We’re all familiar with plants and animals, but there’s an entire third category that doesn’t get as much attention: the humble fungi. From tasty mushrooms to creepy parasites that hijack insects, this unique kingdom of life always does its own thing, including in fiction! From colorful zombies to galactic stardrives, we’re talking about the many ways storytellers have used fungi, and hopefully a few ways they haven’t thought of yet.
Show Notes
Generously transcribed by Arturo. Volunteer to transcribe a podcast.
Intro: You are listening to the Mythcreants Podcast with your hosts: Oren Ashkenazi, Chris Winkle, and Bunny.
Bunny: Hello and welcome to another episode of the Mythcreants Podcast. I am Bunny. And with me today is:
Bunny: And maybe I should call this the Mycocreants podcast, the Mushroomcreants podcast, because today we are talking about the fungus among us.
Oren: Ah, I could have sworn I got rid of that with that cream. I got. Damnit.
Bunny: Now it just keeps coming back. It’s everywhere. It’s in the floor, baby. It’s in the sky. It’s in the soil of a spacecraft.
Oren: It’s a good thing I’m renting, not buying. This is someone else’s problem. Get the heck outta here.
Bunny: We are talking about fungi today, and allow me to start with my pet peeve, which is that there’s only two types of fungi in Minecraft, which is personally offensive.
Chris: So is there either the weird, creepy fungus or the very cutesy fungus?
Bunny: Minecraft is just blocky fungus. There are mushrooms, which are the cute kind of fungus, and they’re also cows, but there’s the red-spotted fungus and there’s brown fungus, and that is quite boring, Minecraft. Do better.
Oren: Minecraft discourse! It’s as if 2010 was alive and before my very eyes.
Bunny: I know! Comment and subscribe. So I just wanna start this episode by calling out Entangled Life by Merlin Sheldrake, which more or less inspired this. As you probably can guess after the episode about senses, I am on a bit of a nonfiction reading kick currently. So we are talking about fungus and fiction, what it does and what it could do, and the answer is lots of things.
Oren: It makes Mario big.
Bunny: That’s true. Doesn’t it also turn him into an elephant now?
Oren: Is that a mushroom? I know that’s a power he has, but I don’t know anything about the latest Mario game.
Bunny: I don’t either, but I hope it’s a mushroom.
Oren: He gets fire powers from a plant, which is not a mushroom. Those are different, fungus and plants, very different.
Oren: I mean, I looked this up ahead of time. Animals and fungi have more in common than either of them do with plants.
Bunny: This is a whole thing with their roots in the mycelium, the hyphae, and how plants, like, wouldn’t really have roots without it. I don’t know. It’s a whole complicated thing, but yes, they are technically different.
Chris: There is a whole like mutualistic symbiosis between roots and like mycelium that they go together.
Oren: They team up a lot, right? So do badgers and coyotes. That doesn’t mean that a coyote is more similar to a badger than it is to a wolf.
Bunny: We need to make more of these comparisons. Is badger more similar to a fungus or is it more similar to a vacuum cleaner?
Chris: We need more stories with slime molds. Will sometimes move around like an animal and sometimes stick around like a plant.
Bunny: Bring forth the slime mold. Slime mold solving puzzles, you guys, it’s so cool.
Oren: I definitely feel like fungi stories have gotten creepier in the last, I don’t know, decade or so. And unfortunately, unlike the zombie episode, I didn’t have time to do historical research on this, so I don’t know if that’s true. It’s just what it feels like.
Chris: I suppose if we read all the books with fay in it, we might come upon some cutesy mushrooms, because I think that’s where a lot of the cutesy mushrooms come from, is like fairy stuff, right? Like the fairy rings. They pop outta nowhere overnight and suddenly there’s a ring of mushrooms, so it must be magic. Or like little mushroom houses. I don’t think the romantasy inspired by Moss actually has little cutesy mushroom houses, I’m guessing.
Bunny: Better should. Love interest lives in a little mushroom house now.
Oren: As far as internet memes go, the circle of mushrooms is also creepy now. People share one of those and it’s like, “Oh no, run away! It’s the fairies! Aaah!”
