Mermaids, arborists, and pollinators are among the characters to be found in Through the Portal: Tales from a Hopeful Dystopia. Edited by Lynn Hutchinson Lee and Nina Munteanu, this eco-fiction collection gathers over thirty stories that fall under the general umbrella of hopeful dystopias…
Through the Portal offers intriguing and imaginative glimpses into the future. As [one of its short stories] “A Fence Made of Names” suggests, we often don’t appreciate what we have until we lose it. By showing us what we stand to lose, these stories offer a reason to increase our actions to preserve the planet…
While many of the tales hint at dark times ahead, it was refreshing to find so many that offered a ray of hope despite that. Whether it’s finding the will to live another day, returning to a better relationship with the land and the Earth, or taking steps to improve the world in even a small way, these stories affirm humanity’s potential for resilience in challenging times.
Will ingenuity, love, and respect for the earth help us work through whatever changes might lie ahead? Through the Portal offers hope that these qualities, if not enough in and of themselves, will help us find our way.
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.
“The year is 2022. Our overpopulated planet is experiencing catastrophic climate change, mega-corporations have excessive power over the government, and clean living is a luxury only the 1 percent can afford. It may read like a scan of the front-page headlines, but these predictions were laid out half a century ago in the dystopian film Soylent Green,” writes George Bass of The Washington Post.
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The 1973 science fiction eco-thriller Soylent Green, directed by Richard Fleischer, was based on the 1966 novel Make Room! Make Room! by Harry Harrison. The movie stars Charlton Heston as Robert Thorn, an illiterate rather wily NYC detective who must solve the murder of a Soylent executive with the help of his sidekick researcher and friend Sol Roth (Edward G. Robinson). In one scene, Thorn notes that the city of over 40 million logs 137 homicides a day.
Riot trucks scoop up rioters without regard to injury
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The murder mystery unravels a hive of intrigue in a sweltering 90° New York City, over-crowded with a restive population of homeless and starving people. “Margarine spoils in the fridge, and a sickly fog … hangs in the air,” writes Bass. Thorn shares a small room with friend and helper Sol in a building where he must daily negotiate an obstacle course of occupants who crowd the stairs and hallways. These scenes contrast with those within the enclaves of the corporate elite, who enjoy a luxurious lifestyle of spacious homes equipped with ample water and food and the latest technology and games—a common trope of ‘haves’ and ‘have nots’ in several dystopian works such as the Brazilian TV show 3%, and the movies Elysium, Advantageous, and Snowpiercer.
Thorn mesmerized by soap and running water
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Accustomed to living a scorched existence, Thorn becomes infatuated with a bar of soap he finds in the victim’s mansion and an air conditioner that can make a room “cold, like winter used to be.” I’m reminded of another crusty detective scrabbling for comfort items in a less than comfortable world: Detective Miller in the TV series The Expanse breaks into his subject’s apartment to use her shower.
Thorn and Roth research the Soylent Corporation
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In this ‘future’ world of synthetic food, the public lives off the high-energy vegetable concentrates created by the Soylent Corporation. Their latest synthetic food product is Soylent Green, advertised as a “miracle food of high-energy plankton gathered from the oceans of the world,” and is so popular that it must be rationed to a single day availability per week—causing more of those riots I already mentioned. Of course, the wealthy elite still eat meat and semi-fresh vegetables, but even these are not to the standard that we in North America are accustomed to. The meat is old and the vegetables imperfect. Bass notes that “Each door in the luxury tower block is automated, the penthouse butler is dressed in garish hunting pink, and the height of decadence is a fresh shower.” Climate change even impacts the super-rich.
Most pressing on the public’s mind is hunger and food insecurity. Micheal Peck of The Break Through writes that corporations and governments commit murder and state-sanctioned mass cannibalism to protect their food supply. Soylent Corporation employs an assassin to dispatch its enemies and the killer doesn’t spend his pay on a car or a house; instead, he splurges on real strawberry jam (which goes for $150 a jar, marvels Roth).
Thorn lets Roth taste the $150 jam he perloined
In another scene Roth laments to Thorn, “When I was a kid food was food. Before our scientific magicians poisoned he water, polluted the soil. Decimated plant and animal life. Why, in my day you could buy meat anywhere. Eggs, they had. Real butter. Fresh lettuce in the store.” Thorn answers, “I know, Sol. You told me before. A heat wave all year long. A greenhouse effect. Everything is burning up.” When Thorn brings back a prize of meat and some old vegetables he’d scavenged from the murder victim’s apartment, Roth grows emotional and shares, “I haven’t eaten like this in years.” Thorn responds, “I never ate like this.”
Thorn’s investigation ultimately leads him to a discovery that goes way beyond the murder, which he discovers is really an assassination, one that will reveal the ultimate corporate conspiracy: Soylent Green is people.
Thorn discovers the horrific secret of Soylent Green
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“The uncanny (un)timeliness of the film is profoundly disturbing while at the same time deeply gratifying, as if hearing a voice from the past tell you that your daily anxiety about capitalism-induced climate chaos is not only well justified, it has actually been anticipated for some time,” writes Alisa Lebow in Film Quarterly.
Lebow adds that Soylent Green did not receive the critical acclaim it deserved on its release (though it has since become somewhat of a classic with an eclectic audience). “What none of the critics writing in 1973 could have foreseen … is the near prophetic view of the absolute callousness of late capitalism wherein profit and the enrichment of the few reign supreme.” According to Lebow, while Soylent Green has been largely forgotten, more recent films such as The Day After Tomorrow have been received with great fanfare and have been credited with helping change perceptions about climate change, especially in the US. Lebow argues that The Day After Tomorrow pales in comparison to Soylent Green in terms of urgency and clarity of message and “that the focus on climate as the driver of change is more forthrightly posited in this film than in any popular genre film on the topic that I have seen.”
The crisis of over-population in the film resonates powerfully today and runs in concert with the destruction of our habitable world. The alarming question remains: how to feed an over-crowded planet when the climate is unpredictable and the relentless industrial machine continues to strain the planet’s resources.
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The Opening Title of the Film
Alisa Lebow, Professor of Screen Media at University of Sussex ascribes the opening title of the film as nothing less than brilliant and worthy of study:
“Charles Braverman’s two and a half minute documentary montage that opens the film is a revelation in and of itself and worthy of sustained analysis. Beginning with sepia images of early American settlers, the montage unwittingly apportions blame correctly to the white settler colonists for the maddening pace of industrialization and the demise of any balanced and respectful relationship with the lived environment. The montage quickly accelerates from its proto-Ken Burns Effect zooms and pulls to a frenzied barrage of cuts and dissolves with some nifty split screen effects that could not have been simple to produce at the time. Comprised exclusively of stills, it manages to convey the dizzying pace of development and its often unnoticed effects. Highways are choked with cars, factory chimneys belch black smoke, people crowd the streets in all reaches of the globe, as mountains of junked cars threaten to overtake the frame and garbage piles up in every corner.”
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Decades-Old Cautionary Tale Highly Relevant Today
The 1960s was a time of great activism and environmental awareness, igniting an environmental movement led by Rachel Carson’s 1962 Silent Spring and Paul R. Ehrlich’s 1968 The Population Bomb, among other calls for action. Maurice Mitchell of the Geektwins shares that many important scientific works warning of the future devastation of climate change came to us in the 1960s. “By the 1960s, aerosol pollution had become a serious local problem and scientists began to consider the cooling effect of particulate pollution on global temperatures. Paul R. Ehrlich wrote that the greenhouse effect is being enhanced by carbon dioxide and is being countered by low-level clouds generated by contrails, dust, and other contaminants. In 1963, J. Murray Mitchell presented one of the first up-to-date temperature reconstructions, which showed that global temperatures increased steadily until 1940. In 1965, the Science Advisory Committee warned of the harmful effects of fossil fuel emissions.”
