“Water wants to flow. It doesn’t like to be restricted. If confined in a ravine, it speeds up and cuts a channel along the thalweg, eroding the hardest material and polishing a path that uniquely suits it. Water is selfish. It is always moving, even when it isn’t.”
Lynna Dresden
A Diary in the Age of Water is “An exceptional and thought-provoking dystopian fiction.”
LITERARY TITAN
In my 2007 novel Darwin’s Paradox and its 2010 prequel Angel of Chaos—dystopian tales set in an unrecognizable post-climate change Canada at the end of the 21st Century—the father of the main character lectures his impressionable young daughter about how climate change helped create the heathland scrub that replaced the mixed woodlands of the old Carolinian and sub-Boreal environments:
“What’s over there?” She points to a far, dark hill.
“Woodland. This was all forest before the cities got built and the climate changed.”
“Climate changed?”
“Yes, honey.” He focuses on the distance. “Caused the revolution thirty years ago. Since then the Ecologists have virtually eliminated our greenhouse gas emissions. Of course, the planet will be feeling the effects of global warming for decades to come. Perhaps centuries.”
“They saved the planet, didn’t they?”
His brows knit. “Perhaps they did, perhaps they didn’t,” he says enigmatically.
I’d originally written the novel and its prequel in the seventies, before entering university. So, you might think that I was incredibly imaginative and prescient to come up with such climate devastation. But this simply isn’t so (well, not entirely, anyway). Just as with Margaret Atwood—who says: “When I wrote the Handmaid’s Tale, nothing went into it that had not happened in real-life somewhere at some time”—I was simply reading the signs.
When it came to climate change, of course, I had some help. During my days at university, studying limnology, and in the 1980s and ‘90s when I worked as an environmental scientist and consultant, I encountered evidence of a changing environment and climate; people in the environmental sciences certainly knew the dangers of climate change long before it entered the common zeitgeist.
Science fiction dystopias aren’t so much predictive as realistically projecting possibilities based on current or past social patterns (these past social patterns, as Santayana notes, have a way of returning to us when we don’t pay attention to them). This notion lies at the root of the term cautionary tale and what makes one truly harrowing or terrifying; we sense to our very core how likely these scenarios are.
Response to my 2020 cautionary tale A Diary in the Age of Water reflects this visceral reaction by readers who shared that this blur of fiction with non-fiction and sense of realism—a “this could happen” quality—totally unbalanced them and engrossed them. Comments included “unique and captivating,” “unsettling and yet deliciously readable,” “strangely compelling” “scary and comforting at the same time,” “made my heart clench,” “a book of genuine power.”
Indeed, many successful predictions have been made in speculative fiction. In 1961, Stanislaw Lem’s novel Return From the Stars predicted the invention of the touch pad, iPhone, iPad and Kindle. The telescreens that monitored the citizens of George Orwell’s Oceania in his dystopian 1949 novel Nineteen Eighty-Four was reflected, twenty years later, in the first CCTV installed in the United Kingdom. Philip K. Dick’s Minority Report accurately predicted personalized ads, voice-controlled homes, facial and optical recognition, and gesture-based computing. Self-driving cars were showcased in many speculative books and films such as Bladerunner, and Isaac Asimov’s I, Robot.
But many speculations have also not been realized. No flying cars—OK, some companies such as Toyota, Hyundai and Tesla are working on prototypes. While NASA plans to construct a surface habitat called Artemis Base Camp so that astronauts can remain on the moon’s surface for days or perhaps even weeks, it is far from happening soon. Also, no rotating space stations and space elevator–yet.
Many envisioned totalitarian/dystopian states in speculative fiction have also not been realized (e.g. We, Nineteen Eighty-Four, Brave New World, Fahrenheit 451, Handmaid’s Tale, Hunger Games, The Dispossessed, V for Vendetta )—though one could argue that aspects of each world envisioned by an author has occurred or is occurring in some form. One need only recall Edward Snowdon’s disclosures of NSA’s insidious surveillance to see parallels with Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four. And as Margaret Atwood famously said in the quote above, nothing goes into her stories “that have not happened in real-life somewhere at some time.”
“The function of science fiction is not only to predict the future but to prevent it.”