Chris: Yeah. I’m sure there’s some folklore about disappearing in those or something, but mostly I think they’re cute.
Oren: Definitely feels like the more that you learn about how fungus actually works, the easier it is to make them creepy. When you see a mushroom, most of the actual organism is underground and the mushroom is just the fruiting body, and there’s no way “fruiting body” doesn’t sound creepy as heck. It’s like, “That is just a creepy-sounding term. Who came up with this term?”
Bunny: Then you realize that it’s like the mushroom’s genitals, and it’s sending out little invisible things that go and, like, seed the environment.
Chris: By the same approach, we could say that, of course, that flowers are plant genitals.
Oren: Uh, the internet memes love that one, too. Don’t get me wrong
Chris: Yeah they do I just want some context here when we say the mushrooms are genitals.
Bunny: I feel like people are less spooked by flowers than they are by fungus.
Oren: They are, but I think the reason of that is that we interact more with flowers. We have them built into our daily lives, whereas with fungus, we eat mushrooms, but that’s about it. We try not to interact with fungus more than we have to.
Bunny: And they are tasty.
Chris: And of course there’s always gonna be some drug stories.
Oren: That is another way that spec fic writers can use fungus, is to make the magic mushroom literally magic. I’ve done that a few times in various stories or roleplaying games that I’ve run, where consuming a certain variety of special mushroom will give you some kind of magical ability, but it will also make you very high. So have a fun time with that.
Chris: Best of both worlds. Maybe this is just because we tend to reduce mushrooms down, treat them like they’re the same thing. Imagine if we thought all plants were like the same plant, inherently. Then it would be like, “Oh, some of them are poisonous and some of them will get you high, and some of them you can eat,” because they’re like different plants. But, like, when we think about mushrooms, right? there’s something intriguing about the fact (and sometimes it’s actually very hard to tell apart), if you go mushroom foraging, is something you really have to watch out for. The delicious mushrooms and the poisonous mushrooms can look nearly identical. But for storytellers, I think there’s something fun about that. This mushroom could be TC or it could be poison, or it could be drugs.
Bunny: Right. And they’re like, they’re rare. They’ve got cool names like “destroying angel,” and they look unlike anything else. We have one book, that does the drug thing quite a lot, I know I’ve talked about on this podcast before, is The Velocity of Revolution, which is definitely inspired by the psychedelic mushrooms. Psilocybin is the mind-altering drug that is found in magic mushrooms. But in The Velocity of Revolution, basically people take this particular strain of mushroom and when people are on the same strain, they, like, share physical experiences and emotions and like low-level telepathy, and then it got out of hand in the end where they were like literally stopping time and then making all the foreigners sick because they didn’t live with the mushroom or something.
Oren: That’s a very flexible mushroom.
Bunny: It does interesting things with the internal consistency of the mushroom, like I can buy that there are different strains that do different things to, like, your mind and physical state. As long as they have this family resemblance about them, then there’s an internal consistency, but then it just got out of hand. And Chris likes to make fun of it because the mushrooms get stronger when you go faster.
Oren: That part’s a little out of theme. You’re using the same strain of mushrooms, so you share experiences. Okay, that tracks, but introducing velocity into it, obviously that’s in the title, but mushrooms have nothing inherently to do with going fast. That’s not a theming connection that is at all obvious.
Bunny: Gets dieselpunk and they have motorcycles. And motorcycles go fast, and so does the fungus.
Oren: It’s a fun-gus, not a boring-gus, so it’s gonna go fast, okay?
Bunny: Yeah. Chris, come on. It’s the rules of dad jokes.
Oren: My apparently hottest take about fungus is that I actually liked the spore drive from Discovery. I thought it was neat. I wish that they had built up to it a little more rather than just, like, having it already working when the story started, because I don’t think that the idea of a galactic mycelial network is wrong in Star Trek. I think it could actually fit fine. I just thought it needed a little buildup ’cause it’s a really big thing to just introduce and have, like, already known in the show.
Bunny: Entangled Life actually interviewed the mycologist. The character in the show who has the drive, I think, has the same name as him. An actual consultant that they brought on, this real mycologist, which is cool.
