Plants in Science Fiction

by Katherine E. Bishop

In a short story from 2004, ‘Corpse Mouth and Spore Nose’, a detective examining a dead body that appears to be overcome by fungus falls victim to a similar fate.37 The detective stands over the ‘living corpse’ with sprouted mushrooms over his body and a ‘frozen blue-bulb of a fungus’ in place of his genitals, and he watches as the ‘mushroom man’ opens his eyes and mouth to reveal countless corpses ‘three inches tall’, coughing them up as they spill towards the detective’s legs. I would be remiss not at least to note the possible queer significance of the sprouting of a fungal nonhuman (already classically phallic) phallus in the place of the original as perhaps a male-remaking through a phallic death, even possibly the re-imagining of reproductive capacities and sensitive, maybe even sexual co-minglings in a weird landscape. But the narrator is not so excited by these queer possibilities: he holds his gun up to the mushroom man’s head and says, ‘I. Do. Not. Believe. In. You’, and fires.38 The passage that follows reads as a clear forebear to The Southern Reach Trilogy, where spores are inhaled, their ingestion into the lungs as violent as the sapling’s was in ‘Monsters’:

  He breathed in deeply, through his nose … A spore entered his nose … He sneezed, but the spore hooked itself into the soft flesh inside his left nostril. The pain made him jerk upright and he howled … now he felt the spore slide down into the back of his throat and begin to crawl back up into his mouth … He dug into his mouth with as many fingers as he could fit. The burrowing sensation became more intense.39

  At just the moment when the detective thinks he has eliminated the hybrid breathing body with a mouth full of corpses, he himself breathes in deeply, a sign of relief. But this breath only infects him with a ‘thousand snow-white spores’ and activates his own subsequent transformation.

  Though fungal bodies have much in common with vegetal bodies, they maintain key differences. Fungi are more closely related to animals than plants: they do not perform photosynthesis but instead live on dead or decomposing matter that they use as a source of carbon. Most reproduce by spores, tiny particles that can germinate sexually, asexually or both. Fungi are hardly contained organisms; they form complex systems of mycorrhizae, symbiotic underground relationships with other fungal and vegetal life. Most spores that are released never become a new organism, though many can stay alive in search of a mate for weeks. Asexual reproduction through the release of spores produces new organisms that are genetically identical to the parent organism, whereas sexual reproduction (occurring more often in adverse environmental conditions) introduces genetic variation into fungi populations.40 Spores seem to be a source of wonder and possibility in VanderMeer’s work, and this is in part due to their complex and radically different modes of survival and reproduction as well as their role as agents within communal and symbiotic environments.

  In ‘Corpse Mouth’, wonder and fear are evidenced by the detective’s fascination with examining the strange dead body coupled with his attempted refusal to believe in its existence and desire to destroy it. But much like the sapling, the spores burrow back into his mouth and throat, integrating themselves as inseparable despite the detective’s best efforts to claw them out. Also, like the effects of the sapling, these spores transform the detective in both body and mind: ‘[T]here was a great Nothing in his head. Not a thought. Not a memory or even Memory. There was only the relentless squirming of the spores as they raced through his body … He did not even have his own mind.’41 The sporous takeover remaps his consciousness and erases his memories from a previous existence. They rewrite the narrative of the past through erasure of the individual, an example of what Chen and Luciano point to as the ‘promise and costs of the call to move “beyond” the human’.42

  In The Southern Reach Trilogy, stories are literally told by fruiting bodies. The trilogy is told from the perspectives of several people associated with the governmental branch called the Southern Reach, which over the past thirty years has sent numerous research expeditions into a quarantined area known as Area X. The contours of Area X are impossible to define, but one possible reading is that this swath of land has undergone catastrophic environmental change that has made it dangerous for human life. All members of previous expeditions have either disappeared or returned from Area X to find they have a particularly malign form of cancer. The first novel, Annihilation, opens with the beginning of the twelfth expedition, as a team of four women from various fields stumble upon a structure they call a tower or tunnel. The biologist, the narrator, while climbing the steps downward into the structure, notices something very weird:

  At about shoulder height … clinging to the inner wall of the tower, I saw what I first took to be dimly sparkling green vines progressing down into the darkness … Then, as I stared, the ‘vines’ resolved further, and I saw that they were words, in cursive, the letters raised about six inches off the wall … the letters were made from … a type of fungi or other eukaryotic organism …

  ‘Words? Made of fungi?’ the surveyor said.43

  The biologist leans in closely to make out the words, and ‘Triggered by a disturbance in the flow of air, a nodule in the W chose that moment to burst open and a tiny spray of golden spores spewed out. I pulled back, but I thought I had felt something enter my nose, experienced a pinprick.’44 In a mode that has begun to feel familiar in VanderMeer’s fiction, the vegetal (or is it fungal?) intrudes into the human, this time through linguistic and material invasion. As Gry Ulstein has pointed out, ‘the role of language and words in The Southern Reach suffuses language with an organic, living quality, which suggests its inherent influence over and connection to the flesh, the body, the corporeal.’45 The tissue of the moss-like vines is fleshy, the spores it produces its vehicles of infiltration. The story itself unfurls again, this time in the form of the sporous invasion. Reading this moment alongside the invasion of the ‘story-creature’ in ‘Monsters’, VanderMeer’s work seems quite clearly invested in the power and responsibility of stories in our current moment to effect real change.

  The biologist in Annihilation undergoes dramatic transformations throughout the rest of the trilogy. She first experiences a low-grade cold, fever, faintness, itchiness and a cough. But these symptoms eventually fade to make room for what she will call throughout the book ‘a brightness’. As she changes, she experiences the nonhuman world anew, she becomes ‘so attuned to [her] environment … animal, natural or unnatural’, and even the wind ‘was like something alive; it entered every pore of me.’ She goes on to recall that ‘just a day ago, I had been someone else’.46 Eventually she will transform so foundationally that she will no longer be the biologist. In a kind of doubling that perhaps foreshadows the doubled plant-brother of ‘Monsters’, the biologist (now called Ghost Bird) finds that she lives with the memories of her previous self while simultaneously knowing that she is no longer that person. In the trilogy’s third book, Acceptance, she asks, ‘What kind of life is this … That you could live within the memories of another and think of them as real, a second skin, and yet so utterly false?’47 The sporous infiltration again performs a kind of doubling and a simultaneous erasure. Whereas in ‘Monsters’ a new ‘plant-brother’ is born of the narrator and in ‘Corpse Mouth’ the detective’s memories are completely erased, here the biologist is both herself and not herself, an imperfect double.

  These explorations of various forms of doubling by spores suggest a queer form of reproduction inspired by spore-producing fungal and vegetal life. In her essay ‘Fear of a Queer Plant?’, Sandilands thinks about the queerness inherent in vegetal life and relations. She writes, ‘sexualized botanical horror stories were (and are) articulations of multiple biopolitical anxieties, and plants were (and are) complex queer agents that demand attention to specific entanglements of sex, gender, race, and species.’48 These biopolitical anxieties, what Sandilands calls ‘evolutionary self-doubt’ paired with the fear that plants may possess sentience, emerged in response to plants’ movement ‘up the “scale of organized beings” toward animality’ while
also seemingly attaining actual agency – ‘even intelligence’. Though not quite sexualised botanical horror stories, VanderMeer’s fiction repeatedly stages vegetal and fungal transformations as the result of reproduction inspired by (maybe even carried out by) plants or fungi through sporous asexual reproduction and inter-species gestation. If plants are ‘complex queer agents’ as Sandilands suggests, they are also the agents of radical change in VanderMeer’s work. It is through intimate, though sometimes quite violently so, relations with the human, that plant and fungal bodies undo stable categories of identity, self and species. The jarring, invasive sporous intimacies in VanderMeer may also serve as a reflection on similar anxieties exacerbated in the context of a changing climate. Does thinking about plants as sentient, as capable of queer intimacies, change the way humans will treat plant life in the future? Will understanding plants as complex queer subjects stop deforestation, the use of pesticides or factory farming more broadly speaking?