Ray Bradbury
There are, in most cases, no technological impediments to the flying car, the jetpack, and moon-bases; only cultural ones. “These SF predictions ought to be viewed as visions of where we could be, as opposed to where we will be, or, keeping Bradbury in mind, visions of where we don’t want to go and, thankfully, have mostly managed to avoid to date,” says Steve Davidson of Grasping for the Wind. “Perhaps it’s all cultural,” he adds. Science fiction writer and futurist David Brin says that he is “more interested in exploring possibilities than likelihoods, because a great many more things might happen than do.”
In his book Four Futures: Life After Capitalism Peter Frase writes: “the importance of assessing possibility rather than likelihood is that it puts our collective action at the centre, while making confident predictions only encourages passivity.” In his 2010 essay, David Brin cites Orwell’s 1984 as a “self-preventing prophecy” that helped prevent the scenario (at least in its fullest).
George Orwell wrote his dystopian satire in 1949 about a mind-controlled society in response to the Cold War. The book was a metaphor “against totalitarianism and for democratic socialism,” said Orwell in his 1947 essay Why I Write, adding that, “Good prose is like a windowpane.” Was Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four a failed novel because the real 1984 didn’t turn out quite like his 1984? Hardly. Hugo Award-winning novelist Robert J. Sawyer argues that we consider it a success, “because it helped us avoid that future. So just be happy that the damn dirty apes haven’t taken over yet.”
References:
Brin, David. 2010. “The Self-Preventing Prophecy: Or How a Dose of Nightmare Can Help Tame Tomorrow’s Path.” in Abbott Gleason et al. eds., On Nineteen Eighty-Four: Orwell and Our Future. Princeton University Press, Princeton, p.222.
Frase, Peter. 2016. “Four Futures: Life After Capitalism.” Verso Press, London. 150pp.
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.
Issue #128 of Apex Magazine featured an interview that Rebecca E. Treasure did with me, posted on December 10, 2021. We discussed the power of story, the use of dystopian narrative, and the blur between fiction and non-fiction to create meaningful eco-fiction. Here’s part of the interview. For the complete interview go here:
INTERVIEW
Nina Munteanu, author of “Robin’s Last Song,” is a prolific creator with multiple books, podcasts, short stories, and nonfiction essays in publication. Her work spans genre, from eco-fiction to historical fantasy to thrillers, and of course, science fiction. Her work as an ecologist informs all of her writing, which circles around an essential exploration; the relationship between humanity and our environment.
At the top of Nina Munteanu’s website, there is a quote: “I live to write, I write to live.” This sentiment is reflected in her fiction, which is not just about characters in compelling situations solving their problems with compassion, but is about all of us, our planet, our environment, and our future.
Rebecca E. Treasure
Nina Munteanu sat down with Apex for a conversation about story, ecology, and the future.
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APEX MAGAZINE: “The Way of Water” in Little Blue Marble is such a powerful piece touching on water scarcity and friendship, a dry future and the potential for technology to overtake natural ecology. “Robin’s Last Song” explores extinction, human fallibility, friendship, and again, that conflict between technology and nature. Do you think we’re heading toward the kind of dystopia shown in these stories?
NINA MUNTEANU: The scenarios portrayed in these eco-fiction narratives are deeply grounded in current realities that involve a kind of dissonance between technology and natural processes—more specifically our myopic use of technological “fixes” to make nature more efficient for our use, whether it’s to mine water from the air (disrupting the water cycle) or gene-hack monocrops to increase yield (compromising the crop’s resilience and long-term productivity). It isn’t so much the technology, but the thought process driving its use that is undermining the environment we live in. Our unwillingness to think of ourselves as part of the very environment we’re manipulating for shortsighted purposes could certainly bring about some version of these dystopias.
While these narratives are based on the realistic premise of current and projected water use and food production, their trajectories are fluid and multi-faceted. We still have many directions we can go. Concrete precedents set by a changing climate and our several-century interference will ensure continued extinction of species, reduction of bio-diversity, the proliferation of unstable simple ecosystems prone to crashing, and an unruly water cycle. Despite these, planetary responses remain fluid and unpredictable; there is so much about the natural world we still don’t know. And that is what my story “Robin’s Last Song” touches on: even when it looks utterly bleak and nothing seems left, Nature surprises us with hidden gifts. If nothing else, we are humbled by it. And a little wiser, hopefully.
