Human relationships with fungi are fraught. They are sources of decay and connection, the mold that ruins our food, and the mycelial networks that keep our crops healthy. Our stories wrestle with them because they so perfectly represent everything in nature that most discomfits us.
At the Field Museum in Chicago, I once found myself in an ancient exhibit full of glass plant models. One particularly dusty corner held a set of glass mushrooms. A typewritten index card, possibly not updated since the World's Columbian Exposition, informed the viewer that “Some scientists now think fungi may be their own kingdom, rather than a type of plant.” We are well past the era when life was easily divided into a countable number of kingdoms, but this early challenge to our neat categories has been as great a source of fungal anxiety as any more physical threat to human well-being. Human philosophers like Borges[i] and Shotwell[ii] have argued for the abitrariness, harmfulness, and ultimate impossibility of systematic taxonomization; fungi embody those arguments.
Weird fiction has long used fungi as a stand-in for the inexplicable and alien. Lovecraft, as frightened of mushrooms as of the open ocean, old houses, and people who don’t speak English, created an oeuvre that includes fungal haunting (“The Shunned House”), fungal brain-stealing aliens (“The Whisperer in Darkness”), and fungal nightmare creatures (The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath). His anxieties reject the ecologically unclassifiable and uncontrollable—and reflect the desire for a world that submits to “civilized” definition and division.
As we’ve come to understand the degree to which we are enmeshed in, and interdependent with, the world’s complexity[iii], writers of ecologically oriented subgenres have welcomed exactly those aspects of the world that Lovecraft (and many others) once rejected. Solarpunk, eco-fiction, and climate fiction treat fungi as not merely necessary, but symbolic of another and better mode of relation.
T. Kingfisher, whose stories often combine classic horror tropes with an appreciation for the inhuman, has one series that particularly illustrates the continuum between weird terror and Anthropocene integration. The Sworn Soldier books follow Alex Easton, a retired soldier of Gallacia, through kan encounters with the dangerous and difficult-to-classify. Alex kanself fits both of these descriptors: a skilled fighter, and with a gender barely recognized outside of kan own small country. (In addition to soldiers, Gallacia also has pronouns for G-d and for rocks—though not, inconveniently, for mushrooms.) Each book typifies a specific attitude toward the things that violate our assumptions and categories, and a specific point on the arc that fungal literature has followed from repulsion through ambivalence and finally to connection.
What Moves the Dead: The Fungal Threat
The first Sworn Soldier book, What Moves the Dead, riffs on Poe’s “Fall of the House of Usher” with a more-or-less classic depiction of weird, frightening fungus. Easton visits the estate of an old friend in trouble, meets a mycologist (Beatrix Potter’s fictional aunt), and discovers that the local fungi have developed into a hive mind that can possess corpses both animal and human—and sometimes the living as well. While the hive mind is young and curious, even sympathetic, it lacks the concepts that would allow it to respect individual selfhood. Negotiation being impossible, it must be destroyed—recognizable human existence is preserved, with a tinge of regret.
Fungal ignorance of boundaries is often a source of horror. Decay, parasitism, merging of things that should remain separate: all break down the lines between human and non-human, life and death, self and other. These concerns reflect, and magnify, genre fiction’s broader discomfort with anything that questions traditional western ideas of individual selfhood. Silvia Moreno-Garcia’s Mexican Gothic follows a similar track to the Kingfisher, although patriarchs use her fungi to keep people in their places (both metaphorical and literal). Other fungal horrors are not so bound. With unlimited growth, they turn the whole world into themselves—something that only human extraction and exploitation are supposed to do. Marc Laidlaw’s “Leng,” Stephen King’s “Gray Matter,” and Amanda Downum’s “Spore” posit super-parasites that control humans. Human vulnerabilities—ranging from curiosity to alcoholism—allow possession and transformation that, once given an inroad, threaten the entire species or even biosphere. Fungi, the original nanotechnology that can remake anything, are also the original gray goo problem[iv].
This fear reaches its apex in stories like The Girl with All the Gifts and The Last of Us. The similarities between zombie plagues and cordyceps are intuitive, a place where mythological study exacerbates fear. Even knowing now that fungi are their own kingdom—indeed, that they have more similarity to Animalia than plants—the ease with which they make use of the other multicellular kingdoms is discomfiting. Cordyceps species have evolved to control insects, forcing them to climb to high places from which spores can easily disperse, then growing out through their heads to release those spores[v]. While the original hypothesis was that they rewrote the bug’s ganglion, it now appears that they puppet movements directly.
