As autumn turns to winter it’s time for me to summarise what I’ve read and thought about fungi this season. I started off from the current trend for fungal fiction. I found myself asking whether fungi are being used to think about better ways of being, and this made me wonder about the relationship between fungi and utopia. This led me to think about the fungi appearing in contemporary utopian fiction, and to ask what work authors are putting fungi to in their literary utopias. Here’s what I found when exploring these questions.
Fungal fiction
Mushrooms are popping up all over contemporary science fiction and fantasy, reflecting that they evidently have a place in the contemporary popular imagination. Texts that are part of this trend for fungal fiction include:
- Sorrowland by Rivers Solomon
- Kinning by Nisi Shawl
- The Seep by Chana Porter
- Annihilation by Jeff Vandermeer
- Rosewater by Tade Thompson
The fashion for fungi is also evident in contemporary popular science and nature books. These include:
- Entangled Lives by Merlin Sheldrake
- Finding the Mother Tree by Suzanne Simard
- Mycelium Running by Paul Stamets
- Underland by Robert Macfarlane
- The Hidden Life of Trees by Peter Wohlleben
Fungi have also been the focus of critical enquiry in the arts and humanities, most notably in Anna Tsing’s The Mushroom at the End of the World and in Yasmine Ostendorf-Rodríguez’s Let’s Become Fungal!
And a couple of honourable mentions to writers who broke the ground back in the 1960s: Sylvia Plath with her poem ‘Mushrooms’ and John Wyndham’s Trouble with Lichen.
The fungal turn
Some are calling the current prevalence of fungi the ‘fungal turn,’ a term defined by Allison Mackey and Elif Sendur. They observe that:
A growing body of contemporary fiction and film, along with political and practical networks, such as zines, conferences, and writing collectives, are engaging with fungal discourses to think about the porous and permeable limits of bodies, to reconsider our relationship with space, time, death and decay, and to imagine novel ways of perceiving, living and resisting power. (Mackey and Sendur 2024, 5)
Their emphasis on using fungi as a means for thinking about ways of being and of structures of power made me wonder if, within the fungal turn, fungi are performing a utopian function. If fungi are theorised as modelling an alternative way of life, are fungi effectively being used to articulate ideas of utopia? In which case, what is the fungal utopia, and how does this relate to fungi as they appear in contemporary literary utopias?
Fungi and their allegorical meanings
In what Mackey and Sendur call ‘fungal discourses,’ I found there is a set of political and philosophical meanings attached to the physical properties of fungi. Within these discourses, it makes perfect sense to state, for example, that fungi are anti-capitalist, queer and decolonial.
These traits, ascribed to the fungi, are ones that the ascribers admire and wish to emulate. As such, the shared vision of what fungi represent in the fungal turn seems to me to be a kind of utopia. And if utopia is encoded in the allegorical meanings of fungi, I will attempt to decrypt the fungal utopia now.
Mycelium represent underground political activism
Fungi often come to our attention in the form of the mushrooms we see above ground. However, mushrooms are only the reproductive part of the fungus, which grow to spread its spores. The main body of the fungus is underground, and this is the mycelium.
Mycelium grows and spreads unseen until mushrooms pop up in a manner that from the surface seems sudden and unexpected. This leads to its use as a metaphor for underground political and activist movements who organise out of sight then suddenly emerge in interventions such as protests. Often these emergences might be simultaneous across various locations, while the organising structure remains unseen.
This metaphorical usage is similar to earlier discourse around rhizomes, first theorised by Deleuze and Guattari (see A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia). Rhizomes are bulbs and tubers (potatoes, daffodils, ginger, bamboo to name a few) and they similarly spread underground before breaking through the soil.
However, as Maymana Arefin notes, “[r]hizomes exist largely as storage for resources within an individual plant [and do not] convey the movement of resources between individuals in an ecosystem” (Arefin 2021, 28, emphasis in original). This is where fungi are different and where, in fungal discourse, they acquire additional layers of (utopian) meaning, as mycelium does not absorb water and nutrients only for the fungus itself.