AM: Your stories show readers the kind of world we could be facing if nothing changes. Do you believe such disaster is preventable?
NM: Humanity can destroy habitats and ecosystems; but we can’t destroy the planet—well, not yet anyway. We can only change it. Earth will endure. The question is: as Nature changes will we endure? We are currently destroying and simplifying the ecosystems that best support our species, and heralding in those that may not. Ecologists use a term “natural succession” to describe when one species or group of species create better conditions for another group that will succeed them. We are in danger of doing this. And we’re taking down a lot with us. This planet has experienced four major extinction events in the past (wiping out up to 90% of its species) and each time life came back in full force; but each time, that life looked different from what had preceded it.
To ensure our own survival, we need to ensure the survival of our supporting network: forests that balance a climate best suited to us; a biodiversity that brings resilience; a clean healthy ocean that nurtures all life. But I am hopeful. We need creativity and joy and connection to do this right. We are creators at heart and are more joyful when creating. We are capable of creating so much beauty in our music, art, and science. When faced with insurmountable odds and terrible circumstance, our earnest hearts fill with kindness and compassion. Some countries have embraced the Happy Index—over the GDP—to measure their success. Bhutan has achieved carbon negativity and others are following its lead. We know what the solutions are. We have the technologies. We understand the science. We just need the will.
As Yuval Harari noted, we remain an insecure species; despite our curiosity and capacity for wonder, we are prone to fear, suspicion, and defensive action in the face of the unknown. Our preoccupation with “self” in all its iterations limits our ability to gain a more healthy perspective and to see ourselves as part of our environment, not apart from it. Our hubris and separation comes from that same insecurity. Like the hero in the hero’s journey, we’ve strayed from our “home” to find ourselves. The changes in the world that we’re largely responsible for creating (e.g., climate change, habitat destruction, and oversimplification) are also part of our journey to find ourselves. When we find our humility and our unique gifts to the world, we can prevent disaster. It won’t be the tool—technology—that does it. It will be the wisdom that comes with loss of ego, allowing us to forge a partnership with the rest of the world, human and non-human.
With the wisdom of feminine energy emerging from the shadows and lighting its voice with kindness, humility, compassion, unity, and wholeness, I’m ever hopeful. It’s time to grow up, forgive ourselves and each other, and become whole.
For the entire interview, go to Apex Magazine, December 10, 2021.
Rebecca E. Treasure grew up reading science fiction and fantasy in the foothills of the Rocky Mountains. After grad school, she began writing fiction. Rebecca has lived many places, including the Gulf Coast of Mississippi and Tokyo, Japan. She currently resides in Texas Hill Country with her husband, where she juggles two children, two corgis, a violin studio, and writing. She only drops the children occasionally. To read more visit www.rebeccaetreasure.com.
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 the Spring 2021 Issue of Ecology & Action, author and Dragonfly.eco publisher Mary Woodbury lists some of her favourite eco-fiction that inspires action. Nina Munteanu’s clifi eco-novel “A Diary in the Age of Water” is among them:
“Fiction exploring humanity’s impacts on nature is becoming more popular. It has the distinct ability to creatively engage and appeal to readers’ emotions. In fact, it can stir environmental action. A survey I took last year showed that 88% of its participants were inspired to act after reading ecological fiction.
Principled by real science and exalting our planet’s beauty, these stories are works of art. They live within classic modes of fiction exploring the human condition, but also integrate the wild. They can be referred to as “rewilded stories.” The following Canadian titles are some of my favourites in this genre.”
Mary Woodbury, Dragonfly.eco
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 2019, at the When Words Collide writer’s conference in Alberta, I participated in a panel on eco-fiction. The panel, consisting of Alex Reissen, Merilyn Ruth Liddell, Claudiu Murgan, Nina Munteanu, and moderated by Canadian speculative author Candas Jane Dorsey, discussed what eco-fiction is, what it means to its writers and its readers and why it’s an important genre of literature. How, for instance can eco-fiction writers influence our audience to engage in helping the planet and humanity, in turn? How can we do it without turning to the polemic of non-fiction? We discussed the importance of “storytelling”, bringing in characters to care about, making the global experience (and issue) personal. Essentially dramatizing the premise.
