Reaching Out

Posted by Maya Horton

https://strangehorizons.com/wordpress/non-fiction/how-to-grow-a-city-biogenic-architecture-and-symbiotic-evolution/

https://strangehorizons.com/wordpress/?p=58958

What makes something alive? Well, it depends on your perspective, since there is no standard definition of life. Despite this, most people are comfortable with the idea that life is an organism’s path through time, beginning with birth, experiencing changes such as various growth and reproduction, and ending in death.¹

As manned exploration of the solar system comes ever-closer to becoming an everyday reality rather than a science fiction device, speculative fiction writers have the opportunity to imagine new possibilities and niches without the overheads of running an expensive laboratory. We also have the opportunity to consider pitfalls, drawbacks, and impacts long before they happen. Or maybe we’re just a bunch of daydreamers, which is where I come in.

Imagine you’ve been asked to design a self-sustaining human habitation on a lifeless world, using only the genetic blueprints you’ve found on Earth. It needs to provide food, shelter, waste recycling, and some means of air purification. It also has to play a role in the long-term terraforming of your world. You start with a traditional biodome structure, but soon run into problems. Waste decays too slowly. Greenhouse gases build up too fast. Plants die, and the soil won’t sustain new life. Where to go from here?

Of course, there’s no shortage of science fiction exploring this topic. In the Monk & Robot books, Becky Chambers re-examines our hypothetical relationship with nature. In Aurora, Kim Stanley Robinson explores planetary inhospitability and closed-system collapse. Tade Thompson’s Wormwood trilogy asks us to radically reconsider our views of symbiosis and its influence on human society. There are dozens, if not hundreds, of similar examples.

While we’re brainstorming solutions to future problems, let me introduce you to the biogenic city. This improvement on the standard SFF staple biodome comes with numerous free upgrades, such as radiation shielding, advanced nutrient cycling, cheap protein, and living shelter. The drawbacks? You might end up with killer mushrooms. Read on!

About Fungi

As a phylogenetic kingdom, fungi are neither plants nor animals, but have a distinct existence all on their own. They exist from the microscopic to the macrocellular and can be found in almost every environment on earth, including in the air and under the sea. While some form the heaviest, densest, and most complex organisms ever discovered, others can travel thousands of kilometres unassisted through the atmosphere, reaching heights of several kilometres.

Of course, this is no different to the diversity of life found in animals or plants. And yet it is this very sense of separation from the more recognisable realms of plants and animals that gives it so much potential as a tool for science or the imagination.

Fungi’s Role in the Ecosystem

Before moving on to the task of designing living cities, it is worth recapping the role of fungi and what they provide. This gives a baseline with which to design new systems and structures later.

Fungi play a major role in soil building and substrate integrity. Hyphae, the long filaments that make up the bulk of fungal growth, function as a binding agent in soil. They hold particles together, form aggregate materials, and help create proper draining and pH levels. This is crucial in allowing for the long-term stability of a habitat and maintaining requirements for other species that live there.

But they are also often early colonisers, changing and modifying their environment to create new niches and different habitat structures. Without fungi, it would be much harder for other life to adapt and evolve. Indeed, there could be up to around four million different species of fungi, up to 90 percent of which are likely to still be unknown to science. The roles, function, and existence of these are likely to be deeply embedded into their environments, since this is certainly true for the known species.

It is precisely for this reason that designing novel habitats for fungi first, rather than introducing a few key species later as an afterthought, has so much potential. In the classic non-fiction work Entangled Life, Merlin Sheldrake argues that fungi are “infrastructure engineers” that can find design solutions to even the most complex problems.²

Symbiosis and Convergent Evolution

A lichen is a symbiotic organism formed between a fungus and an alga (and sometimes a cyanobacteria). The fungus provides shelter, stability, and protection, while the alga photosynthesises and produces much-needed sugars. Together, they form a single symbiotic organism for the benefit of both.

Lichens are by far the most successful form of symbiosis on Earth. The strategy of combining fungi and algae is so beneficial to both that it has evolved independently no less than ten times throughout history (other underappreciated examples include corals and mangroves). The power of this combination allows lichen to survive in some of the most extreme environments on Earth—already providing potential for science fiction worldbuilding!

