Mutual Aid Is the Norm

Ray Nayler discusses his new novel and the ‘rhizome of care’ that links us with nonhuman species.

By Anna Maria GrzybowskaAugust 11, 2026

• Fiction

• SF

• Environment

PALACES OF THE CROW, Ray Nayler’s latest novel, is a story of survival, care, and interspecies cooperation. Set in Lithuania during World War II, the narrative follows four teenagers who find refuge in the forest: Neriya, a Jewish girl; Kezia, a Roma horse trader; Czesław, a Polish soldier; and Innokentiy, a nonverbal orphan. Together, the children struggle to live through the dangers of war and learn, against all odds, to find solace in the small community they’ve built. Entangled with that community is a flock of crows, which at times guides them through the dangers of the forest, and at times relies on the children for their help.

This new book isn’t Nayler’s first exploration of multispecies coexistence. His first novel, Locus Award winner The Mountain in the Sea (2022), concerns an encounter with a cephalopod culture. His Hugo Award–winning novella The Tusks of Extinction (2024) speculates on the de-extinction of the woolly mammoth. Each of these narratives invites the reader to confront their own biases toward other animals and embrace their otherness without erasing the human perspective. In this sense, Nayler’s fiction successfully blends a sense of interspecies community with responsibility toward other species, challenging the prevalent anthropocentric perspective.

I met Nayler at the 47th International Conference on the Fantastic in the Arts, where I presented research on his work. In May 2026, we convened on Zoom to discuss Palaces of the Crow.

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ANNA MARIA GRZYBOWSKA: In your work, you often engage with a speculative framework. Your previous books—The Mountain in the Sea, The Tusks of Extinction, and Where the Axe Is Buried (2025)—are all considered science fiction. By contrast, your most recent novel, Palaces of the Crow, explores a different time and place, that of the Second World War on the Eastern Front. Do you see imagining the past as a fundamentally different project or a continuation of the same speculative impulse?

RAY NAYLER: There are two parts to my answer. The first is about the way I view speculative fiction and its relationship to fiction in general. Many consider this a hierarchical binary relationship, with literary fiction on the one hand and genre fiction on the other. Genre fiction people tend to prize genre fiction above literary; literary fiction people may prize literary fiction above genre. Lots of readers say to me, “Well, I don’t usually read science fiction, but I really enjoyed The Mountain in the Sea,” or something like that. I once jokingly defined my primary target audience as precisely the people who start their review with “I don’t usually read science fiction, but …” I dislike such a statement because it shows a kind of attitude toward genre fiction that isn’t useful. For me, there is no opposition between the two.

Genre fiction is, instead, an exploitation of abilities that fiction as a whole possesses. It’s a bit like evolution through exaptation. I see genre as an exaptation of things that already existed in literary fiction, using them in ways that are different, productive, and interesting, and that expand the possibilities, universes, and viewpoints from which we can examine the world. I never see this relationship as a binary; I see them as being a part of the same whole, the same organism. And if you treat speculative fiction that way, as this organism that can do many things, it’s more a verb than a noun. It’s about what you are doing as a writer at any particular time. It’s not that I’m a science fiction writer. I’m a writer, and I’m quite often science fiction–ing in my writing.

Second, examination of the past has a long history in science fiction—call it alternate history or counterfactual. This type of what-if problem—what if this had happened instead of that—is a classic of the genre. However, that’s not quite what I’m doing with Palaces. It’s more like speculative fiction set in the past. I’m using many of the same speculative techniques I’d use in, say, The Mountain in the Sea, but in a subtler way, as my characters are not scientists. One of them is an aspiring scientist and will become one during the book, but they don’t have a technical understanding of what’s happening with the crows. Instead, they’re witnessing the crows’ actions from this very human position. For many people, the book feels less speculative precisely because of this altered positionality. The accent is a bit off of “Why are the crows doing what they’re doing?” It’s more “How are the crows interacting with these characters and vice versa?” It’s a different kind of thing, but I’m comfortable with the idea that speculative fiction doesn’t have a boundary anywhere: as a process of exaptation, it can emerge in many different places.