Candas described fiction writers as “sneaky,” exploring the issue (and message) through context and setting with a focus on character journey. This includes use of sub-text and subtleties embodied by individuals. I mentioned treating the environment as a character—a character to care about.
We explored several areas in which writers could elucidate ways to engage readers for edification, connection and participation. We discussed optimism, new perspectives, and envisioning our future.
“Science doesn’t tell us what we should do,” Barbara Kingsolver wrote in Flight Behavior. “It only tells us what is.” Stories can never be a solution in themselves, but they have the capacity to inspire action.
“People need such stories, because however dark, a darkness with voices in it is better than a silent void.”
Margaret Atwood, Maddaddam
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.
‘Hopeful dystopias’ are much more than an apparent oxymoron; they are in some fundamental way, the spearhead of the future—and ironically often a celebration of human spirit by shining a light through the darkness of disaster. I discussed this in a recent interview on Solarpunk Futures Podcast.
In a recent interview on the CBC Radio show Ideas “Beyond Dystopia”, Canadian author Margaret Atwood (who penned the dystopic The Handmaid’s Tale and Maddaddam trilogy) said much the same thing. Atwood argued that dystopias and cautionary tales ultimately embrace an element of hope, through a character’s experience. Dystopias can serve as a road map for individual endurance, resilience, and triumph through disaster.
I talked with Solarpunk Futures about how the purposeful blur of fiction with non-fiction in my latest eco-novel A Diary in the Age of Water produced a heightened relevance to the dystopic journey for the reader.
Solarpunk: Your latest book is an eco-novel, or rather something of a fiction-nonfiction hybrid perhaps, called A Diary in the Age of Water. Tell us a bit about that novel and the role that water plays in the story.
Nina: A Diary in the Age of Water follows the climate-induced journey of Earth and humanity through four generations of women and their battles against a global giant that controls and manipulates Earth’s water. The book spans over forty years (from the 2020s to the 2060s) and into the far future, mostly through the diary of a limnologist, which is found by a future water-being. While A Diary in the Age of Water is a work of fiction, its premise and much of its story are firmly based on real events, people and phenomena. The dramatization of these through four main characters carry the reader into consequence and accountability. Water’s relationship with each character provides four different perspectives on the value of water to humanity—from the personal and practical to the spiritual and existential. For readers with an evidence-based approach to learning about water’s importance, the diarist provides interesting facts on water in each of her entries in the form of epigraphs (mostly from Robert Wetzel’s Limnology). Things like: watershed, hypolimnion, aquifer, thalweg, clapotis gaufre, and petrichor, to name a few…
I chose a diary format to purposely blur the fiction with non-fiction. I was writing about both the far and the near future and much of it was based—like Margaret Atwood and her books—on real events and real people. I wanted personal relevance to what was going on, particularly with climate change. I also wanted to achieve a gritty realism of “the mundane” and a diary felt right. Lynna—the diarist—is a reclusive inexpressive character, so I thought a personal diary would help bring out her thoughts and feelings. There’s nothing like eves-dropping to make the mundane exciting. The diary-aspect of the book characterizes it as “mundane science fiction” by presenting an “ordinary” setting for characters to play out. The tension arises from insidious cumulative events and circumstances that slowly grow into something incendiary. The real events are the fuel that incite a slow-burn fictional drama that blurs the reader’s perception of reality and heightens its relevance.
Solarpunk: Can you give us an example of an event in your book where the lines between fiction and nonfiction get blurred?
Nina: In the diary entry entitled “Watershed,”, for July 14, 2049, Lynna writes:
Today, CanadaCorp announced that the collection of rainwater was illegal. As of today, I could be arrested for using my rain catcher and cistern. I’ve decided to continue using the cistern, and I’ve warned Hildegard not to breathe a word to anyone at school about what we’re doing with the water. Thankfully, I have time to train her in the art of subterfuge before she starts Grade Two in the fall.
What follows in the story is a series of greater water restrictions that mimic some of the currenet ongoing scenarios in other parts of the world (e.g. illegal rainwater collection in parts of the USA; shutting down of home water taps in Detroit; required and restricted water collection at public water taps in parts of the world).
