In his 1642 work De Cive, the political philosopher Thomas Hobbes established his vision of the modern civil state with the metaphor of mushrooms [1]. He imagined man as fungorum more: like a mushroom, sprouting from the earth fully grown, with no prior engagements to any other person. He was burdened with no history, bound by no debts, and beholden to no one. Hobbes’s hypothetical mushroom-man was the ultimate sovereign individual. Free of messy human entanglements, he could enter into society as perfect equals to his fellow man.
What Hobbes did not realize is that mushrooms are, in many ways, opposites to the independent figure he perceived them to be. What appeared to be a pillar standing alone was, in truth, an intricate system of entanglements with the world around it. The visible portion, the fruiting body, is only the reproductive part of the mushroom. Underneath, the vegetative portion, the mycelium, extends a mass of threadlike hyphae into the earth. The enzymatic touch of this branching network reaches into the environment, breaking down wood, flesh, or even rock. Fungi illustrate the illusory nature of a self-contained existence—the complex web of relationships sustaining them is simply hidden underneath the surface.
These relationships extend to other living organisms, and may take on a myriad of forms: carton ants build papery nests of plant matter, weaving fungal mycelium through its walls for structural support [2]. Wood-decaying fungi establish themselves in pine trees through holes bored by red-cockaded woodpeckers, eating away at the heartwood and easing the process of constructing the woodpecker’s nesting cavity [3]. Burying beetles raise their young in animal carcasses coated in an antimicrobial slime that they secrete, the biochemical properties of which are concocted by strains of yeast that live in their gut [4]. Fungi have intertwined themselves with other species in fundamental yet oddly intimate ways, connecting with other species in their endeavors to seek shelter, find sustenance, and raise their young.
Uprooting the mushroom man
Hobbes and his political descendants would find the interconnected lives of fungi troubling. Being dependent on another entity encroached on the discrete boundaries of the autonomous individual, the foundational idea underlying liberal personhood. As such, it was considered incompatible with freedom and equality, and therefore a threat to civilized society. This anxiety around dissolving or transgressing boundaries is a fear that is indeed assigned to fungus in speculative fiction and horror. In Stephen King’s Grey Matter (1973), the mutated fungal form of a former mill worker appears to be undergoing mitosis when it reveals itself to a group of terrified locals, with the narrator dreading the implications of a world swallowed by its pulsating grey flesh. In The Last of Us, a mutated strain of Cordyceps fungus infects humans, turning people into cannibalistic zombies that stalk the ruins of cities to terrorize human survivors. The vision of large-scale societal collapse recalls a Hobbesian nightmare of man unconstrained by civilization, descending into his original state of nature to be ruled only by bellum omnium contra omnes, or a perpetual war of all against all.
The plurality of fungal life, however, is at odds with the all-encompassing domination of the fungal apocalypse. Fungal associations may be any combination of parasitic, mutualistic, permanent, contingent, with one other organism or with many—far more nuanced than claiming total dominion over all other life. Even the most disturbing examples of fungal parasitism involve a great deal of sensitivity and specificity to the host’s life history and behavior, as opposed to the indiscriminate proliferation of their fictional counterparts. A world in which a single species views the world as substrate for its unending expansion is not a fungal world, but a reflection of the world as we have organized it today. It is modern human society that is organized to fulfill the constant growth of industrialized capitalism, that justifies exploitation and expropriation using racial and colonial hierarchies, that acts on its imperative to extract, consume, and (re)produce endlessly.