Oren: I thought that was a neat idea and I like the idea of them traveling along it. I think that’s cool. It does highlight the completely unforced error of making Discovery a prequel for no reason ’cause it just creates weird continuity issues that didn’t need to be there. But as an engine, I thought that was neat. Star Trek has a lot of quasi-magical technology. Let’s maybe introduce something a little different this time instead of just the same five tech that we’ve seen every time before.
Chris: Yeah, and I think the network effects are one of the neatest things about using fungus, and that also brought something to Last of Us. It also toned down the zombies ’cause now zombies don’t have much novelty anymore, but it also gave them fungus to make them unique. And one of the neatest part of that was, again, we have this unseen underground zombie network that all the zombies are attached to, which we can use then to explain like, “Oops, you stepped on the fungus. Now the zombies know you’re here,” which was great for the story.
Bunny: Right, it’s a much more interesting mechanic. Not a lot of stories, sadly, seem to use mushrooms, and you can play around with the properties of mushrooms in interesting ways, like the mycelium, like the wood-wide webs are this living computer that can stretch for miles and miles. I’m pretty sure that the largest organism in the world is a fungus that goes for miles and miles.
Oren: They get really big, maybe not the largest, but they can get very large.
Chris: The Last of Us is based on zombie ant fungus, right?
Bunny: Oh, yes. Let me tell you about Cordyceps. Ophiocordyceps. I hope I’m saying that. So there’s actually quite a few types of this particular type of fungus, but manipulative fungal parasitism, which is what happens when an ant gets infected by this fungus, has evolved multiple times in unrelated lineages across fungi, and then also in things like viruses.
Chris: So there’s more than one zombie amt fungus. There’s not just one zombie fungus.
Chris: Do they always affect ants or do they affect anything other than ants?
Bunny: It’s mostly insects, but no, there’s one that’s a virus that wasps inject into ladybugs, and then the ladybugs, like, become guardians for wasp eggs.
Chris: Whoa. That is weird.
Bunny: No, it’s really bonkers. They’re parasites, but, like, sometimes this virus, the wasps have essentially used this virus as, like, part of their reproductive strategy to keep their eggs safe. So there’s both the virus and the wasp that are being parasites to this ladybug. This behavior, again, it’s evolved across, like, unrelated species. So it’s like a very successful strategy, but the one that’s like most well known is Ophiocordyceps unilateralis, I think is how you say it, which is the carpenter ant fungi. Ants get infected by the fungus and then they lose their fear of heights. They leave the nest, and then they climb up to the nearest plant. And at exactly like 25 centimeters off the ground, they bite down on a vein in the leaf. It’s like this death grip. That’s where they will stay. And then the fungus stitches their feet to the plant, and then a mushroom grows from its head and showers spores down on other ants below. And that’s the lifecycle, essentially, of this fungus.
Chris: Is it trying to get itself eaten by a deer?
Bunny: No, in this case it’s just trying to infect more ants, although there are, I think there are fungal parasites where it, like, has the bug climb up a leaf and then tries to get eaten by a bird and then it, like, reproduces in the bird’s digestive tract or something. I don’t know if that’s a fungus, but that is also another parasite behavior.
Oren: I’m just really looking forward to the Disney adaptation where the father fungus says to the child fungus, “This is the circle of life, son. We take over the ants and use the ants to create our own reproductive cycle, but eventually we die and become plants, and then, like, the ants eat those.” And the son will be like, “Yes, that is a just system.”
Chris: “We look down on our land from this grass. Look at all, you, all the sun touches. That is ours. Our kingdom.”
Oren: “We will bless the ants with our presence. Look how much they love us!”
Chris: “What’s that shadowy place? Oh, that’s fungicides.” I hope it’s a musical.
Oren: I have noticed that fungus is a popular choice among people who wanna do like an end-of-the-world-style event, because fungus are not unknown in medical science, but they’re… we have less encounters with them, so there are fewer treatments. That kind of story is gonna be changed forever because of Covid and I can’t even begin to estimate how big an impact that’s going to have. But I was definitely noticing before Covid that fungi were becoming more popular as a thing that would end the world with a super plague.