Mycorrhizal networks represent sharing economies
Mycorrhizal fungi are fungi that spread in and around plant roots. The mycelia of mycorrhizal fungi form mycorrhizal networks connecting numerous plants and fungi through the soil. These networks pass water and nutrients to and between plants, and transmit carbon and sugars from the plants to the fungi.
Allegorically, the fact that fungi share resources through mycorrhizal networks is used to suggest they demonstrate an alternative to capitalism. Arefin notes the “transfer of resources between plant communities through mycorrhizal networks has […] been dubbed a kind of underground socialism” (Arefin 2021, 22-3).
However, this idea is not new and unique to the current fungal turn. Since Victorian times, mycorrhizal networks have been used as a metaphor for socialism and cooperation. Ella Mershon explains:
By the end of the nineteenth century, the fact that fungi entered into not only parasitic but also symbiotic relationships with other species had been well established. What is more, Victorian scientific popularizers were spreading the idea that fungal networks represented utopian possibilities for reimagining the Darwinian struggle for existence: here was evidence of an ancient system of cooperation (Mershon 2020, 268).
Mershon confirms that other related discoveries came to have similar political resonances. “The discovery that fungi entered into symbiotic relationships with algae,” for instance, “came to exemplify the ‘intimate relations’ of cooperative living,” while “the discovery of nitrogen-fixing bacteria extended the fungal analogy for mutual aid”. Apparently even the anarcho-communist Pyotr Kropotkin “was quick to seize upon the microbe’s ‘precious work’ on behalf of species other than its own” (all Mershon 2020, 281).
The fungal utopia, therefore, is anything from socialist to communist to anarchist, but definitely not capitalist. It is based on mutuality and not competition.
Fungi’s sexual morphology represents non-heteronormativity
Fungi have many, many biological sexes. The schizophyllum commune (pictured above) has at least 23,328, which I first learned from a meme mocking trans-exclusionary radical feminists. This very example shows the ease in which statements about the biology of fungi gain allegorical meaning. In the words of Natalia Cicere: “fungal morphology and physiology allegorize human social relations, which in turn imbue these mushroom facts with significance” (Cicere 2024, 72).
Mershon again traces the association between fungi and “denaturaliz[ing] heteronormative assumptions” back to the Victorians. She notes the discovery of mycorrhizal fungi by Albert Bernhard Frank, who described how “certain species of trees did not ‘nourish themselves’ but were fed by a ‘wet nurse’ […] of fungal mycelium”. Mershon suggests this “nonbiological, nongenealogical relationship” proved potent in “political and libidinal imagining at the turn of the twentieth century” (all Mershon 2020, 282).
Allegorizing fungi as queer works to establish queer presence in the fungal utopia. Perceiving fungi as queer means the fungal utopia expects and welcomes diverse genders and sexualities.
Fungi’s symbiotic relationships represent ecological embeddedness
Fungi form symbiotic relationships with plants. Living in symbiosis means the fungus and plant each supply some of the other’s needs in a co-dependent relationship.
Merlin Sheldrake documents that through his study of fungi he came to recognise symbiosis as “a ubiquitous feature of life” (Sheldrake 2021, 18). He recalls attending a conference where:
Someone got up to talk about a group of plants that produced a certain group of chemicals in their leaves. Until then, the chemicals had been thought of a defining characteristic of that group of plants. However, it transpired that the chemicals were actually made by fungi that lived in the leaves of the plant. […] Another researcher interjected, suggesting that it may not be the fungi living inside the leaf that produced these chemicals, but the bacteria living inside the fungus. Things continued along these lines. […] To talk about individuals made no sense any more (Sheldrake 2021, 18-19).
Sheldrake reminds his reader: “You carry around more microbes than your ‘own’ cells” (Sheldrake 2021, 18). The scientific facts about fungi and microbes are presented as inspiration to think differently about how we see our human selves.
These thoughts about symbiosis challenge the notion of ourselves as discrete individuals. Instead, they refigure our bodies as places of connection with the world. From this perspective, it becomes very hard to continue to think of ourselves as separate from our environment.