  ‘Corpse Mouth and Spore Nose’, when read together with The Southern Reach Trilogy and ‘This World is Full of Monsters’, demonstrates VanderMeer’s obsessions with vegetal and sporous infiltration into the body. Transformed by these nonhuman, organic agents, the human body is repeatedly ‘hijacked’, and so is the mind.49 The arc of VanderMeer’s fiction thereby suggests that a radical reconfiguration of the human is either necessary, unavoidable or both in present and future ecological conditions. Vegetal and other spore-producing bodies are thus not mere backdrops or setting in VanderMeer’s weird fiction; they are integrated into the narrative as well as into the bodies that populate his stories. This integration in enacted differently across his work, but it often occurs as the result of breathing in spores, which in turn produces delirium, confusion, fantasies and delights.

  Airy Dreams

  Throughout her contribution to the philosophical exploration Through Vegetal Being (2017), the feminist philosopher Luce Irigaray meditates on the atmospheric relation between the vegetal and the human. It is the air that unites their shared spaces, and breath that mediates those spaces. She writes of her relationship with plants:

  We were, in a way, in communion with one another. Air put us into living relations even if we did not assume the same role with respect to it. Through air, I participated in a universal exchange from which my tradition cut me off. Thus, I was alone and not alone. I took part in a universal sharing. Gradually, I experienced such an involvement, and this brought me comfort, gratitude, and also responsibility. I became a citizen of the world, first as an inhabitant of the earth who joined in a sharing of air.50

  Air is the material of communal existence with most forms of life and nonlife, and it helps Irigaray frame herself, through air, as a citizen of the world through this experience. Her sense of being simultaneously ‘alone and not alone’ through ‘living relations’ with plants is her embrace of communal living in which she finds herself no longer alone (in the world, in her body). Vegetal life enables an environment that is both liveable for her as well as liveable in her. Negotiating between maintaining selfhood on the one hand and embracing complete collectivity is, I think, a central tenet to her sense of vegetal being. The fiction explored in this chapter has also presented these tensions inherent in forming embodied communities with the vegetal.

  Atmosphere is the space in which Irigaray finds connection with the vegetal. Quite simply, the act of breathing is profound for Irigaray. She writes that it ‘reminded me of the difference between the other and myself. Losing our identity to form a whole with the others, be they human or not human, amounts to giving up our own breathing, and this can lead to a terrible struggle for survival.’ Though for Irigaray, maintaining some form of oneself, what she calls one’s ‘singularity’, is possible, one must ‘remain capable of transformation’, to form community with (nonhuman) others. Traditions that neglect the importance of breath and the ways in which breath unites all living beings, have ‘rendered our subjectivity both weak and rigid because it is frightened of any change’.51 It is through the exchange of air and breath that Irigaray locates the possibilities of more malleable subjectivity shared with nonhumans, an exchange which this chapter has begun to explore in Jeff VanderMeer’s vegetally minded weird fiction.

  It is also through speculation of spores’ airy passages that the anthropologist Anna Tsing’s research has traversed. In her book-length study of the matsutake mushroom, Tsing revels in learning about the travels of mushroom reproductive spores. She writes, ‘There is something about the stratosphere that inspires airy dreams’, her thoughts taking off with ‘drifting spores … across eons, across continents’.52 Though VanderMeer’s fictional spores are much more localised, spreading and gestating between bodies, one might also locate in his work these kinds of ‘airy dreams’, though they are often more terrifying at first. The ambiguity of transformation in his work is indeed one of the central elements of transformation. As the biologist asks immediately following her inhalation of the spores in Annihilation, ‘I was unlucky – or was I lucky?’53 Transformation through sharing of air changes bodies so completely that the consciousness housed within them feels alienated from the person they used to be. With changed memories, and thus the historical narrative of one’s own life altered and even erased, new forms of consciousness accompany new forms of embodiment made possible, even necessary, by the plant. These forms of embodiment forgo normative notions of the bounded self in favour of communal, attentive and integrated trans-species ethics. In Chen’s transformative work on queerness, race and disability in toxic environments, they write, ‘[s]tanding before you, I ingest you. There is nothing fanciful about this. I am ingesting your exhaled air, your sloughed skin.’54 Chen is describing what they call ‘queer ingestion’, an intensity and potency charged in the very air we share through breath. Refusing to forgo the animacy of nonhuman objects, Chen reminds us that the very air we breathe challenges the integrity of the self and its boundaries, as well as the conditions and possibilities of living in a toxic world.

