Ma forêt: a radical reimagining of prehistory
Antoinette Rychner’s Ma forêt imagines a prehistoric world where the forest itself seems to breathe with the wind, where animal cries punctuate life, and where human beings are woven into a larger ecological tapestry. The novel blends science fiction with a lyrical, arborescent prose that feels at once ancient and startlingly contemporary. It asks big questions in a playful, often irreverent voice: how might societies organize themselves when the old scripts of power are under critique, and what would a more equal living together even look like?
Power cycles, seasons, and social ethics
In Rychner’s world, the social order hinges on resources and subsistence, but also on a biology that is strictly female. Each year brings a single fertile period during which sexuality is tightly regulated, a design born of ritual and caution rather than mere appetite. The community’s governance rides the seasonal tide: a spring’ matriarchy, a summer patriarchy, and an autumn-winter phase where roles soften and governance becomes more horizontal. This cyclical model, inspired by the author’s reading of historical debates about collective decision-making, tests whether power can be held more lightly by broad participation rather than a single ruling elite.
Central to the plot is the ritual surrounding reproduction: the Ouxes, a council whose leaders are sacrificially removed to prevent them from seizing perpetual authority. Yet the summer breeze that should carry continuity also wafts a spirit of revolt. A season of dissent challenges the very structures the community has relied upon for survival, insisting that an ancestral order can be interrogated, revised, and changed if its people demand it.
From Graeber–Wengrow to Rychner: the politics of history
The novel channels ideas from David Graeber and David Wengrow’s The Dawn of Everything, specifically the argument that our political possibilities emerge from collective conversation and shared imagination. Rychner adopts this premise to suggest that human beings are moral, social creatures capable of debating options and choosing paths that better serve the group. In Ma forêt, the author also borrows the idea of seasonal power, using cycles to explore how societies might reconfigure questions of leadership, labor, and belonging.
In interviews, Rychner has emphasized that her work uses a distant past to ask urgent questions about today: what would it mean to live with less coercive authority? How could a community organize itself so that everyone has a voice in decisions about the common good? The book’s science-fictional lens reframes environmental crisis as a catalyst for rethinking governance and kinship, not as an excuse for despair.
Language, tone, and storytelling craft
Ma forêt is often described as a “language with trees”—a poetic, sometimes rough edge that blends current vocabulary with neologisms and cunning syntactic detours. The tone blends humor with hardness, tenderness with bite, creating a narrative that feels both intimate and expansive. It is at once a fable, a political treatise, and a work of speculative fiction that refuses to shy away from the brutality and beauty of its world. The result is a text that invites readers to laugh, to question, and to imagine anew how communities might organize themselves beyond the cages of contemporary power.
The future past: a hopeful hinge for thinking about now
Narrator and author alike hint that Ma forêt could be read as a utopian projection—a far distant future or a post-collapse present where humanity regains a decentered, nature-embedded way of living. The book’s optimism rests on the premise that even after ecological upheaval, parts of humanity could endure, heal, and restore relationships with forests and other living beings. It is not a naïve dream but a call to reconfigure how we live together: how we raise children, how we distribute resources, how we debate, decide, and dream.
Why this book matters
Ma forêt invites readers to reconsider the codes that organize societies. It blends science fiction with ecofeminism and philosophical fable to propose that governance, family, and community can be reshaped through dialogue, courage, and a willingness to challenge entrenched hierarchies. With its arborescent prose, playful insight, and uncompromising honesty, Rychner’s novel remains a provocative invitation to imagine living differently while laughing at the absurdities of the present.