What inspired you, and what was your motivation for exploring the clash of youth and war? How do you see the significance of writing a World War II coming-of-age story today?

There are many roots to the novel. An early root is that I was always fascinated by the war on the Eastern Front. As someone from the United States and Canada, I was fascinated by that region, and I studied it quite a bit. I later lived in Central Asia and Russia and came to learn more about the war from that perspective. I believe that World War II is a foundational moment of modernity as we know it. The world we live in is, in many ways, the world that World War II created, and it remains that world. We are still completely shaped by the national boundaries the war left behind, our attitudes toward friend and foe, and what we call people in discourse. We talk about “fascists” and “Nazis,” and we apply those terms in ways that are rhetorically powerful. These are just a few examples of the continuing relevance of World War II and the way it needs to be addressed as a shaper of the modern world.

Furthermore, I took a course on Holocaust literature—taught by a Holocaust survivor—at UC Santa Cruz in the 1990s, and I was powerfully affected by a Polish book: This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen by Tadeusz Borowski. It’s about a Polish war prisoner at Auschwitz, in a somewhat privileged position because he’s not Jewish, who is witnessing the destruction of European Jewry firsthand. One of the powerful moments in the book is when he’s recovering at the Auschwitz hospital, and he’s playing soccer with a bunch of patients on the hospital’s soccer field. He sees a train pull into the station and witnesses the sorting of the Jews who had been brought to Auschwitz, and he turns away and keeps playing soccer. During the next outing, he notices the train is gone. At that moment, he realizes that, between the two outings, thousands of people have just lost their lives in this routine and mechanical way.

This way of treating human beings is something that emerged out of World War I and then World War II. It infects our way of looking at one another, what it means to be a human being, and everything about our status as animals and with animals. In some ways, World War II is the absolute triumph of alienation and alienating technology, and that is the world we live in: the world of alienation that came out of war. Then, when I learned Russian, one of the first books I read was Alexander Fadeyev’s Molodaya Gvardiya [The Young Guard], which is about a group of young people resisting the Nazi occupation. It’s a piece of Soviet propaganda, very much in the Soviet realist propagandistic mode, but it is also a very human and touching story of youths working together for a common cause. Those are some of the roots.

One of the other roots is that this book is written as a reaction to Lord of the Flies—not so much the book itself, but its effect within society and the way it is read with Darwin’s theories of evolution. Lord of the Flies suggests a world of total competition and dominance between the weak and the strong. That, I believe, is an inaccurate description of how animals behave, and of how human beings behave except in extremis and under resource pressure. Human beings are massively cooperative, nonviolent animals that organize themselves in massively cooperative, nonviolent communities to a large extent. Violence is much more of a rarity than it is a normal event.

Violence is not the norm; cooperative mutual aid is. Birds are an excellent example of this mutual aid: they live together in large and largely peaceful flocks, protecting one another. A crow does not survive in the forest; a crow survives in the flock. The flock survives in the forest. Just like humans do not survive in the world—human society survives in the world, and we survive as members of a society.

The novel’s setting, the forest, is an interesting choice. On one hand, it is a place of “safety” and distance from the main hotbeds of war. On the other hand, as one character warns Czesław, “There is a war in these woods, and it is a war of everyone against everyone.” There is also a third perspective, that of the crows, for whom it is “a forest world.” Considering the forest’s multitudes, how did you think about it while writing?

The forest is such a rich symbolic space because it is so deeply embedded in the human story. It seems as if nearly all of our myths, especially European ones, revolve around the forest. It’s this place where people venture into danger and come out of it, where they get lost, where they find wisdom, and where the unknown is. It’s saturated with our fears and hopes as a species.