In this context, fungi acts as a container, providing a stable substrate in environments where there may be no soil, or indeed any organic material at all, for traditional plants to grow in. As a symbiotic organism, they occupy an ecological niche that allows other plants and animals to move into an area by providing food and shelter where there was otherwise none.

There is an extra benefit, too. Lichens don’t just convert sunlight to sugars through photosynthesis. They absorb heat and store it, radiating it back out into the environment later once the sun has gone down. Their rough surfaces can trap moisture, creating tiny oases in otherwise barren environments. They break down rocks, form natural barriers, and add structure in barren wastelands. As pioneer species, they alter the chemical and physical environment, providing habitable focal points for plants, animals, bacteria, and indeed other fungi. From the first nucleation of a microhabitat in an otherwise inhospitable environment, this symbiotic relationship between algae and fungi creates a space where water, soil, vegetation, and animals can exist.

Finally, more lichens can grow in more extreme parts of that environment—such as the tops of trees—creating a patchwork, fractal-like pattern of life. The larger macroscopic life can become, the more sprawling, complex networks they can support, right down to microscopic levels.

This happens over and over again in the global ecosystem, but even more interestingly, current research is looking into the potential of creating synthetic lichens and deliberate symbionts, to create targeted, specific compounds and novel species for bioengineering.³ Since the component species remain separate, and it is only the relationship between them that is being artificially constructed, such research has wide applications.

Fungi’s role as a symbiont doesn’t end with lichen. It can form essential bonds with every other phylogenetic kingdom. Fungal relationships with bacteria would form a research paper of its own, and its role in animal digestion is fundamental to the evolution of certain kinds of vertebrates. Fungi fix nutrients into plants, provide shelter and protection, and reduce the risk of dangerous disease by breaking down waste materials more rapidly. In some cases—such as that of Monotropa uniflora, the surreal ghost pipe plant—a plant cannot photosynthesise, and survives by consuming sugars produced directly from mycorrhizal fungi within tree roots. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the species is also known for its ethnobotanical uses.⁴ Certainly, it is not difficult to see the possibilities for such interactions to form the basis of new life on alien worlds, particularly if subterranean or with varying access to sunlight.

Indeed, the role of fungi on Earth is so central that any consideration of a human-viable offworld environment should place them at the centre too.

The ghost pipe plant

Fungi and Biogenic Materials

What factors must you consider when growing a city from scratch? There’s more than you might think. For a start, there are all the services that humans need and expect, including recreation, justice, transport, education, third spaces, and a sense of identity, to begin with. But imagine a city on a secondary world: are there additional structures that need to be built in? Food generation, air recycling, a water cycle? As secondary world architects, we are responsible for building in all the services that nature creates for free.

Moreover, we might be comfortable enough designing for other people, since if we know a city, we know what it does or doesn’t need to provide. But what if we’re designing for species other than us? For radically different needs and scales, whether physical or temporal? How do we plan for a multiscale, multi-use, multi-species environment? Part of the problem comes from knowing where to start, and there are two options for doing this. We can start with the anthropocentric view: what does a human being need to survive? What plants, animals, and habitats do we need to bring with us in order to feel at home?

In this framework, we need ways to capture, sanitise, and transport water. We need space for food growth, waste recapture and purification, and places for nature to exist on its own terms. We need homes, workplaces, communication networks, and the ability to stay fit and healthy. We may want safe environments for pets and families in time (standard requirements for distant world habitations in space operas).

Of course, not everyone is going to be comfortable with this purely anthropocentric (and, often, culturally biased) perception of “human” need, and with good reason. There’s no rule to stop us designing a city from absolute scratch: if we are designing for biogenics, what do those species need—not just to perform a function, but to thrive? What symbiotic relationships can they form with what novel species? How do they prefer to optimally store and transport water and nutrients? What are their preferred parameters for growth and repair? Can we, as human beings, fit our lives into that? The answers to these questions are, unfortunately, still largely the domain of science fiction writers rather than grounded in academic research.