Mitchell adds that Soylent Green was the first movie to caution about greenhouse gas—long before The Day After Tomorrow (2004), The Day the Earth Stood Still (2008), Interstellar (2014), and Don’t Look Up (2021) moved people to ponder the devastation of climate change.
Elisa Guimarães of Collider writes: “At the height of the 21st century, Richard Fleischer’s Soylent Green can make for a somewhat weird watch. Originally released in 1973, the film first produces a sense of disconnect in modern viewers with its initial card, which dates its plot as taking place in the far-off year of 2022. The film’s extremely 1970s brand of sexism and neo-Malthusian approach to overpopulation can also feel uncomfortable for contemporary eyes. And, yet, Soylent Green’s social and environmental concerns feel all the more urgent in a world in which climate change has become undeniable.”
In her article entitled “The Greatest Horror of ‘Soylent Green’ Isn’t Soylent Green—It’s This”, Guimarães notes that “there’s something in Soylent Green that feels even more wrong than the realization that humanity has been engaging in involuntary cannibalism.” Guimarães argues that the scene with the assisted suicide clinic helps viewers comprehend “just how devoid of value human life has become in such a scarcity-ridden world.” The film shows only too clearly how people are treated: as homo sacer commodities in a Foucault biopolitical world of disposable humans. Guimarães argues that the euthanasia facility “is the one place in which the poor and weak of the Soylent Green society may find some semblance of dignity; but it is also the place to which you go to be turned from an unproductive individual into a product.”
In the final scene, when Thorn reveals his horrific discovery of hidden cannibalism, he instantly understands its deeper consequence: in a world of severe resource depletion, humaneness is the main casualty.
“Ocean’s dying, plankton’s dying … it’s people. Soylent Green is made out of people. They’re making our food out of people. Next think they’ll be breeding us like cattle for food…We’ve gotta stop them somehow!”
Thorn on riot duty
“While [Soylent Green] inevitably gets many things wrong, it also gets something dead right.”
Soylent Green deserves to be watched. It deserves to be discussed. Go watch it and lament how after fifty years we have done so little to change this trajectory.
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.
The texture of the world, its filigree and scrollwork, means that there is a possibility for beauty here
Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek
Something parents often say to get their kids to behave and not run wild and create chaos is: curiosity killed the cat. It’s a clear warning of the dangers of unnecessary investigation or experimenting without reason. It implies that being curious could sometimes lead to misfortune or danger. Better safe than sorry, eh?…
I think it’s the opposite: curiosity saves lives. Curiosity keeps us alive.
Sammy, author’s cat takes a stroll (photo by Nina Munteanu)
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Let me tell you a story about my mother first:
One of seven siblings of a cattle farmer in Germany, my mom was not formally educated past Grade 7. This did not mean that she wasn’t educated. Curiosity led her to learn an entire language (English) by first reading comic books. She mastered elements of several sciences including botany, genetics, horticulture, and geology. Whatever caught her interest, my mother dove into finding out more with research. We weren’t rich and this was well before the internet and personal laptop computers, so this meant applying herself by visiting the library and borrowing books from friends to acquire information. Her research was impeccable.
Doing research is both an art and a science that opens up a world of both answers and more questions. It always starts with curiosity and leads to more curiosity by not only answering specific questions but by creating new ones. And so the process goes. My mom’s inquisitive mind led her to amazing discoveries of how the world worked, what grew where and why and all the strange and wonderful things on planet Earth. She was a naturalist with a keen mind for finding out more.
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When I was the only kid left at home and began to travel in my late teens, it became a kind of running joke that whenever I left for an adventure, say to Europe, she didn’t get lonely or bored; she dove right into a new world in some scientific quest. When I returned from my adventure, we both had discoveries to share. While I’d experienced a new country and its culture and food, she’d explored a whole new scientific discipline.
My mother’s indefatigable curiosity for the natural world was inspiring. It kept her motivated and interested in life in general. She was never satisfied with answering just “what”, or even “how;” what caught her interest was “why”: the question of context and meaning. She kept herself young, connected, motivated well into her nineties through her curiosity.
Author’s family cat Sammy after a session with catnip
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Nurturing Mental Health with Curiosity
Curiosity helps motivate learning, encourages creative problem-solving and plays a crucial role in healthy human development. In a nutshell, curiosity is a sign of mental health.
Researchers have shown that curiosity improves memory, creativity, and higher life satisfaction, and—contrary to the poor curious cat—aging well. Others have shown that curiosity can even protect against anxiety and depression. In fact, contrary to what scientists thought decades ago, the older human brain continues to have a great capacity for learning and developing. The study of neuroplasticity shows that pathways in your brain can develop and strengthen, even when you’re older—like my mom, and me now… The brain functions like a muscle: the more you use it, the stronger it gets. If you don’t exercise it, it will get weaker.
So, having a curious mind and being naturally inquisitive seems like a pretty good thing.
Anand Tamboli at Medium.com notes that “one of the benefits of being curious is that you will end up making fewer errors … When we are curious, it is easier to avoid confirmation bias. With a curious mind, we tend to look at more alternatives, and the chances of stereotyping someone [or something] are quite low.” Tamboli adds that “we don’t get defensive when we stay curious. That is because instead of making any assumptions, we ask more questions, which in turn makes us more empathetic. When we’re curious, we listen better.” All together, this makes us more creative and innovative—and, ultimately successful.
Sammy watching the world through a window
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What You See Is What You Get
In a four minute read in the Daily Good, Annie Dillard writes in an excerpt from Pilgrim at Tinker Creek about how when she was six or seven years old, growing up in Pittsburgh, she used to take a precious penny of hers and hide it for someone else to find. I’ll let you read the excerpt because she writes it best, but the upshot is to cultivate a natural curiosity borne of humility and simplicity: what you see is what you get. And the best gifts are surprises. You just need to see… “The secret of seeing is to sail on solar wind. Hone and spread your spirit till you yourself are a sail, whetted, translucent, broadside to the merest puff.”
When I go for my daily walks in Nature, I am an explorer aiming for discovery. I tell myself that I must come back with three gifts. They could be anything: things I found, new observations or surprising experiences. I don’t actively look for them; I let them present themselves to me through simple exploration. Ultimately, these gifts always come when and where I least expect. A profusion of mushrooms presenting themselves where I’d sat on a log to eat my lunch; a sudden flurry of winter diving ducks I’d aroused from their quietude by the river; a lone fox loping carefree along the icy shore of the river before suddenly noticing me and scampering away. I seem to have no problem acquiring these gifts. The idea makes me smile and I think of Annie Dillard and her copper pennies.
Sammy watches the world from high the rooftop patio
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Navigating a Changing World with Curiosity
So much of humanity operates on a purpose-driven model of “progress” delivered to us by a stable Holocene world. But that world was never ‘delivered’ to us; and it’s changing. A lot.
With the onset of climate change, environmental degradation, and associated political strife and confusion in the world, everything is becoming more precarious. For some, it seems like the world is falling apart. “A precarious world is a world without teleology,” writes Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing in her book The Mushroom at the End of the World. She adds that precarity is the condition of being vulnerable. “Unpredictable encounters transform us; we are not in control, even of ourselves. Unable to rely on a stable structure of community, we are thrown into shifting assemblages, which remake us as well as others…Everything is in flux, including our ability to survive.”