This ecological awareness, triggered by translating what is observed in fungi onto our bodies, is similar to the notion of trans-corporeality. The term trans-corporeality, coined by Stacy Alaimo, literally means movement across bodies. It describes how our skin is not a barrier where our bodies start and end. Rather, we are permeable and air, food, water, toxins (and more) constantly move between us and our environments.
An awareness of trans-corporeality might result, Alaimo hopes, in an “ethics that turn from the disembodied values and ideals of bounded individuals toward an attention to situated, evolving practices that have far-reaching and often unforeseen consequences for multiple peoples, species and ecologies” (Alaimo 2010, 22).
This shows how rethinking our physical selves can affect our environmental ethics. As Mackey and Sendur put it, symbiosis “can help us trace a path toward formulating our relationship with the nonhuman” (Mackey and Sendur 2024, 6).
Within the fungal utopia, therefore, individuals interact differently with the world due to an awareness of their ecological embeddedness.
Decomposition represents hope of regeneration
Fungi are decomposers. They take dead material, such as dead wood, and digest it, creating new soil. This is also rich metaphorical ground.
Participants in fungal discourses do not generally consider we are on a positive trajectory. Rather, they see much in the world that needs to be dealt with before we can move towards a better future. Fossil fuel dependence, extractive capitalism and the rise of the far-right, for instance. In these circumstances, the capacity of fungi to decompose even toxic matter has allegorical significance.
The subtitle of Anna Tsing’s book on the matsutake mushroom is “on the possibility of life in capitalist ruins”. The matsutake grow in forest where capitalist interests have failed. The timber plantations that would have replaced them became commercially unviable, which saved the remaining forest from destruction. But Tsing is quick to relate the fate of the mushrooms figuratively to our own: “If all our forests are buffeted by such winds of destruction, whether capitalists find them desirable or throw them aside, we have the challenge of living in that ruin, ugly and impossible as it is” (Tsing 2017, 195-96).
Through the example of the matsutake mushroom, Tsing reframes living in the ruins of capitalism as having potential for a good life:
Without stories of progress, the world has become a terrifying place. The ruin glares at us with the horror of its abandonment. It’s not easy to know how to make a life, much less avert planetary destruction. Luckily there is still company, human and not human. We can still explore the overgrown verges of our blasted landscapes – the edges of capitalist discipline, scalability, and abandoned resource plantations. We can still catch the scent of the latent commons – and the elusive autumn aroma.” (Tsing 2017, 253. The “autumn aroma” is the smell of the matsutake.)
Jack Halberstam’s concept of unworlding, which I have written about elsewhere, also takes inspiration from lifeforms such as fungi that process decaying material. He argues this function is essential to avoid carrying what is rotten over into the future.
In fungal discourses, the fungal function of decomposition is also applied metaphorically to thoughts and ideas. Ostendorf-Rodríguez explains through quoting the mycologist Giulian Furci:
‘In a way fungi degenerate, but it’s to enable regeneration.’ […] According to Furci, the same needs to happen in the process of ideals and ideas: ‘They need to decompose in order for new ones to arrive. It’s really important to let ideas rot. Let them disintegrate and give life to new ideas.’” (Ostendorf-Rodríguez 2023, 99)
Through their decompositional ability, fungi become a powerful symbol of hope. They are used to suggest that even the most polluted and degraded circumstances can be salvaged. This sense of possibility provides motivation for the fungal utopia.
Neglect in Western science represents decoloniality
Fungi did not get its own kingdom (alongside those of plants and animals) until 1969. Some, such as Patricia Kaishian, prefer to call it a ‘queendom’ to draw attention to the patriarchal conventions that shape our understanding of biological sciences (Ostendorf-Rodríguez 2023, 276). In my favourite explanation for their neglect, John Lupinacci elucidates:
In the middle to later part of the 16th century, Linnaeus founded a Latin binomial naming system Systema Naturae still in use today. Frustrated by the vast and chaotic diversity of fungi, he banished the diversity of fungal groups to the homogenizing category he called Chaos fungorum. He sent that shit to the fringes (Lupinacci 2023, 3).
