Contemporary speculative genres such as science fiction, fantasy, and horror have generated an uncountable number of non-realist plants that can provide new ways of re-enchanting – and returning us to – the real plants with which we inhabit the planet. Depictions of fantastical plants do not, however, always reflect an environmentalist agenda, and the long pedigree of monstrous plants demonstrates considerable complexity, for example in encoding monsterised images of both coloniser and colonised in the figure of the aberrant plant, or, in African-American literature, critiquing the plantation system’s violence against human and non-human bodies. In many serialised works, the plant can serve as merely a novel monster of the week among many interchangeable excuses for action and adventure, while other texts deploy the alien plant in order to imagine different modes of consciousness and being, or offer the promise that we might communicate more meaningfully with plants. The unusual plants to be found in much botanical speculative fiction may cultivate ecological and other-species consciousness in unconventional ways, as we see in texts from authors as different as J. R. R. Tolkien in his mid-twentieth-century epic fantasies and Richard Powers in his 2018 climate change novel The Overstory.

Is there room for weaklings in Darwin’s theory of evolution? The “survival of the fittest”—that muscular phrase taken from Herbert Spencer—would seem to suggest not. A more nuanced and counterintuitive picture emerges, however, when fitness is remapped: as a form of mutuality between the human and the nonhuman, rather than an exclusively human attribute vested in a single individual. I explore that possibility in the contemporary novel, a genre evolving steadily away from its Victorian antecedents, and circling back to the epic to reclaim an elemental realism, alert to the reparative as well as destructive forces of the nonhuman world. In Barbara Kingsolver’s The Poisonwood Bible and Richard Powers’s The Overstory, these nonhuman forces turn the novel into a shelter for disabled characters, granting them a testing ground and a future all the more vital for being uncertain.

From questions posed by Wilfred Owen at a Craiglockhart War Hospital talk ‘Do Plants Think?’ and Alan Turing’s rhetorical echo ‘Can Machines Think?’ to Dipesh Chakrabarty’s query ‘Who is the we?’ in a postcolonial Anthropocene, times of crisis goad us into recognising wider sentience and reimagining collective agency. This essay considers how a collective comprised of humans, intelligent botanical or zoological life, and AI might respond to climate crisis using two literary case studies. Richard Powers’ The Overstory and Vandana Singh’s ‘Entanglement’ use contemporary tree science and quantum entanglement, respectively, as innovative, interdisciplinary narrative models. These models also dictate the resolutions of their stories – eventualities of collectivity that may still be evolving, but gesture toward potential climate-changed futures. As this essay argues, these two works offer contrasting visions based on how they deploy AI design potentials, the emotional responses of hope and despair, and the spectre of uncertainty as either a creative space for solutions or a reminder of impossible choices. These stories also pose important questions about corporate power, empathy, and social justice, reminding us that reckoning with human cultural diversity is still the soil from which any more-than-human climate collective must grow.