It also functions as a kind of liminal space. In war, it was a liminal space at the edge of conflict where people were hiding and from where they were mounting resistance. For me, the forest has a sense of overturning hierarchical structures. When humans enter the forest, they are changed: by being in the forest, they become someone different from who they were outside of it. The forest is also a place of refuge as well as a place of threat. In the war, that becomes important: the forests of Poland, Lithuania, Belarus, Russia, and other countries preserved the lives of thousands of people. I read partisan memoirs and learned that, for those people surviving in the forest, survival takes knowledge and awareness of one’s environment and a willingness to adapt to the forest. You need to become of the forest to survive in it.

Beyond that, the forest is an interconnected system, a massive fungal network. One of the things I do with my daughter in the woods is try to identify what is a tree and what is its ramet. Quite often, there can be 50 or 100 of these ramets, and they’re all the same thing, the same being, the same creature. Underneath the soil, they’re all completely connected by the same root system. You’re not really looking at 10 trees—you’re looking at a single organism whose interconnectedness is imperceptible unless you use the tools of science. They aren’t simply trees; they’re whole systems of life. The forest is filled with this amazing interconnectivity, with trees nursing other trees through fungal networks, passing water from one root system to another. It’s filled with animal relationships and the complex interrelationships between species, and it’s a rich place for exploring the natural world. At the same time, you can argue that the living, breathing, and moving that the forest does is much like a single organism. In the Gaian or environmental sense, there is a wholeness to the forest.

At the beginning of writing the book, I remember thinking about something I discovered about the genetic variation of trees, which I thought was amazing. Oaks, in particular, have an enormous variety of genetic material inside them: in a single grove, there’s more genetic variation than in the entire human species. We can stand in this grove of trees, look around, and the oaks seem almost identical to us. Yet they are more different from one another than any human being could possibly be from another human being. That’s quite striking and says something about the perspective of difference and what we’ve done with difference—the failures of that, and how that’s led to things like World War II. In Palaces, the characters are all from different places, but they come together to form this single organism, one person. They meld and inscribe one another with attitudes and beliefs. They help each other. They change each other the way humans do.

You also describe the writing of Palaces as a “rhizomatic formation.” Could you elaborate on how this rhizomatic formation took place and how the crows became enmeshed with the imaginary of the war?

I’m taking the rhizome from the work of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, the metaphor of a fungal network, and the way it links that which doesn’t always seem related. At the center of it is what I wrote in my journal after waking up from a dream: “The self is that portion of the other that the self accepts as constituting the self.” I’ve tried to argue against this concept in my mind, but I find I cannot, because I think this is fundamentally true biologically. It’s also true of societies and of people as individuals. It’s true of any autopoietic structure. A cell is marked, and that mark that identifies the cell as belonging to my organism is what keeps my immune system from destroying it. Attitudes I accept as my own (even unintentionally) are the attitudes of those I’ve met that I’ve accepted as forming a part of my own attitudes about the world. The United States, or any other country, is composed of people the US accepts as being a part of it. That’s how a society is formed. That’s how nations are formed. Everywhere in nature, you see this boundary of selves, but what’s amazing about this is that all those “selves” are entirely constituted of foreign elements. All of the cells that constitute us came from our mothers’ and fathers’ material. Then, we also have bacteria, all the swarms of other unicellular organisms that our bodies accept as composing us.

One of the things woven into human societies is animal society: animals are part of our culture, and we’re interwoven with animal cultures. Crows have a fascinating relationship with humans because they’re weaving in with us, often at the edges of our culture. They are one of the few animals that have expanded their population and largely benefited from the human presence in their environment. We’ve created spaces where crow creativity can flourish and crows actually have an advantage. Here’s a story that illustrates this perfectly: I was tide-pooling with my daughter, and there was a school group that came and left, and then these crows flew down from the sea cliffs to the tide pools and started walking around. I said to the ranger, “That’s odd; I usually don’t see crows on the coast because they’re driven off by gulls,” and she said the crows know that children are not very careful with where they put their feet, and they will crush hundreds of snails around the edges of the tide pools. The crows wait for the children to leave so they can have a feast.