In addition to the problems they present to taxonomy, fungi are also notoriously difficult to cultivate. Lupinacci again: “While mycologists estimate about 6 million different fungi, only a few are studied, and even less cultivated into production with only around two dozen commonly grown and of that only seven species grown on a mass scale” (Lupinacci 2023, 3-4). Thanks to the difficulty of accommodating fungi within Western science and agriculture, fungi are perceived allegorically to be resisting these systems of control.
Comensurately, when using fungi as a reference to think about our relationship with the natural world, fungal discourses position themselves as outside of the system. Sherryl Vint suggests: “an entity that ‘refuses’ to fit into any of our categorizations is enormously productive for restructuring how we approach the very idea of thinking about other species and relations of belonging” (in Mackey and Sendur 2024, 9). Focussing on the uncategorisable and marginalised fungi exposes the limitations of understanding the world through the hierarchical approach of taxonomy. This outsider perspective offers the potential to conceive of the relationships between humans, plants, fungi and non-human animals in other ways.
Arefin describes the aim of shifting “our understandings away from the rhetoric of human mastery and appropriation over nature towards new, reciprocal terms on which we might relate to non-human life forms,” as a “decolonial approach” (Arefin 2021, 17-18). I understand this on three levels.
- The “rhetoric of human mastery” that applies to the human/nature relationship is a colonial logic. This logic is most clearly demonstrated in the plantation. Under the plantation model of farming, one crop is grown exclusively, historically with the use of slave labour, and all other plants, animals, fungi and people are excluded from the colonised land. As mastery is a colonial logic, a new logic of reciprocity would be a decolonial approach.
- Focussing on fungi, which have been neglected in Western science and philosophy, means adopting a position other than that historically adopted in the West. In adopting a contrary position to that assumed by colonial powers, it might be inferred this is a decolonial position.
- A concept of nature that notices reciprocal relationships, rather than hierarchical ones, has more in common with Indigenous worldviews. These systems of knowledge have (like fungi) been marginalised by Western colonial powers. Attending to them is therefore a decolonial approach.
Through these layers of meaning, the taxonomically neglected fungi are used to advocate for a decolonial politics within fungal discourse. This suggests that decoloniality is important to the fungal utopia.
Summary of the fungal utopia
In summary, the sections above have shown that the allegorical meanings of fungi within fungal discourses constitute a shared fungal utopia along the following ideals:
- Political activism
- Sharing economies
- Non-heteronormativity
- Ecological embeddedness
- Regeneration
- Decoloniality
Other utopian functions of fungi
I also found other ways in which fungi fulfil a similar function to utopia in the current fungal discourse. Firstly, in their perceived offering of a blueprint or model for alternative social structures or other ways of thinking. Secondly, in the way they enable some commentators to express their desire for other ways of being through the idea of ‘becoming mushroom’.
Blueprints and models
The following are examples of fungi being used as a blueprint or model for better ways of being in or thinking about the world:
- In her thesis, titled ‘Mapping Alternative Futures through Fungi’, Arefin hopes that “as functional webs of care within the soil, mycorrhizal networks may provide us with blueprints for the future organisation of mutual aid groups” (Arefin 2021, 34). She believes “we can learn a great deal from mycorrhizal networks about ourselves, our relationships with each other and the alternative futures that we wish to build” (Arefin 2021, 39).
- Alison Sperling suggests that fungi are “a kind of model organism for ecological thinking – the mushroom not as an individual organism, but as always a vast network underground, feeding and communicating with countless diverse species of plant and animal” (in Mackey and Sendur 2024, 9). In this iteration, fungi model an ecological utopia of interspecies interconnections.
- Inspired by fungi’s ability to decompose rock, Sherryl Vint describes how fungi are helping her to develop “an entirely different philosophy of life”. She acknowledges her new understanding is more akin to “Indigenous ways of thinking about the world, where stone and metal can be kin as much as trees or animals might be” (in Mackey and Sendur, 10).
