Nature’s internet

 

Fungi form an integral part of our biosphere, essential for decomposition and recycling of organic materials. Throughout the history of science fiction they have appeared as foodstuffs, infections, biocontamination, plagues, cures, ambulatory monsters, occasionally amicable sentients and even as possessing entities. However as scientific awareness of mycelial networks has developed, so science fiction has responded. Here I’m going to take a look specifically at fungal networks and interconnectivity in science and science fiction [1][2].

 

Mycelia are the extensive, strand-like fungal structures of which mushrooms are only the fruits. While each fungus organism develops from a single spore, their mycelial networks typically interconnect underground, blurring the boundaries between individuals and a collective. Mycelia transport chemicals, redistributing food, warning signals and hence information from point to point within the network. These networks can be extremely extensive, spreading under entire forests. They also connect to plant roots in a symbiosis known as mycorrhiza, again channelling required resources to the plant in question (often woody plants such as trees, shrubs and roses). Indeed, garden shrubs (including roses) are now often planted together with mycorrhizal fungus spores in order to encourage their establishment in the new environment.

 

The extent of information and chemical transport is sufficiently extensive that the role of mycelial networks has been described variously in the media as “nature’s internet” or the “wood-wide web”.

The networking capacity of mycelial networks lie at the centre of Sheri S Tepper’s novel Raising the Stones (novel, 1990). This focuses on the corporate-owned agricultural world of Hobbs Land. The occupants of Settlement One on Hobbs Land inherit a God from the native - and now extinct - Owlbrit people. This has led to health, comfort and peace … all of which suffers when the God dies. From the dust left behind - or the spores - a new God develops as a mycelial network which feeds on a dead human being. This spreads through the entire settlement and affects the inhabitants, restoring their peace of mind and prosperity. Their actions and attitudes appear to be guided on some instinctual, subconscious level - raising to conscious instruction when needed in certain individuals. Soon Gods are seeded (from cuttings of the mycelial mat) and their fruiting bodies (in the form of large, stonelike masses) erected in temples every settlement on Hobbs Land, bringing similar amity and prosperity to others.

Hobbs Land is set in a solar system with several inhabited planets, populated in a human diaspora from Earth centuries before and linked by Doors (essentially teleportation portals). Different religious sects occupy different regions, and some of these object to the Hobbs Land gods. As a result, religious conflict erupts, which the Hobbs Landers counter with planting mycelial mats (or, as they think of them, new Gods) at key locations on other planets, converting the extremists (and so asking questions about free will and the right of humans to retain beliefs and self will if that will harm others).

 

Interestingly, the Gods themselves are not native to Hobbs Land but instead arrived in a cataclysmic comet impact early in its history:

“When the skies had cleared at last, however, there had been a new inhabitant upon the coalesced world: a threadlike growth that spread from the point of impact outward until it lay everywhere within the soil and over the stones ang among the plants and among the clumsy, prototypical animals” (Raising the Stones, Tepper, Chapter 6).

 

It is never entirely clear whether the Gods are fully conscious in their own right, or acting instinctively and forming a gestalt of the consciousnesses in their network. These include cats and other plants and animals, as well as humans. The Gods also seem able to reshape matter to reproduce ideas in the minds of their participants (i.e. creating forests, lakes and even extinct creatures). The mechanism here is obscure. It is also a little unclear how the connection to humans and animals is achieved. While the mycelial networks are described as spreading under settlements and towns, only in a few rare instances do we hear of particularly intransigent people falling asleep and waking up with a fine down of mycelia connecting them to the ground. Certainly though, those in most contact with the Gods appear to receive instruction and guidance.

 

The properties of the mycelial network here here goes well beyond what we know Earth fungal networks to be capable of, but are broadly welcomed, despite (likely justified) fears amongst the characters over the corruption of free will and the threat to their self-determination.