Thankfully, biogenic design gives us the opportunity to focus on any or all of these things. But for the sake of this article, I will reluctantly focus on anthropocentric architecture in the standard context of post-terrestrial settlement. First of all, let’s take a step back and start with the very basic building blocks for our offworld setting.

Ecosystem Services and Natural Capital

The two most obvious uses for fungal species in a city design is through bioremediation—breaking down waste materials and eliminating toxins—and food production, whether through direct use of high-nutrient mushrooms or through the fermentation and preservation of less digestible foodstuffs. These basic ecosystem services are “built in” to city design, but a truly biogenic city has benefits that far transcend what can be imagined by policy and economics.

The most powerful benefit for an offworld city comes in the form of radiation shielding. Many fungal species, particularly those that are incorporated into lichen, offer high amounts of protection against ultraviolet radiation, making them perfect superstructures in environments without atmospheric protection, reducing the specifications required for more traditionally imagined domes and, in some circumstances, providing temperature regulation and heat stores for colder times. Many species also produce bioluminescence, giving free light in environments (such as the moon) where access to daylight may be out of sync with the natural cycles expected by life on Earth.

When your city is grown, not made, you can adjust conditions to suit all those that live there. A lichen city can grow along a wide Martian plain, allowing sprawling single-storey protection, food production, and moisture gathering while still offering protection from violent sandstorms. If you focus only on sealing internal areas and living spaces, the amount of energy and resources needed to create a breathable habitat are markedly reduced.

At the same time, if you find yourself on a craggy rock world, with steep but otherwise protected cliffs, a city grown from a modified bracket fungi allows you to maximise the vertical space available. Indeed, whatever circumstances happen to arise, there is likely to already be an exact or approximate solution contained already within Earth’s genetic playbook.

Clearly, this is yet another area that is already rich with examples from SFF. If our physical environment shapes the ecological niches that evolve to make use of them, then it can be argued that social structures evolve as an additional layer on top of that. There are plenty of possibilities for egalitarian, anarcho-syndicalist, socialist, permacultural, or any other form of post-capitalist or uncapitalist ecologically driven society. Indeed, almost the entirety of the cli-fi subgenre explores alternative economies and ecological realities. A fungal city—fundamentally symbiotic, genetically cooperative, and designed around long-term circularity and habitat creation for future generations—reduces the need for product-driven societies, and thus reduces or removes economic hierarchies and all of the social and planetary harm that comes with it.

Biomaterials

The role of fungi, and in particular its subterranean mycelium, is already being explored for its potential in biomaterials and biostructures. The benefits of biomaterials include easy custom shaping, strengthening and self-repair, sustainability and circular economy, and negative carbon footprints plus a variety of secondary and tertiary downstream benefits. Let’s take a deeper look at each in turn.

One of the main benefits of a biomaterial comes in its capacity for modification. In recent years, there has been a considerable resurgence in interest in the different uses for fungi across different industries. Many of these applications focus on creating a substrate and then injecting mycelium into it to create a strong and living structure. While many start-ups focus on creating versions of traditional building materials such as bricks, in some cases the focus is more on developing a kind of fungal papier-mâché that can be used for furniture, household items, and even buildings.

In the most sustainable cases, the substrate itself comes from waste materials from another industry, and some of the most common examples are sawdust, pulp and paper, or agricultural waste. When combined with frames of wire, timber, or other materials, the endless capacity for customisation becomes clear.

Of course, when we imagine a fungal city, what comes to mind probably isn’t paper pulp held together with mycelium, but the vast fruiting bodies we are used to seeing in woodlands when temperatures fall. For those who are drawn to what could be rather than what is, it’s rather more romantic to imagine falling asleep below vast lamellae stretching overhead like rafters.

So how feasible is something like that? Well, of course, it depends on what you’re asking.