Humans, with our larger brains, can imagine the insectile ganglion still struggling to reimplement its normally irresistible instincts, only to find itself usurped by something more powerful. Sometimes the horror is another, alien intelligence replacing our own—but sometimes it’s zombie mushrooms with no thought of their own. Our tendency to turn everything around us to our own ends is bad enough. Something that can do the same, but with no redeeming art or love or regret, implies a wave of monotonous assimilation with no chance of turning back. Our fears for what the alien can do reflect our fears about ourselves.
What Feasts at Night: The Enemy and Educator
The second Sworn Soldier book, What Feasts at Night, is more definitively supernatural horror—although the mycologist returns from the previous installment—and its dangers stem from traumatic, all-too-human histories. Even here, relationship to the land and what grows in it is paramount. Easton’s Gallacian cabin is plagued by a restless, breath-stealing spirit. Buried beneath the springhouse many decades previously, she’s released when a fallen rock blocks the flowing water that normally keeps food cold and haunts contained. The cabin caretaker’s gentle son is vulnerable to her nightly attacks, but Easton fights her in dreams that mix kan traumatic memories of war and of the first book. It’s kan familiarity with these horrors, and experience living with trauma, that let ka fight in a state where other victims forget to resist. This begins a process of considering how responses to fear are shaped as much by our own psychologies as by the frightening thing itself—and thus considering that there is more than one possible way to respond.
Many stories place fungus in this sort of ambivalent, interstitial role: still frightening, but sympathetic and perhaps even desirable as an alternative to the failures of the Anthropocene. We may recognize that something different is needed while still flinching at that difference. The classic Tumblr post in which a mushroom responds to terrified demands with “You cannot kill me in a way that matters” falls into this liminal space. It’s this resilience that makes fungi so alien, garnering fear, respect, and envy in equal parts, so strongly that we have to make a joke out of the whole thing. There’s a lesson down in the mycelial ooze, if we have the nerve to examine it.
Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, in The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins, suggests that the lesson is about how to live with precarity. The old, ostensibly rational structures have collapsed: we are already stuck in an inhuman world of human making. “The Economy” is an elder god thriving on the sacrifices of gig work, of eighty-hour weeks with no promise of steady income. Capitalism treats people and resources in isolation, alienating them from their embedded webs so thoroughly that we finally acknowledge individual separation as a worse horror than connection. Climate change makes weather, crop growth, even the existence of land itself, unpredictable. But fungi—matsutake in this particular case—grow and thrive in disrupted landscapes. Perhaps, in a time when disruption and precarity are no longer avoidable, we can do the same.
It’s no shock, therefore, that much writing in this space hybridizes the Weird with climate fiction, recognizing that survival requires abandoning our current assumptions about “humanity.” Amelia Gorman’s Field Guide to Invasive Species of Minnesota imagines a world where ecological disaster has broken down boundaries between species and kingdoms, and where adaptation means transformative metamorphosis. “Tiny feathery tips of green eyelashes better absorb the sun in a year that will be wracked with famine and flush with wild vegetable humans.” Max Gladstone and Amal Al-Mohtar’s This Is How You Lose the Time War, similarly, depicts a conflict over the very nature of life on earth: one with nature woven inextricably into technology, the other with technological networks ruling all. Balance is anathema to both sides. Passionate enemies become passionate lovers, and battles for dominance turn at last to inextricable interdependence.
Time War is not the only story where fungal complexity breaks down dichotomies. The same entity may both invade and teach, or change us in ways more welcome than a cordyceps. Tade Thompson’s Rosewater and Adrian Gibson’s “fungalpunk” stories, along with Jeff VanderMeer’s Ambergris universe, put humans into relationships with mushroom entities that can be glossed as conflict, but aren’t quite. Sue Burke’s Semiosis has humans as the colonizers, adapting to a world of sapient plants for whom fungal networks are symbiotic infrastructure.
Easton asks, of the breath-stealing moroi, “Blessed Virgin, why must you keep sending me innocent monsters?” Kan lament surfaces a longstanding conflict: fighting still seems the only possible response, but ka yearns for alternatives. From that place of doubt about whether what we face is destruction or salvation, we can finally reach stories in which other options are on the table.
What Stalks the Deep: The Alien Ally
The third and so far final Alex Easton book, What Stalks the Deep, finds ka in a strange and foreign place (America) to deal with something superficially similar to the first book’s fungal intelligence. (Actually a jellyfish-siphonovore—inevitably, your choices in weird fiction are mushrooms or tentacles.) This time, while kan instinctive reaction remains revulsion, both ka and the intelligence are able to overcome their fears and cooperate to handle a shared threat. The creature is a collective, mimetic organism, yet able to recognize and respect the separateness of other entities. We are now fully in the realm of fungal strategy as a complement to our own mammalian methods of interacting with the world, one that brings its own value.
