Ecocide in Ann Leckie’s “The Raven Tower”

Work-in-progress seminar with Maria Damkjær (ENGEROM).

Abstract

One the the central templates for the stories we tell is one where humans subdue nature; what Marek Oziewicz calls the ‘ecocidal unconscious’. This is as true of fantasy literature as of other genres: the ‘wrongness’ (John Clute) that must be reversed is often coupled with environmental disaster which threatens human civilisation. But fantasy also has the potential to put non-human entities at the centre of the story. In this work-in-progress talk, I will discuss Ann Leckie’s The Raven Tower (2019) as a novel of ecocide. The story takes place in a world where gods alter the fabric of reality merely by speaking, because what they say must be true. The narrator is a stone, more precisely a glacial boulder, who is also a god. In the background of the story is an enigmatic god called the god of the Silent Forest, who enacts punishment on people who log, burn, or even traverse the Silent Forest without permission. The talk will untangle the relationships between gods, humans, and the natural world, and discuss the novel as one which, I suggest, ‘radically decentres’ humans.