- In conclusion to her essay ‘How to Love a Mushroom,’ Anna Tsing writes that “the objectives of those of us in this field are to open the public imagination to make new ways of relating to nature possible” (Tsing 2010, 201). Aiming to open the public imagination and enable new possibilities for human/nature relations is something I would call a utopian project.
Expressing desire for other ways of being through ‘becoming mushroom’
The second way in which writers use fungi to present utopian ideas is by using fungi as a metaphor to help articulate their vision for other ways of being.
Michelle Sadler and Sara Cohen Shabot, for example, suggest that under the optimal conditions for childbirth, “the [birthing] person is transformed into a kind of fungus” (Sadler and Cohen Shabot 2025, 9). They elaborate their metaphor in a table setting out five fungal principles, a corresponding “birth analogy” and the implications for obstetric care. For example, for the fungal principle of “mycelial networks,” the birth analogy is “childbirth unfolds within dense relational networks,” and the implication is that “collaborative care models involving doulas, midwives, family, and community are encouraged” (see Sadler and Cohen Shabot 2025, 8). The “implications” column effectively sets out their utopian vision for childbirth, but it is expressed by means of the fungal principles and birth analogies.
John Lupinacci uses fungi to express his aims as an educator. Fungi inspire him to “recognize, resist, and (re)author human subjectivities and push to move beyond the monocultural ways in which we apply a limited understanding of ourselves and our worlds to our work [in education]” (Lupinacci 2023, 4). In terms of using the idea of becoming fungal to speculate about a utopian education system, he wonders “what might happen if we moved away from ‘What do we do in schools today and tomorrow?’ and more toward imagining they were gone and we worked from the rubble and mire in the rot of decomposition to feel, smell, see a different way of learning to be together on [the] planet” (Lupinacci 2023, 10).
Yasmine Ostendorf-Rodríguez explores the idea of becoming mushroom in depth in her book Let’s Become Fungal!, as the title implies. Her twelve teachings (chapters) explore questions such as “How to organize like a mycelium?” and “What are fungi teaching us about multispecies models of collaboration?”. She describes her approach as “using a mycological lens to define sustainable and fair models of collaboration and organization” (Ostendorf-Rodríguez 2023, 328). As such, her whole book can be read as an attempt to express utopia through the metaphor of becoming mushroom.
Fungal fixes
There is a third way in which fungi might seem utopian, and that is in their potential use to solve human-made problems. Examples include replacing single-use plastic with mushroom-based packaging, and cultivating fungi that digest toxic waste. A key proponent of such fungal fixes is Paul Stamets, who states his book Mycelium Running “will show how you can help save the world using mushrooms” (Stamets 2005, x).
However, while these projects might mitigate some of the harm done by extractive capitalism, I do not see them as offering a true alternative. This is because they repeat the pattern of extracting from nature to advance human agendas. As such, I have not considered them utopias.
How mushrooms work in utopia, not as utopia
Having explored the ways in which fungi are fulfilling a utopian function in the current fungal discourse, I realised these are not the same as the ways in which fungi are functioning in contemporary literary utopias.
Contemporary fungal discourses often project a lot onto the mushrooms. Sadler and Cohen Shabot for example say that fungi “challenge conventional notions of individuality” and “embody the fundamental ecological principle of interdependence” (Sadler and Cohen Shabot 2025, 6). Mershon says “They resist systems thinking” (Mershon 2020, 267). Rhiannon Rumble says “Fungi disrupt classifications, refusing binaries in a state of existence that seems to be and/and rather than either/or” (Rumble 2025, para 8). However, these are all things they interpret fungi as doing, they are not what fungi actually do.
In speculative fiction, fungi are not anthropomorphised. Instead, humans are made more fungal. In SF there is scope for characters to become mushroom in a fantastical way, by becoming fungal-human hybrids. And when they do, this provides a vantage point from which to reflect on human/nature and human/human relations in the real world.
Effectively, in speculative fiction the allegory works the other way around. Cicere puts it like this: “Fungal life does not provide an allegory for what human life might be like in capitalist ruins; instead, direct human interactions with fungi provide allegories for social scenarios; something fantastical is used to allegorize something real” (Cicere 2024, 76).
