Fungi Functions

Cross-Species Imaginaries in Tade Thompson’s Wormwood Trilogy

Bibliographic Data

ID11610764
AuthorsK Crane (0000-0003-4890-5936, University of Rostock, corresponding author)
Year2022
Volume52
Issue3
Pages461-476
Publication date2022-07-26
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueZeitschrift für Literaturwissenschaft und Linguistik (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0049-8653 • E-ISSN: 2365-953X
PublisherJ.B. Metzler (PUBLISHER • DE)
DOI10.1007/s41244-022-00261-3
OpenAlexW4287981743
LanguageEN
References cited16

Science fiction (SF), through its various generic conventions, provides a stage for exploring many dimensions of the Anthropocene: It enables challenges to time, to species, to causalities, to space-time coherences, and also to singularity. Tade Thompson’s- Wormwood trilogy engages several non-linear metaphors in engendering a nonhuman other, most specifically internet networks and fungi becoming. The alien sentience rendered in the trilogy offers an – amorphous and yet simultaneously very concrete – other against which humans must rally, themselves at the brink of the threat of extinction. Wormwood’s xenosphere – an atmosphere permeated with ›xenoforms‹, a kind of alien fungi which can interact with humans – constitutes only one of the many ways in which this SF world challenges the modes with which we organise our knowledges of our world

Extinction (optical mineralogy · Sentience · Trilogy · Geographies of human-animal interactions · Space Science and Extraterrestrial Life · Utopian, Dystopian, and Speculative Fiction

Tools

Open DOIOpen Access