Urban Fantasy, Interconnectedness, and Ecological Disaster: Reading Anne Bishop's The Others Series

This essay explores the ecocritical potential of urban fantasy through a reading of Anne Bishop's popular five-volume series The Others. The essay specifically aims to trace the operation and influence of what environmental philosopher Timothy Morton calls "the ecological thought" throughout the series' depictions of interconnectedness across human and nonhuman worlds (4). The essay argues that Bishop's series utilizes the conventions of urban fantasy to deliver an unambiguous ecological allegory in which an ethic of deferential cooperation and coexistence with the nonhuman is humanity's only chance for survival in the face of wide-scale ecological disaster.