Anthropocene Crisis and Emergence of AI: An Eco-Critical Study of the Stone Goods and Bewilderment

This paper examines how contemporary eco-fiction deploys artificial intelligence as both narrative catalyst and thematic mirror for dealing with the issue of climate anxiety, focusing on Richard Powers’s Bewilderment and Jeanette Winterson’s The Stone Gods. Both novels situate AI within fragile ecological futures, yet they do so through markedly different narrative structures. Powers grounds his story in intimate human–nonhuman attachment, while Winterson presents a cyclical, Post-human universe marked by repetition and technological hubris. In Bewilderment, AI-mediated Neuro-feedback becomes a means of spiritual communication through which a child’s heightened ecological empathy is amplified, foregrounding the tension between technological solutionism and the emotional dimensions of environmental grief. The novel frames AI not as a salvific force but as a reflective apparatus that connects human psychology with environmental forces. Conversely, The Stone Gods imagines AI within a recursive structure of planetary collapse, highlighting how corporate technologies, war, and destruction of the home-world, Orbus cause the Apocalypse and the entire destruction of the human world. By dissecting several symbolical images which are an inevitable part of the thematic content of these novels which work as eco-fiction, the paper argues that eco-fiction increasingly uses AI to articulate the contradictions of life in the Anthropocene. AI emerges as a narrative locus where environmental dread, post-human ethics, and speculative futures converge. Ultimately, these novels illuminate how climate anxiety reshapes both our mindscapes and our understanding of intelligent systems, suggesting that the future of ecological storytelling lies in interrogating, not escaping, the entanglement of technology and planetary precarity.