The visions of fungus as totalizing world-eater additionally fail to capture a crucial feature of the extractivist logic that governs the 21st-century global economy. Not every part of the world is equally consumed—extractivism refers to not only the extraction of natural resources, but the unequal modes of political and economic organization that are built on resource extraction. In extractivist systems, the flow of resources and capital centralizes power as one party accumulates them while the other party is depleted [5]. In other words, extractivism is inherently relational. Mycelial networks, which show how living organisms and their environment are connected in relation to each other, are therefore an ideal medium to explore the structures we use to organize modern society as well. In Mexican Gothic (2020), Severance (2018), and Sorrowland (2021), fungi make the systems that have shaped modern society—colonialism, global capitalism, and technoscientific progress—visible. In these works, fungal horror originates from the fear of seeing a system’s extractive logic embodied in its totality, in all the inhumane, unjust, and exploitative ways in which we have bound ourselves together. Like the mycorrhizal threads that coordinate zombie movements en masse in The Last of Us, the revelation of our interconnectedness is at once deeply alien and instantly recognizable. After all, the motion of our everyday lives is already tethered with the lives of countless others, entangled in systems too large for us to comprehend, and which compel our behavior in ways that we may not be fully conscious of. If we uprooted Hobbes’s mushroom-man, do we dare examine how exactly he is entangled with the world around him?
Mexican Gothic
In Silvia Moreno-Garcia’s Mexican Gothic, a colonial project co-opts fungal biology to enact its extractive logic. Set in 1950s Mexico, the novel’s protagonist Noemí Taboada travels to a decaying manor built on the estate of her cousin’s English in-laws, the Doyles. Located on the outskirts of a mining town, the manor sits atop an abandoned silver mine, the source of the Doyles’ now-declining fortune. Haunted by visions of fleshy walls covered in a sheen of silvery mold, Noemí discovers that the house and its inhabitants are connected by a fungal entity known as “the gloom.” Its spores and mycelia extend within the walls and under the floors of the estate—and through the bodies of all who have lived and died in it. The Doyles have symbiotically merged with the gloom, entwining their descendants and the house itself into a monstrous fungal assemblage.
Unlike the zombies of The Last of Us, the fungal presence in Mexican Gothic is not portrayed as a corrupting force. Exploitation and dehumanization are intrinsic to the Doyle colonial project. Fungi only expose, not transform, the social and material relations underlying it. Noemí’s visions are revealed to be the memories of the indigenous workers that once toiled in the silver mines, as the gloom acts as a shared memory repository for those connected by it. Together, the Doyle symbiont uses every part of the workers, systematically extracting their labor, their bodies, their memories and selfhood. Howard transforms the Doyle estate into what Martin Arboleda in Planetary Mine terms a “sacrifice zone,” built environments that commodify labor by turning “the organs of the collective laborer” into “the appendage of heavy infrastructures and systems of machinery.” Here, Mexican Gothic renders the infrastructure of the sacrifice zone in entirely biological terms [6]. Noemí’s fungal revelation allows her to see the Doyles’ colonial enterprise for what it is, expressed not in profit or commerce but in the visceral horror of using humans as substrate. Within the Doyle symbiont, fungal processes are organized and operated indistinguishably from colonial extraction.
While fungal decay and consumption is a source of horror, the novel is clear that the extractive logic of colonialism is not inherent to the fungus itself. The Doyle patriarch, Howard Doyle, reveals that he destroyed an indigenous religion in order to claim the gloom for himself. Howard sees imposing his worldview onto the fungus as the means to fully leverage its power:
“The priests had managed to transmit a few stray memories from one to the other through the mushrooms ... but they were crude and random occurrences. Doyle systematized.”
Instead of single memories, Howard is able to transmit his entire consciousness. For centuries, he has achieved a form of fungal immortality by transferring his consciousness to the gloom, and from the gloom into the body of one of his children. He has become capital personified, requiring a steady supply of living substrate to reproduce himself. The systematized process through which Howard extends his life mirrors the plantation logic discussed by Anna Lowenhaupt-Tsing in The Mushroom at the End of the World. Lowenhaupt-Tsing identifies “scalability” as a key quality of colonial capitalism through the model of Portuguese sugarcane plantations in Brazil [7]. By exterminating local wildlife and peoples, colonizers acquired open land to occupy with clonal plants and slave labor. Populating empty land with interchangeable rote labor and identical crops was replicable, a system for endless expansion. Howard’s immortality is scalability made flesh, extending his control over the estate through interchangeable descendants and disposable workers to secure his colonial legacy.
