Perhaps all speculative fiction is just looking for "a shortcut to mushrooms"!
Anton, the head chef, says the high-quality animal proteins we feed Nuth-Shoggoth give our Ambrosia a “heady nuttiness” that sets us apart from the other Shoggoth restaurants in the Loop.
Mushroon: verb / to stay rooted in one place more broadly, to favor / thought over action.
Queer lot that we were with our notebooks crusted like churchyards
The planet SC-624– / called Ovhevrh by its indigenous / which means “Flying Mountain”— / is colloquially known as Fly Amanita
Creativity, of all kinds, benefits from breaking down rigid taxonomies. And that decay, whether we fear it or welcome it, provides rich loam for imagining what might come next.
These stories convey fungal environments as exceeding human comprehension and existence; they precede us, interface with us, and will last beyond us. They hold together the temporal continuity of a place.
When it comes to the innovative possibilities of growing a city – particularly one on a distant world where we have total freedom to construct every aspect ourselves – perhaps the greatest gain of biogenic architecture comes not from trying to imagine a single species that does everything we might want, but thinking of how to layer different organisms together to create something multi-symbiotic.
While it played with the backstories of known characters and tweaked the designs of certain species (both highly polarizing among fans), Discovery also brought us new technology and new aliens, including the first sentient fungal species in canon. The jahSepp were only around for a few episodes, but these fungi were not only complex and beautifully fleshed out but also expertly built, incorporating our current mycology knowledge base.
If and when the climate continues to warm, fungi are likely to become more prevalent in our daily lives, and with familiarity will come more stories. Hopefully, unlike in Hodgson’s “The Voice in the Night”, we can right our climate-catastrophe-bound ship and avoid being consumed.
The process of giving a fungus an STD (on purpose) to save your chest(nuts) works like this: (1) you have a tree dying from chestnut blight; (2) you introduce a second strain of chestnut blight that carries the STD; (3) the two fungal strains engage in…ahem ... parasexual behaviour in the tree, passing on the STD; (4) the original chestnut blight fungus is weakened by the STD, giving the tree a chance to fight back.