So much of the relationship between humans and crows is around how we destroy things, knowingly or unknowingly, and crows come and benefit from that destruction. We associate crows with a lot of negativity—with the battlefield, with picking over the dead that we’ve created with our human conflicts. If we analyze why this is so, we find it’s because the crow benefits from the broken spaces we create in nature. That’s the part of the rhizome that connects the crows to war.

What connects the crows to the children in Palaces is a different rhizome—the rhizome of care. Before meeting the children, the crows in Palaces were cared for by another human, and while individual crows are no longer around to know that, the flock hasn’t forgotten. The relationship the children benefit from in World War II has its roots in a relationship formed in the pogroms of World War I by this Jewish man whose fragmentary autobiography they found in the forest. He cared for the crows, and they care for human beings in return. Then, in a further return, human beings will care for the crows again. This thread of care weaving between species binds them together. Humans demonstrate enormous amounts of care for animals—beyond the horrible amounts of destruction we visit on them—which cannot be ignored. Many humans are deeply, deeply connected to animals, whether it’s through our companions or through our relationship with the world around us. In all the critiquing of the human condition, let’s not forget how great our capacity for empathy for other species really is.

Zooming out a little bit, I wanted to ask about the possibilities and limitations of representing interspecies relationships. The Mountain in the Sea is structured around efforts to communicate with Octopus sapiens. In The Tusks of Extinction, there is a human scientist who becomes a mammoth to help the herd of the species resurrected from extinction. Palaces is a story of—as the name of one of the chapters suggests—“mutual aid” between humans and crows. Each of these stories brings other animals closer to the human animal, without collapsing one onto the other. What’s your approach to constructing nonhuman characters and your perspective on both the proximity of and distance from other animals?

It’s very complicated, and it gets back to this idea that I don’t think of myself as a writer; I think of myself as someone who is writing. It’s a process, and I’m learning through that process. There’s another phrase I wrote down in my journal: “Making makes the maker.” The craft of writing is my way of remaking how I see the world, of working through my own philosophy for how my own understandings are not reacting to but responding to the world.

Moreover, my audience consists entirely of human beings. The goal is always the relationship with the reader, that conversation between the writer and the reader. My focus is not trying to communicate to an octopus what it’s like to be an octopus; it’s trying to communicate to a human being what it would be like to try to communicate with an octopus. At all times, I’m aware of not anthropomorphizing animals, and I take their difference very seriously. It’s in no way different from the way I feel about all my characters and books. I’m terrified of attributing to someone else something that comes entirely from myself. Everything has to come out of this deep kind of listening to the world. You have to be able to really embody other people’s experiences to write a character at all. And that goes with animals too.

There’s a famous essay by Thomas Nagel titled “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?” It’s often misread because he actually suggests that there’s a way to sort of know—not to know completely, but there is an access point: blind people who use sound to navigate. They know something of what it’s like to be a bat, and if we pay close attention to the way sound reverberates, even sighted people can start to do this. By quieting ourselves down, we can begin to hear the other and understand them better. If you’re writing animals, you really need to try to silence a lot of the static and attempt to deeply conceive of a world from their eyes in some way.

The other thing is that we need to remember that humans are animals, and not only that, but other animals were also our first teachers. When human beings were looking around for models of how to do things, they found them in animals. I’d bet that the human being who used a spear to fish learned it from shorebirds. She watched the egret and said, “Oh, if I sharpen a stick, I could have a beak like that bird has and I could do what that bird does.” There are probably a million other examples in which the human being is formed from our knowledge of animals moving in the world. A lot of our technologies are imitations of other animals’ bodies and ways of being. We have that connection with them always within ourselves.