By merging with the gloom, Howard transforms from a perpetrator of colonial extraction into the system of extraction itself. He becomes a literal mushroom-man: he propagates his discrete and uncompromised self by passing from one fully grown body into the next. He attributes this ability to his efforts to centralize control of the fungus, which he alone masters. However, the system he creates is neither free nor equal, and actively demands the exploitation and subjugation of countless other lives. Howard is the grim answer to Hobbes’s conundrum of how to create an entirely self-made man: by dehumanizing the people that made his existence possible.
Severance
In Mexican Gothic, the horror of Noemí’s fungal revelation spurs her to act against it. Unwilling to be subsumed into the Doyle symbiont, she sets the manor ablaze, destroying Howard’s legacy of oppression. In contrast, the post-apocalyptic, post-fungal revelation world presented in Ling Ma’s Severance is met with no such disruption. The novel’s protagonist, Candace Chen, lives a millennial office-drone life in New York City when most of the world’s populace succumbs to Shen Fever, a fungal pandemic. Though Shen Fever causes a “fatal loss of consciousness," the infected continue to mindlessly repeat mundane routines even as their body decays. Trapped in the inexorable rhythms of work and consumption, Shen Fever exposes the forces of capital that animated society long before the pandemic arrived. While Mark Fisher compared capital to an "abstract parasite" in Capitalist Realism, the fungal pandemic in Severance makes it a tangible one. The fevered residents of the city—the shop assistant who folds and refolds the same shirt, the taxi driver that endlessly meanders through deserted streets—literally embody Fisher’s Gothic description of life under capitalism: “... the living flesh it converts into dead labor is ours, and the zombies it makes are us. [8]”
Severance is a fungal apocalypse, and an apocalypse in the original sense of the word—a pulling back of the veil, a moment of revelation. What Shen Fever reveals is invoked in the “sweatshop sublime," a term defined by Bruce Robbins in three realizations, through the experience of contemplating an electric kettle [9]:
“... first, that one is the beneficiary of an unimaginably vast and complex social whole and, second ..., that this means benefiting from the daily labor of the electricity- and kettle-producing workers, much of it unpleasant and under-remunerated ...
[This] is not entirely outside everyday experience. What seems special ... is a third realization: that this moment of consciousness will not be converted into action.”
Candace has a brush with the sweatshop sublime before the pandemic begins in her job coordinating the production of bibles. She must inform a customer that their “Gemstone Bible" project had to be scrapped due to adverse health effects suffered by Chinese factory workers from inhaling gemstone dust. The customer is primarily annoyed about being inconvenienced, and she struggles with their indifference towards the workers:
“I understand, I conceded, then almost couldn’t help myself. But the workers are dying, I repeated, as if I knew.”
Candace glimpses into the vast extractive network of global capitalism, but the discomforting experience eventually fades into the tedium of her working life. Drifting between memory and present day, Candace’s narration of Severance is fragmented and nonlinear, taking on a dissociative quality. Moments of consciousness occur, but fail to take root.
Fungi, however, prove more adept at thinking in systems. Some mycelial networks span tens of meters, sourcing and transporting nutrients and minerals across the forest floor. For a fungus, the labyrinthine mechanisms through which goods are produced, extracted, and consumed might appear intuitive. The origin of the strain of fungal spores that cause Shen Fever is thought to be a noxious mixture of industrial chemicals in one of the countless factories within Shenzhen’s Special Economic Zones. Its dispersal is facilitated by the global supply chain, spreading along international trade routes. The fungus is able to grasp the sweatshop sublime without issue: we are all implicated in global capitalism, and our existences are interconnected by it. The unsafe working conditions in a Chinese factory do, in fact, impact the American customer who was indifferent towards them. Severance does not replace the eldritch entanglement of the sweatshop sublime with a sentimental appeal to shared humanity, but portrays it as material fact with material consequences.