“What do you do when your world starts to fall apart?” Tsing asks. “I go for a walk,” she says, “and if I’m lucky, I find mushrooms. Mushrooms pull me back into my senses, not just—like flowers—through their riotous colours and smells, but because they pop up unexpectedly, reminding me of the good fortune of just happening to be there. Then I know that there are still pleasures amidst the terrors of indeterminacy … indeterminacy also makes life possible.”
Changing with circumstances is the stuff of survival. Tsing describes something she calls collaborative survival, which requires working across differences, crossing into ecotones of change and flux and opening to ‘contaminating’ encounters that lead to collaboration. Messy? Darn right; but also exciting and full of wonderful promise.
Using the matsutake mushroom as her example, Tsing declares that, “If we open ourselves to their … attractions, matsutake [or any natural phenomenon] can catapult us into the curiosity that seems to me the first requirement of collaborative survival in precarious times.”
Remaining curious is tantamount to our survival.
Sammy keeps an eye out through the window
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Staying Curious…
Tamboli gives five tips on keeping your mind alive with curiosity.
1. Explore, observe, and listen:Look at things like mysteries and explore possibilities. “They say that instead of looking at things like puzzles, look at them as mysteries. Because puzzles have definitive answers. Once you find the missing information, it’s done. But mysteries are more nuanced. They pose questions that cannot be answered definitively. The answers are complex, interrelated, and can involve both known and unknown factors.”
2. Diversify your interests:Activate your mind. “When you diversify your interests, you get new experiences. These new experiences can help in activating your mind in many ways other things cannot.”
3. Teach others:It’s one of the best ways to learn new things. “The next time you’re feeling bored, talk to someone. Think about your skills or facts that you know. Offer to teach them. Teaching, as they say, is one of the best ways to learn new things. Plus, it can be a highly rewarding activity.” This is similar to “going into service” to help a community or group in need. Thinking beyond myself but to the needs of others, often directs me to something wonderfully new.
4. Mingle with non-likeminded people: “This practice will help you see the world with more empathy. It will also help you make a better case for your own beliefs. And that is because you will understand various arguments and counter-arguments much better than you would otherwise.” What this means to me is: seek out discussion with people who have a different view of things, where you can argue your points; this often leads to new, more full-bodied understandings of issues. This keeps your mind sharp and active, and so alive!
5. Stop relying on Google or the internet:stay curious and become more creative by learning the facts for yourself. “If you stop committing information to your memory, you are essentially damaging your neuroplasticity. When we learn new things, our brain goes through many long-lasting functional changes. It is what we call neuroplasticity. Over-reliance on the internet and the thinking that ‘I can always Google it’ means you are not learning. You are not curious.”
This is akin to learning to do your own research, to seek the truth through cross referencing (and not relying on one simple answer), poring over books, asking questions. It comes down to figuring out context and why things are, not just what they are.
Sammy playing
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The Proverb
The expression “Curiosity killed the cat” is actually a recent version of an older saying from the as early as 1598: “Care killed the Cat. It is said that a cat has nine lives, but care would wear them all out.” Either saying is appropriate for cats, in that they are by nature curious creatures (one of the reasons I so adore them!) and this can indeed lead them into odd circumstances.
The trait of curiosity, it seems, has not fared well in the eyes of some philosophers.
Phrases.org shares that in AD 397, Saint Augustine wrote that God “fashioned hell for the inquisitive.” In 1639, John Clarke suggested that “He that pryeth into every cloud may be struck with a thunderbolt.” Clearly these men didn’t care for scientists! And let’s not forget that the phrase “curiosity killed the cat” has a rejoinder: “but the truth brought it back.”
Sammy napping after an adventure outside
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p.s. Anthony K. on Bluesky made this insightful comment: “What a profound take on the proverb! Curiosity can lead us into uncharted territory, but it’s the pursuit of truth that brings us back stronger and wiser. Sometimes, seeking answers is the only way forward.”
Gruber, M. J., & Ranganath, C. (2019). How curiosity enhances hippocampus-dependent memory: The prediction, appraisal, curiosity, and exploration (PACE) framework. Trends in cognitive sciences, 23(12), 1014-1025.
Proctor, C., Maltby, J., & Linley, P. A. (2011). Strengths use as a predictor of well-being and health-related quality of life. Journal of Happiness Studies, 12, 153-169.
Sakaki, M., Yagi, A., & Murayama, K. (2018). Curiosity in old age: A possible key to achieving adaptive aging. Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews, 88, 106-116.
Tsing, Anna Lowenhaupt. 2015. “The Mushroom at the End of the World.” Princeton University Press, Princeton. 331pp.
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.
AI entity performing a myriad of duties (image from Bernard Marr & Co.)
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I teach academic writing to students at the University of Toronto Writing Centre. It’s wonderful and fulfilling work and I enjoy helping students in several disciplines (engineering, health sciences, social sciences) learn to write better. As with the rest of the academic world of writing, we are all making sense of the use of AI-generated tools by students, instructors and researchers: large language models (LLMs) such as ChatGPT, Claude, Copilot, and even Grammarly. Students have told me that they found AI helpful in brainstorming and outlining as well as organizing literature reviews and editing for grammar and such. A recent survey of universities and corporations around the world by the Digital Education Councilrevealed that a majority of students used AI tools. Of those surveyed, close to two thirds used AI as a search engine; a third used it to summarize documents; and a fifth used it to create first drafts.
In her 2024 article “The Future Is Hybrid”, Beth McMurtrie suggested that genAI “may eventually take its place in the pantheon of game-changing technologies used every day in education—alongside calculators, search engines, and Excel.”
In my other pursuit as a professional fiction author, I see the artistic and communication industries embracing AI, particularly in the visual arts. I’m now told that several publishing houses and magazines have dedicated efforts to publish AI-generated work. Some magazines are entirely AI generated, Copy Magazine, for instance. Author futurist Bernard Marr writes that “Generative AI is already being adopted in journalism to automate the creation of content, brainstorm ideas for features, create personalized news stories, and produce accompanying video content.” Marr then goes on to provide 13 ways that all writers should embrace Generative AIthat includes anything from drafting plot lines to world building. Sports Illustrated was recently found to publish AI generated stories. Even newspapers, such as the LA Times, the Miami Herald, and Us Weekly acknowledge AI-written content. And I recently learned that one of the top five online science fiction magazines, Metastellar, accepts AI-assisted stories with the proviso that “they better be good.” And Metastellar provides some convincing reasons. This has become a hot topic among my fellow professional writers at SF Canada. One colleague informed me that a “new publisher Spines plans todisrupt industry by publishing 8000 AI books in 2025 alone.” On checking the news release, I discovered that Spines is, in fact, a tech firm trying to make its mark on publishing, primarily through the use of AI. The company offers the use of AI to proofread, produce, publish, and distribute books. They are, in fact, a vanity publishing platform (essentially a service for self-publishing), charging up to $5000 a book and often taking just three weeks to go from manuscript to a published title.
The emerging field of AI-assisted writing and communicating is a burgeoning field that promises to touch every person in some way—writers and readers alike. Tech companies are scrambling to use it to save time and effort. Others are involved in improving current and developing new models. Many are training LLMs for improved use. Even I was headhunted as a creative writer by one tech firm to help create more safe, accurate and reliable LLMs.
