November 1, 2026October 6, 2026 / thealiennextdoor / Leave a comment

Some time ago, I was invited by the publisher of Nova to contribute to their upcoming German anthology, based on real science. In our initial correspondence, editor Marianne Labisch mentioned that they were “looking for short stories by scientists based on their research but ‘spun on’ to create a science fiction story;” she knew I was a limnologist and was hoping I would contribute something about water. That is how The Polywater Equation (Die Polywasser-Gleichung) was born.

I drew on some early work of mine with colonizing patterns of periphyton (attached algae) in streams. Elements that worked themselves into the story and the main character, herself a limnologist, reflected some aspects of my own conflicts as a scientist interpreting algal and water data (you have to read the story to figure that out).

**The diatom forest** (periphyton colonizing a substrate in a stream) (illustration by Nina Munteanu *adapted for the van der Wal et al. paper in H2O*)

My study involved placing glass slides in various locations in my control and experimental streams and in various orientations (parallel or facing the current), exposing them to colonizing algae. What I didn’t expect to see was that the community colonized the slides in a non-random way. I published my findings in Hydrobiologia entitled “The effect of current on the distribution of diatoms settling on submerged glass slides.”

*Photo (left) and illustration (right) of diatoms colonizing glass slides parallel to the current (Nina Munteanu, Hydrobiologia)*

For more details of my work with periphyton, you can go to my article called Championing Change. How all this connects to the concept of polywater is something you need to read in the story itself. Up to recently, you would have had to read the story in German in the anthology “Tales of Science, Volume 2” (Marianne Labisch & Kiran Ramakrishnan); now, thanks to Metastellar Speculative Fiction and Beyond, the story is available in English for your reading pleasure.

The Polywater Phenomenon of the 1960s

The polywater phenomenon started well before the 1960s, with a 19^th century theory by Lord Kelvin (for a detailed account see The Rise and Fall of Polywater in Distillations Magazine). Kelvin had found that individual water droplets evaporated faster than water in a bowl. He also noticed that water in a glass tube evaporated even more slowly. This suggested to Kelvin that the curvature of the water’s surface affected how quickly it evaporated.

*Soviet chemist Boris Deryagin looks through a microscope at polywater*

In the 1960s, Soviet chemist and physicist Nikolai Fedyakin picked up on Lord Kelvin’s work and through careful experimentation, concluded that the liquid at the bottom of the glass tube was denser than ordinary water and published his findings. Boris Deryagin, director of the Institute of Physical Chemistry in Moscow, was intrigued and his team confirmed that the substance at the bottom of the glass tube was denser and thicker than ordinary water and had additional anomalous properties. This phase of water had a thick, gel-like consistency; it also had a higher stability, like a polymer, over bulk water. It demonstrated a lower freezing point, a higher boiling point, and much higher density and viscosity than ordinary water. It expanded more than ordinary water when heated and bent light differently.

Deryagin became convinced that this “modified water” was the most thermodynamically stable form of water and that any water that came into contact with it would become modified as well. In 1966, Deryagin shared his work in a paper entitled “Effects of Lyophile Surfaces on the Properties of Boundary Liquid Films.”

British scientist Brian Pethica confirmed Deryagin’s findings with his own experiments—calling the odd liquid “anomalous water”—and published in Nature. In 1969, Ellis Lippincott and colleagues published their work using spectroscopic evidence of this anomalous water, showing that it was arranged in a honeycomb-shaped network, making a polymer of water—and dubbed it “polywater.” Scientists proposed that instead of the weak Van der Waals forces that normally draw water molecules together, the molecules of ‘polywater’ were locked in place by stronger bonds, catalyzed somehow by the nature of the surface they were adjacent to.

This sparked both excitement and fear in the scientific community, press and the public. Industrialists soon came up with ways to exploit this strange state of water such as an industrial lubricant or a way to desalinate seawater. Scientists further argued for the natural existence of ‘polywater’ in small quantities by suggesting that this form of water was responsible for the ability of winter wheat seeds to survive in frozen ground and how animals can lower their body temperature below zero degrees Celsius without freezing.

In 1970, when American physicist Denis Rouseau blamed the phenomenon on contamination by the experimenters’ own sweat, the significance of the results was abandoned in the Kuddelmuddel of scientific embarrassment. By 1973, ‘polywater’ was considered a joke and an example of ‘pathological science.’