Even after societal collapse, Severance questions if the roots of capitalist logic live on. The leader of the survivors, an IT technician named Bob, insists on constructing a settlement within an abandoned mall in Illinois. Upon their arrival, he establishes a hierarchy amongst the rest of survivors, unilaterally dictating divisions of labor and resources. Within the mall’s shiny glass walls, he recreates capitalist relations in miniature, as if extending its hyphal threads into fresh substrate.
Bob’s actions recall the hosts of parasitic fungi such as Ophiocordyceps. Infected ants leave their underground nests and climb to the highest points of nearby plants [10]. When the Ophiocordyceps fruiting body erupts from their head, it rains spores onto unsuspecting ants below. Just as Ophiocordyceps directs its host, Bob similarly follows an ill-defined drive. When Bob finally succumbs to Shen Fever, Candace wonders if he was infected even before he began exhibiting symptoms. Could the fungal presence of capitalism have compelled him to seek out conditions favorable to its regrowth? Ultimately, Bob’s sense of self and interests are so intertwined with a capitalist worldview that the question of whether fungal desires motivated his actions is immaterial. Unlike the unfortunate ants, it seems unlikely that infection altered his true nature.
Sorrowland
Under the extractive systems we live within today, the outlook for human connection might seem pessimistic. The fungal revelations of Severance and Mexican Gothic present the primary form of human collective organization as the eldritch webs of capitalism and colonialism. Escaping these systems is either total or fraught: Noemí wholly rejects the notion that she should serve as substrate, burning the manor and the gloom along with it. Candace survives the fungal apocalypse, but whether she ever will live outside of capitalism is more ambiguous. What does that mean for those of us who, as frequently invoked on the internet, “live in a society"? Short of burning it all down, is there no way to form connections not dictated by extractive frameworks?
In Sorrowland (2018), Rivers Solomon explores the multiplicity and complexity of human connections forged through shared histories of exploitation and trauma. The novel’s protagonist, Vern, is a young Black and queer woman escaping a religious cult in the American South. Her body undergoes strange transformations, acquiring superhuman strength and senses. She experiences “hauntings," manifestations of the dead that can physically interact with Vern. Similarly to Mexican Gothic and Severance, Sorrowland does not present interconnectedness as a remedy for past wrongs or as a romanticized future for the alienated present. Despite being long gone, the ghosts of Vern’s hauntings can harm her even in the present. For those whose histories are inextricable from white supremacy and colonialism, being entangled with the past can manifest as intergenerational trauma.
Vern’s hauntings are fungal in nature: the cult she escaped is in actuality a government testing ground for human experimentation. She, like other members of the cult, were infected with a fungal organism without their consent or knowledge. Through the mycelial threads that connect Vern to the past, Sorrowland surfaces the ugly history of the technoscientific exploitation of the Black body. Her experience recalls the Tuskegee syphilis study, the gynecological experiments J. Marion Sims conducted on enslaved women without anesthesia, the state-sponsored eugenic sterilization of Black and indigenous peoples—among the many ways in which Black bodies have been treated as substrate for American technoscientific interests. Vern discovers that the intended effect of her transformation was to turn her into a biological weapon, to make her an instrument of the state violence that she herself has suffered.
Sorrowland approaches fungal connectivity from a markedly distinct position when compared to Mexican Gothic and Severance. Candace is part of a capitalist ecosystem, in which her employer profits from her labor while her lifestyle depends on exploited labor in turn. Noemí refuses the subjugation of colonialist violence, maintaining her autonomy. But Vern’s body and selfhood are treated as biopolitically disposable from the beginning. Through Vern, Sorrowland explores the perspective of the exploited class, the supposedly inert substrate that feeds the mushroom-men that live above.