  Though the forms of weird embodiment I have explored in this chapter are attempts to amend or critique the ‘old weird’ as exemplified by Lovecraft, I nonetheless find his early definition of weird fiction useful here, as it perhaps suggests that the weird has always had an airy and intensely embodied quality. He writes in an often quoted phrase: ‘The true weird tale has something more than secret murder, bloody bones, or a sheeted form clanking chains according to rule. A certain atmosphere of breathless and unexplainable dread of outer, unknown forces must be present.’55 The atmospheres that Lovecraft’s weird writing evoke have made him a particularly attractive figure for literary-philosophical studies in the Anthropocene, a moment wherein climate change and ecological collapse signal looming (and many already arrived) dangers that are far too massive and interrelated for human consciousness alone to possibly comprehend fully.

  VanderMeer’s weird writing is starkly different from Lovecraft’s in both its politics and prose, demonstrating the dynamism and importance of a new weird, reworked as a contemporary mode of ecological fiction. The fact that the atmospheres in VanderMeer’s fiction are revealed to be intensely shared is not, as in Lovecraft, a source of horror, but produces instead strange affinities and attitudes towards transformation and intimate becoming-with-others, human or not. Neel Ahuja has written that ‘[i]n ever more precarious intimacy with the shrinking number of living species, we inhabit a queer atmosphere in which the ether of the everyday is marked by senses of transformation and crisis’;56 it is a space of ‘unpredictable touching, attractions, and subtle violences’.57 I am especially drawn to reading VanderMeer’s weird renderings of atmospheric and intimate ingestions as a form of queerness in the Anthropocene that must exceed the human in order to understand the relation between queer and the human as ‘contingent rather than stable’.58 VanderMeer’s imaginative vegetal and sporous embodiment may prompt us, then, to think a bit more seriously about how to be-with others better, or about how we have alread
y long ‘been-with’ others, in the queerest way, in shared ethers.59

  10 The Botanical Ekphrastic and Ecological Relocation

  Katherine E. Bishop

  Though rooted in classical literature and rhetoric, ekphrasis has been the subject of renewed attention in modern poetry, fiction and literary criticism. Examples of mimetic ekphrasis in poetry, that is, poems that represent known visual works, include W. H. Auden’s discussion of Bruegel’s Landscape with the Fall of Icarus in ‘Musée des Beaux Arts’, John Keats’s ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’ and ‘Nude Descending a Staircase’, X. J. Kennedy’s contemplation on Marcel Duchamp’s abstract painting of the same name. Others uses of ekphrasis, particularly in novels, work on a more notional basis, as epitomised in Achilles’ impossible shield from the Iliad, a coterminous description and interpretation of an imagined work of art. Such verbal descriptions of visual art, as ekphrasis is now commonly defined, reach into the middle ground between seeing and saying, between foreground and background. They create contact zones between the artist, the perceiver and the reader that allow the text itself to slip between forms rather than reinforcing boundaries – where do we draw the lines of what constitutes art? In this sense, as W. J. T. Mitchell argues, all ekphrasis is ultimately notional, as at its root it’s about unknowability: ‘it seeks to create a specific image that is to be found only in the text as its “resident alien”’, while encouraging speculation about the nature of visualisation, art and reality.1

  Following Julia Kristeva’s notion that quoting can provide a way to ‘accommodate’ rather than overtake the quoted text, Asbjørn Grønstad argues that ekphrasis can ‘allow expanse, not possession’.2 This sense of accommodation is always complicated by the author’s/perceiver’s authority in their act of interpretation, but it also makes visible their act of seeing, illuminating what lies beneath their lines of sight. This ‘showing seeing’, as Mitchell frames it, takes on ‘not just the social construction of vision, but the visual construction of the social’.3 Ekphrasis, thus, emphasises not just what we see but how we see. It is a way of realising that our sightlines and blind spots are not natural but constructed.