This, despite earlier work by Henniker and Szent-Györgyi, which showed that water organized itself close to surfaces such as cell membranes. Forty years later Gerald Pollack at the University of Washington identified a fourth phase of water, an interfacial water zone that was more stable, more viscous and more ordered, and, according to biochemist Martin Chaplin of South Bank University, also hydrophobic, stiffer, more slippery and thermally more stable. Pollack called it Exclusion Zone (EZ) water: a microscopic layer of water that near hydrophilic (water-loving) surfaces pushes away suspended particles (microspheres and solutes). These interfacial interactions may be driven more by ionic impurities and concentration gradients than actual molecular differences.

How was this not some form of polywater?

The Polywater Equation—Die Polywasser-Gleichung

In my story, which takes place in Berlin, 2045, retired limnologist Professor Engel grapples with a new catastrophic water phenomenon that looks suspiciously like the original 1960s polywater incident:

The first known case of polywater occurred on June 19, 2044 in Newark, United States. Housewife Doris Buchanan charged into the local Water Department office on Broad Street with a complaint that her faucet had clogged up with some kind of pollutant. She claimed that the faucet just coughed up a blob of gel that dangled like clear snot out of the spout and refused to drop. Where was her water? she demanded. She’d paid her bill. But when she showed them her small gel sample, there was only plain liquid water in her sample jar. They sent her home and logged the incident as a prank.

But then over fifty turbines of the combined Niagara power plants in New York and Ontario ground to a halt as everything went to gel; a third of the state and province went dark. That was soon followed by a near disaster at the Pickering Nuclear Generating Station in Ajax, Ontario when the cooling water inside a reactor vessel gummed up, and the fuel rods—immersed in gel instead of cooling water—came dangerously close to overheating, with potentially catastrophic results. Luckily, the gel state didn’t last and all went back to normal again.

*Tales of Science anthology selling at Dussmann bookstore in Berlin*

The German anthology made it to all the big bookstores, including Dussmann das KulturKaufhaus and Thalia in Berlin. The English version is now available online on Metastellar magazine.

*Nina Munteanu holds a copy of “Tales of Science” anthology (photo by Jane Raptor)*

References:

Chaplin, Martin. 2015. “Interfacial water and water-gas interfaces.” Online: “Water Structure and Science”: http://www1.lsbu.ac.uk/water/interfacial_water.html

Chaplin, Martin. 2015. “Anomalous properties of water.” Online: “Water Structure and Science: http://www1.lsbu.ac.uk/water/water_anomalies.html

Henniker, J.C. 1949. “The depth of the surface zone of a liquid”. Rev. Mod. Phys. 21(2): 322–341.

Kelderman, Keene, et. al. 2022. “The Clean Water Act at 50: Promises Half Kept at the Half-Century Mark.” Environmental Integrity Project (EIP). March 17. 75pp.

Munteanu, N. & E. J. Maly, 1981. The effect of current on the distribution of diatoms settling on submerged glass slides. Hydrobiologia 78: 273–282.

Munteanu, Nina. 2016. “Water Is…The Meaning of Water.” Pixl Press, Delta, BC. 584 pp.

Pollack, Gerald. 2013. “The Fourth Phase of Water: Beyond Solid, Liquid and Vapor.” Ebner & Sons Publishers, Seattle WA. 357 pp.

Ramirez, Ainissa. 2020. “The Rise and Fall of Polywater.” Distillations Magazine, February 25, 2020.

Szent-Györgyi, A. 1960. “Introduction to a Supramolecular Biology.” Academic Press, New York. 135 pp.

Roemer, Stephen C., Kyle D. Hoagland, and James R. Rosowski. 1984. “Development of a freshwater periphyton community as influenced by diatom mucilages.” Can. J. Bot. 62: 1799-1813.

Schwenk, Theodor. 1996. “Sensitive Chaos.” Rudolf Steiner Press, London. 232 pp.

Szent-Györgyi, A. 1960. “Introduction to a Supramolecular Biology.” Academic Press, New York. 135 pp.

Wilkens, Andreas, Michael Jacobi, Wolfram Schwenk. 2005. “Understanding Water”. Floris Books, Edinburgh. 107 pp.

The Little Rouge River in winter, ON (photo by Nina Munteanu)

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.