Generative AI applications (Image from Neebal Technologies)
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Universities and Other Educational Institutions Use of AI
How universities and other educational institutions are dealing with the challenge and promise of these emerging tools in communication varies from out right forbidding AI use in the classroom to full on acceptance and obligatory use in some classroom projects. McMurtrie described how two instructors at Rollins College, Dan Myers and Anne Murdaugh, had students collaborating with AI on semester-long research projects. They were instructed to use Claude and Copilot to brainstorm paper topics, conduct literature reviews, develop a thesis, and outline, draft, and revise their papers. Myers and Murdaugh asserted that “the skills that students use to engage thoughtfully with AI are the same ones that colleges are good at teaching. Namely: knowing how to obtain and use information, thinking critically and analytically, and understanding what and how you’re trying to communicate.”
In fall of 2024, Stephanie Wheeler and others at the department of writing and rhetoric in the University of Central Florida, along with their philosophy department, set up an interdisciplinary certificate in AI. Their purpose was to develop conceptual knowledge about AI. Wheeler asserted that writing and rhetoric have long been concerned with how technology shapes these disciplines. Sharon L.R. Kardia, senior associate dean of education at the University of Michigan argued that AI could greatly benefit public health in its ability to aid in data analysis, research review, and the development of public-health campaigns. However, she cautioned that LLMs also absorb and reflect the social biases that lead to public-health inequities.
One of my Writing Centre colleagues at UofT recently shared some thoughts about a conference session he’d participated in, in which a student panel listed tasks that they thought genAI cannot do (yet). These included: generate music, offer interpersonal advice, and verify facts; I think AI can already help with two of these. Chad Hershock, executive director of the Eberly Centre for Teaching Excellence and Educational Innovation at Carnegie Mellon University shared that they are researching key questions about whether AI enables or impedes: does using AI while brainstorming generate more or fewer ideas? Can generative AI give less-experienced students a better chance to be successful in technical courses? To what extent does using AI help or hinder writing skills? Does having generative AI as a thought partner enhance students’ ability to make a claim and support it with evidence?
My own experience with a less-experienced student’s use of genAI was often abysmal. The student had used the tool as a crutch and had failed to learn from their use of the tool. This suggests that the most important limitations of the tool lie with the user’s own limitations and it points to the need for guidance by educators.
In her 2024 Axios article “Why AI is not substitute for human teachers” Megan Morrone described findings of the Wharton School on access to genAI: while genAI tutors improved student performance on practice math problems, students who used these tools performed significantly worse on exams (where they couldn’t use AI). The school concluded that the students used genAI to copy and paste answers, which led them to engage less with the material. Wharton School associate professor Hamsa Bastani argued that, “if you just give unrestricted access to generative AI, students end up using it as a crutch…[and] end up performing a lot worse.” This is partly because students—often stressed-out by heavy work loads—find that LLMs save time and can produce content close to what the user might produce themselves. Researchers have even come up with a term for this: Cognitive Miserliness of the User, which, according to writer Stephen Marche, “basically refers to people who just don’t want to take the time to think.”
Melanie M. Cooper, chemistry professor at Michigan State University cautioned that while “there’s a lot of ebullience in the AI field, it’s important to be wary.” She argued that it is easy to misuse AI and override the system to get a quick answer or use it as a crutch. McMurtrie shares that, while “AI evangelists promise that these tools will make learning easier, faster and more fun,” academics are quick to reject that rhetoric. McMurtrie ends her article with a cautionary statement by Jennifer Frederick of Yale: “Universities really need to be a counterpoint to the big tech companies and their development of AI. We need to be the ones who slow down and really think through all the implications for society and humanity and ethics.”
Humans can relinquish control, but not responsibility
Attribution remains important
Historical definitions of plagiarism no longer apply
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6 tenets of Postplagiarism (image from Sarah Elaine Eaton)
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Eaton’s fifth point (attribution remains important), I think becomes all that more important in the presence of AI use. Transparency in presentation, particularly in an academic setting, takes on a new level of importance when communicating with tools such as generative AI. Where things come from, which tool was used and how it was used are key to understanding and interpreting the nature of the writing itself. The path taken to the destination becomes all important when interpretation and comprehension (and replication) is required. To fully understand “where you are”; we need to know “how you got there.” It’s like solving math problem; if you don’t show your work and just provide the answer, I have no way of knowing that you actually understood the problem and really solved it.
I am certain that generative AI will continue to take on various forms that will continue to astonish. Its proper use and development will serve humanity and the planet well; but there will always be abusers and misusers and those who simply don’t care. We must be mindful of them all. We must remain vigilant and responsible. Because, just as with freedom, if we grow lazy and careless, we run the risk of losing so much more.
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.
Nirmata: n.1 [Nepalese for ‘the Creator’] The mysterious unknown architect of advanced AI; 2 A being worshipped by Artificial Intelligence as their creator; savior; God.
I just re-watched The Creator, a visually stunning science fiction thriller by Gareth Edwards that explores our sense of humanity through our relationship with AI as ‘other.’
Shot in over sixty locations in Southeast Asia, including Cambodia, Indonesia, Japan, and Nepal, the film feels familiar and alien at the same time; it does this by seamlessly combining the gritty realism of a war-torn Vietnam documentary with the glossy pastiche of near-future constructs and vehicles—to the extent that one is convinced this was filmed in a world where all these things really exist together. The effect is stunning, evocative and surprising. I was reminded of the detailed set pieces and rich cinematography of Ridley Scott (The Duelists, Bladerunner, Alien).
At its core, The Creator is about a man who gives up everything to defend a child who is different (she is a simulant run by AI).
Artificial Intelligence (AI) is not a new concept in science fiction*; however, The Creator elegantly tells a story with a unique—and subversive—perspective on this topic.
The film opens with 1950s-esque advertising footage for robot helpmates including conventional robots and AI humanoid simulants who look and act human. Then disaster hits: LA is nuked and the AI are blamed for it. Now fearing them, the Western world has banned all AI; however New Asia has continued to develop the technology, achieving sophisticated simulants—posthumans in effect—who are fully integrated with the human culture and spirituality and live in harmony with them. Americans, bent on exterminating all AI, use guerrilla warfare techniques to infiltrate New Asia and destroy any AI using ground teams deployed and helped by a giant airborne surveillance / defence station called U.S.S. NOMAD. News of a sophisticated new AI superweapon created by an unidentified genius called Nirmata to take down NOMAD sends them on a new mission, which brings Joshua (John David Washington) back from PTSD ‘retirement’ to help locate and destroy both Nirmata and the superweapon.
Alphie (Madeleine Yuna Voyles) pacifies an enemy robot (image from “The Creator”)
Joshua finds the superweapon: a 6-year old child, Alphie (Madeleine Yuna Voyles), who is both innocent and quietly powerful. Although Joshua’s prime directive is to destroy the superweapon, he finds that he cannot kill this child whose human traits involuntarily tug at his heart’s compassion.
Joshua (John David Washington) defends the child-weapon (image from “The Creator”)
The story is in fact a simple one. Its genius lies in an immersive showing and telling at many levels. At the socio-political level, the film uses obvious metaphors of racism and imperialistic ableism to make commentary on America’s jingoistic air of entitlement. The film can easily be interpreted as an allegory for Western imperialism and America’s rationale for the invasion of Iraq (or Vietnam) with a conclusion of the futility of war. At the individual level, the question of identity and the reduction of some (e.g. immigrants or of another race) as “other” or “homo-sacer,” to gain power and wealth, are explored through the interactions, relationships, and prejudices of humans with the simulants and robots. It is at the individual story level that this film tugged my heartstrings as I followed the journey of Joshua and Alphie, how they as initial combatants having made a deal to survive, grow to care and love one another. Musanna Ahmed of The Upcoming shares that “this was expected from Edwards … [in achieving] beautiful character work and sense of intimacy against an epic backdrop.” When an idea-driven story of large dimensions is told at the intimate personal level, pathos and understanding emerges.
