Welcome to Seeds of Story, where I explore the non-fiction that inspires—or should inspire—speculative fiction. Every couple weeks, we’ll dive into a book, article, or other source of ideas that are sparking current stories, or that have untapped potential to do so. Each article will include an overview of the source(s), a review of its readability and plausibility, and highlights of the best two or three “seeds” found there.
This week, I cover Merlin Sheldrake’s Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change Our Minds and Shape Our Futures. This book is why everyone keeps writing about mycelial networks—or at least it’s why I keep writing about mycelial networks. It makes a fascinating case for the role that this sometimes-neglected kingdom plays in earthly life, and will make you either eager or nervous for a big meal of sauteed morels.
What It’s About
About twenty years ago, I went to the Field Museum in Chicago for the first time. They had just opened their new Evolving Planet exhibit, an absolutely stellar walkthrough (literally) of the history and interconnections of life on earth. It was, and remains, one of my favorite museum exhibits anywhere. Down the hall, however, I found an old display of intricately worked glass flora, unchanged since at least the ’70s. One case contained a variety of glass mushrooms. A hand-typed, fading index card noted that “some scientists believe fungi may constitute their own, separate kingdom from plants.”
Sheldrake’s book demonstrates just how far mycology—never mind cladistics—has come in the intervening decades. Fungi are not only a separate kingdom from plants, but are in fact more closely related to animals—for values of “closely related” that still involve being a separate kingdom.
But “separate” is an inapt word. Fungi lead biologists to question the whole concept of separation: their metabolisms are deeply, symbiotically entwined with surrounding organisms. And vice versa. While our understanding is still in its infancy, plants communicate with each other through a “wood wide web” of mycelial network. Fungi give, take, or pass nutrients, sometimes all three at different times or with different organisms. They produce chemicals to entice or repulse specific plants and animals. They may have thousands of cross-compatible sexes, putting many species beyond our current domestication and cultivation technology.
As mushrooms connect to everything around them, so there are a thousand routes in to learning about them. Sheldrake opens with truffles, one of the most expensive substances on earth due to their complex taste and difficult harvest. He manages to gets himself brought along on a hunt—impressive in a field where desperate hunters engage regularly in dognapping and occasionally in murder. The process provides a window into human and fungal olfactory abilities, and the methods by which fungi produce volatile chemicals. The truffle’s reproductive cycle leads to discussion of the basic foundations of mycelial networks, as well as the complexities of fungal symbiosis with surrounding ecosystems. There’s a sideline into how these networks adapt to catch and consume nematodes when other nutrients are scarce. There’s speculation about the fuzzy boundaries of individual organism-ness, and Robin Wall Kimmerer’s Potawatomi framework of organisms as verbs rather than nouns.
Other chapters are equally wide-ranging around central species, researchers, or concepts: lichen, drug trips, plants that don’t photosynthesize, soil decomposition, yeast domestication… libraries are full of microhistories attempting to connect the entire world to cod or paper or traffic jams; Sheldrake makes an excellent case for fungi as the center of a macrohistory.
Buy the Book
Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change Our Minds and Shape Our Futures
* * *
As I read Entangled Life, I found myself doubting that all this could be entirely accurate. Some of the claims seemed deeply unlikely. However, when I searched for expert critiques—the sort of thing that completely breaks, say, Guns, Germs, and Steel—I found only praise for the book and for Sheldrake’s research. His approach, rich with fungal drug trips, imagined mushroom perspectives, and wild hypothesis generation… apparently, that’s just what mycologists are like.
Even for a teetotaler like me, whose entire drug-taking experience involves really good tea and chocolate, mushrooms turn out to be mind-expanding. Mycelial networks in particular, and their similarities to neuronal networks, fascinate me. I remember where neuroscience was when I first saw brain diagrams in my freshman cognitive science class, and wonder about the fungal equivalent of discovering that white matter transmits signals as well as gray. It’s probably not much like human—or cephalopod—thought, but it’s probably not much like a barren asteroid either.
Mushrooms are tied up in human thought: as Sheldrake says, the mind-altering powers of everything from alcohol-producing yeast to psilocybin have power as “both makers and breakers of human social orders.” Timothy Leary, in the Sixties, claimed that fungal drug trips involved communication, either directly from the mushrooms or from the whole universe filtered through their lenses. It’s both hard to believe, and a hard piece of poetry to resist. Sheldrake notes that psilocybin can treat otherwise resistant depression, and help people come to terms with terminal illness—admittedly more wisdom than you’d expect from a bottle of Bud Lite.