Interview with Author Simon Rose About “The Memory Bank”

October 4, 2026September 1, 2026 / thealiennextdoor / Leave a comment

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

‘Othering’ in the Time of Climate Change & The AI Cult

September 20, 2026September 24, 2026 / thealiennextdoor / Leave a comment

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?

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.

*Ink cap mushrooms curling and deliquescing (photo by Nina Munteanu)*

Acorns line up beneath a red oak, Jackson Creek Park, ON (photo by Nina Munteanu)

David Eggers on AI Use by Writers

August 30, 2026September 22, 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.

Nina Munteanu Interview on Writers To Writers Podcast

August 23, 2026September 22, 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*

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

July 26, 2026September 22, 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.”

The Best of Metastellar Year Five is now out.

A Diary in the Age of Water Featured in PhD Thesis on Heterogenous Being

April 19, 2026June 23, 2026 / thealiennextdoor / Leave a comment

My eco-fiction novel A Diary in the Age of Water was recently discussed in a 2025 PhD thesis by Steven L. Ogden out of the University of Albany, State University of New York entitled: “Heterogenous Being: The Inhumanities and the Creative-Scientific Aesthetic.” I was fascinated by his stirring, well-researched dissertation that explored the dichotomous narrative separating human with non-human. A narrative that is changing—though very slowly.

Ogden’s PhD thesis advances a hybrid form of inquiry on “Heterogenous Being”¹ that links the sciences with humanities to address the precarious realities of Earth’s ecological and environmental conditions; he does this by acknowledging the influences and agented potentialities of nonhuman subjects in narrative, both in fiction and nonfiction. “… these inhuman² examinations not only provide the nonhuman with a comparable or more profound existence alongside our own; they also illustrate the immense and consequential scope of our collective realities,” writes Ogden.

Ogden is, of course, referring to the prevalent historic use of ‘othering’ vs. providing agency to environmental ‘characters’ in novel writing. I write about this in my two articles on character-coupling.

Othering in Literature

The rhetoric of ‘Otherness’ in most fiction is typically portrayed through the singular point of view (POV) and discourse of a protagonist on a journey.³ In most forms of literature the POV ‘voice’ represents the Self, the inclusive ‘us’ (worldview) in its encounter with the Other, which in turn is the ‘not us.’ In his book Orientalism: Western Conceptions of the Orient Edward W. Said contended that for there to even be an ‘us’, there has to be a ‘not-us’. The resulting power dynamic of “them and us,” of Other and Self, is created and controlled by perceptions of the singular POV voice.

In most genres of literature, the Other is often relegated to this dichotomous portrayal. In post-apocalyptic and metaphoric journey stories the Other may be the harsh environment or a calamity through which the protagonist must find their own strength to survive; in military stories it is clearly the enemy, seldom portrayed with compassion or understanding but there to test our hero; in coming-of-age stories it may be the oppressive rule or established world the hero must overcome; in science fiction it may be the hostile or unknowable aliens who must be defeated.

The irony of this way of thinking is made clear in Ogden’s introduction. 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.” He 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.

Through this new paradigm and approach, Ogden contends that “no longer can anthropogenic issues of climate change, trash vortices, deforestation, synthetic pollution, effluence, nuclear waste isolation, or species extinction be concealed from the majority of literary imaginings. Because as the trajectory of once passive, ancillary things and forces find an arena of greater articulation, the Anthropocene becomes an epoch whose hazards affect more than its namesake. Readers are afforded a larger moral and literary connectedness to a greater variety of relatable nonhuman subjects in the throes of this crisis, with that inhuman accordance likewise enlarging the terrains of their own ontological and epistemological perspectives as an ecomimetic strategy furthers the understanding of the nonhuman with each varied literary elaboration.” He adds that the “massive temporal and spatial persistence/distribution of anthropogenic nonhuman ‘hyperobjects’ like plastics, polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs), per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS), or nuclear waste expands the probable aesthetic and political/ethical dimensions of the creative arts.”

Ogden concludes that in such a space of consideration (an allied creative-scientific aesthetic), an intermediacy is established between the literary arts and sciences in which “principal methods, qualities, and philosophies are openly exchanged, and a multimodal expression links the realms of simplified rationalism with pure allegory into a compounded composition of metaphor and description, myth and science, characterization and cause-and-effect, and poetic reveries and empirical rationalism.” This greater perspective expand dynamic probabilities for the inhuman world to experience agency and greater and more meaningful presence, what Ogden calls “a necessary heterogenous representation of both humans and nonhumans within the collective scientific and literary imagination…towards a more meaningful and affective realization.”