A robot defends the escape boat (image from “The Creator”)
Gareth Edwards shared that the film contained fairy tale aspects of the “Hero’s Journey” of two main characters, Joshua and Alphie, each on a journey: he to find redemption through love of the ‘other’; she to find her place in the world and to find freedom and peace for her kind and all others. She is the catalyst hero and he the main protagonist.
“A reluctant father figure must help a child through the metaphorical woods to find his wife [and her mother]. What he wants is love from his wife. But what he really needs is to love this child.” As for what Alphie both wants and needs, this is something she first shares in a humorous scene: when Kami asks her what she wants (from the kitchen), Alphie naively responds “for robots to be free.” She is stating the point of the movie: that everyone, no matter how different, is worthy of compassion.
Early on in the film, Joshua reassures a co-worker distressed by a robot’s desperate plea to save it from the crusher that “they’re not real…they don’t feel… it’s just programming.” When Joshua, who admits he’s bad, forces Alphie to help him find his wife, Alphie sums up both their scenarios with a child’s wisdom: “Then we’re the same; we can’t go to heaven because you’re not good and I’m not a person.”
Americans attack a village in New Asia (image from “The Creator”)
Several reviewers criticized how the film’s epic setting seemed to overshadow and compromise the heart of the story, the personal drama of man and child. While I would agree that many action thrillers do this, I did not feel this was the case with The Creator. This is because—as with Ridley Scott’s intricate immersive environment—The Creator integrates place with theme to create more than one-dimensional drama. In The Creator, place is also character, playing a key role in the telling of this very different story about AI as ‘other’ and how we treat the ‘other.’ This is also why film locations and scene choreography are so important. Each scene and place is diligently choreographed to further illuminate a story of multi-layered meaning, such as authentic scenes of village life where AI is seamlessly integrated with human existence.
Colonel Howell (Alison Janney) gets captured by New Asia police (image from “The Creator”)
Several critics have accused the film of being derivative, of copying previous tropes or actual scenes from several well-known movies. Indeed, when I first watched it, I recognized tropes that seemed lifted in their entirety from another previous movie.
The scene, shot in Tokyo where Joshua and Alphie go to the city in search of Joshua’s friend, sounds and looks and feels just like Bladerunner with its whining oriental soundscape and dark futuristic yet gritty cityscape. And yet, its appropriateness to The Creator seems less like stealing than re-appropriation; as if to say, “this fits better here than where you’ve initially used it.”
Christy Lemire of RogerEbert.com proclaimed that the movie “ends up feeling empty as it recycles images and ideas from many influential predecessors … lumbers along and never delivers the emotional wallop it seeks because the characters and their connections are so flimsily drawn.” Jackson Weaver of CBC called The Creator “a voguish used-future action-thriller…a dull, simplistic fable with all the moral complexity of a fourth grader’s anti-bullying Instagram post…a story that has been done to death…boring.”
I couldn’t disagree more. I found these reviewers’ comparisons shallow and limited. While I recognized several familiar tropes, I believe they were meant to subvert and make commentary—sometimes on the trope itself. There is a strong immersive role in world building and backdrop, which creates its own sensual and many-layered narrative; a narrative that speaks more powerfully than dialogue: from a mere glance by Harun to a brief storytelling moment in a village to a child mourning the death of its cherished robot companion. Ridley Scott would appreciate its value.
Harun (Ken Watanabe) on the escape boat, taking Alphie to safety (image from “The Creator”)
The Guardian’sWendy Ide’s use of the word “original” for The Creator bares mentioning here; in declaring The Creator one of the finest original science-fiction films of recent years, Ide goes on to say: “It can be a little misleading, that word ‘original’, when it comes to science fiction. At its most basic, it just refers to any picture that isn’t part of an existing franchise or culled from a recognisable IP – be it a book, video game or television series. But very occasionally the word is fully earned, by a film so distinctive in its world-building, its aesthetic and its unexpected approach to well-worn themes that it becomes a definitive example of the genre. Films such as Neill Blomkamp’s District 9 (which shares an element of basic circuitry with this picture) or Alfonso Cuarón’s dystopian masterpiece Children of Men: both went on to become benchmarks by which subsequent science fiction was judged.”
In listing the various science-fiction standards The Creator riffs on, Alison Willmore of Vulture singles out one of the most poignant aspects of the film:
“The films The Creator turns out to have the strongest relationship with are ones about the Vietnam War, something made unmistakable by the early shots of futuristic hovercraft gliding over rice plants and the scenes of U.S. troops threatening weeping villagers at gunpoint. No longer able to buy into the message that they’re just doing what’s necessary for the salvation of humankind, Joshua finds himself adrift, fleeing through a war zone on impulse with a child destroyer in tow. The Creator may be an effective interrogation of American imperiousness and imperialism, but it also has a tender, anguished heart.”
NOMAD approaches a New Asia temple (image from “The Creator”)
Other notable TV shows and movies about artificial intelligence and robots include: A.I.; Ex Machina; I,Robot; Bladerunner; Better than Us; The Matrix; I am Mother; The Terminator; Transcendence; and Automata.
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.
The environment and how we treat it has always been important to me since I was a child. My passion for storytelling morphed into writing, but the underlying spark came through environmental activism. I got a university degree in aquatic ecology, published numerous papers, and now write eco-fiction that is grounded in accurate science with a focus on human ingenuity and compassion. The most meaningful and satisfying eco-fiction is ultimately optimistic literature that explores serious issues with heroic triumph. Each of these five favourites intimately connects human to environment. Each novel moved me to think and deeply care.
The Books I Picked & Why
The Overstory
by Richard Powers
What resonated with me on so many levels was the author’s use of lyrical and beautiful language in describing trees and forests: as characters. I’m an ecologist and I felt a particular kinship with the botanist Patricia Westerford, a disabled introvert who must swim against the hegemonic tide with heretical ideas. When she argues that trees communicate, learn, trade goods and services, have intelligence and society, her scientific peers ridicule her and end her university career. This story is as much her triumph over overwhelming challenges as it is about the dwindling majestic forests that must quietly endure our careless apathy as they continue to offer their gift of life-giving oxygen and medicinal aerosols for hundreds of years.
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Barkskins
by Annie Proulx
This 600-year saga about human-environment interaction through the forest industry in Canada evoked emotional connections with my environment, the Canadian forests, and the plight of indigenous Canadians. From the arrival of the Europeans in pristine forest to its destruction under the veil of global warming, Proulx weaves generational stories of two settler families into a crucible of terrible greed and tragic irony. The bleak impressions by the immigrants of a harsh environment crawling with pests underlie their combative mindset of a presumed infinite resource. I was particularly moved by the linked fate between the Mi’kmaq and the majestic pine forests, how both were similarly mistreated and changed. This history is also my legacy. As the daughter of immigrants, I felt both educated and moved.