Bunny: Actually, fungus come up, not for the average person, like, thinking about what medicine is, but medicine does use fungus for quite a few things. Actually, the Cordyceps fungus, some of the, like, chemicals it uses to regulate, like, host behavior, one of those is cyclosporine, which is an immunosuppressant. Yeah. We actually use as an immunosuppressant in, like, organ transplantation. And obviously penicillin is like the big boy. We all know penicillin, but they are used in a medical context, not necessarily for superbugs.
Oren: All-natural, baby! I also noticed a funny little loop, and I don’t know for sure that this is what happened, but it just looks like it’s what happened, ’cause you have the Last of Us video game, which precedes the TV show by quite some time, and it’s got the fungus zombies and it’s got the whole person who died against a wall with fungus coming out everywhere. It’s got that image. And then along came the movie Annihilation. And if I remember correctly, the book doesn’t really have much in the way of fungus horror. If there was any, I didn’t pick up on it.
Chris: There’s a lot of creepy weird stuff in it, the book, that it’s unclear what kind of lifeform this is. We can just say that, but I don’t think it calls out fungus in particular.
Oren: But the movie has that very similar image of, like, the person embedded in a wall with an explosion of fungus all around them, and it’s very beautiful and has these really vibrant colors and feels like it was inspired by the game. And then the Last of Us TV show came out and it does the same thing and it feels like it was inspired by Annihilation! And I don’t know that’s actually what happened. It’s just, when I look at the pictures together, it seems like it’s a progression.
Bunny: Now that you mentioned that, I have seen those two images and they do resemble each other. That is strange.
Oren: It’s a very powerful image, right? I get why multiple filmmakers want to use it.
Chris: Do we see real fungal images that look like that? I guess that’s the question. Could they have been inspired by real fungal pictures?
Bunny: They could be. Honestly, it might look more like lichen. Lichen is very interesting. Lichen is a partnership between one or more algae with one or more fungi. So they’re like this composite organism.
Oren: Plants and fungi teaming up again. As an animal, I’m concerned.
Bunny: Yeah, they’re coming for us. No, lichen are really cool. Don’t want to get too sidetracked, but they’re like poly-extremophiles and go into suspended animation and like radiation that would kill tartigrades. Like, they’re just fine. They can get rehydrated and they just go on growing.
Oren: They’re cool with multiple romantic partners, ’cause you did say they were poly.
Bunny: They are polyamorous: they’ve got multiple fungus, multiple algae, making a big cool baby.
Chris: In what situations do they go in suspended animation? Is it just like when things dry out or… ?
Bunny: When scientists send them to space, for one. There’s a hypothesis that maybe life on Earth started through, like, contamination from space. And so people are like testing that theory, and lichens are like a candidate for what type of life could have survived, like out in space and then reentry.
Oren: The unfortunately named panspermia.
Bunny: Yes, panspermia. I do not like that name.
Oren: Nobody likes that name!
Chris: Did not think about it until you mentioned that. Now I can not not hear it, so thank you.
Bunny: I prefer “galactic lichen.” I think that’s a better name for the theory.
Oren: I’m definitely lichen that one more.
Oren: I much prefer the idea that lichen did not come from space, but have this space hibernation anyway, just in case. Just to mess with scientists a bit.
Bunny: They do mess with scientists. They’re like really weird and can do some pretty cool things, including the suspended animation for 10 years, and then they rehydrate and they just keep on doing their own thing, but if you start thinking about lichens, you can’t think about them in terms of fungus and algae, or then you start missing the lichen. So they’re really interesting in how they complicate concepts of individuality and symbiosis.
Oren: What is a species, even? That kind of reminds me of the aliens from Three Body Problem, and that book’s been out for a while, but spoilers in case you’re watching the TV show: the aliens in that story have a thing where they will dehydrate themselves and go into suspended animation for long periods ’cause their planet is always like slingshotting around too close to their sun, which is a neat idea. It did create some plot problems because you’re sitting there wondering, “Okay, hang on. How do you guys have the infrastructure to create an interstellar invasion fleet if every 10 to 50 years, your civilization gets destroyed and you have to start over?” But plot holes aside, I like the concept.
