Nina Munteanu with Simon Rose and Suzanne Lieurance on Writers To Writers Podcast
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I was recently interviewed by Simon Rose and Suzanne Lieurance on Episode 4 of Writers To Writers June 2026.
We covered why I write about ‘green issues’ in my fiction, how I came to write eco-fiction and my aversion to littering—an aversion which Suzanne shared she also felt—which I ascribed to a disrespect for others and ‘the silent other’, represented by the natural world. We discussed my influences as a kid growing up and then later as an adult.
I shared how I have incorporated ‘green issues’ in both my fiction and non-fiction writing and short and long fiction. We shared how we started as young kids creating stories for our families and neighbourhood friends, developing our skills as storytellers.
We also discussed the strange world of writing and publishing and how a prequel to a prequel can come about. This then morphed into a discussion of morally gray characters and their evolution and why I find the character Loki far more interesting than Thor. If you want clarification on these, go have a listen!
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Nina Munteanu is a Canadian ecologist / limnologist and novelist. She is co-editor of Europa SF and currently teaches writing courses at George Brown College and the University of Toronto. For the lates on her books, visit www.ninamunteanu.ca. Nina’s bilingual “La natura dell’acqua / The Way of Water” was published by Mincione Edizioni in Rome. Her non-fiction book “Water Is…” by Pixl Press (Vancouver) was selected by Margaret Atwood in the New York Times ‘Year in Reading’ and was chosen as the 2017 Summer Read by Water Canada. Her novel “A Diary in the Age of Water” was released by Inanna Publications (Toronto) in June 2020.You can read her just released eco-fiction thriller Gaia’s Revolution by Dragon Moon Press.
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Nina Munteanu interviewed by Simon Rose and Suzanne Lieurance on Writers To Writers Podcast
In my latest eco-fiction novel (Re)Genesis (upcoming), four teenagers in ‘small town’ Ontario discover and unravel a conspiracy by a chemical factory that uses shapeshifting substances for weapon use, causing a shift in the genetics of humanity itself. The discovery eventually leads them to communist Poland where it all started with the cyanobacteria Nostoc commune.
(Re)Genesis follows the premise of dark karma as Nature learns to reflect back what we send out. Making use of real examples of learning, pattern recognition, anticipation and adaptation in non-human life, the novel explores the concept of biosemiosis* in this eco-thriller.
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Nostoc commune found colonizing a gravel path, ON (photo by Nina Munteanu)
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Ahmed Bennu, a mind-challenged boy, who is arcanely transformed by a tragic incident into a genius publishing papers at Harvard, pursues the concept of biosemiosis in Nostoc commune, a ubiquitous cyanobacteria (blue-green algae)—and an organism his own body has begun to mimic—that has colonized the world. In a scientific paper published by Nature, he describes the ever-increasing fluidity in Nature and argues that Nostoc can anticipate and exert goal-oriented behaviour to change itself and its environment. He joins Harriet—who lost her best friend in that arcane incident—and their investigation leads them to a nefarious past, to the 1950s, deep in the Kurpioska Forest of Poland, where chemical company Zima Elastomers used Nostoc to concoct a freakish substance for the communist military. Not only did the substance infect the workers there; it escaped with dire consequences for the world’s future.
Of course, it’s just science fiction. But is that all it is?…
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Biosemiosis & Umwelt
In the 1930s, Jakob von Uexküll coined the term Umwelt* (species-specific reality or subjective environment) to define a life process that involved semiotic* interactions. He argued that an organism’s behaviour results from activity that attributes meaning to the world around it, rather than merely mechanically reacting to stimuli. Building on this notion, Friedrich S. Rothschild coined the term “biosemiosis” in 1962 to postulate that life has its subjective interpretation of the world around it—its Umwelt—a segment of the world that has significance and meaning based on that life’s biology and needs. Developing the concept of biosemiosis further, Thomas Sebeok later contended that all organisms are enveloped in a cloud of messages about themselves and their situation, which they constantly transmit, receive, and interpret. Life itself is a process of signification and meaning-making, from bacteria and plants to mammals and birds. Biosemiosis involves pattern recognition, anticipation, flexibility, goal-directed movement, memory, and learning.
All organisms participate in complex interactions that involve sophisticated signaling and exchange. In Planta Sapiens, Paco Calvo argues that, “this happens at the level of single-celled organisms, which can collect information and make decisions.” The slime mold Physarum polycephalum,for example, is an amoeba-like cell that can navigate its environment through learning, memory, and decisions. In the 1980s, evolutionary biologist Lynn Margulis argued for intelligence of bacteria based on similar observations.
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Nostoc filament showing various adaptive cells (illustration by Nina Munteanu)
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My novel (Re)Genesis features the cyanobacteria Nostoc commune, known to be highly adaptable to changing environments and known to participate in complex interactions by entering into symbiotic relationships (e.g. plants, fungi and lichen) that involve complex communication and exchange of resources; biosemiosis in action. In my novel, Nostoc commune is used by Polish biochemical company Zima Performance Elastomers as the driving core of a synthetic protein substance with chameleon properties called Syprene and meant for covert stealth operations by the military. Not unlike Margaret Atwood’s calamitous dystopia Oryx & Crake, things go wrong at Zima: terrible unintended consequences occur as non-human biological intelligence asserts its self-determination and humans find their sovereignty eroded into a more fluid existence.
In a scene close to the middle of the book, two sisters wish each other goodbye at the train station in the village of Mala Dolina, built for Zima Elastomers; a veil of dark portent overshadows them both:
Ewa and Zofia stand in awkward silence at the little train station in town, waiting for the train. A thick snowfall covers the tracks and the ground. The snow comes down like thick confetti, covering everything with a soft blanket of white.
It’s time for her to return to Warsaw to teach the winter semester at the university. She hates to leave Zofia with the twins so young, especially with Piotr not totally recovered. But, given how their work shifts now overlap less, surely Piotr can look after the twins when he’s home. It is not perfect, but it must work, she decides. Things must go on.
Ewa glances covertly at Zofia, standing next to her on the platform, and worries nonetheless. Piotr is definitely not fully recovered from his accident last fall. She finds him often morose and strange, staring off into the distance for a protracted time or saying odd things that have nothing to do with anything. Pieces of nonsense. He seems to have lost his joy for life and it is impacting her sister. He now walks with a stoop. Shortly after Christmas, Zofia had anxiously confided to her something distressing: Piotr had told Zofia that there was something in the brine pit. Something moving and alive. This is, of course, impossible. Nothing can live in that cesspool of poisonous waste. Zofia reminded her that Agata had made that same claim shortly before she was found dead and floating face down in the brine pit. Ewa recognized real terror in Zofia’s eyes. Neither said aloud the terrible thought that went through their minds: was Piotr going mad?
Ewa hears the train approach and soon it comes around the corner, emerging out of the thick pine forest, pushing through the snow on the tracks. Both women glance at one another with fake smiles.
What follows validates their fearful foreboding.
Process philosopher Alec Borislow writes, “There are invisible meanings, signs, and messages constantly being transmitted that shape the reality of all life forms. Biosemiotics aims to make the unseen seen.”
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Heterogenous Being*
In his 2025 PhD thesis, Steven L. Ogden explored the dichotomous narrative that separated human with non-human. Evoking the term “heterogenous being,” Odgen acknowledged the influences and potentialities of nonhuman subjects in narrative, both in fiction and nonfiction.
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.” Ogden 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.
In his exploration of Richard Powers’s novel The Overstory, Ogden points out that one of Powers’s main characters, botanist Patricia Westerford, understands 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.’” And yet plants are biosemiotics, exhibiting cognitive behaviour through adaptation, anticipation, flexibility, and goal-direction. Plants demonstrate phenotypic plasticity through their complex engagement with their environment, shaping what emerges.
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Various slime molds, ON (photos by Nina Munteanu)
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There is a growingzeitgeist of not just planetary awareness but of sensibility, a sense that we are interlinked with all other life and nonlife, that we are all more than the sum of our parts. And that intelligence—no matter how it is interpreted and measured—is far more prevalent than we thought, and found everywhere: from bacteria to insects to plants to animals, fungi and slime molds. Indeed, works devoted to incredible and intelligent nature of the non-human world have increased dramatically. Notable examples include Merlin Sheldrake’s Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds; Robin Wall Kimmerer’s Gathering Moss, Suzanne Simard’s TheBreathing Trees, Paco Calvo’s Planta Sapiens and Zoe Schlanger’s TheLight Eaters.
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Several books on nature’s intelligence
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Is it possible that we have finally escaped the oppressive shackles of 17th Century Cartesian dogma contesting that dogs have no feelings?
God, I surely hope so.
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Glossary:
Umwelt: a segment of the world that has significance and meaning based on an organism’s biology and needs: sounds it hears, scents it smells, foods it tastes.
Semiosis: the process of interpreting something as signifying something else using the process of signs, symbols or sound to produce meaning.
Biosemiosis: a biological term for ways organisms communicate, interpret meaning, and interact with their environments through signs and codes.
Heterogenous Being: 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.
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References:
Barbieri, Marcelo. 2008 (ed). “Introduction to Biosemiotics: The New Biological Synthesis” Springer, Netherlands. 525pp.
Borislow, Alec. 2023. “Send Me a Sign: Biosemiosis, Umwelt, And Signifiers.” Medium, November 30, 2023.
Calvo, Paco, M. Gagliano, G. Souza, and A. Trewavas. 2020. “Plants are intelligent, here’s how.” Annals of Botany 125: 11-28.
Haraway, Donna Jeanne. 2008. “When Species Meet.” University of Minnesota Press.
Hata, Shingo et al. 2022. “Dried Nostoc commune exhibits nitrogen-fixing activity using glucose under dark conditions after rehydration.” Plant Signal Behav. 17(1): 2059251.