Returning to Earth, and to the nearer future, Ian McDonald’s Chaga (novel, 1995), and Tade Thompson’s Wormwood Trilogy (novels, Rosewater, 2016; The Rosewater Insurrection, 2019; The Rosewater Redemption, 2019) share some interesting similarities. Both explore the consequences when an African city and its surrounds are affected by the arrival of a fungal entity from space.

 

Chaga describes the spreading of an alien biosphere from an impact site near Mount Kilimanjaro, swamping towns and eventually overwhelming Nairobi. The central character is a Northern Irish journalist who feels drawn to the site and to the African culture that is being both threatened and enriched by the alien environment. This is not a true fungus, being too alien - instead the chaga is formed of carbon fullerene mega-molecules known as buckyballs. However the language used throughout mixes forest, coral reef and fungal metaphors, speaking of spores and filaments, and stressing their interconnectedness in a way very reminiscent of mycelial networks:

“It’s smart. The trees talk. The roots connect, like the cells in your brain. They touch, they share and they think, but it is not any kind of intelligence we understand.” (pg 70, 1995 Gollancz edition)

 

A similar picture can be found in Rosewater and its sequels, where the entity known as Wormwood creates a bubble of alien life under a dome, around which the African city of Rosewater grows. The city becomes known as a place of healing, with anything from disease to severed limbs healed by Wormwood’s influence. This influence makes itself felt in the form of fungus spore-like structures described as exoforms. Not only can Wormwood form physical connections to any organic life or building in its vicinity through mycelial networking, it extends this into a contactless network which gives a small fraction of the humans infected with exoforms, sensitives, a telepathic and information-transfer connection known as the xenosphere.

 

Antifungals provide some protection against xenoforms, and the exoform network is a close (albeit extraterrestrial) analogue of Earth-native mycelial networks. This is reflected throughout in the language used and the description of the organisms. As the central character is informed:

 

… xenoforms are promiscuous with neural tissue. Once connected, it sets up duplex communication, despite the fact that mechano-receptors are afferents, i.e., they take impulses in the direction towards the central nervous system, not from it.

[...]

Once it forms a connection, the xenoform looks for other xenoforms around it to build a network and share information. It is quite extraordinary how far this data can travel. Some commentators also suspect there are two forms of communication between xenoforms. Adjacent cells use direct microtubular links, but there appears to be a quantum-based entanglement-style distant communication employed under special circumstances.

 

The trilogy focuses initially on a sensitive called Kaaro who attempts to investigate the influence of Wormwood. As he discovers, the xenosphere is the manifestation of an alien information gathering effort - to which humans were never intended to gain access. The sequels follow the subsequent events as the original creators of Wormwood follow up their plan to replace xenoform-permeated Earth life with themselves, and a number of characters are killed only to become ghosts of information uploaded to the xenosphere.

 

Thompson’s novels were widely praised and have been subjected to extensive academic study, much of it in the geopolitical and socioeconomic context of the African setting. As in other stories, the invasive properties of the mycelium-like exoform network asks questions about human autonomy and even the future of humanity itself, in this case in the context also of colonialism and politics. The fungal exoforms blur boundaries between human and alien, alive and unalive, between different species and between different planets.

There’s a fine line between stories of networked fungal intelligences and the much more numerous stories of human and animal possession by fungus (alien or otherwise). In most cases, these focus on the body horror of being subsumed, or on treating those infected in the tradition of zombie movies (as, for example, in the recent television series The Last of Us).

 

The Men of Greywater Station by Howard Waldrop and George R R Martin (short story, Amazing Stories, 1976) fits into this horror sub-genre of humans and animals being absorbed by a fungus that can be traced back at least to William Hope Hodgson’s A Voice in the Night (short story, 1909). All animal life, including humans, on the planet Greywater is susceptible to being infected with ever-present fungal spores, and infected animals and men are described as having strands of fungus hanging from the back of their heads and attacking with mindless determination. Where this differs from many earlier stories is in imagining the fungal mass as a single sentience - hostile to other intelligent life. The language here describes spores, rather than mycelia, but is nonetheless clearly describing a networked gestalt in which connections are made and information exported across large distances. Unlike some of the other examples discussed here, the human beings retain no individual consciousness but instead are used as mobile limbs for the dominant fungal entity. The unrelenting onslaught of fungus-affected life is contextualised against humanity’s own ongoing conflict against others.