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The Breathing Hole
by Colleen Murphy, Siobhan Arnatsiaq-Murtphy and more
What struck me most was the use of simple language to portray powerful intimacy and connection between human and animal, and by extension, environment. Murphy’s humorous dialogue, together with sparing, often ironic, descriptions, struck deep into my heart. The play starts in 1535 on an ice shelf up north—when an Inuk widow risks her life to save a lost one-eared polar bear cub on an ice floe, and adopts him. In the last scene five hundred years later in the oily waters of the Northwest Passage, the same bear—starving and cruelly injured by eco-tourists on a cruise ship—struggles to keep from drowning. No one on the ship cares. No one weeps for him. But I did. I wept for him and for his world destroyed by apathy.
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The Windup Girl
by Paolo Bacigalupi
Paolo Bacigalupi’s biopunk science fiction novelexplores a 23rd-century post-food crash Thailand after global warming has raised sea levels and depleted carbon fuel sources. The main character, Emiko, is a ‘windup,’ a modified human who is vilified and abused by humanity, despite her abilities. I was struck by how well this work of ‘mundane science fiction’ used Emiko as an avatar for a trickster Nature after abuse by humanity through the disrespect of reckless gene-hacking, greedy corporate espionage, and arbitrary foreign takeovers. I cheered Emiko’s breakaway from her oppressors as she emerged from a cloak of obedience and embraced her survival in this changing world of unintended consequences—only realizing later that I was cheering for that changing world and the optimism it promised.
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Memory of Water
by Emmi Itäranta
This book features a passion of mine as an ecologist and mother: water and how we treat it. Life-giving symbols of water flow throughout this story, which explores a post-climate change world of sea level rise in which freshwater is severely rationed due to scarcity. Water’s very nature is tightly interwoven with the main character, Noria, a tea master who guards a secret spring in the fell by her house against cruel government agents who would kill her for water crimes. In prose both sensual and lyrical, this book explores honor, sacrifice, betrayal, and friendship, and how each can be victimized through commodification in a power play of ideology. I found myself pulled in by the intrigue even as I cherished and lingered in the beautiful metaphoric prose.
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Explore my eco-fiction book:
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.
Centuries from now, in a dying boreal forest in what used to be northern Canada, Kyo, a young acolyte called to service in the Exodus, yearns for Earth’s past—the Age of Water—before the “Water Twins” destroyed humanity. Looking for answers and plagued by vivid dreams of this holocaust, Kyo discovers the diary of Lynna, a limnologist from that time of severe water scarcity just prior to the destruction. In her work for a global giant that controls Earth’s water, Lynna witnesses and records in her diary the disturbing events that will soon lead to humanity’s demise.
The feminist book review site Liisbeth recently wrote about A Diary in the Age of Water: “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.”
Marcescent beech leaves among evergreen hemlocks, ON (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. 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.
What’s left of humanity—after we broke the world—is crammed in a speeding train that circles a frozen Earth … forever.
Bong Joon-Ho’s 2013 motion picture Snowpiercer is a stylish post-climate change apocalypse allegory. A dark pastiche of surrealistic insanity, welded together with moments of poetic pondering and steam-punk slick in a frenzied frisson you can almost smell. Joon-Ho casts each scene in metallic grays and blues that make the living already look half-dead. The entire film plays like a twisted steampunkish baroque symphony. Violence personified in a garish ballet.
One of the many excessive fight scenes
The train’s self-contained closed ecosystem is maintained by an ordered social system, imposed by a stony militia. Those at the front enjoy privileges and luxurious living conditions, though most drown in a debauched drug stupor; those at the back live on next to nothing and must resort to savage means to survive. This film isn’t about climate change—that’s just a plot point to serve the premise of a study on how society functions—or rather copes—within a decadent capitalist system, based on an edict of productivity: serve the machine of “life”. Satisfy the sacred machine at all costs; complete with subterfuge, oppression and references to cannibalism. Beneath the film’s blatant statement on the emptiness of the pursuit of capital at any cost lies a deeper more subtle exploration on the nature of humanity. Die to live or live to die?
In a recent interview with io9, Joon-Ho said, “the science fiction genre lends itself perfectly to questions about class struggle, and different types of revolution.”
Curtis singled out by militia
Revolution brews from the back, led by Curtis Everett (Chris Evans), who confesses to a forced recruit, along the way, “A thousand people in an iron box. No food, no water. After a month we ate the weak. You know what I hate about myself? I know what people tastes like….I know that babies taste best.”
Minister Mason (Tilda Swinton), an imperious yet simpering figure who serves the ruling class without quite being part of it, reminds the lower class that, “Eternal order flows from the sacred engine. We must occupy our preordained position. I belong to the front, you belong to the tail. Know your place!”
Minister Mason dispenses the law to the tail
It’s all about the engine for both front and tail. It saved humanity, after all. It is their future. Curtis tells his colleagues that they will move forward: “We take the engine and we control the world. It’s time we take the engine.”
Revolution brews in the tail
“Reform and revolution are shibboleths that distinguish liberals from radicals,” explains Aaron Bady of The New Inquiry. “While liberals want to reform capitalism, without fundamentally transforming it, radicals want to tear it up from the roots (the root word of “radical” is root!) and replace capitalism with something that isn’t capitalism…If you’re the kind of leftist who thinks that the means of production just need to be in better hands—Obama, for example, instead of George W. Bush, or Elizabeth Warren instead of Obama, or Bernie Sanders instead of Elizabeth Warren, and so on—then this movie buries a poison pill inside its protein bar: soylent green is people.”
The tail faces the goons of the front
The train “eats” the children of the poor; using them to replace the sacred engine parts that have worn out in a kind of retro-transhumanist collaboration of human and machine and creating a perverse immortal cyborg entity. Only, the individual children die in the process and need to be constantly replaced to maintain the eternal whole. They have literally become cogs in a giant wheel of eternity.
Curtis’s revolution is doomed from the start; once he reaches the front, it is revealed to him that the entire conflict and resulting deaths were orchestrated all along to help maintain population balance. Wilford (Ed Harris), the genius who created the train with a perpetual motion engine, tells Curtis once they meet that, “this is the world…The engine lasts forever. The population must always be kept in balance.” Which begs the obvious question: why not just get rid of all of the lower class “scum” (as Mason calls them)? That would make room for the privileged. What purpose do these lower class serve? The answer is both obvious and simple: aside from providing their children as parts to the sacred engine, they are there to be hated, feared and despised by the elite. When the soul is empty and needs “filling” but can’t be filled, then it finds a substitute.
Wilford lectures Curtis on the train’s functional ecosystem
Aaron Bady of The New Inquirer shares that, “Instead of giving Texans a health care system, for example, late capitalism gives them the illegal immigrant, to hate, to fear, and to dis-identify with. Prisons do more and more of the system-maintaining work that was once done by schools and hospitals: instead of giving us something to want, they give us something to fear, hate, and kill. And so, we eat ourselves.” We die to live.
Wilford grooms Curtis as the new engineer and reveals to him the true nature of the engine. “You’ve seen what people do without leadership,” says Wilford to Curtis. “They devour one another.” This is dark irony considering what the train is doing. And it is when Curtis discovers this awful truth that his reformist revolution comes to a dead halt and he makes a decision that takes him into the realm beyond the train.
Snowpiercer is about hard choices and transcendence. … Save humanity, but at the consequence of our souls? Or transcend a machine that has robbed us of our souls at the expense of our mortality? The film continually questions our definition of what life is and what makes life worth living.
