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.

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.

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.

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.

As part of a collective of African writers who have created an Afrocentric Sauútiverse of five planets, two suns and a spirit moon, a world of science and fantasy, where there is no written language, we play with technology and sound magic to scrutinise the world as we know it, and use speculative fiction as a response to our world. 

SFF authors are the front-line practitioners who put the fruits of history’s craft into daily practice, sharing it in doses the public can consume, combining, treating, administering, customizing, even inoculating against evils like propaganda and despair.

I thought the lady who was the corpse did a particularly good job and it is sweet that we got a happy ending here.

Hallo friends, and welcome to Stories from the Radio, where we listen to old radio shows and laugh at them for being so old. Today, we are going to listen to something by the golden boy of old time radio, Arch Oboler. He is perhaps best known for his horror series ‘Lights Out’ but dude was pretty prolific in his time. He dabbled in radio, television, fiction, and all those other neat things. Today’s show is called Revolt of the Worms, which is an excellent name for anything. I’m hoping for some nice, golden-age-of-sci-fi-radio type story, but as we have seen time and again, you never can tell with old time radio.

Hysterical dude continues to be hysterical, which is a nice change from having the woman be hysterical all the time

One of the recent bright spots in the world of speculative short fiction publishing is the rebirth of Fantasy Magazine. Yes, Fantasy is back, published under the Psychopomp umbrella with co-editors Arley Sorg and Shingai Njeri Kagunda at the helm. (You can read more about how this all came about at Psychopomp and support the zine by signing up for a subscription.)  “Silence Starved and Swallowed” by Sydney Paige Guerrero from Fantasy 97, the first issue of Fantasy in this incarnation, is a devastating, darkly gleaming story about grief and sadness. Guerrero describes how our inability to put our emotions into words, to communicate our pain and vulnerability to those around us, can devour us entirely: “black holes start with swallowed silence.”