This is best explained with a few examples.
Kinning by Nisi Shawl
In Nisi Shawl’s Kinning, activists form kin-groups by inoculating themselves with the same strain of fungus. This gives them a heightened awareness of each other both physically (e.g. through touch, smell and hearing) and psychically, across distances.
The fungus enables them to form chosen family groups, which provide support and structure as they carry out their activism. The groups include blood and non-blood relations, platonic and sexual relationships, humans and animals.
The idea of finding kin across species is key to Donna Haraway’s environmental philosophy:
Making kin seems to me the thing that we most need to be doing in a world that rips us apart from each other, in a world that has already more than seven and a half billion human beings with very unequal and unjust patterns of suffering and well-being. By kin I mean those who have an enduring mutual, obligatory, non-optional, you-can’t-just-cast-that-away-when-it-gets-inconvenient, enduring relatedness that carries consequences. I have a cousin, the cousin has me; I have a dog, a dog has me.
[…] It’s not necessarily to be biologically related but in some consequential way to belong in the same category with each other in such a way that has consequences. If I am kin with the human and more-than-human beings of the Monterey Bay area, then I have accountabilities and obligations and pleasures that are different than if I cared about another place. Nobody can be kin to everything, but our kin networks can be full of attachment sites. I feel like the need for the care across generations is urgent, and it cannot be just a humanist affair (in Paulson 2019, para 19-20)
In Shawl’s fiction, the fungus works to put these individuals in a category together. This allows her to explore ideas of making kin that are relevant and urgent in the real world.
The Seep by Chana Porter
In Chana Porter’s The Seep, a spore-like alien lifeform, ‘invades’ humanity through the air and water. Once ingested, the alien alters the host’s mind to become more empathetic and aware of ecological connections.
The outcome of the invasion is objectively positive. People are respectful in their interactions with each other and even with objects. They understand the provenance of any object by touching it, perceiving where the tree that became the table grew. The Seep (as the alien is known) also grants people the ability to modify their bodies, for example to change gender, but also just for fun.
However, the text explores whether the ‘gentle invasion’ of The Seep really is benign and benevolent, given the non-consensual way it enters the human body. This prompts questions around free will and the real-world implications of desiring universal solutions to problems, even those as urgent as climate crisis and social injustice. The fungus therefore has a double function in The Seep. It both creates the utopia in the text and is the means through which the author critiques utopia.
Sorrowland by Rivers Solomon
In Rivers Solomon’s Sorrowland, a fungal infection intended to turn its hosts into biological weapons enables Vern, an escaped test subject, to fight back against her oppressors.
Vern is African American and her, and her community’s, exposure to the fungus recalls the history of medical experimentation on black bodies. The story has also been read as a neo-slave narrative, with Vern’s escape and pursuit mirroring that of an escaped slave chased by slave patrol (see Vergara 2023 for this reading).
As such, the key way in which the fungus in Sorrowland reflects the real world is through being imbued with historical and racial implication. In fungal discourses, fungi are often seen as something separate to human history from which to draw inspiration. Sorrowland challenges this separation. Conversely, the fungus in Sorrowland focuses attention on the history of colonisation and racial injustice on US soil.
Conclusion
The fungal turn might be offering utopia in a new guise, presented in the form of mushrooms. But in doing so, it does not bring anything new to utopia. Instead, it is simply another blueprint, another metaphor to use to express one’s desires, or another technological fix for the future.
The fungal in contemporary speculative fiction does, however, offer an intervention in utopia. It forces utopia to consider ecological connections, be reflexive about its own practices for thinking and imagining universal ‘better’ futures, and acknowledge history and race. This is something I will study further as part of my PhD research. So watch this space for more thoughts!
I will end by noting one last everyday utopian quality of mushrooms. That is, the joy you feel when you notice them. Start looking for mushrooms and moments of genuine excitement will punctuate your time outdoors. It’s also an easily shareable interest, which has engaged all generations of my family. The pictures accompanying this article (apart from the schizophyllum commune) are from a walk in Weston Woods, November 2025.
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