Chris: Yeah, we need more stuff inspired by lichens. Like what if you had a culture that took a more lichenistic view of, like, individuality versus community? That’d be pretty cool. Or what about if astronauts have learned how to do suspended animation? I guess they also just dehydrate themselves.
Oren: They could have done that in Discovery, ’cause they had this problem in Discovery where there, like, I think, weren’t enough symbionts and they were trying to figure out a way to solve it. Fungus is the answer. They will help you to live in harmony.
Bunny: Fungus are the answer, you guys. I think maybe there’s a fungus growing in me that just makes me wanna talk about fungus.
Chris: Oh no! Don’t put it anywhere near grass, okay? When you get 25 inches up that grass, you’re done for.
Bunny: No! Centimeters, Chris. Centimeters.
Chris: Oh. Oh no. I need to embrace the metric system.
Oren: No, we’re gonna use freedom units here.
Chris: I know it’s less intuitive, but…
Oren: From a storytelling perspective, you can do more prosaic uses of fungi. You don’t necessarily have to be embracing, like, the full mycelial treatment. Your characters maybe just need some food in the forest. Fungus are very good for that.
Bunny: That’s true. Fungus be tasty.
Oren: And of course, just for regular cooking. It doesn’t necessarily have to be a survival situation. The fact that many fungi are poisonous is also a fun little plot point that you can add in there.
Bunny: I want more fungus forests.
Chris: I don’t recommend stewed mushroom and fruit medleys, though. I know that Link likes them in the little cook pot. I’m not digging it. I don’t think you should make that.
Bunny: Gosh, there’s been a lot of video games with fungus, which is what I’m learning from this episode. There’s Minecraft, there’s Mario, there’s Link. Books really need to catch up.
Chris: Luckily for Link, none of his mushrooms are poisonous, right? He can just scavenge all of the mushrooms and put ’em in his pot, and it’s fine.
Oren: Nothing is placeless in the world of the modern Zelda games, or at least if there is, it’s very uncommon.
Bunny: No, mushrooms are tasty. I love me some mushrooms, sautéed and buttered. Not necessarily related to fiction, just a tasty thing in general.
Chris: I think something that also tends to make fungus creepy is just, it’s a decomposer. It’s very related to death, decomposition in a way that flowers aren’t, although flowers grow on dead things, but they’re not like so intimately involved in the process of breaking down dead matter.
Oren: Mushrooms can, of course, also live without sunlight. Fungus doesn’t photosynthesize on its own. Lichen does though, right? That’s part of the process.
Bunny: That’s part of the partnership, is that the algae provides photosynthesis, essentially.
Oren: But since fungi don’t, by default, photosynthesize, they can also live in dark places, which tends to make them spooky to us ’cause, “Ooh, we can’t see what’s in there.” There could be anything in there. There could even be a zombie.
Chris: There is a heterotrophic flower that doesn’t actually use sunlight, that’s also pretty creepy. Like it’s white, it’s not green.
Bunny: They’re called like pipes or something. Those are also connected, literally connected to the mushrooms, and that they’ll like tap into the network of mycelium that grows underneath forests and they’ll just get energy from that, essentially.
Oren: Is that a parasitical relationship or symbiotic? Are they giving anything back?
Bunny: So what a lot of plants give back is phosphorus, but if they’re not photosynthesizing, I’m not sure. It might be a parasite relationship. I don’t remember.
Oren: Just freeloading on the mycelial network. I approve. I respect that level of laziness.
Bunny: They’re hackers hacking into the mycelium Man. This is something that I haven’t ever seen done, and because it’s really spooky and creepy, it definitely should be. People don’t talk about it because it happens on the micro level and it happens to worms. It could happen to people too. I think people should extrapolate from this.
Chris: Okay, but first, is this something I’m gonna have nightmares about?
Chris: Okay. Our listeners have been warned.