Lynna’s August 13, 2051 diary entry in my 2020 novel seemed to predict the atmospheric river disaster that befell British Columbia in November 2021:
In the mid- to late-twenties the west coast succumbed to massive atmospheric river storms. San Francisco. Los Angeles. Seattle. Even earthquakes seemed to follow climate change’s lead. The earthquake / tsunami that hit Vancouver Island in 2029 shifted the Earth’s axis by three inches, Daniel informed me. The American military stormed over the border with swift aid. “Did you know that they never left?” Daniel asked me. I hadn’t known that. But I wasn’t surprised either.
Of course, these “predictions” were really just good research into the current scientific knowledge and what current circumstances may naturally generate in the future. I was just doing a good job at reading water.
Given that cli-fi features climate change, environmental destruction, and species extinction, you must think ‘how can it not be all doom and gloom?’ But dystopias often do reflect—in their depiction of terrible circumstance—an element of triumph, of overcoming adversity, and ultimately of hope. In fact, dystopias generally draw on a writer’s optimism; else, why would we write these cautionary tales? A strong belief in humanity underlies much of eco-fiction. Solarpunk is a rising light of eco-fiction that has emerged recently in response to the denial-despair dilemma many of us face when we think of climate change. This kind of eco-fiction features ingenuity, generativity, independence, and community. And it ultimately leads us through it all toward the light. A Diary in the Age of Water is in fact a dystopia with elements of solarpunk.
You can listen to the entire podcast interview on Solarpunk Futures: Imagining a New World here.
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 appeared on Warren Lawrence’s Morning Show on WKNY am Radio Kingston, New York, where we talked about water as a life-giving substance and a force of climate change. We talked, of course, about my recent eco-fiction novel “A Diary in the Age of Water”, which Warren had totally enjoyed and recommended to his listening audience (to my delight!)
Warren asked me to share my process of writing this particular book as a diary and a work of “mundane science fiction:”
I was writing about both the far and the near future and much of it was based—like Margaret Atwood and her books—on real events and real people. I wanted personal relevance to what was going on, particularly with climate change. I also wanted to achieve a gritty realism of “the mundane” and a diary felt right. Lynna—the diarist—is a reclusive inexpressive character, so I thought a personal diary would help bring out her thoughts and feelings. There’s nothing like eves-dropping to make the mundane exciting. The diary-aspect of the book characterizes it as “mundane science fiction” by presenting an “ordinary” setting for characters to play out. The tension arises from insidious cumulative events and circumstances that slowly grow into something incendiary. The real events are the fuel that incite a slow-burn fictional drama that blurs the reader’s perception of reality and heightens its relevance.
We talked at length about the blur between real events and the fiction of this book and how the diary conspired in that felt blur for the reader. To Warren’s question of what I expected my audience to get from the book, particularly on the importance of water, I responded:
While A Diary in the Age of Water is a work of fiction, its premise and much of its story are firmly based on real events, people and phenomena. The dramatization of these through four main characters carry the reader into consequence and accountability. Water’s relationship with each character provides four different perspectives on the value of water to humanity—from the personal and practical to the spiritual and existential. For readers with an evidence-based approach to learning about water’s importance, the diarist provides interesting facts on water in each of her entries in the form of epigraphs (mostly from Robert Wetzel’s Limnology). Things like: watershed, hypolimnion, aquifer, thalweg, clapotis gaufre, and petrichor, to name a few.
Regarding whether Canadians see water, deforestation, pollution, or climate change differently than Americans, I responded:
My first response to that is no, we’re all North Americans. If there is a noticeable divergence, it is between North Americans and the rest of the world, based on our shared capitalist worldview and mixed settler and indigenous heritage. But Canadians do share some subtle differences from our southern neighbours. We are a northern people; much of our land lies in the unsettled northern boreal forest. Our population is far more sparse at five people/km2vs. close to 40 people/km2in America. With a majority of our population occupying the most southerly ten percent, Canada has large regions of pristine natural environments. I once entertained a ‘romantic’ metaphoric notion of Canadians resembling the settlers of Winterfell in the Westeros of Game of Thrones; a people more attuned to their land. Canadians profess to place environment high on our list of values and concerns. And yet we share a legacy of appalling forest management, rampant clearcutting of old-growth forest in British Columbia, insufficient federal and provincial water legislation, and environmentally-catastrophic mining practices in the oil tar sands of Alberta, the northern boreal forest of Canada and abroad.