Kecsey, et. al. 2018. “Adaptations of cyanobacterium Nostoc commune to environmental stress: Comparison of morphological and physiological markers between European and Antaarctic populations after rehydration.” Czech Polar Reports 8(1): 84-93.
Kimmerer, Robin Wall. 2003. “Gathering Moss: A Natural and Cultural History of Mosses.” Oregon State University Press. 176pp.
Marder, Micheal. 2013. “Plant-Thinking: A Philosophy of Vegetal Life.” Columbia University Press.
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.
Reber, A.S. 2019. “The First Minds: Caterpillars, ‘Karyotes and Consciousness.” Oxford University Press, New York. 296pp.
Schlanger, Zoe. 2025. “The Light Eaters.” Harper Perennial. 304pp.
Simard, Suzanne. 2026. “When the Forest Breathes.” Allen Lane. 336pp.
Trewavas, Anthony. 2003. “Aspects of Plant Intelligence.” Annals of Botany 92(1): 1-20.
Uexküll, Jakob von. 1921. “Umwelt und Innenwelt der Tiere” 2nd ed. Julius Springer, Berlin.
Uexküll, Jakob von. 1931. “Die Rolle des Subjekts in der Biologie.” Die Naturwissenschaften 19: 385-391.
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Nina Munteanu is a Canadian ecologist / limnologist and novelist. She is co-editor of Europa SF and currently teaches writing courses at George Brown College and the University of Toronto. For the lates on her books, visit www.ninamunteanu.ca. Nina’s bilingual “La natura dell’acqua / The Way of Water” was published by Mincione Edizioni in Rome. Her non-fiction book “Water Is…” by Pixl Press (Vancouver) was selected by Margaret Atwood in the New York Times ‘Year in Reading’ and was chosen as the 2017 Summer Read by Water Canada. Her novel “A Diary in the Age of Water” was released by Inanna Publications (Toronto) in June 2020.You can read her just released eco-fiction thriller Gaia’s Revolution by Dragon Moon Press.
Place ultimately portrays what lies at the heart of a story. Place as character provides an archetype that story characters connect with and navigate in ways that depend on the story’s theme, particularly in allegories that rely strongly on metaphor. Theme is essentially the “so what part” of a story; what is at stake for the character on their journey. Theme is the backbone—the heart—of the story, driving characters to journey through time and place toward some kind of fulfillment. There is no story without theme. And there is no theme without place.
When place is the environment—a forest, meadow, swamp or heathland—the author has an opportunity to go beyond simple backdrop, even beyond deeper metaphor, to intimately portray the voice of ‘the Other.’ Eco-literature brings awareness to environment as ‘Other’; eco-literature intimately explores humanity’s role in defining ‘the Other’ by portraying environment on a journey as character with agency and sometimes with voice—often through character coupling. Nineteenth Century author Thomas Hardy recognized the tenuous position of wilderness during Victorian Britain with increasing industrialization and urbanization. Taming Nature to achieve ordered beauty had become an obsession; Hardy recognized this and mourned the loss of pre-industrial agrarian landscapes to human greed and modernization.
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Thomas Hardy’s Heath: Return of the Native
For Victorian author Thomas Hardy, trees, meadows, winding brooks and country roads were far more than back-drop for his world and his stories. Elements of the natural world were characters that impacted other characters in a world dominated by nature.
Perhaps best known for his melancholic stories of fatalistic, ironic tyrannies, Thomas Hardy wrote with a tender and poetic sensibility about Nature, and particularly the heath where he grew up. All of Hardy’s writings embody a strong sense of place. Nature—like his omniscient narrative form—lies beyond the scope of humanity: vast, amoral, and unfathomed; and yet, inextricably linked to the feckless actions of its humans. Egdon Heath in Return of the Native remains one of Hardy’s most enduring characters and best examples of the power of place in story.
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Author D.H. Lawrence evocatively personified Hardy’s bleak heathland: “Egdon, whose dark soil was strong and crude and organic as the body of a beast.”
Egdon Heath is a metaphoric black hole from which no light escapes. None of Hardy’s characters escape the embrace of this behemoth. Dark, swarthy and associated with the night: “The face of the heath by its mere complexion added half an hour to evening; it could in like manner retard the dawn, sadden noon, anticipate the frowning storms scarcely generated, and intensify the opacity of a moonless midnight to a cause of shaking dread.” Each character is touched by the heath’s brooding grip and each feels its power differently: hapless Wildeve; idealist Clym; desperate Eustacia and suffering Thomasin.
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Cixin Liu’s Forests: The Three Body Problem
Cixin Liu’s The Three Body Problem—set against the backdrop of China’s Cultural Revolution—follows Wenji Ye, disillusioned by the massive environmental deforestation in the labour camps she is sent to work:
Her company wielded hundreds of chain saws like a swarm of steel locusts, and after they passed, only stumps were left. The fallen Dahurian larch, now bereft of branches, was ready to be taken away by tractor. Ye gently caressedthe freshly exposed cross section of the felled trunk. She did this often, as though such surfaces were giant wounds, as though she could feel the tree’s pain … The trunk was dragged away. Rocks and stumps in the ground broke the bark in more places, wounding the giant body further. In the spot where it once stood, the weight of the fallen tree being dragged left a deep channel in the layers of decomposing leaves that had accumulated over the years. Water quickly filled the ditch. The rotting leaves made the water appear crimson, like blood.
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Frank Herbert’s Desert: Dune
Frank Herbert’s Dune chronicles the journey of young Paul Atreides, Duke Leto’s son, who according to the indigenous Fremen prophesy will eventually bring them freedom from their enslavement by the colonialists—The Harkonens—and allow them to live unfettered on the planet Arrakis, known as Dune.
But, as the title of the book clearly reveals, this story is about place—a harsh desert planet whose 800 kph sandblasting winds could flay your flesh—and the power struggle between those who covet its arcane treasures and those who wish only to live free from slavery. Place—and its powerful symbols of desert, water and spice—lies at the heart of this epic story about taking, giving and sharing. When he thinks of Dune, the newly placed Duke Atreides uses water metaphors: “He sighed, glanced back at the dry landscape where the flowers were gone now—trampled by the dew gatherers, wilted under the early sun.”
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“The desert stretched out like a static ocean. [It] lay there full of moon-silvered waves—shadows of angles that lapsed into curves and, in the distance, lifted to the misted gray blur of another escarpment.”
The immense sandworms of Frank Herbert’s Dune are strong archetypes of Nature—large and graceful creatures whose movements in the vast desert sands resemble the elegant whales of our oceans:
It came from their right with an uncaring majesty that could not be ignored. A twisting burrow-mound of sand cut through the dunes within their field of vision. The mound lifted in front, dusting away like a bow wave in water.
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Annie Proulx’s Forest: Barkskins
The opening combines subtle to obvious images of an “unwelcoming” wilderness—as dark behemoth—and foreshadows the forest’s eventual destruction by settlers intent on conquering Nature. Proulx’s 300-year saga starts with the arrival of the Europeans in Canada’s pristine forest
Within the first ten pages we gain a rich and potent collage of first impressions by the settlers of “the moody darkness” of the New France forest, previously only seen by the “sauvages.” The barkskins “tramped up the muddy path toward a line of black mist … In a few hours the sodden leaf mold gave way to pine duff. Fallen needles muted their passage, the interlaced branches absorbed their panting breaths … evergreens larger than cathedrals, cloud-piercing spruce and hemlock. The monstrous deciduous trees stood distant from each other, but overhead their leaf-choked branches merged into a false sky, dark and savage …They walked on through the dim woods, climbing over mossy humps, passing under branches drooping like funeral swags,” hearing pines hissing in the wind,” and crossing “snarling water,” and “swarms of mosquitoes in such millions that their shrill keening was the sound of the woods.”
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These bleak impressions of a harsh environment crawling with pests such as bébites and moustiques underlie the combative mindset of the settlers to conquer and seize what they can of a presumed infinite resource. By page seventeen, we know that mindset well. René asks why they must cut so much forest when it would be easier to use the many adequate clearings to build their houses and settlements. Trépagny fulminates: “Easier? Yes, easier, but we are here to clear the forest, to subdue this evil wilderness.”
For them, the vast Canadian boreal forest was never-ending and for the taking: “It is the forest of the world. It is infinite. It twists around as a snake swallows its own tail and has no end and no beginning,” Trépagny claims.
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Richard Power’s Forest: The Overstory
Richard Powers’s The Overstory follows the life-stories of nine characters and their journey with trees. At its heart is the pivotal life of botanist Patricia Westerford, whose work resembles that of UBC’s Suzanne Simard. Westerford is a shy introvert who discovers that trees communicate, learn, trade goods and services—and have intelligence. When she shares her discovery, she is ridiculed by her peers and eventually loses her position at the university.
Like the marcescent beech, Patricia finds herself asynchronous with the rest of the forestry department at Purdue, in fact with the entire forestry discipline in the country. She disagrees with their edict of needing to “clean the forest of snags and wind throw to improve forest health.” She disagrees with their use of terms like thrifty young forests and decadent old forests, mean annual increment and economic maturity—not ecological but economic terms based on exploitation and human utility.
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Patricia’s early conviction that these silent trees are social creatures, sets her on a singular path that will push the boundaries of doctrine and a hegemony of human utility. She assiduously sets out to prove her premise of social trees and in so doing, becomes the forest. “She works all day in the woods, her back crawling with chiggers, her scalp with ticks, her mouth filled with leaf duff, her eyes with pollen, cobwebs like scarves around her face, bracelets of poison ivy, her knees gouged by cinders, her nose lined with spores, the backs of her thighs bitten Braille by wasps, and her heart as happy as the day is generous.” Like Ovid, she is becoming.
