Mycelial Mutations

Introduction Over the last decade, fungi have increasingly appeared in popular culture. Non-fiction texts, such as Melvin Sheldrake’s Entangled Lives (2020) and Doug Bierend’s Mycotopia (2021), illuminate some of the hidden lives of fungi and explore how we could utilise fungi, from sustainable myco-culture to building materials, and models of fungal communities. In turn, this emerging mycological knowledge inspires fiction exploring intersections of human and fungi, including M.R. Carey’s The Girl with all the Gifts (2014) and David Koepp’s Cold Storage (2019). Heightened interest in the potential for fiction to become reality spawns (spores) further investigation. In many of these fungal fictions, the core premise is that a mutation has enabled fungi to infiltrate and control humans. Fungal eruptions warp the form of the human body, and the human becomes food. The fungal mutant demonstrates agency, the capacity to set goals, and learn from its errors. The agentic nonhuman is a terrifying prospect. As the human adapts to this infiltration, both species evolve to survive in the fungal future through further mutation and hybridity. Many of these narratives explore, or leave space for the possibility of, a generation of symbiotic fungal-human beings, a multispecies assemblage best adapted for the post-mutation world. The fungal-human mutant is a challenge to our concept of the human as a separate, bounded individual, and signals future possibilities of adaptation and hybridity. In this article, I consider examples of fungal mutation and the transformation into a human-fungal symbiote. I draw on an ecoGothic framework to consider why fungus is a recurring subject of mutation and how mutated nature might interact with the human. The ecoGothic in Brief An ecoGothic approach orients us to “the more disturbing and unsettling aspects of our interactions with nonhuman ecologies” (Keetley and Sivils 7). It draws our attention to transgression of boundaries, fear of Nature, and the potential horrors arising from human (ab)use of our environments. Beyond this fear of Nature is what Simon Estok terms ‘ecophobia’, an “irrational and groundless hatred of the natural world” (“Ecocriticism and Ecophobia” 208). Estok identifies that ecophobia stems from a sense of human particularity and a desire to dominate and control the natural world. Ecophobia is the response to a loss of control and the perceived threat of a natural world filled with “unpredictable and uncontrolled nonhuman agency” (“Theorising the EcoGothic” 46). As Stacy Alaimo also notes, “the environment, which is too often imagined as inert, empty space or as a resource for human use, is, in fact, a world of fleshy beings with their own needs, claims, and actions” (2). A central concern of the ecoGothic is the interchange between the human and nonhuman worlds. Fungal mutations, and the mutant beings that result, draw together Julia Kristeva’s ‘abjection’ and Alaimo’s ‘trans-corporeality’. Kristeva theorises that, to maintain our sense of bounded self, we must throw off (abject) “what disturbs identity, system, order” (4). Bodily waste and the corpse are examples of objects that encroach on that boundary, threatening the “collapse of the border between inside and outside” (53) and thus a source of horror and fascination. Alaimo uses trans-corporeality to describe the recognition that, despite our efforts to separate human and nonhuman entirely, “we are permeable, emergent beings” and our bodies are in constant, productive interchange with the ‘more-than-human’ world (156). Though still a niche area within the ecoGothic, the emergence of fungi across texts has drawn increased critical attention in recent years. Ashley Kniss recognises this “Gothic mycology” as a mode mapping “the mysterious behaviour of fungi onto literary plots” (22). Kniss identifies that the “decay-filled endings” of these fungal plots simultaneously offer new beginnings, spaces that have the potential to “reimagine humanity’s interconnectedness with the more-than-human”, a reframing that “goes beyond mere human-fungal hybridity and proposes instead a novel becoming” (23). The fungal ability to infiltrate and control the human, and the resulting hybridity, overwhelms apparently clear boundaries. This fungal infiltration dissolves the boundary of the ‘self’ and reminds us of our own materiality; the natural environment is intimately entangled with our bodies. Additionally, fungi themselves, as organisms of darkness and decay, thresholds and excess, are uniquely Gothic entities. It is worth noting some of their ecoGothic peculiarities before considering how these are transformed in fiction. The Mutability of Fungi There has always been something of the unknown, the strange, the mutant about fungi. Even as we try to pin down fungal properties, whether in popular fungal nonfiction or as objects of scientific study, fungi seem to be continually transforming. Depending on the health and