“Latest Nightmare Fungus Spreads to Hospitals in 38 States.”
“Apocalypse-Primed Fungus on the Rise Globally.”
“The Battle Against the Fungal Apocalypse Is Just Beginning.”
Only one of the above news article titles is fictional. Fungi have been on Earth for roughly 1.5 billion years, adapting to changing environments and flourishing in new and unique environmental niches. Fungi have survived some of the hottest and wettest periods in Earth’s history. Fungi thrive when it is warm and moist—they are all the way on board for climate change, with or without a coincident apocalypse.
Anthropogenic climate change is the defining public health crisis of the twenty-first century. Driven by greenhouse gas emissions from fossil fuel use, climate change is having dramatic impacts on not just its perpetrators (i.e., humans), but all types of life on Earth, including fungi. The ability of fungi to thrive under warmer, wetter conditions is an inconvenient fact of life (and death) for many other species. Fungal infections continue to ravage the populations of organisms as varied as plants, bats, amphibians, and humans. Dutch elm disease (Ophiostoma), chestnut blight (Cryphonectria parasitica), and oak wilt (Bretziella fagacearum) are all caused by fungi, and have devastated North American tree populations. White-nose syndrome (Pseudogymnoascus destructans) has reduced the populations of some bat species by over 90 percent. Chytridiomycosis (Batrachochytrium) has caused some amphibian species to go extinct. Fungi are here to stay; other species be damned.
Speculative literature has made its own notes on fungi along the way. An early example is Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Fall of the House of Usher,” wherein fungi add a sinister element to the house’s “sentient” appearance (fungi play a greater role in T. Kingfisher’s “Usher” adaptation, What Moves the Dead). But fungi are not just creepy house window dressing—they can be all consuming, both in fiction and in real life.
In real life, climate change can interact with fungi in many domains: evolutionary, range expansion, zoonotic interactions, fungal virulence, and antifungal resistance, among others. Of these domains, range expansion and zoonotic interactions seem to be the most commonly used in speculative fiction (more on that below).
Heat and Fungi
Heat (in this case, we are concerned with the heat from global warming) accelerates many things at the microbial level, including the emergence of hypervirulence (i.e., very damaging/deadly infections for the host) and antifungal resistance. These processes also occur in bacteria at the higher temperatures that come with climate change. Antibiotic resistance is a more common subject in speculative fiction than antifungal resistance. In 2015, several stories were commissioned as part of a series titled Futures: Stories of the Post-Antibiotic apocalypse. These short stories included characters dealing with untreatable antibiotic resistant urinary tract infections that ruin a marriage (“Ayanda” by A.S. Fields), untreatable antibiotic resistant medical device infections (“Sting” by Madeline Ashby), untreatable skin and soft tissue infections that kill a noble (Causes by Lydia Nicholas), class and biological warfare intertwined with antibiotic resistant infections (“Transmission” by Tim Maughan), and children afraid of playing for fear of a minor scrape leading to their untimely deaths (“They Want to Live Too” by Jenni Hill).
Extreme Weather Events and Fungi
But climate change is not strictly increased global temperatures. Climate change comes with an increased number of extreme weather events, the aftermaths of which can be favorable to the dissemination of pathogens. Take for example floods—increasing severity and frequency of floods can allow for overgrowth of fungi and dissemination of fungal pathogens through water and moisture left behind, even after the floodwaters have dissipated. Extreme weather events can displace persons, moving them to new environments with exposure to fungi (and other microorganisms) to which they would not otherwise have been exposed. When people (and other animals) move, or are forced to move to new areas, the endemicity of pathogens may be different after migration (a form of range expansion/zoonotic transmission). Changes in pathogen endemicity for migrants can mean a completely immune-naïve host within and among which the pathogen can spread.
Extreme weather events can damage crops, leading to food insecurity. Malnutrition leads to reduced immune function, and could leave humans more susceptible to fungal infections (and other types of infections—tuberculosis thrives in the malnourished). In addition, damaged crops lead to increased need for fungicides, leading to more antifungal resistance, leading to harder to treat fungal infections—a deadly feedback loop. Though not specifically called out as fungal, the blight that forces Matthew McConaughey to leave Earth in the movie Interstellar was likely a fungus, given the strong link between fungi and crop loss on our Earth.
Extreme weather events and subsequent migration can also increase overlap between humans and animals, with potential for zoonotic transmissions, i.e., an animal-endemic pathogen makes the leap into humans because of increased exposure. Every year, humans and pigs exchange influenza viruses where they cross paths, and there is no reason that this cannot happen for other types of pathogens. Though not fungal in origin, the virus featured in the 2011 movie Contagion migrates to humans through bats and pigs. Candida auris, a fungi known for causing infection in humans, may also have made leaps through other animals to reach humanity.
