From monstrous mushrooms to mycological futures

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Contemporary genre narratives across film, TV, literature and video games are increasingly exploring the role offungi as part of speculative worldbuilding. Once feared for their alien, monstrous alterity and taxonomic uncertainty,a renewed cultural fascination with fungi and mycelium is prompting contemporary science fiction (SF) and horrortexts to reconsider fungi through the lens of nonhuman possibility. Incorporating genre studies, criticalposthumanism and formal close analysis, this thesis will explore how the fungal is used to explore the inescapableentanglement of human and nonhuman worlds and rethink ideas of human agency and subjectivity. In examininghow fungi are being deployed conceptually and formally in recent genre texts from across mediums, this thesis willexamine how fungi can help to imagine radical and hopeful forms of contemporary being and future survival at atime of planetary and interspecies crisis.