One of my earliest encounters with fungi in speculative fiction was Lemony Snicket’s The Grim Grotto, in which a young protagonist becomes infected by deadly spores. Though the Medusoid Mycelium was invented, there are many dangerous fungi in the real world. Coccidioides immitis, when inhaled, settles into lungs and grows, damaging organs and spreading into the brain and bones via blood. Ingesting just half a cap of Amanita phalloides (death cap mushrooms) kills a human—and distinguishing them from edible mushrooms is tricky. Armillaria ostoyae travels through root networks of its tree victims, stretching hidden rhizomorph strands under the bark to feast on nutrients. The trees then wither. Unlike us, fungi eat from the inside by inserting themselves into their food. Fungal spores can also trigger allergies, but because they can grow anywhere—even inside homes—they are difficult to evade. Fungi can be invasive, toxic, destructive, consuming, and inescapable. Easy to fear, they fit naturally into the horror spectrum.
Yet not everyone tries to flee from fungi. In Trouble with Lichen by John Wyndham, a lichen extract that extends human life becomes a precious societal commodity. This mirrors the numerous medical and technological benefits fungi afford us. Some species produce antibiotics like penicillin or compounds that can be used as sustainable biofuels. Materials from fungal cell walls can substitute human skin to support wound repair and tissue regeneration. Fungal-derived anodes outperform graphite in lithium-ion batteries. Mycelium, the branching hyphal part of fungi, have been used as biodegradable textiles, materials, and even as building components. This incredible potential for biotechnology positions fungi as a promising element of science fiction.
Their fruiting bodies, mushrooms, can appear overnight and vanish as quickly, as if by magic. Fungi seem capable of growing anywhere in the world—and even beyond. They stretch through earth, in lightless caves, underwater. Their spores can reach everywhere, travelling in the wind to cross landscapes and climb mountains in search of ideal growth conditions. Fungi endure extreme climates, thrive off human garbage, live on extraterrestrial space stations, and survive Chernobyl. Radiation exposure orders of magnitude higher than what kills humans does not destroy fungi. Their indestructibility is not passive. Hyphae react and adjust to their environment, retaining spatial memories about sources of nourishment or stress. Mycelia have therefore been compared to neural networks in the brain—integrating, storing, and utilising information. By attributing intelligence and sentience to their fantastical abilities, we can certainly regard fungi as something powerful, immortal, divine—and right at home in a fantasy setting.
Fungi readily traverse boundaries of speculative fiction like they do geographical terrain. Despite this ubiquity, or perhaps because of it, they remain largely undefinable. Their capacity to shift reproductive strategies feels fairly queer to me. They instil terror, inspiration, awe. They can help or harm. This genre ambiguity reflects fungi in nature. Their symbiosis with plants can change from beneficial to parasitic. Species that typically rely on decomposing material in soil can switch to predating nematode worms when nutrients are hard to find. This push-pull of advantageous vs. destructive force is a familiar dance, in particular, for people marginalised by their social systems. It is a constantly evolving calculus to decide how to interact with power and risk becoming poisoned. Navigating an unknowable, unyielding, amorphous fungal entity in speculative fiction can therefore resonate with how we conduct continual power analyses to move through our worlds.
These versatile features can be incorporated into settings and environments to purposefully explore worldbuilding themes. In Sascha Stronach’s The Dawnhounds, the city is made of fungus, magical energy connecting the life of a place to its residents. This recognises not only the potential for biotechnology—myco-architecture is already in the works—but also the interconnectedness around us. Mycelial networks exchange mineral nutrients for photosynthesised carbohydrates from plants. This relationship functions as a natural economy, with trade terms shifting depending on resource availability. Fungi can exploit this “market,” transporting resources to areas yielding greater returns. But there are also myco-heterotrophs, plants unable to photosynthesise. By fully providing for them, mycelia support these plants’ unusual evolutionary directions. This infrastructure engenders diversity through accessibility, by unconditionally enabling life—an inclusive dynamic difficult to imagine in most human economies. But this overwhelming impact on the ecosystem does not guarantee benevolence. Jeff VanderMeer’s Annihilation portrays eerie fungi as representations of cosmic horror, of a setting that cannot be understood by the human expedition sent to study it. 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.
Other books touch instead on fungi altering our senses of time and place. The Luminous Dead by Caitlin Starling involves a cave of glowing fungus where someone sees apparitions of dead people. Tade Thompson’s Rosewater depicts a fungus-like entity that gives the protagonist psychic abilities to locate lost things. Fungi do possess various ways of manipulating the biochemical machinery of sensory perception, including through psychedelic compounds. Psilocybin, for example, can generate hallucinations, euphoria, and synaesthesia, bending the rules of reality by altering the mind. In fact, psilocybin desynchronises activity between brain regions. People have described this feeling as “ego dissolution,” with acute treatment ameliorating negative affect for months, increasing connectedness to nature, and even reducing authoritarian attitudes. After decades of stigma, Western science is starting to recognise the healing benefits of psychedelics that older cultures have long known: The Aztec god Xōchipilli, for instance, is often portrayed with divine mushrooms (“teonanácatl” in Nahuatl). It is interesting to consider, spiritually or physiologically, that fungi can reach into our minds in a way that mirrors their infiltration of ecosystem components. Our resulting perception of the world could thus be considered an extension of fungal behaviour.