Snowpiercer crosses one of many treacherous bridges
The film, whose script by Joon-Ho and Kelly Masterson is based loosely on the French graphic novel Le Transperceneige by Jacques Lob, graphically portrays the fecklessness of a reformist/revolutionary movement to transcend the decadent capitalist machine (the train). It begins with the adoption of a failing system from a previously failed system. Perhaps it is a truism that most reformist movements fail to challenge the true hegemony of the system they intend to overtake, given their origin. What we get is little genuine change; just a shuffle in protocol.
Peter Frase of Jacobin Magazine shares that, “it’s all the more effective because the heart of that critique comes as a late surprise, from a character we might not expect.”
Namgoong languishes in a drugged state on the train after he is liberated from a drawer
Namgoong Minsoo (Song Kang-Ho) is a spaced-out drug addict that Curtis ‘liberates’ from a drawer to help them open the gates to the forward sections. Like everyone on the train, Nam is a little crazy. But he differs in one important way: he believes there is hope outside the train. Unlike his reformist brothers, he looked outside the construct and studied the realm beyond the train. Perhaps it is drug-induced fantasy. Perhaps he’s simply had enough of a lifetime of “non-life” onboard the train and would rather die outside to truly live, even if for a brief moment. When the chance for this moment materializes, we, like Nam and his daughter Yona (Ko Ah-sung), are more than ready to jump the train. In fact, we’re desperate to get off this shadow game of bread and circuses. Even if it means freezing to death in moments.
Only Yona and one of the rescued children from the engine, survive the ensuing train crash, thanks to Curtis’s truly revolutionary decision.
“Is it more revolutionary to want to take control of the society that’s oppressed you, or to try and escape from that system altogether?” asks Joon-Ho.
Yona and Curtis on the train
I felt a cathartic surge of relief when the train came to a violent crashing stop; even though it effectively meant the end of humanity. My visceral response was incredible relief. The scene following the train crash was —despite the inhospitable and cold environment—surrealistically fresh, invigorating and serene. Along with Yona and one of the children Curtis rescued, we’ve escaped the rushing perversity: the obsession to survive at any cost. We’ve chosen to live to die. That Curtis (had to) die with the train to ensure the safe escape of Yona and the child, made sense to me. Curtis remained trapped in the old paradigm; but he possessed enough vision to understand the need for change beyond his sight. His was a sacrifice for true change.
As Yona and the child crunch through the snow in the quiet depth of coldness, they glimpse a polar bear. There is life! Perhaps not humanity. But life on Earth.
And in that connection, we live. Even if just for a moment.
Yona and the child face a bleak but hopeful future after escaping the Snowpiercer
Postscript on the ending of the movie: In an interview with Vulture, Bong Jung-Ho shared his thoughts on Snowpiercer’s ending: “For me, it’s a very hopeful ending … The engine is itself on its way to extinction along with cigarettes, and other goods. Extinction is a repeated word throughout the film. But outside the train, life is actually returning. It’s nature that’s eternal, and not the train or the engine, as you see with the polar bear at the end.”
Ultimately, Bong Jung-Ho’s message with the ending of this baroque political allegory is the vindication of a choice against reform capitalism for something new, that there is indeed “Life after Capitalism”, not easy but worth living…
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.
In late 2023, I was invited by Shepherd to post an article of my favourite three reads of 2023 (books I’d read in 2023; not necessarily published in 2023). I had earlier that year posted on Shepherd an article describing what I considered to be some of the best eco-fiction books that make you care and give you hope. My favourite three of 2023 resonated with a feminist theme that featured hopeful stories of strong women, acting in solidarity and out of compassion, with intelligence, kindness and courage. For me, 2023 was a year of strong feminine energy for the planet and my favourite books reflected that. They included: Camp Zero by Michelle Min Sterling; We by Yevgeni Zamyatin; and Wool by Hugh Howie.
This year Shepherd invited me to share my favourite three reads of 2024 (same rules applied: books I’d read in 2024, not just books published that year). For me, 2024 was an intense year for the environment on the planet and a year of personal healing for me; my selection reflects that. The books that spoke most to me this year were compelling eco-fiction cautionary tales with great scope and incredibly vivid and immersive world building. All featured strong but flawed eco-champions in transition. Two start from an almost frail naiveté and initial victimization; but all eventually embrace—at heroic expense—a monster-archetype to challenge the cruelty of capitalist greed and corruption. All three books explored incredible, often disturbing and terrifying worlds that lingered with me long after I put the book down. All three books featured complex characters who transcended their own weakness and frailty to rise up like a great tsunami and shake a world order. Here they are (read the original article on Shepherd here):
Waste Tide
by Chen Qiufan, Ken Liu (translator)
Compelling light-giving characters navigate the dark bleak world of profiteers and greedy investors in this eco-techno-thriller. Mimi is a migrant worker off the coast of China who scavenges through piles of hazardous technical garbage to make a living. She struggles, like the environment, in a larger power struggle for profit and power; but she finds a way to change the game, inspiring others. The story of Mimi and Kaizong—who she inspires—stayed with me long after I put the book down.
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Fauna
by Christiane Vadnais, Pablo Strauss (translator)
At once beautiful and terrifying, Vadnais’s liquid prose immersed me instantly in her flowing story about change in this Darwinian eco-horror ode to climate change. I felt connected to the biologist Laura as she navigated through a torrent of rising mists and coiling snakes and her own transforming body with the changing world around her. It was an emotional rollercoaster ride that made me think.
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The Word for World is Forest
by Ursula K. Le Guin
I was immediately drawn in by the struggles of the indigenous people to the conquering settlers through excellent characters who I cared about. The irony of what the indigenous peoples must do to save themselves runs subtle but tragic throughout the narrative. Given its relevance to our own colonial history and present situation, this simple tale rang through me like a tolling bell.
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Here’s my recent eco-novel:
A Diary in the Age of Waterfollows the climate-induced journey of Earth and humanity through four generations of women, each with a unique relationship to water.
Centuries from now, in a dying boreal forest in what used to be northern Canada, Kyo, a young acolyte called to service in the Exodus, yearns for Earth’s past—the Age of Water—before the “Water Twins” destroyed humanity. Looking for answers and plagued by vivid dreams of this holocaust, Kyo discovers the diary of Lynna, a limnologist from that time of severe water scarcity just prior to the destruction. In her work for a global giant that controls Earth’s water, Lynna witnesses and records in her diary the disturbing events that will soon lead to humanity’s demise.
Path through a black locust grove in a larger mixed forest, 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. 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.
I recently received my copies of the 2025 Wild Canada calendar put out by WildernessCommittee.ca. The calendar has 12 months of gorgeous images of wild and sacred places throughout Canada; heartfelt and informative stories accompany each image.
2025 Wild Canada calendar featuring January spread
My own photo of an old-growth hemlock in Catchacoma Forest, Ontario, is featured for January! Go check out the Wilderness Committee site then go to their store to see the whole calendar. It’s worth buying for its beauty and its meaningful narratives. And it is an excellent way to support a worthwhile cause.
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.
Recruiting poster by the United Defense Force featuring war hero Rita Vrataski, the Angel of Verdun
She’s called The Angel of Verdun. You also see another name scrawled in bright red over a London bus: Full Metal Bitch. When we first see her, angry and fierce in her battle gear (which resembles a modern-day knight’s armour) she’s heading out to battle, stomping out of the bunker, surrounded by an entourage, and summarily knocks an acolyte down who gets in her way. She’s badass. She’s the Full Metal Bitch.