Recent research—much of which was introduced to non-mycologists in Merlin Sheldrake’s 2020 Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change Our Minds and Shape Our Futures—shows the vibrant and vital role that fungi play in Earth’s biosphere. They share complex relationships with plant life, breaking down the distinctions between parasite, host, and symbiont as well as they do organic matter. They play key roles in communication between trees, and in the “Wood Wide Web” networks that allow plants to pass information. In symbiosis with algae and cyanobacteria, they create the lichen that were the first explorers of dry land. They were also the organisms that first brought symbiosis to the attention of biology in the late 1800s, proving that nature was not always red in tooth and claw.
Along with their natural powers, fungal technologies are an increasingly clear part of any sustainable future. Fungal bricks can reduce the carbon footprint of construction[vi]; mycoremediation can break down toxins and plastics[vii]. You can even make computers with them[viii]. The rate of biotechnological advances is growing, and these advances seem only the initial wave[ix]. Authors looking for inspiration in emergent tech are more and more likely to find mushrooms involved.
A 2023 Strange Horizons article on fictional fungus wraps up with Sheldrake’s book, mentioning only Becky Chambers’s A Psalm for the Wild-Built and Star Trek: Discovery as positive depictions of the kingdom amid a litany of disturbing classics. Discovery’s interstellar mycelial networks are the ultimate magic mushroom trip, but their biggest contribution may simply be spreading the idea that fungus can be wildly useful and transformative. Although even solarpunk discussions still find more fungal horror than hope, a new set of fruiting bodies is growing.
Chambers’s cozy solarpunk provides an early example, with mushroom construction as one of many nature-friendly components in a world that has settled into post-industrial harmony. But Elizabeth Bear’s “Thanksgiving” is a sharper take, flipping the old idea of species-transforming, mind-changing fungus: what if this “apocalypse” is what we need to survive? What if the mycelial perspective, of endless interconnection and permeable selfhood, would be good for us? And, in our world still awaiting that transformation, where we have so much trouble working together, who gets to decide?
This is the difference between fungi and other technologies that find their way into stories of sustainable futures: we can’t help imagining that they’ll change not only our materials science, but our politics, our culture, and our systems of social organisation, and our minds themselves. And we know—as so many stories also imagine new ways of organizing action, breaking down hierarchies, and changing relationships with the rest of the biosphere—that our minds need changing. As in What Stalks the Deep, empathy across seemingly alien gaps is the key to survival.
Nika Murphy’s “Ghost Tenders of Chornobyl” walks these gaps. In a tale that’s equal parts eco-fiction and ghost story, the spirits of the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone (also known, appropriately, as the Zone of Alienation) work with radiation-absorbing mushrooms to heal the land. It’s a natural connection between the dead and decay, collaborating to renew life[x]. But the zone is also a center of fighting in the Russia-Ukraine War, and not all the ghosts come from the same side. Both radioactive and human alienation need to be broken down and remade, and the two processes are not separable. Tentatively, they might even be welcome.
Sienna Tristen’s Hortus Animarum: A New Herbal for the Queer Heart seems a spiritual sequel to Amelia Gorman’s poetry collection above, and more definitive in grasping at change. “Green mushroom wine” and birch trees are the smell of home, “and one day I’ll cease my wandering and come home for good. What I’m saying is when I am done being crude and animal I will call myself sapling in earnest.” Here a move beyond the mammalian is not just tempting apocalypse but inevitable desire. Jarod K. Anderson’s poetry and memoir, too, use mushrooms as metonymy for processes valuable in their own right, and ongoing metamorphosis as a necessary state of being.
Even stories of concrete, practical fungal infrastructure merge into this kind of transformation. Vandana Singh’s “Indra’s Web,” for example, has a mycelia-based power grid start to become self-organizing and self-optimizing. The modifications appear at first to be system failures, but are matched by new human approaches to the apparent crisis: slowing down rather than jumping to first reactions, taking time to understand and analyze, and trusting symbiotic teams to reach the right answer. Working alongside fungi is changemaking even without neural incursions. It may be enough—and inevitable—to learn from their examples.
