If ecofiction is literature that privileges ecological themes, fantasy fiction can also be ecofiction. Ecofantasy fiction has a role to play in how we imagine a better world.

I don’t want to get bogged down in genre definitions here because I’m not trying to argue for rigid categories. Instead, I want to think about the value of stories and books that are undeniably fantasy fiction but that engage with ecological themes and concerns. 

Why Fantasy?

My academic training privileged literary fiction, but science fiction had a place, too. Not fantasy. Like many readers, I enjoyed fantasy fiction as a kid, but I drifted away from genre fantasy as I got older.

When I started writing fiction again as an adult, dystopias and cautionary science fiction tales flew across the keyboard. Yet, the more I wrote, the less I wanted to write those stories. I still love science fiction. I still write science fiction. Yet, the stories that most often bubble up for me revolve around magic and witches and the nonhuman in its endless forms.

Even in my scholarship, I’m drawn to revised fairy tales, and to writers that work across genres: Margaret Atwood, Octavia E. Butler, Jeanette Winterson, Ursula K. Le Guin, etc. Whether revising fairytales or exploring deep space, their works all, in various ways, expand upon what came before. They make those stories more inclusive, more exciting, and more radical. There are a lot of writers who continue and expand those efforts, often through science fiction: Charlie Jane Anders, Ryka Aoki, Becky Chambers, and Nnedi Okorafor, to name only a few. Importantly, many of them write fantasy as well, or blend science fiction, fantasy, literary fiction, etc.

What Ecofantasy Fiction Offers

Ecofantasy fiction is partly about returning to the pieces of our cultural imagination that hold potential to help us think differently. Rethinking and revising our expectations about fairies and dragons is fun, but also, relevant and important. These stories are the common heritage of many of us who grew up on European tales and American reinventions of them, regardless of personal identity or other cultural inheritances. They are ours to retell, remake, revise, and reinvent, to turn into the stories we need now.

There are other stories and imaginaries, including but by no means limited to Indigenous ones, that have urgent truths to teach. They are not my stories to tell, though. Nor are they dominant in Western culture. I read them and learn from them and am deeply grateful to the writers who share them, but I can never write them.

Dominant narratives are imbued with the power of the cultures they help to uphold. Reimagining them is a way to intervene in that power. Those are stories I think we need to reckon with as well as to reimagine.

Fantastic Realities

There’s another piece to all of this, too. Fantasy imaginaries frequently enchant the nonhuman. That enchantment is often culturally aligned with unscientific or pre-scientific understandings. We are meant to outgrow the enchantment and find our places in the post-enlightenment rational world. But, science itself is more enchanting than we tend to think. How else would you describe Western science’s dawning awareness of how trees communicate and care for one another through mycorrhizal networks?

We are learning more and more about what nonhuman animals know and can do, from magpies who take off one another’s research trackers, to incredibly intelligent octopi.

Humanist enlightenment inquiry was never objective. It was always constrained by ideologies of human superiority and dominance—and in racist, sexist, and ableist beliefs.

Ecofantasy allows writers to reinvest the world with the magic that has always been there, while also remaking the myths that have often been bent to serve problematic power.