Philosophically, mycology is “beset with political baggage.” This doesn’t mean everyone at conferences is yelling about American elections, but rather that the choice of central organizing metaphor is inextricable from human social issues. Much as psychology is shaped by whether you imagine memory as a computer or a wax tablet, fungal relationships look different if you imagine them as parasitic freeloaders, socialists, or “rational economic individuals trading on the floor of an ecological stock exchange.” And of course, none of these metaphors are entirely well-suited for such fluid, adaptable, symbiotic organisms.
The Best Seeds for Speculative Stories
Those Mycelial Networks. Who can resist the idea of an interspecies communication and cognition network woven through the soil? It might be a source of collectivist mind control, like the cordyceps that insinuate themselves through weird fiction, or a way to roll back the alienation between many modern human cultures and nature. It might be an excellent model for biomimetic designs, and the basis for an Internet of Things that does more than let bitcoin miners hack your fridge. I have a story coming out in December playing with the “antifungals” who refuse to participate in such a network, and it’s not not Sheldrake’s fault. The same goes for the Mycelial Age historians on my Patreon who’ve been reassuring everyone that This Too Shall Pass and Be Very Confusing To Future Researchers.
There are so many different possible directions, from humans learning how to leverage existing fungal capabilities, to genetically engineering new ones, to fungi learning how to… leverage… existing human capabilities. And then what kind of stories will they tell?
Decomposition and Its Discontents. Trees first appeared 360 million years ago, in the Carboniferous. Lignin-eating mushrooms first appeared 60 million years later. That gap is responsible for most of Earth’s coal, and thus for kicking off industrial civilization and all of our resulting capabilities and existential problems. Oil (and thus plastics) come through anoxic and largely bacterial decomposition, but mushrooms (or lack thereof) still play a key role in which fuels are available, and when. A world with different types of decomposition, at different times, might follow very different routes to advanced technology. Some of those routes might be safer than the one we’ve followed—or, potentially, even more dangerous.
This kind of slow-off-the-bat evolution is unusual for mushrooms, which have already developed the ability to eat plastic, radiation, and toxic waste—sometimes with human encouragement and sometimes spontaneously. Mycoremediation is a core technology for just about any imaginable solarpunk future. In advanced forms, it has the potential to create whole new life cycles for whole new kinds of manufacturing, transforming both “reuse” and “recycle.”
Holobionts and Symborgs. As an alternative to the individual organism view of the world, Sheldrake shares the technical term “holobiont,” referring to “an assemblage of different organisms that behaves as a unit.” Think lichens or Portuguese man o’ wars. He goes beyond this to analogize from cyborgs (fusions of living organisms and technology) to symborgs (fusions between symbiotic living organisms). This is not so much a possibility as an inevitability, given what we are learning about internal microbiomes and such. But there is a lot of space for engineering our own symborg natures, both for medical purposes and enhancement. If you’re going on a long trip, wouldn’t you like to be able to break down plastic for nutrients? …Maybe “like” is too strong a word. But there are definitely times when I would appreciate a fungal intermediary telling my digestive enzymes to behave.
New Growth: What Else to Read
Robin Wall Kimmerer’s books come up again this week, enough of a recurring theme that I may need to put Braiding Sweetgrass next in the column queue. Ed Yong’s books, particularly I Contain Multitudes, offer takes on an interconnected ecology from different directions. I’ve also heard good things about Zoe Schlanger’s The Light Eaters for the plants’ side of the story.
The connective and transformative powers of fungi provide compost for poetry. Amelia Gorman’s Field Guide to Invasive Species of Minnesota, Jarod K. Anderson/CryptoNaturalist’s microblogged mini-poems, and Sienna Tristen’s Hortus Animarum: A New Herbal for the Queer Heart seem particularly resonant with Sheldrake’s work.
Ursula Vernon and Silvia Moreno-Garcia are two of many authors working fungal intelligence through the crannies of weird and gothic horror. Try What Feasts at Night and Mexican Gothic as respective starting points.
Not a book, but my prize for most delightfully campy use of mycelial networks goes to Star Trek: Discovery—because if mushrooms can do all the things Sheldrake suggests, why not faster-than-light travel as well?
Share your mushroom stories, fears, and/or recipes—if sauteed morels still sound appealing rather than alarming—in the comments!
My first mycophilic fiction would be Brian Aldiss’s Hothouse (aka The Long Afternoon of Earth), which had the human protagonist saddled with a parasitic, sentient morel. It did not predispose me toward our fungal friends. But I do enjoy morels sauted in butter, now and again.
You gotta get them before they get you!
I read this recently, and while I’m not wild about Sheldrake’s hallucinogenic evangelism, the book was mind expanding in ways a trip could not be.
Loved it so much I bought the illustrated edition.
I have definitely been eyeing that!