Candida auris; Photo: Shawn Lockhart
The “Nightmare Fungus”
Candida auris has been making the news rounds lately (including one of the headlines at the top of this article). Some scientists hypothesize that climate change has led to its rapid emergence and global spread. The theory goes that as the global temperature has increased, Candida auris has become progressively thermotolerant (tolerant to heat). Ordinarily, normal human body temperature is too hot for Candida auris to survive and cause any trouble. Now that Candida auris has become tolerant of higher temperatures, human body heat is no longer a sufficient deterrent to it colonizing and infecting us.
Early Fungi in Speculative Fiction
With all this fungal doom and gloom, it’s no wonder that fungi feature prominently in horror and horror-adjacent speculative fiction. An early example of fungi in speculative horror fiction is William Hope Hodgson’s (of The House on the Borderland fame) “The Voice in the Night,” a short story about a fungal ghost ship encountered by a traveler who is then overtaken by the fungus themselves. “The Voice in the Night” demonstrates the problem of immune-naïve hosts/range expansion—the discoverer of the fungal ghost ship had never been exposed to the fungi before and became infected with it upon first contact.
Consumptive Fungi
William Hope Hodgson also inspired another writer of the fungoid—Jeff VanderMeer, who wrote the fungus-heavy Ambergris trilogy, and short story “Corpse Mouth and Spore Nose.” VanderMeer’s mentioned works and other speculative fungal fiction centers around the idea of consumption. Fungi taking over humans, the world, typically not in ways that work out well for humanity. This consumption is apt—the fictional fungi are doing what real-life fungi do: grow on things and consume them. Consumption is an excellent overarching metaphor for climate change, which, unchecked/unmitigated, will consume us all. Humans, at least—the fungi will be cozily warm, consuming us (if we can’t stop burning fossil fuels). VanderMeer’s short story comes from the collection Fungi edited by Orrin Grey and Silvia Moreno-Garcia. Many of the stories in the collection also feature consumptive fungi, including Paul Tremblay’s “Our Stories Will Live Forever,” A. C. Wise’s “Where Dead Men Go to Dream,” and Laird Barron’s “Gamma.”
Jenny Hval’s Paradise Rot and Rivers Solomon’s Sorrowland take on different aspects of consumption, related to the interconnectedness that comes with the mycelial networks of fungi. Mycelia are the underground root-like filaments of fungi that connect them, allowing them to absorb nutrients and communicate. In Paradise Rot, mushrooms grow between the walls of the old brewery that Johanna lives in with her roommate, with whom she becomes increasingly, mycelial-ly intertwined. In the end, their (maybe) metaphorical mycelia disconnected, Johanna feels like part of her is permanently missing (consumed perhaps by her estranged roommate). In Sorrowland, the main character, Vern Riley, discovers she is part of a government psyop trying to infect humans with fungi in an attempt to make supersoldiers. The underground mycorrhizal network (i.e., a plant/fungal symbiotic web) of the story remembers the dead (those who were consumed), causing hauntings for Vern. Once Vern learns to harness her fungal/mycorrhizal powers, she kills the government agents (consumption! of their lives) responsible for the experiments, and then brings her family back to life. After fungus, there is life.
Both the video game The Last of Us and M. R. Carey’s The Girl with All the Gifts focus on the neurotropism (i.e., goes to/grows on neural tissue) of certain fungi, gifting us with fungal zombie horrors. And what’s a zombie good for if not consumption? In The Last of Us, climate change as a cause of the emergence of the zombifying Cordyceps fungus (based on the real life Ophiocordyceps, which makes dead ants walk) is specifically posited as a prerequisite condition of the fungal zombie apocalypse.
The Ophiocordyceps fungus; Photo: David P. Hughes
Fungi for Good?
Though real-life fungi are seemingly insatiable, speculative fungi are not. It’s not all doom and gloom. Star Trek, famous for its optimism, has fungal optimism too—fungus as fuel. In Star Trek: Discovery, the mycelial (see Sorrowland and Paradise Rot, above) network allows the spore drive to travel the universe. In a more near-future setting, Lisa M. Bradley’s The Pearl in the Oyster and the Oyster Under Glass gives us mycoremediation—fungi that clean up all of humanity’s terrible oil, heavy metal, and other environmental toxin spills.
Final Thoughts
This is by no means an exhaustive list of fungi in speculative fiction. Scientists estimate more than two million fungi species have yet to be characterized/discovered. 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.