Nina Munteanu

Oct 23, 2024 | metastellar.com | Nina Munteanu

Reading Time: 7 minutes“To heck with it,” he grumbled and tossed the razor into the sink. He wiped his face and dabbed the second nick on his chin with toilet paper. He glanced up at his ordinary face, reflected back at him in the mirror. Half-baked and scruffy. I work alone anyway, he thought, studying the grey stubble. No one will notice … or care. He checked his smart phone for messages before dressing. She’d left his freshly laundered clothes for the day on the bed and he put them on.

Apr 19, 2024 | reactormag.com | Nina Munteanu

Our world is changing. We currently live in a world in which climate change poses a very real existential threat to life on the planet. The new normal is change. And it is within this changing climate that eco-fiction is realizing itself as a literary pursuit worth engaging in. Many readers are seeking fiction that addresses environmental issues but explores a successful paradigm shift: fiction that accurately addresses our current issues with intelligence and hope.

Jan 15, 2024 | metastellar.com | Nina Munteanu

Reading Time: 21 minutesMay, 2071I rock on the cedar swing on my veranda and hear the wind rustling through the gaunt forest. An abandoned nest, the forest sighs in low ponderous notes. It sighs of a gentler time. A time when birds filled it with song. A time when large and small creatures — unconcerned with the distant thrum and roar of diggers and logging trucks — roamed the thick second-growth forest. The discord was still too far away to bother the wildlife.

Jan 11, 2024 | shepherd.com | Nina Munteanu |Richard Powers |Annie Proulx |Colleen Murphy

What resonated with me on so many levels was the author’s use of lyrical and beautiful language in describing trees and forests: as characters. I’m an ecologist and I felt a particular kinship with the botanist Patricia Westerford, a disabled introvert who must swim against the hegemonic tide with heretical ideas. When she argues that trees communicate, learn, trade goods and services, have intelligence and society, her scientific peers ridicule her and end her university career.

Jul 5, 2023 | metastellar.com | Nina Munteanu

Reading Time: 17 minutesHer hand slipped again and Izumi realized in a frisson of panic that she was going to die on this godless planet. She’d landed on a tree root, and dangled over the yawning darkness of the sinkhole. A pungent hot mist rose out of the deep like a beast’s cloying breath. Pulses of putrid steam spiraled up, soaking her sweaty body and slicking her hands. The pain of holding on burned. She’d hurt herself in the fall, perhaps broken something.