Warren and I also talked about New York state and NYC, particularly to do with climate change, and how NYC fared in the novel (not well, I’m afraid). As example, I read a portion of the book from the diarist’s entry called “Climate Change”:
When I was growing up, we were already feeling the effects of a changing climate. The most obvious change was in the hundred-year floods calculated by engineers; they started to occur every other year. When I was five years old, Houston suffered a devastating flood and the city and surrounding area basically crashed under the wind and rain deluge of Hurricane Harvey. They lost power. Then their sewers backed up. But it didn’t get ugly until they lost their drinking water.
Five years later the Category 3 Hurricane Norma stormed though New York City with a twelve-metre-high wall of water. Manhattan drowned. Subways and car tunnels drowned. Kennedy Airport drowned. Homes drowned. People drowned.
The same storm put Providence, Rhode Island, under twenty feet of water.
A few days ago, Daniel told me that New York City water is still unfit to drink. “New York will be the new Pudong District,” he quipped with churlish humour. All of Florida south of Orlando is already there. “Like they weren’t warned,” he scoffed.
–A Diary in the Age of Water
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.
Fantasy / SF writer and interviewer Mandy Eve-Barnett recently interviewed me about my recent eco-novel “A Diary in the Age of Water” and on my writing process and evolution. When did it all begin and what choices did I make along the way? she wanted to know. Here are some of her questions and my answers (embellished here) for your reading pleasure. For the full interview go here:
Mandy: When did you first start writing?
Nina: Not until I was a teenager when I wrote my first complete novel (“Caged-In World”—which later served as a very rough draft for my first and second published novels, “Angel of Chaos and “Darwin’s Paradox”). My first published work was a non-fiction article “Environmental Citizenship”, which appeared in Shared Vision Magazinein 1995. I was already a young mother then with a family in Ladner, BC, and working for an environmental consulting firm in Richmond. My first fiction work was a short story entitled “Arc of Time”, published in a small circulation magazine Armchair Aesthete. That story was later reprinted several times throughout the world, including my short story collection “Natural Selection.” Before writing stories, though, I told stories—I shared wild stories of galactic adventure with my older sister; we used to share them late into the night when we were supposed to be sleeping and our parents were snoring in their beds. I also told stories in the form of cartoons. Since I was a small child, I wanted to be a cartoonist and write graphic novels when I grew up. I created and drew several strips with crazy characters on wild adventures, blending my love for drawing with my love for storytelling. I haven’t stopped that form of storytelling and still have a yearning for that form. This is one reason why I’m so delighted with my latest book “A Diary in the Age of Water,” which features some of my limnological sketches, which stand in for the diarist’s sketches:
Mandy: What made you decide on science fiction as a genre?
Nina: That goes back to my love for comics. I wasn’t much of a reader as a kid. While my older brother and sister devoured The Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew series, I secreted myself in the back corner of Williams General store and read Supergirl, Superman and Superboy, Batman, Magnus Robot Fighter and Green Lantern, among others. I was obviously enamored with the fantastic. When I earnestly started to read more than comics, I came across the SF classics: Huxley, Orwell, Heinlein, Clarke, Silverberg and Asimov to name a few. Bradbury sent me over the moon and his “Martian Chronicles” made me cry. I wanted to write like him and move readers like he’d done with me with something that mattered.
The reason I continue to write in this genre is because of its ability to encompass the creative imagination and application of metaphor to story. Given science fiction’s wide range of possibilities in creating a believable reality of the fantastic, science fiction provides a compelling platform for metaphoric storytelling on a grand scale—the story large. Possibilities for powerful archetypes abound. Where else can you make water an actual character?