How Eco-Fiction Empowers & Animates Nonhuman Subjects

While eco-literature overlaps with many genres, it appears to differ from SF and other genres portrayal of Other through its unique intention to give voice to otherwise voiceless characters, and it often does this through masterful use of character-coupling. Mary Woodbury defines eco-literature or eco-fiction as literature “made up of fictional tales that reflect important connections, dependencies, and interactions between people and their natural environments.” The environment—or an aspect of the environment—plays a major role in eco-literature, either as premise or as itself a character on a journey.

Eco-literature may go beyond raising awareness to link environmental abuse with concepts of jingoistic hubris; it may raise issues of human intersectionality, misogyny, marginalization, oppression of class, privilege, sexuality and race, and misuse of power. Violent acts perpetrated on environment—when environment is personified as ‘character’ and/or coupled directly to a character—elicit powerful emotion and clearly demonstrate how social/human injustice reflects environmental injustice.

Eco-literature is particularly poised to make meaningful character-couplings between mostly human protagonist and environmental characters or representatives. This is because the protagonist provides relatable qualities for easy reader empathy, while the Othered character is often less relatable—often an arcane aspect of the environment, such as water (Memory of Water) or a forest (The Overstory). The protagonist’s link to the Other—often as avatar—provides a readable map for the reader to follow and make their own connection.⁴ In Character Coupling Part 2, I provide examples from several works of eco-fiction, such as The Overstory, Barkskins, The Breathing Hole, The Wiindup Girl, The Bear, Memory of Water, and Dune.

A Changing Narrative

Acknowledging the early influences of animal studies rooted in biocentricity (e.g. Carl Safina, Ogden notes that non-fiction representation of nonhuman life has increased exponentially in the last ten years. Ogden includes the following notable examples: Merlin Sheldrake’s Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds; Robin Wall Kimmerer’s Gathering Moss, and Peter Wohlleben’s The Hidden Life of Trees.

In fiction, Ogden focuses primarily on the narrative of Overstory by Richard Powers but touches on other works such as Jeff VanderMeer’s writing. Says Ogden: “What moves The Overstory’s utilization of personification (of trees) … beyond some simple allegorical misconception of dendrological and botanical being is that the provided anecdote of a tree’s agency in the development of soil, weather, and atmosphere is entirely factual.”

Ogden notes 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…In Munteanu’s limnological characterization of freshwater bodies…[this] creative-scientific work of literature enlarges and redevelops the hierarchy of the taxaonomic ranks originally set out by animal studies. [It] increases the principal tenet of the discipline’s genealogy to include the greater part of all biological (and even inorganic) life in its inhuman narrative.”

Giving Voice to Plants ‘Othered’ to Silence

On looking more closely to the multiform agencies of plants, Ogden returns to Powers’ reference of a “gospel of new forestry”, and asserts that “whether it’s the writings of Suzanne Simard, Robin Wall Kimmerer, Emanuele Coccia, Michael Pollan, or Peter Wohlleben, the assumed contemporary bibliographic references in Powers’ novel alone illustrate the author’s appropriation of this gospel of new forestry. Ogden then adds: “These are creative-scientific hybrid forms and metamorphic figurations that have allowed the agency, narrative, and story of the plant world to become more meaningfully articulated, recognized, and appreciated in the modern moment. They are the informed meldings/hybridities (the issuances of comparative figurations, temporalities, and subjectivities of nonhuman agency) that stand as the antecedents of new and emergent metamorphic texts like The Overstory, and which “shift the terms of representation away from human subjectivity” by embedding new species into the storytelling process.”

Ogden argues that “Like Richard Powers and other creative-scientific writers, Westerford (Powers’s own character in The Overstory) understands climate and biodiversity are ‘failing precisely because no [story] can make the contest for the world seem as compelling as the struggles between a few lost people.’” She realizes 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.’”

This is the silence of ‘The Other.’

I further explore this specific narrative (of non-human agency, particularly of birds, plants, bryophytes and algae) in my upcoming novel (Re)Genesis. You’ll hear more about that book in later posts.