As an experiment, Vern is meant to be an iteration of a replicable process, one of many mass weapons produced at scale. Her oppressors, however, overlook the responsiveness of fungal transformations. Notably, fungi are known to form resilient partnerships with other organisms, allowing them to survive circumstances hostile to most other life. They entwine themselves with algae to form lichen, combining their metabolic abilities to neutralize pollutants or detoxify heavy metals [11]. In volatile geothermal soil, they embed themselves in the tissues of grasses, allowing them to tolerate temperatures that would shrivel other plants [12]. Vern’s fungus similarly adapts with her, responding to her trauma, history, and will to live. In The Mushroom at the End of the World, matsutake mushrooms are presented as a counterpoint to extractive plantation logic. Unlike the plantation, matsutakes are non-scalable [5]. They cannot be farmed and systematically replicated as their existence is contingent on interactions with their environment. It is this sensitivity to other life through which Vern’s fungal powers become liberatory, allowing her to flee the cult, resist the police and the state, and ultimately, return to the compound to resurrect the cult’s murdered victims. By entering into a new biological configuration of life with Vern, both defy their oppressor’s extractive logic.
Despite acquiring fungal powers, Vern’s transformation does not turn her into the radically independent figure that Hobbes imagined. While she reclaims her body and autonomy from the state, Vern is not alone at the end of the novel. Sorrowland closes on an image of togetherness, with Vern, her children, and her partner Gogo listening to the woods come alive at night:
“... they could hear the night calls of one thousand living things, screaming their existence, assuring the world of their survival. Vern screamed back."
Sorrowland reaffirms Vern’s vital connection to the world and her relationships of mutual care. Freedom is found not in rejecting all entanglements, but in finding a way to be differently entangled with others. She embraces the fact that her life is connected to the lives around her, committing to a vision of the future where those connections do not have to be oppressive or harmful. The novel articulates this future as emerging “from below," quoting Ursula K. LeGuin’s "Left-Handed" 1983 commencement address [13]:
“I hope you live without the need to dominate, and without the need to be dominated. I hope you are never victims, but I hope you have no power over other people. And when you fail, and are defeated, and in pain, and in the dark, then I hope you will remember that darkness is your country, where you live, where no wars are fought and no wars are won, but where the future is."
Solomon locates the hope for living with each other without the hierarchies and cruelty that extractive systems demand in the rich, resilient imagination of the marginalized and oppressed. In Mexican Gothic, Howard Doyle concentrates the resources obtained by his fungal network, extracting from the laborers and the mines below to sustain his own wealth and immortality. Sorrowland shows that this is not the only way to be “like a mushroom." When resurrecting the murdered victims of the cult, Vern extends her mycelia down into the earth and reaches out to the souls of the dead, pulling them back into the land of the living. She undoes the violence inflicted on them by the state, and gives them the chance to live outside of the cult’s fear and control. Vern uses her fungal powers to transform bonds of shared trauma into connections based on compassion and justice, and that, as the novel suggests, is where the future could lie.
Hobbes’s metaphor was inadvertently accurate: people do come into the world fungorum more. Human and fungal lives alike are entangled with the world. They exist in relation to others, both human or nonhuman, and to the environments that they interact with. But interconnection is a fact of existence, not a value in and of itself. Fungi have recently become a popular utopian allegory for alternative futures, their interconnectedness presented as an antidote to the alienation of modern society [14]. The fungi of Mexican Gothic, Severance, and Sorrowland push back on these romanticized and universalized notions by grounding them in historical and material realities. We are already interconnected within modern sociopolitical and economic systems, albeit in oppressive and violent ways that, too often, remain unexamined.
While Hobbes used an individual mushroom-man to imagine a free and equal society, these works offer a mycelial perspective into the extractive logic that has shaped modern society: a systemic view of dehumanization, commodification, and dispossession. Whether this is an inescapable arrangement is more a human question than a fungal one. The fungi in all three novels do not presume to instruct us on how we should live. They expose the extraordinary violence of extractive infrastructure through the mundane processes of growth, feeding, and reproduction, as if asking: We can live under the conditions of this system. Can you?
Bibliography
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Editor: Gautam Bhatia.
Copy Editors: Copy Editing Department.