ABSTRACT
In an era characterised by intensifying environmental crises, the wrath of nature is evident in the form of pandemics, extreme weather events, natural disasters, and biodiversity loss etc. Our planet appears to be demonstrating its agency in both alarming and enlightening manners, often interpreted through literary, scientific, political and even mythical lenses in various forms of artistic expressions. This paper aims to explore these reckonings of the Earth through the critical analysis of the phantasmagorical portrayal of Gaia's wrath in Claire Buss's (2018) hopeful sci-fi dystopian novel The Gaia Project – a text within the growing body of twenty-first-century environmental fiction that merges mythic imagination with ecological urgency. By drawing from James Lovelock's Gaia Hypothesis and Lawrence Buell's concept of the environmental text, the study argues that Buss reconfigures Gaia not merely as a symbolic Earth Mother but as an iconoclastic force of resistance. Through the lens of phantasmagoria, the paper examines how Gaia's presence in the novel manifests not merely as a literary device or a straightforward apocalyptic punishment but as a reckoning that unfolds in fragmented, spectral, and hallucinatory ways, thus evoking a planetary consciousness that transcends scientific rationalism.