Patricia writes in her book The Secret Forest:
There are no individuals in a forest, no separable events. The bird and the branch it sits on are a joint thing. A third or more of the food a big tree makes may go to feed other organisms. Even different kinds of trees form partnerships. Cut down a birch, and a nearby Douglas fir may suffer … Fungi mine stone to supply their trees with minerals. They hunt springtails, which they feed to their hosts. Trees, for their part, store extra sugar in their fungi’s synapses, to dole out to the sick and shaded and wounded. A forest takes care of itself, even as it builds the local climate it needs to survive.
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Delia Owens’s Swampland: Where the Crawdads Sing
The swampland is beautifully and evocatively portrayed as a living character; its ‘journey’ is closely linked to the Kya, the main protagonist, as development encroaches both swamp and girl through commercial logging, and wetland drainage to build resort hotels. Kya lives with an unbiased understanding of a quiet biological life, surviving through natural instinct in a circle of life and death: a swamp knows all about death, and does not define it as a tragedy or a sin, thinks Kya who sees the swampland as her mother, teacher and sanctuary, embracing her with a protective mantle of natural beauty and wonder. Whenever she stumbled, it was the land who caught her. When the town marginalizes Kya, calling her “The Marsh Girl”, the swamp shields her from the prejudice and cruelty of the human world, providing an intimate protective barrier. In turn, Kya uses her book advance to buy several hundred acres of marsh as a protected wildlife refuge.
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In her article on Great Ecology, Liz Clift writes, “During the period in which Where the Crawdads Sing is set, wetlands were typically seen as a nuisance—and that comes through in the story-telling, when developers want to drain the marsh for a development. Wetlands were also seen as mosquito-infested, buggy, smelly, or even an eyesore. A significant number of wetlands around the world, including in the US, have been lost due to land development and agriculture, which is unfortunate because wetlands are rich with biodiversity and play a key role in maintaining both freshwater and saltwater fisheries, support water quality, and protect against flooding.” This is not a phenomenon or attitude of the past; it unfortunately remains prevalent, particularly in North America.
What Delia Owens achieves in Where the Crawdads Sing is two-fold: 1) the reader knows more about the value of the marsh but also gains a sense of its beauty as seen through the eyes of Kya; and, 2) through the strong connection with the main character and use of evocative metaphor, Owens transforms the marsh into a real character.
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Why Make Place a Character…
Why is this important? Think of a place you know. I’ll use the house I grew up in. To any passerby, the house is just another two-storey cornflower-blue house with veranda on a quiet residential street, lined by trees. But for me, the house carries memories of my childhood, of running up and down the creaky foot-worn stairs, or sharing ghost stories with friends on the back porch as the waning twilight revealed the winking fireflies outside. Playing dolls with my sister in the stuffy attic. The sweet pungent aroma of my father’s pipe smoke in the livingroom and my mother’s thrush-like voice resonating from the kitchen as she baked German sugar cookies. I loved that house, with all its idiosyncratic groans and whistles in the wind and the echoes of cheerful laughter over the years. That house was a character.
Once this happens, once place becomes a character, we find ourselves caring for it.
In story, it is the characters we care about; it is the characters that we cheer for and follow on their journey of loss, redemption or victory.
This is why writers of eco-fiction depict environment as a character. We must first relate and connect before we care; we must first care before we act. Eco-fiction authors also use the device of character-coupling to help readers care. The examples above provide this method through their ‘othered’ characters, who, in turn, relate to the ‘othered’ environment. In another article, I provide more examples of character-coupling in the literature that enable readers to connect to otherwise arcane aspects of their environment through their connection to a character they can relate to.
Beaver Pond just before a rainstorm, BC (photo by Nina Munteanu)
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Nina Munteanu is a Canadian ecologist / limnologist and novelist. She is co-editor of Europa SF and currently teaches writing courses at George Brown College and the University of Toronto. For the lates on her books, visit www.ninamunteanu.ca. Nina’s bilingual “La natura dell’acqua / The Way of Water” was published by Mincione Edizioni in Rome. Her non-fiction book “Water Is…” by Pixl Press (Vancouver) was selected by Margaret Atwood in the New York Times ‘Year in Reading’ and was chosen as the 2017 Summer Read by Water Canada. Her novel “A Diary in the Age of Water” was released by Inanna Publications (Toronto) in June 2020.You can read her just released eco-fiction thriller Gaia’s Revolution by Dragon Moon Press.
Today is Bastille Day, France’s national day that commemorates the 1789 storming of the Bastille prison by an angry revolutionary mob. The event was a major flashpoint that ignited the French Revolution that eventually ended the oppressive Bourbon monarchy.
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This day is also significant in my historical fantasy The Last Summoner. July 14, 1410, is the birthday of main character Vivianne Schoen, the Baroness von Grunwald, who has just turned fourteen and is promised in marriage to a cruel foreigner. It is the eve of the Battle of Grunwald. Fought on July 15, 1410, this conflict was one of the largest and most decisive battles in medieval European history, where the Kingdom of Poland and the Grand Duchy of Lithuania gathered a ragtag allied army of peasant warriors to defeat the powerful knights of the Teutonic Order in what is now northeastern Poland. Their surprising victory crippled the Teutonic Knights’ dominance in the Baltic region and shifted the balance of power in Central and Eastern Europe.
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In an early scene, Vivianne contemplates her fate:
“It’s my birthday today, Fritz,” she announced to her cat. July 14, 1410. She was fourteen years old. Her father and now deceased mother had pledged her since her birth to a stranger from a foreign land on her fourteenth birthday. Today—if the rumor was true, that is. Though she’d overheard the entire von Grunwald Ordensburgen gossip of it for years, her father had never mentioned it to her. Surely, he would have told her of such an important thing in her life if he’d meant it in earnest. Vivianne sighed and stroked Fritz. Then again, perhaps not, she reflected, summoning the stern image of her taciturn father. He never told her anything. If her mother was alive it might have been different….
The young baroness soon makes the startling discovery that she can alter history – but not before she is branded a witch and must flee through a time-space tear, landing in Paris on July 14, 2010, Bastille Day. Now in an alternate France ruled by Teutonic Black Knights, she must decide how to remake history.
Below is an excerpt from The Last Summoner, a scene in that alternate Nazi-ruled Paris on that fateful day:
Paris, France, 2010
FRANÇOIS thrust his way through the thick crowd in Place de la Bastille. He craned to see the parade of greycoats and several blackcoats goose-stepping down the Boulevard de la Bastille and Rue Saint Antoine to converge at la Place. They were followed by heavy artillery that had begun its trek all the way from the Arc de Triumph and Avenue des Champs-Élysées. It was a great show of military power for the Nazis. Today was July the fourteenth, 2010: Bastille Day. In earlier times, the Porte St. Antoine was defended by a drawbridge and the Bastille. All that remained was a gilded statue of liberté in the center of the square to commemorate the culmination of France’s long struggle to establish democracy with its final ‘liberation’ by the Nazis in the mid 1800s.
A clammy wind stirred up tiny dust tornadoes in the square and people flung up their hands to protect their faces from the flying grit. François watched them, like the pocket thief he was. There would be a few easily taken today.
He caught the eye of Philip, one of his neighbours on Rue des Rosiers and the best pick-pocket François knew. The lanky boy nodded to him with a look of surprised delight; he hadn’t expected François to come. There were several dozen kids like he and Philip, scattered throughout la Place, poised to wreak havoc on the crowd at just the right moment. They were only a diversion for the real crime. François glanced briefly at the Banque de France on the corner of Rue St. Antoine, then checked his watch. It was ten minutes to the hour. At 1800 the artillery would give its booming show; and at precisely that moment, masked under the cacophony of the blasting artillery, his anarchist friends inside the bank would blow the safe. They would make their getaway once chaos set in as people realized that they’d been robbed. T’is a godlike thing to lend; to owe is a heroic virtue, he thought with a smirk.
François’s role in all this was very profitable though actually quite dangerous; he and Philip and the other pick pockets were placing themselves in the direct line of attention—and fire of the flics. Their safety lay in their scattered numbers, in their nimble feet, and their ability to negotiate the crowd and blend in when they wanted to. They were all kids, like him; mostly ten to sixteen year olds. They’d all lost their parents and other adult relatives to the Nazis.
Many of the middle class workers had lost their jobs and the will to live when the Nazis introduced efficient city bots and turfed people out of their rich homes. Left behind by dead, imprisoned, or conscripted mothers and fathers or simply abandoned by overworked uncaring parents, most children lived on their own in the streets of Paris with whole district slums devoted to the ‘street brats’. François’s parents had been killed in the Latin Quarter uprising of 2007. There were at least half a million “homeless” children, fending for themselves in the city, according to his uncle; all finding shelter in derelict huts and bivouacs. They were the discarded refuse of a series of purges by the fascist government.
Purges were not new to the empire. They’d begun hundreds of years ago with the Jews, who were pretty well extinct now, François considered. During the early development of the empire, Jews were massacred by the Teutonic Knights, who later became the strong arm of the new Reich as the feared Black Knights. But the purges weren’t enough. Like an old building, the empire was crumbling from within through its own debauchery, and from the outside pressure of war and rebellion. The empire was at war with the Chinese and rebelling Muslims to the east and dealing with the unruly British and upstart North Americans to the north and west. The two English-speaking countries had allied in rebellion against the Reich and were causing Fuhrer Hitler III no end of grief. It was eroding his empire, sucking it of funds, men, arms and resources. And bleeding it of morale as well as the pitifully little humor the Germans might have had in the first place. François saw its effect in the uncalled for cruelty meted out by the Black Knights and greycoats to his fellow Parisians.