Sworn Soldier: From Tales of Trauma to Maps of Change
Alex Easton’s final encounter is with a creature that calls himself Fragment, contrasting with the Whole of the larger organism from which he’s been separated. It’s no coincidence that this loneliness and alienation mark the point at which Alex finally moves from rejecting the alien to accepting communication and connection—but the series as a whole suggests the importance of the arc as well as the endpoint. Fungal fiction as a subgenre is starting to shape such an arc: from desperate, defensive isolation to building familial networks where we never expected to find them. From fear to welcome. From being trapped by the patterns of the past to choosing change in concert with the surrounding world. It’s the arc of not only individual protagonists but a species—and from there, necessarily, not only our own species but the fabric of life from which we were never truly separate.
Fictional trends are not perfect mirrors of real-life ones, and human appreciation of the fungal world predates its regular appearance as a positive force in speculative fiction. Mushrooms have long been welcome on our plates, in our medicine cabinets, and in psychedelic experience and philosophy. But research is opening up whole new realms of appreciation, and expanding the preexisting ones. We are going beyond the visible fruiting bodies and into the mycelial network beneath, and learning just how much of fungal wisdom can be found there. Michael Braungart and William McDonough’s Cradle to Cradle, one of the foundational texts of biomimetic technology, encouraged rethinking the industrial world based on the model of the cherry tree—but the cherry tree itself depends on mycelia in order to be part of a sustainable, cyclical process of growth, decay, and mutual benefit with the surrounding ecosystem. We are finally learning what makes that state possible, and writers are understandably eager to play with the potential.
For now, true fungal solarpunk remains rare, but the bibliography is expanding. Beyond earth, Lovecraft’s suspiciously cosmopolitan fungal extraterrestrials give way to imagining how fungal networks might support parallel intelligences to neural ones—and how communing with them might be preferable to running in terror. On earth itself, better futures may involve both new fungal technologies and new fungal perspectives. We can see that the strangeness of those dusty glass mushrooms breaks down not only simple Victorian biological classifications, but assumptions about what problems can be solved and how. Amid the daunting challenges of the Polycrisis, a force that circumvents human limitations is deeply appealing both in the lab and on the page.
This is not to say that we no longer have room for the monstrous fungal. Our relationship with fungi includes both medicinal supplements and insectile sympathy, mildew and morels, the Wood Wide Web and chytridiomycosis. But by recognizing and exploring that full spectrum, we can find stories—and possibilities—that were previously closed to us. 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.
[i] J. L. Borges, The analytical language of John Wilkins, Alamut Bastion of Peace and Information, n.d.. Translated Translated by L. G. Vázquez from 'El idioma analítico de John Wilkins,' La Nación, 1942.
[ii] A. Shotwell, Against Purity: Living Ethically in Compromised Times, University of Minnestoa Press, 2016.
[iii] See, for example, J. W. Kirchner, The Gaia Hypothesis: Fact, theory, and wishful thinking, Climatic Change, 52, 391–408, 2002. https://doi.org/10.1023/A:1014237331082
[iv] E. Drexler, Engines of Creation, Doubleday, 1986.
[v] C. de Bekker, L. E. Quevillon, P. B. Smith, K. R. Fleming, D. Ghosh, A. D. Patterson, & D. P. Hughes, Species-specific ant brain manipulation by a specialized fungal parasite. BMC Evolutionary Biology, 14, 166, 2014. doi: 10.1186/s12862-014-0166-3.
[vi] D. Craig, The magic of building with mushrooms, Columbia Magazine, 2022. https://magazine.columbia.edu/article/magic-building-mushrooms
[vii] Y. Dinakarkumar, G. Ramakrishnan, K. R. Gujjula, V. Vasu, P. Balamurugan, & G. Murali, Fungal bioremediation: An overview of the mechanisms, applications and future perspectives. Environmental Chemistry and Ecotoxicology, 6, 293-302, 2024. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.enceco.2024.07.002.
[viii] C. Hu, Inside the lab that’s growing mushroom computers. Popular Science, 2024. https://www.popsci.com/technology/unconventional-computing-lab-mushroom/
[ix] M. G. Roth, N. M. Westrick, & T. T. Baldwin, Fungal biotechnology: From yesterday to tomorrow, Frontiers in Fungal Biology, 4:1135263, 2023. doi: 10.3389/ffunb.2023.1135263.
[x] The realities of the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone are echoed in the science fictional trope of areas where everyday assumptions, sometimes including otherwise-predictable physical and biological laws, break down. See for example Arkady and Boris Strugatsky’s Roadside Picnic and Jeff VanderMeer’s Annihilation.
Editor: Gautam Bhatia.
Copy Editors: Copy Editing Department.