I want to exist in this gray middle space between understanding and not understanding. I refuse the idea that we cannot understand other people and other beings that are extremely different from us. I refuse it completely because it argues totally against empathy and care. Equally, I refuse the idea that we can fully understand anyone, including other human beings. There’s no such thing as a total lack of understanding; there’s also no such thing as total understanding. And the job of a creative person trying to describe a perspective that is not their own is a difficult one that exists between those two facts, somewhere in this gray area. The only way you can try to do it well is to be very, very quiet—try not to drown out the voice of the other with your own preconceptions, and try to really listen and respond to what that other being is saying, or how they are moving through the world.

You describe your work as “biorealist” fiction. As you explain, biorealism, “the recognition that human culture and human consciousness are inseparable from the ecological systems which sustain all life,” is an inherently ethical project emphasizing total interconnectedness, and speculative fiction’s unique world-building affordances allow for a deep exploration of that. What do you think are some prolific ways of engaging with biorealist fiction, and how can this engagement become a praxis?

I think about my ideal reader: a person who is in every way just as curious as the person who created the work. The ideal person looking at a painting is as open and as curious as the person who created the painting. Maybe more so. In some ways, the act of reading is more creative than the act of writing. The act of looking, of interpreting, of taking art into one’s self is this: seeking to change the pattern that makes you up as a person. You open the book hoping it will change you, move you, introduce something new to you, teach you something, or help you teach yourself something, or it will engage you in a way that changes your pattern, and that maybe becomes a part of you.

When people say “I feel like I’m always thinking about this book,” I think what they’re saying is “This book has given me a technology, a tool, a technique.” I get this going to museums sometimes. You look at a painting and it just opens up a space that you never thought was possible in your mind; it expands the way you’re capable of seeing the world. That’s the wonder of art, but it’s not the artist alone that does that. It’s that mutual relationship between the artist and the receptive viewer; it’s that conversation. William Sloane wrote, “The relationship in writing is a one-to-one relationship. There is the writer and there is the reader. One of each.” Always only one. Every single time the book is read, this is a conversation that is one-on-one, a conversation between one writer and one reader.

If people are open to this sort of repatterning that happens when engaging with creative work, then they see the world more realistically. I know that you’ve had the feeling. I certainly have had the feeling. This is how I know—sort of—“what it’s like to be a bat.” That’s how we get to a space as a human species where we’re able to live in the bioreal world that we share with all the other species. The world where we recognize the real relationship between our actions and their effects on other people, and we restructure our lives so that we can live in a better way. I think we get there through art more than anything else.

It’s a wonderful calling to be involved in any part of the artistic process, from creating it to analyzing it to simply appreciating it. Any part of that artistic and creative process increases our ability to connect and to really see. Otherwise, we’re stuck in this psychotic world of exploitation and abstraction, the high point of which is the extermination of people during World War II, as if they were cattle. We should also keep in mind the cattle that continue to be exterminated as if they were worth nothing, as if they were machines. We can break down all of those psychotic patterns by learning empathy that art teaches us and repatterning ourselves into more open people. That, to me, is what biorealistic engagement means.

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Ray Nayler was born in Quebec and raised in California. His Locus Award–winning first novel The Mountain in the Sea (2022) was also a finalist for the Nebula Award, the Arthur C. Clarke Award, and the Los Angeles Times Ray Bradbury Prize. Ray’s novella The Tusks of Extinction (2024) won the 2025 Hugo Award, and was also a Nebula and Locus Award finalist. His third book, the cybernetic political thriller Where the Axe Is Buried, was published in hardback in April 2025 and is now available in paperback. His latest novel, Palaces of the Crow (2026), has already earned starred reviews and praise from Kirkus, Publishers Weekly, and Library Journal. Ray most recently served as international adviser to the Office of National Marine Sanctuaries at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and as visiting scholar at George Washington University’s Institute for International Science and Technology Policy. He lives in Washington, DC, with his wife Anna, their daughter Lydia, and two rescued cats.