Bunny: We don’t think of fungi as predators, but they are. Some of them hunt nematodes in some really freaky ways. Some of them set nooses, essentially. Yeah. And they constrict around nematodes in a 10th of a second and trap ’em. They’re these circles and then they inflate and the worm gets stuck inside them. Another one is, they make adhesive nets like spiderwebs, my favorite. Some of them have little toxins on the tips of the hyphae that paralyze the nematode. Once the nematode touches it, and then the fungus grows in through its mouth and digests it from the inside.
Chris: Okay, there’s my nightmares right there.
Bunny: If there was anything that’s gonna give nightmares, it’s… it’s that one. And then my favorite: there’s like little gunboat spores that they’ll send out through the soil that can swim through the soil, and they get attracted to either like pheromones or other chemical signals that the nematodes put off, and then they attach to the worms and, like, harpoon them.
Chris: So it’s like a heat-seeking missile, but a pheromone-seeking missile? It’s like a little spore that follows pheromones to nematode and then shoots it?
Bunny: Gun cells. They’re literally called gun cells.
Chris: But these are spores, right? So they would form new fungus?
Bunny: Yeah, I think so. They would grow into a new fungus rather than feeding the existing fungus.
Chris: They don’t, like, bring the nematode back to the origin point? That would probably be difficult.
Bunny: It’s like a whaling boat that sends out the people to stab the whale, and then a new whaling boat grows where the whale was stabbed.
Oren: Pretty economical. So this could either be like a really creepy high-budget, like high-production-value show, like Last of Us, or it could be a really cheesy episode of nineties Star Trek.
Bunny: Yes.This is what we love about fungus. It’s so flexible.
Oren: Like the Voyager episode with the macroviruses that are just these, like, CGI blobs floating around.
Chris: That was pretty funny, seeing Janeway struggle with them, jump and hold them, and then we pretend after, like, she holds them, that they can actually have leverage to move around in the air and she’s like struggling with it.
Oren: She’s doing her best, okay?
Chris: Viruses are scary because you can’t see them and punch them.
Oren: “Look, Kate Mulgrew, we need you to pretend that you’re wrestling with a CGI virus. So, I don’t know, here’s like a teddy bear for you to hold.” And that’s called acting.
Bunny: A moment of silence for the actors who had to tussle with fake viruses. So, we mentioned fungi being decomposers, and they are. But one really interesting thing that you could do in your fiction with fungi is that it’s also… currently people are using it to build things as well. So fungi is really good at decomposing things. It can decompose very happily cigarette butts and, like, use diapers and agricultural waste. It’s quite good at that. But there are certain companies that are trying to, like, grow it into shapes and use it as building materials. NASA is thinking about growing buildings on the moon out of fungus, and the way this works is, I think, you mold it into a shape, and then you kill it, and now you’ve got your fungus house. If you can get the fungus to absorb, like, electrodes or something like that, then you, when you kill the fungus and put it to use as a house, then you have, like, a built-in electrical system already, which is cool and weird.
Oren: This is just an objectively cooler 3D printer. 3D printers are already cool, but they don’t have mushrooms.
Buny: I think you can even make batteries out of them. People are trying to make batteries out of fungus instead of a toxic metal.
Oren: Any replacement for batteries would be an improvement at this point.
Bunny: Get the fungus in there at all costs.
Oren: I am prepared to charge my phone with a shiitake mushroom.
Bunny: Please someone write this story. I want, like, an environmentally friendly solarpunk post-plastic story where it’s just… all runs on mushrooms. Everything’s built out of mushrooms. You plug your environmentally friendly phone into a shiitake.
Oren: With that, I think we are going to have to call this episode to a close.
Chris: And if we have not given you nightmares, consider supporting us on Patreon, or even if we have. Go to patreon.com/mythcreants.
Oren: Yeah, it’s a service, really. Before we go, I want to thank a couple of our existing patrons. First, there’s Ayman Jaber. He’s an urban fantasy writer and a connoisseur of Marvel. Then there’s Kathy Ferguson, who’s a professor of political theory in Star Trek. We will talk to you next week.
Outro: This has been the Mythcreants Podcast. Opening/closing theme: The Princess who Saved Herself by Jonathan Colton.