 

This concept of a planet dominated by a single, mycelium-connected fungal intelligence recurs elsewhere. William C Tracy’s recent science fiction novel Of Mycelium and Men (book one of the Biomass Conflict series, novel, 2022) imagines a human generation ship arriving on a planet where they hope to found a colony. Instead, they find their landing site bounded by a planet-wide fungal mass which proves to be intelligent. After several generations of travel, it is perhaps unsurprising that the crew’s internal conflict and desire for families, leadership and a successful settlement forms the focus of the novel. However the alien ‘biomass’ is a conglomeration of animal, vegetable and fungal cells, with information mediated by viruses. Its intelligence is non-centralised, and uses individual fruiting bodies and motile organisms as sensory units. The failure of the settlers to recognise the sentience of the biomass causes fundamental problems with what was originally a curious and not overtly hostile being.

 

A more benign living planet mediated by fungi is described in the blockbuster film Avatar (2009). This describes an exomoon, Pandora, on which all life is connected by a neural network centred on a mother tree, which personifies the deity Eywa. Native animal life can connect directly into this network through an organ known as a queue which ends in slender white filaments that allow them to “plug in”. In the film we are told that:
“What we think we know - is that there's some kind of electrochemical communication between the roots of the trees. Like the synapses between neurons. Each tree has ten to the fourth connections to the trees around it, and there are ten to the twelfth trees on Pandora…”

“That's a lot, I'm guessing.”

“That's more connections than the human brain. You get it? It's a network - a global network.”

 

The language here is of roots, rather than fungi, but these are shown as rapidly growing fine white filaments (either in the Na’vi’s organs or emerging from the ground), which can form a dense mat - particularly in scenes where humans themselves commune with Eywa. The connection of the native sentient Na’vi to this network puts it potentially more on a spiritual than mycelial plane, but many observers have pointed out the parallels and inspirations from mycelial networks in forests which provide similar interlinking between tree roots and other plant life. The computer game Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora makes this more explicit, with “mycelial network” activities forming part of the game challenge.

 

However while the examples above all describe localised mycelial networks (albeit planet-wide in some examples) perhaps the most prominent example of mycelial networks in science fiction in recent years extends them further. The television series Star Trek: Discovery centres on a starfleet research ship attempting to develop a new form of faster-than-light drive. This is predicated on interaction with a vast mycelial network (formed primarily of the species Prototaxites stellaviatori) which extends not just across land masses but also through empty space and - crucially - subspace.

 

A normal Star Trek warp drive functions by distorting our normal four-dimensional space-time in order to shorten the distance to be travelled. By contrast, subspace is an alternate set of dimensions more akin to the science fictional concept of hyperspace. Every Star Trek series uses it for near-instantaneous communications - a message transmitted through subspace avoids travelling through the intervening distance in our real space-time and so is not subject to light travel time restrictions. Similarly, Discovery, using the Displacement Activated Spore Hub Drive, travels through subspace, vanishing from our familiar dimensions and reappearing elsewhere, rather than passing continuously between two points in real space. As a result, it can travel almost instantaneously, using the mycelial network that permeates subspace and real space to navigate along “the veins and muscles that hold our galaxies together.”