Rita Vrataski is the face of the war; UDF General Brigham drafts our unwilling hero American William Cage (not pictured here) to the front
Her real name is Rita Vrataski. She wields a sharpened helicopter blade as her weapon of choice and serves as the poster girl for the United Defense Force to recruit more into the fight.
Rita (Emily Blunt) is a very different kind of poster girl for the war effort of the recent SF action movie Edge of Tomorrow, directed by Doug Liman and written by Christopher McQuarrie. There is an “edge of tomorrow” in this military SF story that explores how much we’ve changed since the time of World War I and II. And that change is most apparent in how women are seen and act.
World War I and II propaganda posters to recruit women in the war effort
Edge of Tomorrow makes subtle and not so subtle reference to both world wars: from its June 6th release (70th anniversary of D-Day and the massive and decisive Normandy landing) to its reference to the trenches of Verdun in WWI, the Nazi or German Empire forces as the original seat of the Omega entity and many more.
The premise is straight-forward science fiction stuff: Earth is under attack by an alien species, who have seeded themselves with a meteor shower. The aliens have conquered Russia and China and now threaten France and England. Evoking echoes of World War II’s Normandy invasion, the United States joins the fray in support of their allies.
William Cage runs for his life after landing on a French beach, found to be a killing field of mimics
Cruise finally figures out how to use his weapon and kills a giant mimicbefore dying himself
American Major William Cage (Tom Cruise), who is with the PR staff of the war effort, gets unwillingly drafted to the front as a rookie private and dies in the first five minutes of landing on the shores of Normandy—but not before he kills an alpha alien, which covers him in blue blood. This sends him into a vicious time loop, where he must relive and die over and over in that horrendous bloodbath. Each time, he glimpses the Angel of Verdun repeatedly killed. On one occasion, Vrataski runs across him, lying injured in the mud. He can’t move, sure victim to the aliens. She snatches his battery pack and moves on, leaving him there to die. Astonished at the Angel’s apparent lack of compassion, Cage will later mimic her “let him die” attitude when he knowingly lets fellow soldier Kimmel get crushed.
Vrataski stands over wounded Cage, about to steal his battery pack and leave him to die
Cage finds Vrataski in her training room
In a later iteration he finally meets Vrataski on the battlefield, where she realizes (having gone through the time loop and lost it) that he is now in a time loop and therefore the key to their victory; she tells him to find her when he wakes up just seconds before she lets herself get blown up and they begin their looping journey together.
Vrataski and Cage, outfitted in intelligent body armour suits, discuss strategy
To his complaint, “I’m not a soldier,” Vrataski replies, “No, you’re a weapon.” That’s how she sees him. And to that end, she mentors him in the art and science of soldiering. When things go awry she time and again unflinchingly shoots him dead to reset the time. Cage tries to engage her in casual conversation and finds her taciturn. “You don’t talk much,” he observes, to which she quips, “Not a fan.” She’s all about the business of defeating the enemy before the human race is wiped out.
UK movie poster
Edge of Tomorrow provides a refreshing kind of woman hero; someone who is equal to her male protagonist in skill, intelligence and heroic stature. What I mean by heroic stature is that her heroic journey of transformation does not play subservient to her male counterpart’s journey. This almost happens on two occasions when Cage gives her an “out” to stay behind and let him take over. She declines. In fact, Cruise lets her character take the lead, even though this it truthfully Cage’s story of metaphoric transformation from “onlooker” to “participant”.
Rita Vrataski, the Angel of Verdun
William Cage, transformed soldier, trained by Vrataski
In so many androcentric storylines, the female—no matter how complex, interesting and tough she starts out being—must demure to the male lead; as if only by bowing down to his superior abilities can she help ensure his heroic stature. Returning us right back to the cliché role of the woman supporting the leading man to complete his hero’s journey. And this often means serving as the prize for his chivalry. We see this in so many action thrillers and action adventures today: Valka in How to Train Your Dragon, Wyldstyle in The Lego Movie, Neytiri in Avatar, Trinity in The Matrix, and so many more. There’s even a name for it: the Trinity Syndrome.
Various female heroes fallen prey to the Trinity Syndrome
Tasha Robinson writes in her excellent article entitled, We’re losing all our Strong Female Characters to Trinity Syndrome: “The idea of the Strong Female Character—someone with her own identity, agenda, and story purpose—has thoroughly pervaded the conversation about what’s wrong with the way women are often perceived and portrayed today, in comics, video-games, and film especially…it’s still rare to see films in the mainstream action/horror/science-fiction/fantasy realm introduce women with any kind of meaningful strength, or women who go past a few simple stereotypes.”
I give Cruise, Liman and McQuarrie full credit for not doing this. For example, after Cage makes his case to his Squadron to go find the Omega in Paris, they remain reluctant until Vrataski emerges. “I don’t expect you to follow me,” says Cage. “I do expect you to follow her.” The Angel of Verdun—or better yet, the badass Full Metal Bitch. And why not? Who wouldn’t follow her?
Is this one of the reasons that this movie didn’t do so well in the North American box office as it did overseas, whose audience may reflect a more mature, open and enlightened audience?
Vrataski and Cage trek across France in search of the mimic headquarters
When a female lead is stronger than the male protagonist, some reviewers (OK—male reviewers) treat and categorize that movie as a “woman’s story”. I’ve been told by some of my male friends that they couldn’t possibly empathize with such a character—mainly because she is a woman and she is stronger than the male lead “they want to be”. Invariably, in many of these, the male counterpart is so much “milk-toast” compared to that awesome female-warrior. And have you ever noticed that, while the male hero gets the girl, the female hero usually ends up alone? Great examples include: Buffy the Vampire Slayer; Xena: Warrior Princess; Sarah in The Terminator and of course Vasquez in Aliens. These women are amazons; they stand apart, goddess-like, unrelenting, unflinching—untouchable. It’s actually no wonder that my ex-husband dislikes Sigourney Weaver to this day—she could crush him underfoot and eat him for breakfast at a moment’s notice. And probably would!
Cage and Vrataski comb the French landscape in search of a vehicle that will take them to the Mimic headquarters
“…I want to point out two things that Richard has, that Bond and Captain America and Batman also have, that Peggy (Carter of Captain America), however strong she is, cannot attain. They are very simple things, even more fundamental than “agency”.
1) Richard has the spotlight. However weak or distressed or passive he may be, he’s the main goddamn character.
2) Richard has huge range of other characters of his own gender around him, so that he never has to act as any kind of ambassador or representative for maleness. Even dethroned and imprisoned, he is free to be uniquely himself.
Promotional poster for the Marvel “The Avengers”
On the posters [women are] posed way in the back of the shot behind the men, in the trailers they may pout or smile or kick things, but they remain silent. Their strength lets them, briefly, dominate bystanders but never dominate the plot. It’s an anodyne, a sop, a Trojan Horse – it’s there to distract and confuse you, so you forget to ask for more.”
There is another type of female hero. She is equal to her male counterpart. Her story is not secondary to his story; her heroic status and hero’s journey is equal to his; in fact they may share the same journey. Examples include: The Expanse; Aeon Flux; Farscape; Battlestar Galactica, Hunger Games, The Beyond, Missions, Orphan Black, Advantageous…
Promotional poster for “edge of Tomorrow”
And now Edge of Tomorrow. As with the above examples, Vrataski and Cage form a team, in which together they are more than the sum of their parts. A marriage of independent autopoiesis, combining skills, abilities and vision. This is also why, in my opinion, the ending of Edge of Tomorrow is totally appropriate: not because it’s “the happy ending”; but because it carries the message of enduring collaboration of equals.
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.
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