life cycle of the fungus and its host, the same fungus can be an uncanny combination of symbiotic and parasitic and necrotrophic (Frost 591). Fungi disrupt classifications, refusing binaries in a state of existence that seems to be and/and rather than either/or. What we learn about fungi resists easy categorisation, with any identifying characteristics uneasily qualified by ‘may, can, some, most’. Fungi are “uncannily situated somewhere between animal and plant” (Bierend 249), possessing “a mixture of qualities common to both” (Kaishian and Djoulakian 10). Though mushrooms might appear plant-like, fungi rely on a kind of enzymatic ‘digestion’ like animals. They appear to sense, respond to, and communicate about their environment (Boddy 39, 42) and show complex, even intelligent, behaviours (Sheldrake 65-66). The fungal ability to transform dead matter into succulent growth is horrifying as the visible intermingling of “what should be the ultimate opposites: life and death” (Hogle 108). In many ways, fungi embody the abject; they are “what disturbs identity, system, order, [the] in-between, the ambiguous, the composite” (Kristeva 4). We are inextricably connected with fungi in ways that we are still uncovering. Fungi have evolved to become essential components in unexpected systems, from mycorrhizal networks (the contested ‘Wood-Wide Web’ theory) to our own mycobiomes. Fungi are a dynamic and responsive network, repeatedly demonstrating their “capacity for planning and problem-solving” (Sheldrake 41). They are a reminder that the material and natural world “are complex, interconnected and surprising networks of things, each with its own agency, always liable to interact with human plans in surprising and disconcerting ways” (Clark 114). Fungi elude human control. The agency of fungi is a source of ecoGothic possibilities and a challenge to our current way of understanding the world. Although generally unseen, fungi are ubiquitous. Consisting of hyphae, thread-like cells, that network and tangle into mycelium, fungi are highly adaptable to environmental stimuli and able to change their shapes and behaviours for ecological advantage; “fungal forms are other — indeterminate” (Harley 151). What we do see of fungi is usually the fruiting body, which is formed when hyphae swell and push out into the world. In reproduction, too, fungi are happy to mutate by fusing hyphae, creating spores, or asexual duplication. Fungal fruiting bodies take on bizarre shapes and features that can evoke intrigue, horror, and desire. Their names evoke Gothic themes – ‘Dead Man’s Fingers’, ‘Witch’s Butter’, the Tooths, and the Stinkhorns (genus Phallus; BMS, English Names for Fungi). The Cordyceps genus has particularly captured the imagination, bringing about the end of human society as we know it across popular culture, including The Last of Us (video game 2013, TV series 2023-2025), The Girl with All the Gifts (2014, film adaptation 2016), and Cold Storage (2019). Depictions of mutated fungal threats are all the more unsettling for being threaded through with real-life fungal characteristics. Part of this fascination is the unnerving potential of Cordyceps. Currently, each species of Cordyceps is adapted to one insect species. Cordyceps infect the host, manipulate behaviours to fulfill certain conditions, then use the body as sustenance and a site to mature, before fruiting and releasing spores to begin the cycle anew. New forms of Cordyceps are not beyond the realm of possibility considering most fungal species remain “unknown unknowns” (Boddy 24-25). A Cordyceps specialising in humans is a horrifying proposition. Fungal Mutation Rapidly changing environmental conditions and climate crises in the actual world hold an ecoGothic threat by increasing the potential of mutations. On the one hand, mutation can damage the organism and cause its destruction. On the other, a mutation can become an adaptation useful for survival. Similarly to the monsters and superheroes of pulp-fiction, fictional fungal mutations are often an unintended consequence of unmonitored pollution and scientific experimentation. Initially, the mutations turn the fungus into a threat, and the human into food. The mutations can manifest as fungal agency. There is an inherent tension to exploring nonhuman agency. We can only understand our world and concepts of agency on our own terms. Fungal mutations offer a way to explore this tension, the human subsumed into part of an agentic nonhuman and mutated into a new form. Fungal fictions destabilise our conceptions of humans at the top of the evolutionary ladder. In Cold Storage, by David Koepp, an unlikely human crew are pitted against a “highly mutative organism capable of extinction-level destruction”. Rather than a post-apocalyptic fungal future, the novel is set in March 2019, with the Prologue identifying Armillaria solidipes in Oregon (the humongous fungus) as one mutation away from ending all life on earth. Like Mary She