My environmental themes and eco-fiction lie in the sub-genre of ‘mundane science fiction.’ This is just another form of speculative fiction. Mundane science fiction focuses on existing technology (no ray guns, warp drives, or time travel). Its premise lies in existing circumstances and events to create a near-future realism. My recent dystopian eco-novel “A Diary in the Age of Water” by Inanna Publicationsfits this description perfectly. Examples by other writers include Margaret Atwood’s “MaddAddam” series, Paolo Bacigalupi’s “The Windup Girl” and Kim Stanley Robinson’s “The Ministry for the Future.”
Mandy: Was the ecological aspect of your stories a gradual realization or your primary objective?
Nina: My primary objective was always to tell a compelling and meaningful story and hopefully to move readers in some way—like Ray Bradbury and other writers had with me. The ecological aspects slid in unannounced like a shadow character. It made sense: the environment and how we treat it (and ourselves by extension) has always been something important to me since I was a child. Both my parents were connected to Nature. My father took us on camping trips and picnics in the country; my mother was an amateur ecologist and botanist. From quite young I’ve been an environmental activist; chasing after people who littered, promoting recycling, participating in environmental protests. So, while I was writing science fiction, it was also eco-fiction. When the brand became more known, I realized that this was the kind of fiction I was writing most of the time. So, in some ways, I’ve come full circle with my quest as a youth: to tell impactful stories about the environment—whether this is here on Earth or on some planet in the outer systems—which make people think and feel and question.
Mandy: Can you tell us a little about your newest book “A Diary in the Age of Water”, how you came up with the concept, and your writing process for it?
Nina: The book follows the climate-induced journey of humanity through four generations of women, each with a unique relationship with water during a time of calamitous change. The book starts and ends in the far future in the dying boreal forest with a blue water being, Kyo, who finds the diary of a limnologist, Lynna, from our near-future Toronto. The diary spans a forty-year period and contains a series of entries; each entry begins with an epigraph—quote from the textbook “Limnology” by Robert Wetzel. During the diarist’s lifetime, all things to do with water are overseen and controlled by the international giant water utility CanadaCorp—with powers to arrest and detain anyone. This is a world in which China owns America and America, in turn, owns Canada. The limnologist witnesses and suffers through severe water taxes and imposed restrictions, dark intrigue through neighbourhood betrayals, corporate spying and espionage, and repression of her scientific freedoms. Some people die. Others disappear.
Inspiration for the novel started with a short story I was invited to write by my publisher in Rome in 2015 about water and politics in Canada. I had long been thinking of potential ironies in Canada’s water-rich heritage. The premise I wanted to explore was the irony of people in a water-rich nation experiencing water scarcity: living under a government-imposed daily water quota of 5 litres as water bottling and utility companies took it all. I named the story “The Way of Water” (“La natura dell’acqua”), about a young woman (Hilda) in near-future Toronto who has run out of water credits for the public wTap; by this time houses no longer have potable water and their water taps have been cemented shut; the only way to get water is through the public wTaps—at great cost. She’s standing two metres from water—in a line of people waiting to use the tap—and dying of thirst. “The Way of Water” captures a vision that explores the nuances of corporate and government corruption and deceit together with global resource warfare. In this near-future, Canada is mined of all its water by thirsty Chinese and US multinationals—leaving nothing for the Canadians. Rain has not fallen on Canadian soil in years due to advances in geoengineering and weather manipulation that prevent rain clouds from going anywhere north of the Canada-US border. If you’re wondering if this is possible, it’s already happening in China and surrounding countries.
I chose to use a diary in the near-future part of the story to achieve a sense of gritty realism of ‘the mundane.’ The diary-aspect of the book characterizes it as ‘mundane science fiction’ by presenting an ‘ordinary’ setting for characters to play out. The tension arises more from insidious cumulative events and circumstances that slowly grow into something incendiary.
Many of the events and circumstances that the diarist reports on are real events and based on real people. That they serve as premise for the fiction effectively blurs the fiction with non-fiction. Readers have told me that they often couldn’t distinguish the two in the book and this achieved a real urgency for the reader, who both hated and loved the book for it and couldn’t stop turning the pages as a result.
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.
Shanella Ramkissoon reviews my latest eco-fiction mundane science fiction novel “A Diary in the Age of Water” in Issue 46 of Alternatives Journal (Playbook for Progress):
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.
Nina Munteanu Writing Coach 