Grand Marshal von Eisenreich seemed to call a purge almost weekly. First it was the restless students of the Sorbonne, then it was complaining workers in Nanterre. Then the school teachers of Lyon. Or transit workers in the Mont Parnasse area. No group or person was immune to their indiscriminate wrath. One day you were scorned for dressing in black; the next day for dressing in white. Something drastic would have to happen for it to right itself, his uncle kept saying. Luckily for some, von Eisenreich talked in his sleep and his light-sleeping wife, Lizette, listened. She, in turn, gossiped to François during their pillow talk and François then warned those intended victims through his uncle of the coming purge.
But all that was largely Antoine’s concern and those in the Résistance, like Philip and André and most of the other children assembled here and poised to do mischief. They had a right to be skeptical of François’s presence here. He did what he could, but only if it suited him. His motives weren’t with the liberation of France. His motive was with the liberation of François.
Each for himself, he figured. I come first. That was the rule by which the government operated, he reasoned. Why should I be any different? Now take Sylvie, for instance, he thought, mind recollecting the thirteen-year old girl from the 12ème Arrondissement he’d left only moments ago; she gladly spread her legs for him anytime, anywhere for a cigarette or an apple.
He was a regular Valentino, François figured, and felt something stirring below. He grabbed his crotch and scratched his unruly penis with a leering smile. “Down, boy,” he whispered with a grin. Lizette cooed over François like he was a doll and called him her sweet putain. Baisses moi, mon putain…Tu as un beau cul….He was her little darling peasant to dress…and undress. He didn’t care; he could eat, and live half-comfortably on Rue des Rosiers because of her and other patrons like her. He had a running Pal with naughty vids of all his clients that he rented out to his street friends. And the girls on the street, like Sylvie, thought he was hot.
He jammed his hand in his jeans pocket and smirked at the silver Pal in his palm before re-pocketing it and pulling out a small innocuous-looking black package of rapture. They also called it the black rabbit because of the package and where it took you: through a fantastic black “rabbit” hole.
When his Oncle Antoine finally found him, he tried to get François away from all that. But Antoine was no better off, having been recently chased out of his own house by Black Knights who accused him of helping the anarchists. Antoine wasn’t helping them…he was one, François thought with scathing humor. Antoine was always trying to recruit François to join the Résistance by berating him: “Why do you keep whoring? You’re worth more than that. You’re selling yourself, François. And for what? Half the time you don’t even get money; just that stinking rapture…”
François rubbed the small black package of rapture between his fingers and felt his nose flare with desire. Stinking rapture, indeed. You wouldn’t think it was stinking if you tried it, l’Oncle! He ripped the package open and threw his head back to pour the slightly acrid white powder in his mouth, then flung the wrapper onto the street. Within an instant, the street burst into sharper contrast and he knew his eyes dilated. A grin split his face open and he laughed, feeling invincible. Everything was all right now. Even those stinking Nazis with their swastikas, high-stepping black boots and batons…and whoring wives….
“You’re the Nazi’s putain. They’ve turned you into an addict and they’ve got you on a leash, François,” his uncle had gone on. “Honestly, you should stop all that whoring.”
“Why? And for what?” François had retorted, thinking he made a pretty good living by it; better than his destitute uncle. “Besides, I like it!” he’d ended maliciously. Antoine had lost all that he owned and now had less cash than François. “If I stop, what do I gain?”
“Something you’ve lost, François. Your dignity.”
“My parents lost it for me when they joined la Societé Secrêt and got themselves killed for some lost cause,” François said bitterly. To which his uncle had nothing to say. François knew it was cruel to say that; Antoine loved his brother, Marcel, and his wife, Angeline. Heck, Antoine had even dated François’s mother before François’s dad stole her heart. It had been Angeline, in fact, who’d brought the two brothers into the Résistance in the first place. She was the original anarchist. She’d apparently been one of the founding members of the SSLF. Until joining the SSLF, Antoine had just been an unruly student, one of millions in France. Antoine never married and, judging from the pictures he’d seen, François thought that he’d shriveled up like a prune when Marcel married the only girl that Antoine had courted.
Gunshots exploded inside the bank. François caught Collete’s stricken expression and Alain’s confusion in the crowd. That wasn’t supposed to happen. They were early—it wasn’t time yet! Then the doors of Banque de France burst open and two of their colleagues spilled out, followed by flic who opened fire on them. They fell and the crowd scattered like flies. More flics emerged, aiming their weapons into the crowd.
François bolted.
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Nina Munteanu is a Canadian ecologist / limnologist and novelist. She is co-editor of Europa SF and currently teaches writing courses at George Brown College and the University of Toronto. For the lates on her books, visit www.ninamunteanu.ca. Nina’s bilingual “La natura dell’acqua / The Way of Water” was published by Mincione Edizioni in Rome. Her non-fiction book “Water Is…” by Pixl Press (Vancouver) was selected by Margaret Atwood in the New York Times ‘Year in Reading’ and was chosen as the 2017 Summer Read by Water Canada. Her novel “A Diary in the Age of Water” was released by Inanna Publications (Toronto) in June 2020.You can read her just released eco-fiction thriller Gaia’s Revolution by Dragon Moon Press.
In March this year, Calgary writer Simon Rose interviewed me on his blog about the recent release of the first book of The Icaria Trilogy, Gaia’s Revolution.
Below is the interview:
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My guest today is Nina Munteanu, Canadian author, essayist, and blogger. Nina has published over a dozen fiction and non-fiction books, mostly on the environment. She does a column on Reality Skimming Press and blogs about the environment on her site The Meaning of Water. Today, we’ll be discussing her just-released ecological thriller, Gaia’s Revolution, Book 1 of The Icaria Trilogy, put out by Dragon Moon Press in Calgary.
Simon: So, what’s the Trilogy about?
Nina: It’s a bit of a saga that starts in Berlin in 2022 (Book 1, Gaia’s Revolution) and moves to the Toronto area in Canada, through several generations over seven decades (Books 2 and 3). The trilogy explores a collapsing capitalist society in Canada through ravages of climate change and a failing technology. Book 1 starts with ambitious twin brothers Eric, a gifted engineer, and Damien Vogel, a brilliant scientist, who escape the growing racial violence of Berlin, to ‘peaceful’ Canada in a rivalry to control the evolution of the human race. The warring brothers set off a violent revolution that destroys the Canadian technocratic government and whose weapons ultimately risk the survival of humanity. Fanatical deep ecologist Monica Schlange snares both brothers in her gambit to reshape humanity and its place in the natural world. Three orphaned children, caught in the web of intrigue and violence, will ultimately determine the direction of humanity by introducing the first veemelds (people who can communicate with machines), a new environmental disease, and a new set of rules neither brother envisioned.
By 2095 (Book 2, Angel of Chaos and Book 3, Darwin’s Paradox), humanity—now under Gaian rule—has fled inside environmental dome cities called Icarias, chased inside by an unruly environment. Icarians struggle with Darwin’s Disease—a mysterious neurological environmental pandemic. Icaria 5 (formerly Toronto, Canada) is one of many enclosed cities within the slowly recovering toxic wasteland of North America, and where the protagonist Julie Crane (daughter of one of the orphans in Gaia’s Revolution and a veemeld) lives and works. Julie must deal with the ghosts of the characters in Book 1: including her dead and discredited father, now implicated in spreading subversive science and charged with several political assassinations.
Simon: A technocratic government in Canada? How did you envision that?
Nina: My premise involves several key climate disasters coupled with a highly unpopular decision by the Liberal government to welcome millions of climate refugees, providing housing and amenities that disaster-affected Canadians did not get. This scenario and accompanying sentiment is not new. In 2015, Angela Merkel welcomed over a million refugees from Iraq and Syria into Germany; public support quickly waned and the far right exploited rejection of the policy. Continuing with my premise, increased unrest grew in Canada as protests mobilized the far-right and gave voice to Christian fundamentalists, white supremacists, anti-Semitic conspiracy theorists and Islamophobic nationalists. The growing rift between the polarized major parties opened a gap filled by a new party, neither far right nor far left and based on the logic and merit of science & technology: the Technocratic Party of Canada. The party skyrocketed in popularity with an intelligent population who were fed up with political sophistry and empty rhetoric and excuses. The Technocrats had a plan that made sense and they demonstrated the expertise to carry it out: ways to successfully adapt to climate change, using technology and scientific research. The party subscribed to a scientific management approach, a Taylorism approach based on four principles: select methods based on science; assign jobs based on aptitude; monitor performance; and divide workload based on a systems approach. But, as you read above, they, too, are overthrown for something else: the Gaian dynasty of deep ecologists.
Simon: You’ve brought in many characters in this saga. Who is your favourite?
Nina: You’ll laugh: the main antagonist of Gaia’s Revolution, Monica Schlange (and what she becomes). I really enjoyed writing about the twin brothers—contrasting them despite their twin origins. I also enjoyed writing the three orphan characters: about their terrible journey to safety when the violent revolution moved from the cities to the countryside. I also enjoyed writing Julie’s character (in Books 2 and 3), her journey as a veemeld (gifted and cursed) and being the daughter of a traitor, who must find her way in a treacherous world of lies and intrigue. But my favourite is Monica Schlange: the fanatical deep ecologist, revolutionary, shape-shifter, bad-ass warrior, villain with a conscience. She is a paradox: she cares immensely about the planet, the welfare of the planet’s ecosystems and displays compassion for the orphans; but she has no qualms about killing a man in cold blood—which she does, on several occasions.
There is a scene where twin brother Eric unleashes a techno-clone to murder a colleague of Monica’s; techno-clones are hybrid cyborgs, DNA-altered men merged with synthetics and weapons fused into them, all connected by a hive mind. Monica takes on this murder-machine and cleverly dispatches him—when no one else has been able to. This quickly earns her a reputation as a Badass warrior and soon images of her face—scar across her temple—is plastered everywhere by the revolutionaries.
