It is well known that in much of the West, cultural narratives rarely account or allow for ecosystemic thinking, with an ecosystem understood as a tangled web of humans and nonhumans alike. Story—history, individual life, the future—is construed according to figure and ground, with the (human) figure clearly in the front and leading the way. This construction is found everywhere from political rhetoric to mass media and popular books. The novel is no exception. However, new fiction deliberately attuned to planetary symbiosis is finding ways to portray complex interconnectedness without disregarding individual experience or subjectivity.