The CRSF annual conference took place on 3-4 July 2025. It was a hybrid event and I joined remotely. The official theme of the conference was ‘boundaries’. However, I felt there were two other themes that emerged from the event. Firstly the global prevalence of SF, which the hybrid format supported as it allowed for attendees from around the world. Secondly, fungal fiction, a current favourite topic of mine.
Fungal fiction
Frankie Wakefield
Frankie Wakefield’s presentation focussed on the contemporary trend of body horror depicting human bodies transformed by fungal hosts. She argued that images showing human bodies consumed by fungi are not simply about violation. Rather, they reflect the loss of control felt when environmental crises undermine our understanding of humans as separate from nature. She also suggested they challenge the anthropocentric premise that the world is full of individuals.
Zhiyuan Wang
Zhiyuan Wang explained that, in traditional Chinese botany, both plants and humans are made of qi. Being of the same essence, plants could, for instance, respond to political change. However, from the mid-19th century Western science changed how Chinese people saw plants, instead viewing them as separate to humans. She argued that contemporary Chinese SF is returning to traditional Chinese thought in its depiction of plants using the example of Chen Qiufan’s ‘Fungal Song’. This short story appears to have been translated into English as ‘Do You Hear the Fungi Sing?’ in the collection Tomorrow’s Parties: Life in the Anthropocene, ed. Jonathan Strahan. She suggested this movement is creating a uniquely Chinese posthumanism, not centred in tech but in body and nature.
Keynote – Jasmin Kirkbride
Jasmin Kirkbride’s keynote on ‘mushroompunk’ introduced a plethora of terms relating to the current trend for fungi in SF. I have compiled these into a glossary here.
Kirkbride relayed her admiration for mycelium due to the impossibility of its domestication and its incomprehensible numbers and spread. She noted funga were only added alongside the categories of flora and fauna in Western botany in the late 20th century, which demonstrates that for centuries fungi were not part of our thinking in a literal or philosophical sense.
Kirkbride noted that mushrooms modelling socialism was, however, a thing in the late 19th century. This was of interest to me as this is the same time that utopian fiction was also previously a thing (e.g. Bellamy’s Looking Backward and its many responses including Morris’s News from Nowhere). Is it a coincidence that fungi and utopia are both popular again now? Is there more to be said about that? (These are questions for myself, that I may or may not investigate at some point.)
In comparing mushroompunk and sporror, Kirkbride suggested that the ideas of contamination present in sporror represent a surrendering of responsibility, whereas symbiosis with fungi as modelled in mushroompunk requires our ongoing attention. She stressed that fungi are symbiotic, not colonisers (as often depicted in sporror).
Kirkbride noted that mycorrhizal fungi are very vulnerable to climate change. So, despite the popular suggestion that fungi can make life from our ruins, they don’t always thrive in hostile circumstances. She emphasised that mushroompunk asserts the agency of fungi and is not just stories of humans using mushrooms to save the world. As such, it requires a profound shift in subjectivity that decentres the human.
Other things I enjoyed
Maria Alonso Alonso debating whether biological reproduction keeps women subjugated or, if this role was taken away by technology, the status of women would be further degraded under patriarchy. This was in relation to Helen Sedgwick’s The Growing Season.
Molly Davidson examining the use of AI, which she described as machines that can process language without understanding meaning, as therapeutic tools in times of grief. Does this matter for the human reading the chat responses? Is the comfort worth the illusion?
The debate at the end of the World SF panel on whether SF by marginalised voices within the US (e.g. Indigenous, Black, Caribbean, Latinx) should be considered World SF. The verdict from panellist Francesco Verso was that despite the barriers that these writers face, it is not the same as writers from outside of the Anglophone world.
The concept of ‘chromonormativity’ explained by Teodora Noszkay, through which clocks and calendars seem like somatic facts but, as Noszkay noted, they are actually institutional forces. This made me wonder if my 8-year-old son, who is refusing to learn how to tell the time because he hates having to be ruled by a clock, is actually queering time and protesting capitalism.
Chenkai Yang using the term ‘privatopia’ to refer to gated communities when discussing Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower. I hadn’t encountered this -topia before.
Mary-Antoinette Smith speaking about her ‘To Be or Not To Be Octavias’ project. I also heard her present on this at the Women in the Black Fantastic Conference last December. She included readerly responses to the texts she was discussing in her presentation. I would like to do this in my own work so it encouraged me to see her set a precedent. We were able to have a discussion in the Q&A about writing change-the-world literary criticism to complement the change-the-world fictions inspired by Octavia Butler. She advised me to find my own voice and have courage, which I will endeavour to do.
Philomène Trudelle discussing the defamiliarising effect of using the feminine form of job titles in Elisabeth Vonarburg’s novel Chroniques du Pays des Mères. This interested me as a linguistic method available in the French language for doing what SF often does regarding estrangement.
Olga Zaslavskaya thinking about a multi-media/platform approach to mapping the Arctic according to Indigenous geography, which as she put it is a living archive that requires participation, not just observation.
Jeff Vandermeer giving an author’s perspective on genre in reference to the ‘new weird’. He said that having set boundaries, you then have to keep transgressing those boundaries for the genre to continue. He suggested that with genre, writers are looking for something that tells them they’re onto something, that they’re on the map even when they’re going off the map. I’m collecting perspectives on genre after Walidah Imarisha said “genres are not part of art, they’re part of capitalism […] no artist thinks of their work in that way” on the From What If to What Next podcast. This made me wonder how other artists feel about the utility of genre.
Reading list
Here’s my reading list from this conference:
- The Growing Season by Helen Sedgwick
- Nightbitch by Rachel Yoder
- ‘Fungal Turn’ – special issue of Interconnections: Journal of Posthumanism ed. by Alison Mackey and Elif Sendur
- ‘Science Fiction and New Materialism’ by Alison Sperling in The New Routledge Companion to Science Fiction, ed. by Andrew M. Butler, Adam Roberts and Sherryl Vint
- ‘Do You Hear the Fungi Sing?’ by Chen Qiufan
- The Forest on the Edge of Time by Jasmin Kirkbridge (forthcoming, 2026)
- Ghost Music by An Yu
- The Beauty by Aliya Whiteley
- Scavengers Reign (animated series)
- ‘The Cyborg Manifesto’ by Donna Haraway
- The Deep: A Companion ed. by Simon Bacon