Throughout the first book, I provide a few moments of perspective into Monica’s past. An only child, she grew up on one of the last independent dairy farms in Ontario—before the Technocrats seized it and converted it into a Corporation Farm using scientific agriculture. It killed her father, who she dearly loved. Her mother took to whoring with the first trucker who came along, abandoning her. A ruthless eco-terrorist and subversive, Monica is bent on destroying the capitalist-technocratic machinery to save the planet at the expense of human domination. An unscrupulous eco-terrorist, she uses sabotage and internet tampering to disrupt and hurt climate offenders. She is the quintessential anti-hero. I guess you could say that I realized some terrible fantasies through this character.
Simon:What are you currently working on?
Nina: Not much. I’m taking a wee break from novel-writing and focusing on marketing. I’m currently shopping an eco-fiction novel around that takes place in southern Ontario and the Kurpiowska Forest in Poland during the communist era (specifically the 50s to 70s). I did a lot of research for that book and it was so fascinating!
I am actively coaching writers to publication (see www.NinaMunteanu.me) and writing nature and environmental articles for various magazines and my own blogs (www.TheMeaningOfWater.com). I’m also curating a column on Lynda Williams’s Reality Skimming Press blog on sustainability. Called “Sustainability Over Ambition”, the column consists of a series of articles and interviews I’m conducting with mostly Canadian authors on that complex subject. If you’re a Canadian author, feel free to reach out to me if you’re interested in being interviewed.
Simon: Tell me a little more about your coaching services?
Nina: My coaching includes advice on all story aspects (like storyboarding, world building, character, plot, etc.). I also edit, but my service usually encompasses far more, such as narrative flow, sentence structure, meaning, clarity, and concision. I look at just about every kind of fiction, except horror. I help writers with their nonfiction such as memoirs, biographies, how-to books, and technical books. I also do technical and scientific editing of papers and reports.
Simon: Where can people buy Gaia’s Revolution and the entire trilogy?
Nina: The entire Icaria Trilogy can be purchased on Amazon and other online and brick and mortar bookstores, such as Chapters. Books 2 and 3 are also available in many libraries throughout Canada, given that they’ve been out for a while.
Simon:Thanks, Nina, for being my guest here today and the very best of luck with The Icaria Trilogy.
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The Icaria Trilogy by Dragon Moon Press
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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.Her latest novel “Gaia’s Revolution” was released in 2026 by Dragon Moon Press.
“Munteanu seamlessly blends real-life history and technology with tantalizing glimpses of the future’s drugs, diseases, and evolving concepts…Frighteningly plausible…”
My eco-fiction political thriller Gaia’s Revolution—released March 10 of this year—has already made quite an impact on readers and reviewers: from amazing accolades to outright pans.
I love the controversy!
The book that follows ambitious twin brothers and the woman who plays them has rightly caused a ruckus from its questionable and controversial main characters to a thrilling though notorious plot. Understandably, some readers hated the book, even as others thoroughly enjoyed it. Either way, the book can’t be accused of being mediocre or mundane (something I would detest in my writing).
Gaia’s Revolution “is a politically incendiary portrait of a civilization unraveling under climate collapse, historical trauma, and ideological extremism. Berlin, 2022. In a country destabilized by climate catastrophe and political extremism, activist Damien Vogel becomes the target of a violent state crackdown after protesting with Letzte Generation. As he uncovers long-buried truths about his family, he is drawn into conflict with his estranged twin Eric, whose ruthless plan for humanity’s survival threatens to sacrifice freedom itself.”
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Literary Titan adds that the story “widens into a future history of revolution, ideology, biotech, enclosed cities, and ecological control…The novel is Part 1 of The Icaria Trilogy, and it reads like both an origin story and a warning flare.”
The Prairies Book Review calls Gaia’s Revolution: “Dense, unsettling, and intellectually ambitious.” They describe the novel as “bleak, intelligent, and emotionally explosive.” They add that, “Munteanu crafts the novel as both climate thriller and philosophical inquiry, weaving ecological science, German history, and political paranoia into a narrative charged with dread and moral instability…Munteanu refuses simplistic moral binaries, presenting climate collapse as a force that destabilizes not only ecosystems, but democracy, ethics, and identity itself.”
Reader Neha Shukla writes on Goodreads that Gaia’s Revolution has a “strong message with emotional depth.” Shukla noted that “the emotional side of the story is very well handled.” Lily Thomass wrote on Goodreads that “what stood out to me was the emotional honesty of the story.”
Costi Gurgu, author of Recipearium and The Cursed writes: “Gaia’s Revolution may be the most extensively researched SF novel I’ve ever read…[the book is] so close to reality that it’s frightening.” Claudiu Murgan, author of Water Entanglement, enjoyed the “dynamic plot and interesting, well-defined characters.”
Steve Stanton, Canadian speculative fiction author of Freenet writes: “I love it when novelists tackle the big issues and take on big opponents, and in these perilous times there is no bigger issue than global climate change, and no bigger opponent than patriarchal capitalism. Gaia’s Revolution by Nina Munteanu begins in present-day Germany, where ecological activists are setting the stage even now. In Munteanu’s inspired vision, radical racism, anti-immigration activism, and ultra right-wing security forces will be a crucible fomenting world catastrophe.”
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Stanton adds, “The author uses some subtle stylistic variations for those readers who pay attention to details. The pace is varied, and the plot twists drive the narrative forward. I felt the beginning was a bit wordy with backstory and political philosophy, but Munteanu masterfully dovetails current political unrest and eco-activism into the worldwide dystopia of The Icaria Trilogy. As a prequel, this novel is an embellishment of sci-fi concepts developed very early in Munteanu’s career, but it is also the culmination of a body of work. For me, Gaia’s Revolution has been a delightful rediscovery of a talented Canadian voice.”
Reviews weren’t all positive; some oozed acid in their negative wrath. Why is Gaia’s Revolution eliciting this diversity of polarized reactions?
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Sophia Wasylinko of The British Columbia Review in part suggests why in her negative review: “The book hooked me at first with its look at a world hostile to environmentalists and deep ecological concepts. Unfortunately, once the brothers cross paths with deep ecologist Monica Schlange, things get messy. Both for them and for the book.”
Wasylinko particularly took exception to Monica’s character.
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Literary Titan describes Monica’s mercurial shapeshifting character as “a zealous deep ecologist, [who] becomes one of the book’s most dangerous engines: part savior, part tyrant, using damaged people…as instruments in her plan to remake humanity’s relationship with the natural world.” Wasylinko emphatically disliked Monica, which impeded her enjoyment of the book. The reviewer found that, “…as the story progressed, the more irritated I became with [Monica’s] sexual antics and ‘Tears for Fears’ references. While I probably wasn’t supposed to like her, I didn’t care for her at all.” Wasylinko ended with: “I won’t be continuing with the trilogy…I cannot cope with any more of Monica’s crooning Tears for Fears’ big hit of 1985, ‘Everybody Wants to Rule the World.’”
Literary Titan provides another possible reason for the polarized reactions: “the book refuses to make climate politics tidy. It doesn’t give us a simple contest between virtuous activists and corrupt institutions; instead, it shows how righteousness can calcify into doctrine, how grief can become governance, and how ecological thinking can be twisted into a new authoritarian grammar.” The reviewer found that what unsettled them the most, “was the book’s interest in compromised people [who are not] arranged into neat moral bins. They are products of abuse, ideology, scientific ambition, terror, tenderness, cowardice, and survival.”
Kirkus Reviews adds that: “Political ideals clash as the world falls into chaos … the ongoing political war is frighteningly plausible, and some readers may struggle with deciding who the villains are. The author serves up lively discourse in which the characters offer no easy answers; Munteanu seamlessly blends real-life history and technology with tantalizing glimpses of the future’s drugs, diseases, and evolving concepts.”
In describing the diametrically opposed trajectories of twin brothers Eric and Damien, Prairies Book Review adds that, “Eric’s eco-authoritarian worldview is chilling precisely because it emerges logically from the same environmental realities driving Damien’s activism.”
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The book follows six key characters and a handful of minor characters—all with associated archetypes—and their journeys during this catastrophic time are complex and messy; a function of the chaotic time itself. I make no apology to Wasylinko for the messiness. Revolution is messy. In a time of hard choices, innocence is the main casualty. This becomes evident for all the characters in the novel—particularly the children—as fiction reflects non-fiction. In the end, no one is innocent and all are changed.
Gaia’s Revolution is best described as an exploration of violent change and its associated impact and paradoxes. This is something we will face or already are facing with the growing unruliness of global warming, environmental destruction, and planetary change. Gaia’s Revolution ultimately explores the diverse impact of revolution in an unsustainable world; perhaps it is only apt that its reception by readers is equally diverse.
Paradox and irony drive Gaia’s Revolution. Says Wasylinko: “Gaia’s Revolution shows how quickly utopia becomes a dystopia. Nowhere is this more evident than the [revolutionary] Gaian Army adopting the Technocratic government’s weapons, including terrifying clones, and … book burning.”
According to Literary Titan,Gaia’s Revolution “has the grain of a manifesto smuggled inside a thriller, a story with roots sunk deep into Rachel Carson, chaos theory, surveillance states, and the bad old habit of deciding that humanity must be saved from itself.”
Kirkus Reviews described Gaia’s Revolution as: “a bleak but fascinating portrayal of a near-future dystopia.”
Literary Titan recommends Gaia’s Revolution “to readers of climate fiction, eco-dystopian fiction, biopunk, political fiction, and science fiction readers who like their futures thorny rather than sleek. Readers who enjoy Margaret Atwood’s MaddAddam books or Kim Stanley Robinson’s climate-minded fiction may find familiar pleasures here, though Munteanu’s novel is darker, more doctrinal, and more intimate in its wounds.”