 

Discovery’s lead engineer Paul Stamets lists astro-mycologist as his primary profession [3]. The ship hosts a forest of fungus in a cultivation bay adjacent to its drive sections, and spores are injected into the drive chamber every time it is needed. As well as connecting spaces and being itself alive, the mycelium network is shown to host both intelligent species and animal life. Much of the first season of Star Trek: Discovery explores the use of the spore drive, the mycelial network, and its use - including access to Star Trek’s Mirror Universe. However directing the ship requires access to DNA from the rare creatures able to navigate the network naturally and so is limited to the experimental installation on Discovery herself. By the end of the second season, the USS Discovery itself is irretrievably removed from its own location in space-time, apparently destroyed (its sister ship having already been lost earlier in the series), and so, from Starfleet’s perspective the spore drive is a failed experiment, explaining why no other ship in the Star Trek universe is so equipped.

 

The mycelium network invoked by Star Trek: Discovery may be inspired by that observed here on Earth, but it’s fair to say that mycelia here do not (to the best of our knowledge) access subspace, instantaneous teleportation, other universes, or any of the other properties the Discovery’s cultivation bay and its contents demonstrate. Nor do tardigrades (microscopic life forms writ large in Discovery) have some of the properties assigned to them (you’ll have to watch the series to see them). It has nonetheless brought the existence of real world mycelial networks to a wider public attention.

 

The impact of mycelial networking in resource transport and support for ecosystems here on Earth is now well recognised by ecologists, arborists, mycologists and even gardeners. Ongoing studies of these networks show that they are likely amongst the largest organisms on Earth, with a single Armillaria fungus’ network spanning four square miles, and other examples found weighing hundreds of tonnes. These networks are not undiscriminating. A resource gradient is often seen, for example, between mature trees and younger, weaker plants such as saplings. This enables mature trees to support the next generation through nutrient and energy transfer despite overshadowing them. While some fungi have toxic or parasitic effects, the majority are believed to encourage a positive feedback loop that supports a forest ecosystem.

 

The recent rising awareness of these facts has been encouraged by the Netflix documentary Alien Worlds. This alternates science-fictional, computer generated scenes of natural world footage supposedly taken on a hypothetical exoplanet with factual information drawn from Earth, interviews with and footage of Earth scientists at work in equivalent ecosystems. The episode “Eden” (2020) discussed a possible circumbinary world, shown as orbiting a K+M class binary and with red vegetation. The pseudo-documentary focussed on the life cycle of grazers who crop a forest floor carpet of fungi, and the animals that predate upon them. One of the areas discussed was the role of mycelia in redirecting resources from older, more established trees to smaller trees struggling with shade - and thus promoting the continuity and sustainability of the forest.

 

The future of mycelial networks might be stranger still. On a purely practical level, mycelial growth is already used to form sustainable, custom-moulded packaging, and has been proposed as a material for growth of habitats for human spaceflight or materials for colonisation (already a use reflected in science fictions such as Paul MacAuley’s short story Wild Honey (2015), where it is used to form the shell of a drone, and in Tracy’s Of Mycelium and Men). On a more speculative level, the analogy of mycelial networks to the human brain (pointed out in Avatar), and to the internet (as recognised in popular media and in examples such as the Wormwood Trilogy), have both been reflected in discussion of the potential use of mycelia and their mushroom fruiting bodies for computing.

 

There is a growing awareness of the fungal kingdom and of the important role of mycelial networks in Earth ecosystems. With a prominent science fiction such as Star Trek: Discovery adopting mycelial networks as a core feature, that awareness is spreading into popular culture. It seems likely that fungal networks will only appear more often in science fiction in the future - what’s less likely is that writers will imagine anything significantly more surprising than the truth under all our feet.

 

“Nature’s SF Internet”, Elizabeth Stanway, Cosmic Stories blog. December 2024.

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Notes:

 

[1] I’m specifically not going to look at every story which involves mushrooms or fungal entities, of which there are many, but instead focus here on their networking capabilities.

 

[2] I’m an astrophysicist not a mycologist, amateur or otherwise, so my apologies for any errors that may have slipped through despite my best efforts.

 

[3] Discovery’s astromycologist is named after real-world mycologist Paul Stamets, amongst whose popular science books is Mycelium Running (2005). Discovery showrunner Aaron Harberts also referenced the book as a source in the After Trek discussion programme.