By Julie Waldron
As conversations about climate, conservation, and the future of the planet become increasingly urgent, author Barbara Hynak is approaching one of the defining questions of our time from an unexpected direction: fantasy. Her novel, Roars Across the World, transports readers to a place of failing rains, disappearing resources, territorial conflict, and competing claims to power. Humans struggle to survive. Lions struggle to survive. And neither possesses the ability to control the one force upon which they all depend: nature itself.
At the center of the story are Atum-Sani, a young human leader carrying the legacy of his ancestors, and Tradent, a majestic white lion known as the Leader of All. Each begins with his own understanding of authority and his place in the natural order.
But drought has little respect for titles.
As rivers recede and the threat of a devastating Time of No Rains grows, Hynak uses the collision between their worlds to challenge a fundamental assumption: Can anyone truly rule the natural world? “Both Tradent and Atum-Sani have claims to dominion,” Hynak explains. “The novel questions whether anyone can truly rule a living world.” No leader can order rain to fall. No species can independently preserve an ecosystem. No creature, even the strongest, exists without countless others.
For Hynak, that realization marks the point where dominion gives way to something more demanding. “Stewardship begins where dominion ends,” she says.
When Fantasy Becomes a Mirror
Hynak could have explored ecological responsibility through nonfiction. Instead, she deliberately chose fiction to make an intellectual issue emotional. Statistics can describe drought, habitat loss, and extinction; a story can place readers beside a disappearing river and make them hear a lion whose roar may someday go unanswered.
“Facts tell us that the world is changing,” Hynak says. “Story brings that change close enough to touch the heart.”
Nature isn’t simply the setting in which the characters’ struggles unfold. It participates in them. Rivers recede, rain disappears, grass becomes scarce, herds change their movements, and hunger alters behavior. Those changes ripple outward, influencing decisions made by animals and humans alike. “We are not separate from nature nor do we stand above it,” Hynak explains. “We are within the web.”
And in that web, importance isn’t determined by size.
One of the novel’s most unusual expressions of that philosophy comes not from its powerful lions or human leaders, but from some of its smallest inhabitants: the wrigglies. They cannot dominate a battlefield, their voices cannot compete with a lion’s roar, and they are easily dismissed. Yet they matter.
For Hynak, the wrigglies represent creatures that aren’t considered beautiful, useful or worth saving. “Small does not mean weak and unnoticed does not mean unnecessary,” she says. It’s one of the central ideas running through Roars Across the World: a living system cannot be understood simply by identifying its most powerful members.
The idea extends beyond ecology. Hynak’s characters repeatedly discover that strength can take forms they have failed to recognize. Courage isn’t always fighting. Loyalty isn’t always agreement. Leadership isn’t always command. Sometimes strength lies in questioning what everyone else has accepted.
When Survival Becomes Domination
Hynak doesn’t make those questions easy. One of the most difficult ideas she confronted while writing became one of the novel’s central covenants: “All can Kill to Live.”
Nature is not sentimental. Lions kill because they must eat. Animals defend themselves and their young. Humans may kill to protect their communities. But survival can become revenge, protection can become justification, and power can decide that another life simply doesn’t matter.
Rather than drawing a clean boundary, Hynak allows her characters to wrestle with it. They inherit beliefs, defend them, suffer because of them, and sometimes change them. The process ultimately leads to another question: Is what I believe actually true, or is it something I was taught and never thought to question?
The question belongs to Atum-Sani and Tradent.
It also belongs to the reader.
A Roar or an Echo
Perhaps the novel’s most haunting expression of its message is its Ancient Prophecy: “When the last lion’s roar is only an echo amongst the stars, the world will end.”
For Hynak, the distinction between a roar and an echo matters. A roar can still receive an answer; an echo cannot. The disappearance of the final lion therefore represents something larger than the extinction of a single species. Every creature exists within relationships, with predators, prey, vegetation, water, landscape and other forms of life. Pull one strand from the web and the surrounding strands must absorb the change.
Yet Roars Across the World is not ultimately a story of ecological despair.
“The web is holding,” Hynak says. “The strands are fraying. Both statements are true.”
Her definition of hope may be the novel’s most important message. Hope isn’t assuming everything will somehow turn out fine; it is recognizing that another action remains possible. That transforms an enormous question, the fate of the natural world, into a much more personal one.
Rather than asking whether one person can save the world, Hynak asks readers to consider the strand already within their reach. What can they protect? What can they strengthen? What inherited belief might they reconsider? What living thing might they finally notice?
Atum-Sani and Tradent may inhabit a fantasy world, but the choice confronting them is unmistakably contemporary: continue fighting for dominion over a world no one truly controls, or accept responsibility for the world everyone shares.
For Hynak, the story doesn’t end with the final page.
“In every moment, we are writing the story,” she says. “Write it well.”
Readers interested in exploring Hynak’s vision of survival, stewardship, and the interconnectedness of life can find Roars Across the World on Amazon.