Loss of mental and bodily autonomy appears in fictional contexts as well. The Girl with All the Gifts by M. R. Carey questions what makes us human as a military initiative incarcerates fungus-infected children prone to eating people through no choice of their own. Cases of zombifying fungi are well-documented. Ophiocordyceps unilateralis spores hijack the muscles of ants, forcing the insects to carry them to an optimal location for fruiting before sprouting out of the heads. Entomophthora similarly infects flies, and Massospora cicadas, co-opting these bodies for their own purposes. Ergot alkaloids cause muscular convulsions and hallucinations. To me, this lack of control reflected in speculative fiction is reminiscent of how our bodies can feel like they are out of reach, undergoing a process we have minimal influence over, when we experience disability and/or neurodivergence. Sometimes this becomes so all-consuming that we fall out of sync with the rest of the world’s rhythms. Time warps around us. In this vein, Premee Mohamed’s The Annual Migration of Clouds depicts a fungal infestation that prevents its human bodies from committing unfavourable actions, enforcing decision-making priorities that do not align with what the hosts want.
Indeed, it is the ability of hyphae to process complex environmental cues in making choices that lends itself to the concept of consciousness in mycelial networks. Fungal growth moves toward nutrients and avoids obstructions. Most fungi detect light and colour via opsins. Hyphae sense surface textures and can distinguish themselves from others when forming close associations with other organisms. This suggests an impression of self-awareness, one that could theoretically end up in conflict with our own. Colonial-minded antagonists embody this imposition of their own will in Silvia Moreno-Garcia’s Mexican Gothic, invading other people’s bodies with ropes of fungal control to extract immortality for themselves. Fungi are known to converge into multi-organism arrangements, such as lichen, that involve other non-fungal entities like bacteria. These amalgams can last thousands of years, remaining together even through reproduction cycles, and present a confluence of individual organisms with entire ecosystems.
Furthermore, mycelia transmit information about their surroundings across expansive branching networks using electrical impulses and chemical signals, and they exhibit adaptive reconfiguration, analogous to neural pathways. Importantly, however, this occurs throughout the entire decentralised network; there are no individual organs to pinpoint as leaders. Leech by Hiron Ennes plays with this idea of a collective consciousness. A fungal infestation threatens to remove someone from a hive-mind. It reminds me of the way psychedelics can distance people from the core of their learned identities; as experimental psychologist Matthew Johnson described it, these psychoactive agents “dope-slap people out of their story. […] Psychedelics open a window of mental flexibility in which people can let go of the mental models we use to organise reality.” We understand from fungi, then, that our realities are subjective constructs grounded in our own experiences rather than in objective truth.
Fungi supersede our perceived reality also in their straddling of barriers between life and death. They are notoriously effective at breaking down material that others cannot: wood, waste, and even things they would not naturally, such as pollutants. Their metabolic pathways adapt to their circumstances, learning to decompose new substrates. Humans rely on this skill for their own food sources, carrying fungi in gut mycobiomes and recruiting external digestion support through fermentation. Lichens traverse death and life by extracting minerals from inanimate stone to pass into the metabolic cycles of living beings. They grow on eight percent of Earth’s surface, including the colonial faces carved into Mount Rushmore. This region of the Black Hills is sacred Lakota land stolen during the Gold Rush. Out of concern for its ephemerality, Mount Rushmore was hosed off to remove the lichen. Yet given the uncanny knack of fungi to survive volcanic eruptions and multiple extinction events, they will likely return to complete their degradation. By decomposing dead matter, fungi convert nutrients back to life. This engagement with death and rebirth mirrors spiritual roles of deities like Kali; we understand their place in dying to affirm new life. Fungus in What Moves the Dead by T. Kingfisher blurs the lines between the living and the dead, as it does in Mexican Gothic and The Luminous Dead, connecting stories from the past with people in the future. This reflects another form of time warping, which sees a breakdown of linearity (mainstream in Western temporal traditions) through the imposition of cyclicality (more commonly found, for example, in South Asian philosophies).
Building upon the idea of bending time, fungi in fiction also preserve community history. Mia Tsai’s The Memory Hunters features memories stored in fungus that threaten contemporary political narratives. Sorrowland by Rivers Solomon depicts the violence of unethical testing conducted on Black people through an experimental fungus, which carries the memories of those it previously infected and thereby connects the protagonist to her ancestors. Speculative fungal concepts that introduce creative ways of rediscovering lost history may feel particularly meaningful for the many global communities whose lands and records have been destroyed by colonial assault. These narratives link relationships and knowledge that have been severed, once again challenging the linearity of our histories. They bring ancestral continuity to the forefront instead of isolated individual existence. Fungi provide an ideal platform for such stories, since their networks are the oldest, largest known living organisms on Earth, fossil records dating them back to millions of years ago. Moreover, their growth patterns carry information and memories about the places they have lived in, and unlike humans, their branches can explore all directions at once.
This expansive nature allows them to reach through space and time. The uniquely flexible abilities of fungi offer a temporally transcendent bridge between speculative genres, between ideas of the past and future and present. The scientific struggle to categorise these timeless, shapeshifting, pluralist, decentralised fungal identities underscores their potential for challenging our thinking beyond traditional human limitations. There already exists, for instance, a “Queer Theory for Lichens,” written by sociologist David Griffiths, that encourages us to understand ourselves without heteronormative, binary delineations. The myriad ways of existing and of relating to each other, imagined across the spectrum of speculative fungal fiction, offers us a path to interrogating our fears and hopes for a more heterogeneous humanity.
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