Footnotes:

Ogden describes “Heterogenous Being” as 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.
Ogden explains the use of “inhuman” here by referring to Jeffrey Jerome Cohen’s notes in Stone: An Ecology of the Inhuman, which uses inhuman to “emphasize both difference (‘in-‘ as negative prefix) and intimacy (‘in-‘ as indicator of estranged interiority).” This is akin to the practice of “othering”.
The Other has often been metaphorically portrayed in SF by aliens that lack a distinct voice or viewpoint; some portrayal has reflected a fearful imperialistic colonialism by representing Other as adversary such as an invading monster with no regard for humans (e.g. Robert Heinlein’s The Number of the Beast; H.G. Wells’s War of the Worlds). Kerslake argues that the traits of the Other “fall characteristically—and conveniently—into those spaces we choose not to recognize in ourselves, the ‘half-imagined, half-known: monsters, devils, heroes, terrors, pleasures, desires’ of Said’s ‘Orient’”. The Martians of Ray Bradbury’s Martian Chronicles—who also have no voice—reflect our indigenous peoples under the yoke of settler colonialism and an exploitive resource-extraction mindset. The monster of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein —also with no voice—exemplifies the disabled/deformed unsavory departure from our ‘perfect’ self-image; to be chased, destroyed and nullified.
In some stories the protagonist is Othered in some way, providing a more direct link to the experience of being the Other or being Othered. For instance, in Mishell Baker’s Borderline, disabled protagonist Millie provides the connection to the greater theme of Othering “lesser beings.” In Costi Gurgu’s Recipearium, the protagonists are not human; they are alien creatures that dwell inside the dead carcass of a monster, representing Other as main character.

References:

Descartes, Rene, et. al. 1998. “Discourse on the Method; and Meditations on First Philosophy.” Hacket Pub.

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

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

Latour, Bruno. 2017. “Facing Gaia: Eight Lectures on the New Climatic Regime.” Polity.

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

Morton, Timothy. 2013. “Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World.” University of Minnesota Press.

Munteanu, Nina. 2020. “A Diary in the Age of Water” Inanna Publications, Toronto. 328pp.

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.

Powers, Richard. “The Overstory.” W.W. Norton & Company, New York. 2018. 502pp.

Said, Edward W. “Orientalism: Western Conceptions of the Orient.” Vintage, London, 1978. 432pp.

Woodbury, Mary. “What is Eco-fiction?” Dragonfly.eco. 2016. https://dragonfly.eco/eco-fiction/ Accessed September 15, 2022.

Mist over swelling spring stream, ON (photo and rendition by Nina Munteanu)

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.

Interview with Author Simon Rose on The Stone of the Seer

March 22, 2026February 18, 2026 / thealiennextdoor / Leave a comment

*The Stone of the Seer Trilogy by Simon Rose*

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, we’re looking at his historical fantasy series, The Stone of the Seer.

Nina: What’s the series all about?

Simon: The Stone of the Seer is an exciting historical fantasy series of adventure novels for young adults, primarily set in the turbulent period of the English Civil War.

The Stone of the Seer, book one in the series, features the Vikings, Leonardo da Vinci, and the political turmoil of the 1640s. At Habingdon House, Lady Elizabeth Usborne, Kate, and Tom encounter a magical black stone, mysterious ancient manuscripts, and the incredible time viewing device known as the tempus inpectoris, all while under constant threat from the murderous witchfinder, Daniel Tombes.

In Royal Blood, book two in the series, Lady Elizabeth, Kate, and Tom, along with the tempus inspectoris and the mysterious black Viking stone, are in the heart of London in early 1649, as King Charles prepares to face his accusers at his trial in Westminster Hall, while Elizabeth, Kate, and Tom desperately attempt to evade capture by Daniel Tombes, the witchfinder.

Much of the story in Revenge of the Witchfinder, book three in the series, takes place in the present day, featuring weird dreams, disturbing visions, parallel lives, and a bewildering identity crisis, as Thomas and Katie discover to their horror that not even the passage of centuries can prevent a bloodthirsty witchfinder from the 1640s from seeking his deadly revenge.

Nina: What’s the story behind the story?

Simon: The story, main characters, and some of the settings in the series are fictional but are based on true events and the story features real historical characters, such as King Charles I. The English Civil War was a series of conflicts in England, Scotland, and Ireland in the 1640s and early 1650s. The war originated in the struggle between Charles I and Parliament regarding how the country should be governed.

