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

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

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

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Othering in Literature

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

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

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

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

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

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How Eco-Fiction Empowers & Animates Nonhuman Subjects

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

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

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

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A Changing Narrative

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

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

Ogden notes that “Nina Munteanu’s A Diary in the Age of Water brings the seemingly mundane and inconsequential (what Emanuele Coccia refers to as “residual” objects) to the imaginary forefront within creative-scientific writing…In Munteanu’s limnological characterization of freshwater bodies…[this] creative-scientific work of literature enlarges and redevelops the hierarchy of the taxaonomic ranks originally set out by animal studies. [It] increases the principal tenet of the discipline’s genealogy to include the greater part of all biological (and even inorganic) life in its inhuman narrative.”

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Giving Voice to Plants ‘Othered’ to Silence

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

Ogden argues that “Like Richard Powers and other creative-scientific writers, Westerford (Powers’s own character in The Overstory) understands climate and biodiversity are ‘failing precisely because no [story] can make the contest for the world seem as compelling as the struggles between a few lost people.’” She realizes that her peers believe plants live an inanimate existence, whose rooted immobility points to a kind of “unfreedom” that represents an “archetype of inert matter.” According to poet David Hinton, this devaluation of plant life relates to the human-nonhuman duality, “a Western dichotomy that relegates the vegetal world to a space of ‘linguistic silence.’”

This is the silence of ‘The Other.’

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

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Footnotes:

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

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References:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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