Fungal dreams, visions, and nightmares have long been integral to speculative fiction imagery. Within the SFF landscape, fungi are malleable. They feature in horror, both as external threats and in altering human biochemistry in weird and unspeakable ways. They feature in first contact science fiction, signifying an "other" that is both intimately familiar and thoroughly alien. Of late, they have been deployed as an alternative to hyperspace and wormholes, the mycelial fabric of a space highway that allows for faster-than-light travel. They are present in utopian fiction in a more benign form, as literal building blocks of future, non-polluting, and ever renewing urban environments. They occur in fantasy, bases of social organisation that could both undo—or save—the world "above." Perhaps all speculative fiction is just looking for "a shortcut to mushrooms"!

All these uses of fungi in speculation draw on certain qualities that distinguish fungi from the modern human world, and resist anthropomorphism. At the heart of this is the revolutionary idea that fungi complicate the separation between self and other, and blur the boundaries of identity. As Merlin Sheldrake writes in Entangled Life:

There are two key moves by which fungal hyphae become a mycelial network. First, they branch. Second, they fuse. (The process by which hyphae merge with each other is known as ‘anastomosis’, which in Greek means ‘to provide with a mouth’.) If hyphae couldn’t branch, one hypha could never become many. If hyphae couldn’t fuse with one another, they would not be able to grow into complex networks. However, before they fuse, hyphae must find other hyphae, which they do by attracting one another, a phenomenon known as ‘homing’ ... fungal self-identity matters, but it is not always a binary world. Self can shade off into otherness gradually. (p. 39)

For capitalism, which is built upon the separation of the economic and the political, and thrives upon the atomisation of individuals, there must exist, at all times, the firmest of borders separating self from self, and through those borders, creating otherness. Sheldrake, again:

One way to think about mycelial networks is as swarms of hyphae tips. Insects form swarms. A murmuration of starlings is a swarm, as is a school of sardines. Swarms are patterns of collective behaviour. Without a leader or a command centre, a swarm of ants can work out the shortest route to a source of food. A swarm of termites can build giant mounds with sophisticated architectural features. However, mycelium quickly outgrows the swarm analogy because all the hyphen tips in a network are connected to one another. A termite mound is made up of units of termite. A hyphae tip would be the closest we could come to defining the unit of a mycelial ‘swarm’, although one can’t dismantle a mycelial network hypha by hypha once it has grown, as we could pick apart a swarm of termites. Mycelium is conceptually slippery. From the point of view of the network, mycelium is a single interconnected entity. From the point of view of a hyphen tip, mycelium is a multitude. (p. 54)

Instead of giving in to our temptation to anthropomorphise, what might a reversal of that thought process look like? What if we tried to imagine a human world that is built on mycelial logic? To do so would be to fulfil the task laid out by Ursula Le Guin a decade ago, in exhorting speculative fiction writers to imagine alternatives to capitalism. Doing so might just require us to look for the shortcut to mushrooms.

It is not simply about the blurring of the self, and how that interrogates the foundations of capitalism. From the time of Plato, philosophers have justified political structures by reference to human physiognomy. We cannot imagine alternatives to our centralised political structures (mediated through the nation state, itself a vehicle of accumulation for capital) because we cannot think of an organism that doesn't function according to the logic of a brain and a centralised nervous system. But that isn't how it necessarily works in the non-human world. Octopi have three hearts and a distribution of neurons that allow their arms limited autonomy. In fungi, the decentralisation is even more radical. As Sheldrake describes it:

Mycelial coordination is difficult to understand because there is no centre of control. If we cut off our head or stop our heart, we’re finished. A mycelial network has no head and no brain. Fungi, like plants, are decentralised organisms. There are no operational centres, no capital cities, no seats of government. Control is dispersed: mycelial coordination takes place both everywhere at once and nowhere in particular. A fragment of mycelium can regenerate an entire network, meaning that a single mycelial individual - if you’re brave enough to use that word - is potentially immortal. ... Mycelium is polyphony in bodily form. Each of the ... voices is a hyphen tip, exploring a soundscape for itself. Although each is free to wander, their wanderings can’t be seen as separate from the others. There is no main voice. There is no lead tune. There is no central planning. Nonetheless, a form emerges. (p. 59-61)

Communication, reception, decision-making, organisation—all occurring in a radically horizontal context: the imaginative possibilities are endless, and speculative fiction has only just begun to forage for them. To think fungally may even mean to think in another language, a language that Borges imagined a long time ago. In "Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius," Borges wrote of a language without nouns, and which is crafted through verbs. Not "moon," then, but:

... "to moonate" or "to enmoon." "The moon rose above the river" is "hlör ufang axaxaxasmio," or, as Xul Solar* succinctly translates: Upward, behind the onstreaming it mooned ... (Borges, Ficciones, p. 158)

So it is with fungi, where lichens are "are stabilised networks of relationships; they never stop lichening; they are verbs as well as nouns" (Sheldrake, Entangled Life, 99). The Borges language of speculation imagined a grammar for fungi; and fungi, likewise, can nourish the grammar of speculative fiction. Thinking of symbiotic life-forms in the texture of holobionts, for example, can enrich our more traditional SFF staples, the chimera and the cyborg, and can expand the worlds we build.

In this Strange Horizons special issue, we bring to you the magical worlds of fungi, through fiction, poetry, articles, and reviews. Working through different forms, each contribution illumines an aspect of the fungal lifeworlds, from a speculative lens. We hope that this special issue will serve as a platform for our readers to imagine beyond the logic of the anthropomorphic form, and then—in the finest tradition of speculative fiction—turn that imagination back upon the world that we inhabit (alongside fungi, of course!).

It is little surprise that Sheldrake, in the conclusion of his book, turns to a pioneering figure in modern anarchism, Pyotr Kropotkin, and to his lifelong insistence that "‘sociability’ was as much a part of nature as the struggle for existence" (Sheldrake, Entangled Life, 235). In a world in which capitalism is ever more taking on the logic of a particularly brutal and unconstrained Darwinism, we could do worse than seeking our shortcut to the mushrooms. This special issue takes a step along that path.