The king’s defeat in the civil war led to his trial and execution in January 1649. The monarchy was abolished and replaced first by the Commonwealth of England and then the Protectorate, before the monarchy was restored in 1660. However, the defeat of Charles I confirmed that an English monarch could not rule the country without the consent of Parliament, although this wasn’t legally established until the Glorious Revolution in 1688.

Nina: You must have done quite a lot of historical research for this series.

Simon: I did. These are links on my website at www.simon-rose.com to online sources where you can learn more about the historical events, settings, and leading characters from the English Civil War, some of the leading characters during the conflict, historical locations that are mentioned in the text, life in the seventeenth century, and details from other historical periods that are featured in the stories.

Nina: What are you currently working on?

Simon: I always have a few current projects and right now I’m working more books in the same genre as my previously published paranormal Flashback series, as well as a fantasy series, and a historical fiction novel. I also continue to work on the adaptations of my Shadowzone series into screenplays for movies and TV shows, some other scripts, as well as teaching writing courses at the University of Calgary.

Anyone interested in keeping up to date with the projects that I’m working on is always welcome to subscribe to my monthly newsletter, which you can do at www.simon-rose.com.

Nina: You work with other authors as well as on a variety of projects related to writing and publishing, don’t you?

Simon: Yes, I offer coaching, editing, consulting, and mentoring services for writers of novels, short stories, fiction, nonfiction, biographies, and in many other genres, plus do work with writers of scripts and screenplays. I’m also a writing instructor and mentor at the University of Calgary and served as the Writer-in-Residence with the Canadian Authors Association. You can find details of some of the projects I’ve worked on with other authors, along with some references and recommendations, at www.simon-rose.com.

Nina: Where can people buy The Stone of the Seer series?

Simon: The books can be purchased at most of the usual places and there are details on my website at www.simon-rose.com

Thanks Simon, for being my guest here today and the very best of luck with The Stone of the Seer series.

You can learn more about Simon and his work on his website at www.simon-rose.com, where you can also link to him on social media and at other locations online.

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. Visit www.ninamunteanu.ca for the latest on her books. 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.

“Gaia’s Revolution”, Life After Capitalism: The Promise & Spectre of Deep Ecology—Part 1

March 8, 2026May 6, 2026 / thealiennextdoor / Leave a comment

Twin brothers—a brilliant scientist and a gifted engineer—escape the growing racial violence of Berlin, to ‘peaceful’ Canada in a rivalry to control the evolution of the human race.

My novel Gaia’s Revolution, the first of The Icaria Trilogy—releasing March 10, 2026, by Dragon Moon Press—explores a collapsing capitalist society in Canada through ravages of climate change, water shortages, plague, and a failing technology. The story is told through the lives of ambitious twin brothers Eric and Damien Vogel, and the woman who plays them like chess pieces in her gambit to rule the world.

The novel starts on December 13^th, 2022, in Berlin, the day several members of the climate activist group Letzte Generation* to which Damien belongs, are raided by police who seize their computers and phones. Damien is a quiet scholar, an introvert and deep ecologist*, devoted to the teachings of Arne Næss and George Sessions, who promoted an environmental philosophy of eight basic principles of deep ecology. Næss and Sessions advocated that all living beings have intrinsic value, independent of their utility to human needs. Their philosophy has become a movement that promotes a holistic, eco-centric worldview demanding radical, structural changes to human society to prioritize nature’s flourishing.

*Road through a beech tree forest, ON (photo and rendition by Nina Munteanu)*

Damien later meets with his extrovert anarchist brother in Treffpunkt, near the university campus, and they argue ideology and revolution. Eric contends that the only way humanity will survive is to adapt to climate change by somehow overthrowing the bourgeois plutocrats through violent revolution: preventing the small ruling class carving out a comfortable life for itself while the rest of the world suffers terrible deprivation. Eric pulls out the worn copy of B.F. Skinner’s Walden Two from his jacket pocket, slaps it on the table and pushes it toward Damien. “That’s the answer, Dame.”

Each brother plans to create a new humanity: Eric’s plan is to control humanity through gene manipulation and behaviour engineering (aka Walden Two); Damien’s plan is to draw on deep ecology and use environmental triggers with biotechnologies to empower humanity with physical/chemical abilities to adapt to climate and its changing environment via transhumanist AI.

Neither addresses the elephant in the room: population. Only a much-reduced population will ensure success for either plan.