“We must first destroy before we can create. We must be unruly like climate. We must be relentless like climate. We must ride that wave before we can become the wave.”—Eric Vogel, Gaia’s Revolution
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Nina Munteanu is a Canadian ecologist / limnologist and novelist. She is co-editor of Europa SF and currently teaches writing courses at George Brown College and the University of Toronto. For the lates on her books, visit www.ninamunteanu.ca. Nina’s bilingual “La natura dell’acqua / The Way of Water” was published by Mincione Edizioni in Rome. Her non-fiction book “Water Is…” by Pixl Press (Vancouver) was selected by Margaret Atwood in the New York Times ‘Year in Reading’ and was chosen as the 2017 Summer Read by Water Canada. Her novel “A Diary in the Age of Water” was released by Inanna Publications (Toronto) in June 2020.Her latest eco-fiction novel Gaia’s Revolution was released March 2026 by Dragon Moon Press.
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.
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 misconception of dendrological and botanical being is that the provided anecdote of a tree’s agency in the development of soil, weather, and atmosphere is entirely factual.”
Ogden notes that “Nina Munteanu’s A Diary in the Age of Water brings the seemingly mundane and inconsequential (what Emanuele Coccia refers to as “residual” objects) to the imaginary forefront within creative-scientific writing…In Munteanu’s limnological characterization of freshwater bodies…[this] creative-scientific work of literature enlarges and redevelops the hierarchy of the taxaonomic ranks originally set out by animal studies. [It] increases the principal tenet of the discipline’s genealogy to include the greater part of all biological (and even inorganic) life in its inhuman narrative.”
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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.’”
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:
Ogden describes “Heterogenous Being” as a way of being that recognizes and incorporates humanity’s pluralized configurations with the nonhuman world by uniting the studies of science and humanities into an interdisciplinary hybrid creative-scientific aesthetic.
Ogden explains the use of “inhuman” here by referring to Jeffrey Jerome Cohen’s notes in Stone: An Ecology of the Inhuman, which uses inhuman to “emphasize both difference (‘in-‘ as negative prefix) and intimacy (‘in-‘ as indicator of estranged interiority).” This is akin to the practice of “othering”.
The Other has often been metaphorically portrayed in SF by aliens that lack a distinct voice or viewpoint; some portrayal has reflected a fearful imperialistic colonialism by representing Other as adversary such as an invading monster with no regard for humans (e.g. Robert Heinlein’s The Number of the Beast; H.G. Wells’s War of the Worlds). Kerslake argues that the traits of the Other “fall characteristically—and conveniently—into those spaces we choose not to recognize in ourselves, the ‘half-imagined, half-known: monsters, devils, heroes, terrors, pleasures, desires’ of Said’s ‘Orient’”. The Martians of Ray Bradbury’s Martian Chronicles—who also have no voice—reflect our indigenous peoples under the yoke of settler colonialism and an exploitive resource-extraction mindset. The monster of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein —also with no voice—exemplifies the disabled/deformed unsavory departure from our ‘perfect’ self-image; to be chased, destroyed and nullified.
In some stories the protagonist is Othered in some way, providing a more direct link to the experience of being the Other or being Othered. For instance, in Mishell Baker’s Borderline, disabled protagonist Millie provides the connection to the greater theme of Othering “lesser beings.” In Costi Gurgu’s Recipearium, the protagonists are not human; they are alien creatures that dwell inside the dead carcass of a monster, representing Other as main character.
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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.
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.
Mist over swelling spring stream, ON (photo and rendition by Nina Munteanu)
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Nina Munteanu is a Canadian ecologist / limnologist and novelist. She is co-editor of Europa SF and currently teaches writing courses at George Brown College and the University of Toronto. For the lates on her books, visit www.ninamunteanu.ca. Nina’s bilingual “La natura dell’acqua / The Way of Water” was published by Mincione Edizioni in Rome. Her non-fiction book “Water Is…” by Pixl Press (Vancouver) was selected by Margaret Atwood in the New York Times ‘Year in Reading’ and was chosen as the 2017 Summer Read by Water Canada. Her novel “A Diary in the Age of Water” was released by Inanna Publications (Toronto) in June 2020.You can read her just released eco-fiction thriller Gaia’s Revolution by Dragon Moon Press.
I recently discovered the Polish TV series Lead Children on Netflix—and pretty much binge-watched it. This gripping 6-episode series follows young Doctor Jolanta Wadowska-Król (played by Joanna Kulig) as she gradually uncovers and pieces together a mysterious health crisis that affects children living in the district of Szopienice (in the city of Katowice) dominated by a zinc / lead smelter.
Jolanta stands at a Szopienice graveyard filled with children’s graves(“Lead Children”)
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While the title gives away the subject matter of the series, episodes still unravel with insidious deliberation. In the first scene (after the flash forward) a young boy faints for no apparent reason, bringing our good doctor to his aid; in another scene Jolanta is wiping her filthy windows of black dust (from the nearby smelter) before visiting a pregnant mother with two anemic children who promptly gives birth to a stillborn child. We then move to a meeting of city officials who are deciding which factory Comrade General Secretary Brezhnev will visit and one official suggests the Szopienice Non-Ferrous Metal Works; the plant, he claims, has had “improvements and so forth,” that allowed it to exceed the plan for the past two months (the plan being Boleslaw Bierut’s Six-Year Plan started in 1950, for aggressively industrializing Poland through unrealistic production). All this sets the stage for a dark tale of treachery and brave but dangerous persistence to reveal the truth that will reach deep into your soul and squeeze until you are breathless.
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Doctor Jolanta Wadowska-Króland her assistant walk through the smelter district in “Lead Children”
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When local children begin showing signs of serious illness and developmental problems—high anemia (e.g. haemoglobin less than half normal), headaches, stomach pain, sluggishness, joint pain and muscle weakness, learning problems, hearing loss, irritability, vomiting, internal bleeding and seizures, enamel hypoplasia, blue gums—Jolanta pushes against what looks like a cover-up to investigate the unusual pattern of sicknesses.
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Jolanta recognizes the blue-black gum line in the children as a telltale sign of chronic lead toxicity. Known as “Burton’s line”, it is caused by a chemical reaction by a high level of lead in the child’s blood and sulfur-producing bacteria in the mouth. The interaction creates insoluble lead sulfide deposits in the gum tissue, typically near the gum margin. Jolanta links the poisoning to the lead emitted from the smelter in the Targowisko neighbourhood: in the dust, in the water and the ground where people keep their gardens and children play.
Watercolour drawing of the mouth and gums of a woman who worked in a lead-mill. There is saturnine impregnation with a well-marked Burton’s line and a blue stain on the buccal membrane opposite(source: Wikipedia)
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The Szopienice Non-Ferrous Metal Works (“Lead Children”)
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Jolanta’s efforts to address the problem are met with a concerted resistance from company managers, local officials and authorities, pressured by politics and the need for production over health and welfare of the community. For instance, workers and their families, live in shabby familoks around the smelter; kids play in the dirt, beneath the billowing smoke stacks, exposed to heavy metal-contaminated ash and dust. It gets even more dangerous for Jolanta when the Polish Security Service starts to interfere. As with the Stasi situation in East Germany, citizens are regularly pressganged into denunciating targeted individuals and Jolanta is denunciated by a member of her own staff.
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Woman and baby walks in the dust of the smelter as children play in the contaminated dirt (“Lead Children”)
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By Episode four, the show becomes heart-breaking as the first of the children dies shortly after returning to Targowisko after a reprieve and recovery from the smelter contamination. Meantime, local Polish Communist Party leader and politburo member Zdzislaw Grudzień pressures the smelter managers to “be the best” by comparing them to a high-producing metal works in Dresden (at the time still in East Germany under the GDR); they respond by removing all the dust-catching filters to increase the draft in the chimneys. Here we also learn that the previous head engineer in charge of stack air quality had been for years using only half the filters of the sieve plates in the pneumatic dust extractor to meet productivity targets.
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The smelter with village below (from “Lead Children”)
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The film notes that in the 1970s lead levels around the plant exceeded safety limits a thousand fold. Recent research indicates that even though the smelter was shut down in 2008, lead levels around it still exceed the limits set by the WHO.
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Lead Poisoning in Children and Adults: where it comes from, what it does, and where it goes
Lead Poisoning in Children (image from Pure Earth)
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Lead is a cumulative toxicant that affects multiple body systems; this includes the neurological, hematological, gastrointestinal, cardiovascular and renal systems. According to the WHO, there is no known safe level of lead exposure. Relatively low levels of lead exposure previously considered ‘safe’ are now known to damage children’s health and impair their cognitive development. With even low-level exposure, lead is associated with brain damage, reduced IQ, decreased intelligence, learning difficulties, lower lifetime earnings, increased incidence of heart and kidney disease later in life, and increased tendency for violence.
Young children are particularly vulnerable to lead poisoning, given that they can absorb up to 5 times as much lead as adults from an ingested dose. Children under the age of 5 years are at the greatest risk of suffering lifelong neurological, cognitive and physical damage and even death from lead poisoning. Older children as well as adults suffer severe consequences from prolonged exposure to lead in food, water and the air they breathe; this includes increased risk of cardiovascular death and kidney damage in later life. Children are particularly vulnerable to lead poisoning due to their smaller size and higher rate of lead absorption.
According to the WHO, once lead enters the body, it distributes to organs, including the brain, kidneys, liver and bones. Lead stores in the teeth and bones, where it accumulates over time. Lead stored in bone may release into the blood during pregnancy and expose the fetus.