To this point, Eric, who is far more cynical and ruthless, thinks Damien naïve and feckless in his deep ecological view:

Damien too easily prescribes to the old leftist shibboleth of Nature being the answer to everything and Market being evil. His deep ecology utopia would spring from an atavistic rejection of modern life, a return to ‘the ancient farm.’ But how that fantasy could be achieved without a drastic population reduction is beyond his brother’s imagination. Damien fetishizes the natural world. Just like he does their mother. The naïve fool is a blind romantic, refusing to see reality right in front of him: that Nature is ultimately cruel, cold, and preoccupied with its own survival. Just like their mother.–Eric Vogel, Gaia’s Revolution

*Foggy morning on an Ontario marsh in winter (photo and rendition by Nina Munteanu)*

Eight Basic Principles of Deep Ecology*

In 1984, ecologists Arne Næss and George Sessions set out the following Basic Principles of Deep Ecology:

The well-being and flourishing of human and nonhuman Life on Earth have value in themselves (synonyms: intrinsic value, inherent value). These values are independent of the usefulness of the non-human world for human purposes.

Richness and diversity of life forms contribute to the realization of these values and are also values in themselves.

Humans have no right to reduce this richness and diversity except to satisfy vital needs.

The flourishing of human life and cultures is compatible with a substantial decrease of the human population. The flourishing of nonhuman life requires such a decrease.

Present human interference with the nonhuman world is excessive, and the situation is rapidly worsening.

Policies must therefore be changed. These policies affect basic economic, technological, and ideological structures. The resulting state of affairs will be deeply different from the present.

The ideological change is mainly that of appreciating life quality (dwelling in situations of inherent value) rather than adhering to an increasingly higher standard of living. There will be a profound awareness of the difference between big and great.

Those who subscribe to the foregoing points have an obligation directly or indirectly to try to implement the necessary changes.

*Finn Slough old shed, BC (photo by Nina Munteanu)*

Eric plans to address the 5^th Basic Principle of Deep Ecology—present human interference with the nonhuman world is excessive and the situation is rapidly worsening— by using nefarious means to meet the 4^th Basic Principle of Deep Ecology: the flourishing of human life and cultures is compatible with a substantial decrease of the human population and the flourishing of nonhuman life requires such a decrease. With a reduced population, he plans to make the remaining principles (e.g. 6^th and 7^th) realizable through his behaviour engineering.

But Eric hasn’t accounted for fanatical deep ecologist / eco-terrorist Monica Schlange in his plan… (More on this shapeshifting character in Part 2).

*The Icaria Trilogy by Dragon Moon Press*

You can pre-order the ebook of Gaia’s Revolution by Dragon Moon Press on Amazon. Release date is March 10, 2026. The print version will release soon after. Book 2 (Angel of Chaos) and Book 3 (Darwin’s Paradox) of theThe Icaria Trilogy are already available in both ebook and print form.

*Oak leaves light up a dark pine forest in fall, ON (photo by Nina Munteanu)*

References:

Munteanu, Nina. 2026. “Gaia’s Revolution, Part 1 of Icaria Trilogy.” Dragon Moon Press, Calgary, AB. 369 pp.

Munteanu, Nina. 2010. “Angel of Chaos, Part 2 of Icaria Trilogy.” Dragon Moon Press, Calgary, AB. 518 pp.

Munteanu, Nina. 2007. “Darwin’s Paradox, Part 3 of Icaria Trilogy.” Dragon Moon Press, Calgary, AB. 294 pp.

Sessions, George, Bill Devall. 2000. “Deep Ecology: Living as if Nature Mattered.” Gibbs Smith. 267pp.

Skinner, B.F. 1948. “Walden Two” The Macmillan Company, New York. 301pp.

Terminology:

*Deep Ecology: An environmental philosophy and social movement advocating that all living beings have intrinsic value, independent of their utility to human needs. Coined by Arne Næss in 1972, it promotes a holistic, ecocentric worldview—often termed “ecosophy”—that demands radical, structural changes to human society to prioritize nature’s flourishing.

*Letzte Generation: a prominent European climate activist group, founded in 2021, known for its acts of civil disobedience—such as roadblocks, defacing art, and vandalizing structures—to pressure governments on climate action. The term was chosen because they considered themselves to be the last generation before tipping points in the earth’s climate system would be reached. They are mostly active in Germany, Italy, Poland and Canada. In Germany, they have faced accusations of forming a criminal organization, leading to police raids.