Lead poisoning is not a thing of the past or restricted to communist nations. According to Pure Earth, lead exposure is responsible for an estimated 3.5 million cardiovascular deaths each year; more than HIV, malaria and tuberculosis combined. A World Bank analysis in 2019 demonstrated that children under five years old worldwide lost 765 million IQ points from lead exposure; about 95% of IQ point loss due to lead exposure were in LMICs. Lead poisoning may also account for 20% of the education gap between high- and low-income countries.
Major sources of lead contamination include mining & smelting, manufacturing and recycling activities, and lead use in a range of products. These include lead-acid batteries for motor vehicles. Products that may contain lead include pigments, paints, solder, stained glass, lead crystal glassware, ammunition, ceramic glazes, jewelry, toys, some traditional cosmetics, and some traditional medicines. Lead may contaminate drinking water through plumbing systems that contain lead pipes, solders and fittings.
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1970s Communist Poland
Inspired by real events from 1970s Upper Silesia during Communist‑era Poland, the TV series Lead Children showcases the atrocities committed in the name of industrial growth and production during that time.
This was a time when the Polish Służba Bezpieczeństwa (SB) or the Security Service of the Ministry of Internal Affairs infiltrated all elements of Polish life—not unlike the Stasi in eastern Germany—to ensure that everyone followed party dogma and the mandate of the Polish United Workers’ Party for industrial productivity. The Security Service of the Communist Polish People’s Republic did their bidding from 1956 to 1990, often enlisting the citizens’ militia. Key aspects of the SB mandate involved political repression and surveillance, infiltration of civil society, persecution of the Catholic Church, suppressing strikes and protests, controlling information, and protecting the state-controlled economy.
Boleslaw Bierut’s Six-Year Plan started in 1950, aggressively industrializing Poland and causing widespread shortages, particularly for meat and dairy. In 1956, when Gomułka came into power, things became somewhat less dangerous, but the shortages continued and in some cases got worse. The period between 1976 and 1989 experienced a maximum in shortages of nearly all products. Under communist rule, Poland was driven by rapid industrial growth, often using low-skilled workers with no consideration for their health and welfare. Criticism or resistance was suicidal. Protests and ensuing riots were violently crushed and suspected leaders hunted down and executed.
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(Re)Genesis and the Kurpiowska Forest
Puszcza Białowieska (The White Forest) of the Kurpiowska Forest (photo by OTOP)
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Several key scenes of my upcoming eco-fiction thriller (Re)Genesis take place inside the Kurpiowska Forest in central Poland’s Mazovian Lowlands during the communist rule of Poland (specifically from the 1950s to the 1970s). Young Zofia and Piotr Wójcik and their little twins have come to the Puszcza Kurpiowska to work for Zima Performance Elastomers, a chemical plant that makes a mysterious miracle chemical called syprene that is highly volatile, flammable and toxic. Zima compromises the health and safety of its workers under the yoke of productivity. Workers fall ill and are usually replaced within a decade, either leaving due to ill health or dying of complications. In the following scene in 1959, Zofia has invited her older sister to take care of her twins so she can continue working at Zima Performance Elastomers deep inside the Kurpiowska Forest:
Zofia can’t help a smile. Her older sister is more of an intellectual; she isn’t the mothering type and has made it clear that she doesn’t like children. Yet the twins seem to have softened her heart a little, thinks Zofia, who is so grateful that her older sister is here, so she can return to work.
They eat supper quietly together; Piotr is on the evening shift and won’t be home until later at night when Zofia will reheat some bigos and bread for him.
“How’s Piotr? Still losing his hair?” Ewa asks casually, helping herself to more bigos from the pot.
“Not so much now,” says Zofia. She wipes the side of her bowl with some rye bread to catch the rest of her bigos. “He still gets headaches. I give him piołun for them.”
Ewa frowns and shakes her head. “Does it work?”
Zofia shrugs.
Ewa makes a scoffing sound; she knows that it doesn’t. She leans forward suddenly. “Seriously, you need to do something, Zofia.”
“But what can I do?”
“Zima’s clearly breaking safety rules. The first is not having sufficient signage. Then hiring idiots straight from high school who don’t know what they’re doing and not educating them. You mentioned Janek smoking in the Polyanna Building? Didn’t you say that stuff is flammable?”
“I think so, based on other similar compounds I know about. No one knows what syprene really is.”
“Well, he’ll blow up the plant if he isn’t careful. Good god, sister, you need to report this to the government before it’s more than just some headaches or a bit of hair loss. Before there’s a serious accident. The constitution of ‘52—”
“The constitution! It’s just paper. The Polish United Worker’s Party has its own rules and ways of doing things.” She waves the bread in her hand at her older sister. “Who would I report this to, eh? Have you forgotten what happened when workers demanded better working conditions at the Poznań’s Cegielski Factories in ’56? Nothing can interfere with progress. The government doesn’t care. And let’s not forget the secret police. That Łukasz Zieliński, who’s so chummy with Wozniak, gives me the creeps. I’m sure he’s secret police. He hardly does anything except wander about poking his long nose in everything and making derogatory remarks.”
“Now who’s the cynic.” Ewa leans back with a crooked smile. The smile turns into a scowl as she acknowledges Zofia’s point. “But you’re probably right about him.” She shakes her head, spoon playing with the stew. “And, you do have to be careful, sister. Something will happen. I can feel it in my bones.”
Unfortunately, so can Zofia. Her older sister is right, she concedes. The whole place is a tinder box and lately emotions have been high with arguments and even fights erupting in the polymer building. It doesn’t help that Piotr doesn’t seem to take the dangers seriously by not wearing protection, just to fit in—
There’s a noise outside.
The women turn, hearing shuffling at the door and men talking in low urgent voices. The door bursts open and two workmen—Vasili and Krzysztof—drag Piotr inside. He is barely conscious and his head lolls as he groans and murmurs through a frothing mouth.
The women rush forward.
“What happened?” Ewa demands.
“There’s been an accident,” Vasili says, glancing at Krzysztof, who normally works the shift with Piotr. “He got splashed when the drum broke, and may have even swallowed some of the stuff. Then he went into convulsions.”
“And you brought him here?” Ewa says, aghast.
“There’s no emergency shower or eye wash there—”
“Don’t come any further into the house!” Ewa orders gruffly. “Strip him naked and throw the clothes outside. Then take him to the shower. And for god’s sake take off your shoes!”
The men jump into action.
Zofia looks on, tongue-tied.
“Well, get in there!” Ewa shouts at Zofia. “Scrub him clean. With soap! Quickly!”
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The Kurpiowska Forest near Czarnia, not far from the fictional Zima plant (photo by Polish Tourism)
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Kozienice Landscape Park, Massovia, Poland (image by MasovianStyle.com)
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Nina Munteanu is an award-winning novelist and short story writer of eco-fiction, science fiction and fantasy. She also has three writing guides out: The Fiction Writer; The Journal Writer; and The Ecology of Writing and teaches fiction writing and technical writing at university and online. Check the Publications page on this site for a summary of what she has out there. Nina teaches writing at the University of Toronto and has been coaching fiction and non-fiction authors for over 20 years. You can find Nina’s short podcasts on writing on YouTube. Check out this site for more author advice from how to write a synopsis to finding your muse and the art and science of writing. Her most recent novel “Gaia’s Revolution” was released in March 2026 by Dragon Moon Press (Calgary).
A fanatical deep-ecologist, Monica Schlange, harnesses two orphans in her bid to reshape humanity and its place in the natural world.
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My novel Gaia’s Revolution, Book 1 of The Icaria Trilogy—which released March 10, 2026, by Dragon Moon Press—explores a collapsing capitalist society in Canada through ravages of climate change, water shortages, plague, and a failing technology.
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The story begins in Berlin in 2022, with maverick scholar Damien Vogel, a deep ecologist and environmentalist who joined the climate activist group Letzte Generation* to do acts of civil disobedience to bring public awareness to climate offenders. The novel progresses from acts of civil disobedience to genuine eco-terrorism as Damien follows his revolutionary anarchist twin brother Eric to Canada and forms the Gaians, a radical eco-activist group, recruiting fanatic Monica Schlange—herself a sly eco-terrorist. Monica is an unscrupulous deep ecologist, proficient in using sabotage and internet tampering to disrupt and hurt climate offenders. The twin brothers end up on opposite sides of a violent revolution as Monica—guided by her own agenda as an extremist planetary guardian—plays them both.
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The Icaria Trilogy by Dragon Moon Press
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By 2095 (Book 2Angel of Chaos and Book 3Darwin’s Paradox), humanity has fled inside environmental dome cities called Icarias*, chased inside by an unruly environment. Icarians struggle with Darwin’s Disease—a mysterious neurological environmental pandemic. Icaria 5 is one of many enclosed cities within the slowly recovering toxic wasteland of North America, and where the protagonist Julie Crane (daughter of one of the orphans in Gaia’s Revolution) lives and works. Icarias are run by The Circle, a governing body of deep ecologists who call themselves Gaians. The Gaians’ secret is that they are keeping humanity “inside” not to protect humanity from a toxic wasteland but to protect the environment from a toxic humanity.
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Ecology vs. Deep Ecology vs. Eco-Terrorism
Snow falls on a Scots Pine forest, ON (photo and rendition by Nina Munteanu)
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Ecology: Ecology is the science of relationships. Ecologists study ecosystems (aquatic and terrestrial), how they form, their structure and function, and how they relate to one another within the biosphere. Ecologists look at the relationship of all biota and non-biota, at individuals and communities, how all evolve (succession), at community richness, perturbations and recoveries, and natural enrichment. Ecologists model the flow of energy and cycling of matter over time and space.
Deep Ecology: Deep ecologists are usually ecologists themselves, who have adopted
An environmental philosophy and social movement advocating that all living beings have intrinsic value, independent of their utility to human needs. The philosophy promotes a holistic, ecocentric worldview—often termed “ecosophy”—that demands radical, structural changes to human society to prioritize nature’s flourishing. See the Eight Basic Principles of Deep Ecology.
Eco-Terrorism: Both ecologists and deep ecologists may grow cynical, seeing humanity as an existential threat, a virus that impacts the rest of life on Earth and exacerbates hyperobjects like climate change, loss of biodiversity and habitat destruction. This may lead to activism which some with a fanatical and destructive warrior spirit may move toward eco-terrorism such as criminal actions to halt development, and various acts of violence (e.g. arson, destruction of research facilities, threats against individuals).
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Ecologists, Deep Ecologists & Eco-Terrorists in The Icaria Trilogy
In Gaia’s Revolution deep ecologist / scholar Damien Vogel and his nihilist revolutionary twin brother Eric Vogel trigger a violent revolution and eventual migration of humanity into the enclosed worlds of Icaria. While Damien follows deep ecology as an intellectual and scholar, believing in the eight basic principles of deep ecology, Eric uses the principles to enact merciless ‘solutions’ through brutal acts of eco-terrorism. Deep ecologist / eco-terrorist Monica Schlange insinuates herself into both brother’s plans to orchestrate her own unique vision of the world. Monica differs from Eric in her sense of humanity; a consummate and ruthless eco-terrorist and subversive, she is bent on entirely destroying the capitalist-technocratic machinery of which Eric is a part—to save the planet at the expense of human domination.
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Damien and Christian Isabo meet to discuss recruiting her into their radical group:
Christian says, leaning forward, “She’s a bit of a wild card and possibly a genuine eco-terrorist. For instance, I discovered that she was behind the viral social media fiasco that embarrassed Prime Minister Robinson last year and almost cost him his seat. You know the one—those pictures of him fooling around with the German Chancellor, Magda Zimmermann, who’s married with two kids… Damien. I think that she’s extremely resourceful, stealthy, good at subterfuge and covers her tracks impeccably. Of course, there are definitely anger issues there. But, I also think we can count on her because her motives to help the environment lie on a deep visceral level, tied to her childhood experience and love of Nature.”
Damien studies her image on his phone with a thoughtful frown. He looks up at Christian. “What do we know about her?”
“Well, to begin with, she’s an only child and grew up on one of the last independent dairy farms in Ontario, near Guelph. Her father was strict and encouraged a strong work ethic and love for the natural world. He doted on her but died of a heart attack when she was only thirteen, the year their farm was seized by the Technocrats and converted into a Corporation Farm using scientific agriculture. In fact, their seizure may have precipitated the father’s heart attack. Her mother was assigned as a scullery maid in the farm kitchen; she took to drink then ran off with some truck driver travelling across Canada from Surrey, BC. He didn’t treat the girl well and she ran away before they reached Halifax. She ended up living with her aunt—her father’s sister—in the Beaches. The aunt worked as a librarian at York University and was a fervent member of Extinction Rebellion before it dissolved. She was a real bohemian, a deep ecologist herself, and encouraged the girl.”
While Monica shows the same level of dedication, she betrays a lack of integrity in her less than altruistic motivations and means, thinks Damien. The fact that she’s with Eric [his twin brother and nemesis] proves this. But even that—especially that—can work in their favour. It would seem that, without knowing it, she is already working as an undercover spy for their revolution. He can work with that, Damien thinks. Yes, he can certainly do that. And more. It’s my turn now, brother…
“OK. Set up a meeting,” Damien says. “Let’s get her into the fold.”
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Mist over swelling spring stream, ON (photo and rendition by Nina Munteanu)
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Leonard Crane—one of the three orphans impacted by the revolution and both rescued and tormented by Monica Schlange—studies ecology under new Gaian rule and is eventually inducted into the prestigious Department of Industrial Ecology (DIE) where he works on subversive ecological theories about Icaria’s inevitable demise and is eventually ostracised from the scientific community for his unpopular work. His legacy echoes throughout Books 2 and 3 of the trilogy.
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Books 2 and 3 follow Julie Crane (Leonard’s daughter), a self-taught ecologist. In Angel of Chaos and Darwin’s Paradox, her skills as an amateur ecologist (in a world where ecology is not taught) are tested by the ruthless deep ecologist Gaia, head of The Circle. Gaia denigrates Julie’s ecological pursuits as shallow and ineffectual. When a subordinate of hers asks her if Julie would make a good candidate for The Circle (the governing body of Icaria), Gaia scoffs:
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“You mistake a good scientific ecologist with someone who possesses a genuine empathy for deep ecology,” she said. Her eyes sparkled like sapphires. “No one enters our elite cadre without having impeccable qualifications and submitting to many more initiations than she is capable of passing. She may be an ecologist but she is not a deep ecologist. The science of ecology does not ask what kind of society would be the best suited to maintain a particular ecosystem. Our greater concern is with questions aimed at the level of organic wholeness and ‘Earth wisdom’. She knows nothing of these things.”—Gaia, Angel of Chaos
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Fog enshrouded marsh in early winter, ON (photo and rendition by Nina Munteanu)
Munteanu, Nina. 2026. “Gaia’s Revolution, Part 1 of Icaria Trilogy.” Dragon Moon Press, Calgary, AB. 369 pp.
Munteanu, Nina. 2010. “Angel of Chaos, Part 2 of Icaria Trilogy.” Dragon Moon Press, Calgary, AB. 518 pp.
Munteanu, Nina. 2007. “Darwin’s Paradox, Part 3 of Icaria Trilogy.” Dragon Moon Press, Calgary, AB. 294 pp.
Sessions, George, Bill Devall. 2000. “Deep Ecology: Living as if Nature Mattered.” Gibbs Smith. 267pp.
Skinner, B.F. 1948. “Walden Two” The Macmillan Company, New York. 301pp.
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Terminology:
*Deep Ecology: An environmental philosophy and social movement advocating that all living beings have intrinsic value, independent of their utility to human needs. Coined by Arne Næss in 1972, it promotes a holistic, ecocentric worldview—often termed “ecosophy”—that demands radical, structural changes to human society to prioritize nature’s flourishing.
*Icaria: the name of Étienne Cabet’s utopia. Cabet was a French lawyer in Dijon, who published his novel Voyage en Icarie in 1839. The novel was a sort of manifesto-blueprint of utopian socialism, with elements of communism (abolished private property and individual enterprise), influenced by Fourierist and Owenite thinking. Key elements, such as the four-hour work day, are reflected in B.F. Skinner’s Walden Two. Cabet’s novel explores a society in which capitalist production is replaced by workers’ cooperatives with a focus on small communities.
*Letzte Generation: a prominent European climate activist group, founded in 2021, known for its acts of civil disobedience—such as roadblocks, defacing art, and vandalizing structures—to pressure governments on climate action. The term was chosen because they considered themselves to be the last generation before tipping points in the earth’s climate system would be reached. They are mostly active in Germany, Italy, Poland and Canada. In Germany, they have faced accusations of forming a criminal organization, leading to police raids.
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Nina Munteanu is an award-winning novelist and short story writer of eco-fiction, science fiction and fantasy. She also has three writing guides out: The Fiction Writer; The Journal Writer; and The Ecology of Writing and teaches fiction writing and technical writing at university and online. Check the Publications page on this site for a summary of what she has out there. Nina teaches writing at the University of Toronto and has been coaching fiction and non-fiction authors for over 20 years. You can find Nina’s short podcasts on writing on YouTube. Check out this site for more author advice from how to write a synopsis to finding your muse and the art and science of writing.
Today my eco-fiction novel Gaia’s Revolution (Book 1 of The Icaria Trilogy) releases through Dragon Moon Press in paperback and ebook form on Amazon (and other book retailers).
Gaia’s Revolution explores a collapsing capitalist society in Canada through ravages of climate change and a failing technology. The story is told through the lives of ambitious twin brothers Eric and Damien Vogel, and the woman who plays them like chess pieces in her gambit to ‘rule the world.’ The novel starts out in Berlin—with a scuffle between police and climate activists of Letzte Generation-then moves to Toronto Canada, where an unlikely revolution is brewing…
This day is special for me in a number of ways. Today is also my dad’s birthday. He passed away a while ago, but I know he is here with me as this is happening. You see, when I was just 15, I’d written my first book, an early version of Angel of Chaos. My dad, who had met and befriended an editor at Doubleday, and proud of my accomplishment, arranged a meeting with me and the editor to look at my book. I put on my highest pumps—I could barely walk in them!—and best outfit and met with the gentleman. He did not take my book for publication but praised my work and gave me some wonderful advice. “Keep writing!” he said. I have carried that meeting and advice to this day and thank my dad for his belief in me as a writer—particularly given that he had been pushing for me to become a teacher or nurse. Four decades later, a more polished version of that same book was published in 2010 by Dragon Moon Press (as Angel of Chaos, the prequel to Darwin’s Paradox, which was published in 2007).
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Birch forest in Ontario (photo and rendition by Nina Munteanu)
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The Icaria Trilogy by Dragon Moon Press
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Now, with newly written Gaia’s Revolution (the prequel to the prequel) released, Dragon Moon has reissued new covers for the entire trilogy. Here they are! Oh! And look who’s already reading Gaia’s Revolution!
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Aliens get to read everything before we do…
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Nina Munteanu is an award-winning novelist and short story writer of eco-fiction, science fiction and fantasy. She also has three writing guides out: The Fiction Writer; The Journal Writer; and The Ecology of Writing and teaches fiction writing and technical writing at university and online. Check the Publications page on this site for a summary of what she has out there. Nina teaches writing at the University of Toronto and has been coaching fiction and non-fiction authors for over 20 years. You can find Nina’s short podcasts on writing on YouTube. Check out this site for more author advice from how to write a synopsis to finding your muse and the art and science of writing.
Nina Munteanu Writing Coach 