Photo: Alan Rockefeller, CC

Fungi, largely through mycelium, can grow horizontally for vast distances. The famous Honey Mushroom, or Humongous Fungus, in Oregon is considered one of the largest organisms on Earth. It extends around 3.5 square miles underground (estimates vary), weighs up to 35,000 tons and may be up to 8,700 years old. The species, Armillaria ostoyae, is also responsible for forming several other giant fungal colonies.

But how tall can it grow? Well, on average, its fruiting bodies extend around 15cm above ground.

Of course, there are other taxa with fruit bodies that are much more suited to our speculative purposes. Some of the largest include Phellinus ellipsoideus, with a fruit body of more than half a ton, and Rigidoporus ulmarius, which can grow to over four metres.

By far the largest known fungi, and one of the first known giant organisms to have evolved on Earth, was the enormous Prototaxites which grew up to eight metres tall and is dated back to the Early Devonian. While research increasingly casts doubt over whether it was a fungus at all or a member of an entirely separate lineage, what is known about its novel composition and structure can serve as another source of inspiration about what can theoretically be grown. Prototaxites had a unique columnar shape, held together with a tubular structure, which would have provided it with extra stability at perhaps a lower metabolic cost compared to more solid structures.

One of the biggest downsides of a fungal city is its lack of strength, particularly when considering fungal fruit bodies compared to mycelium or even lichens. Fungi really comes into its own when combined with other species or natural substrates.

A major concern about the use of mycelium as a building material is that it has a lower compressive strength compared to other materials such as concrete, making it less suitable as a building material. However, this concern can be waived, or at least reconsidered, in a speculative setting.

Let’s take the example of a lunar city. One of the best ways to strengthen our hypothetical structures is by enriching them, and there are many species of fungi and lichen that naturally incorporate rock and dust into their own structures, creating structures that are stronger and more resilient as a consequence.

Recently, a team of researchers successfully grew chickpeas in simulated lunar regolith, using a fungal complex very commonly found in terrestrial agriculture. They achieved some manner of successful growth in all mixtures, including pure regolith. Other studies have shown that the extremophile Cryomyces antarcticus can survive on both lunar and Martian rock, and can handle exposure to hostile conditions in space.

Moreover, when we think of a city structure, we tend to think of our needs on Earth. Vast skyscrapers, steel and concrete, and the ability to withstand all conditions. This is not the case elsewhere in the solar system. While the exact composition would depend on the needs of a city—grown within a safe and carefully controlled biodome, or left to fend for itself on an exposed surface—our role as writers is to account for any possibility. So let us return to our moon base and see whether fungi can meet some or all of our building needs.

In lower lunar gravity, the need for materials with a high compressive strength is reduced. Materials need to withstand less compression for the same height of structure due to the reduced gravity, and additionally, there is no atmospheric pressure to contend with, nor the kinds of strong weather conditions that a traditional building would have to withstand. You still have to protect against the impact of falling or stumbling objects, but a whole range of defences against this have evolved throughout the fungal kingdom. The imagination can run wild in trying to predict ways that a living city might defend itself against drunken wanderers stopping for a late-night snack.

One serious potential impact on the moon is that of micrometeorites. These small, sharp, piercing impacts can cause severe harm to traditional building materials, resulting in the risk of lost oxygen and decompression. And yet, fungal species are notoriously self-healing, with many species exhibiting mycelia which rapidly respond to impacts by repairing the gaps. Indeed, the communicative networks that facilitate this could well be utilised for early detection of structural failures, allowing for much faster detection of problems without running the risk of microscopic tears being left undetected, as in traditional materials.

Finally, while lunar regolith itself is relatively stable once you deal with the problem of direct sunlight, the problem of encountering radioactive material on other planets is reasonably high through natural radiation found in rocks. Direct radiation removal through Cladosporium species that may help human beings colonise areas with more active, and dangerous, forms of geological radiation, allowing a first-pass of clean-up that makes way for further waves of bioremediation.

All raw materials come from somewhere, and the recycling of previously living material into substrate for future life is fundamental. Without decomposition from bacteria and fungi, among other processes, mass and nutrients cannot be recycled back into the ecosystem. Life is fundamentally circular in a way that development and technology is struggling to catch up with.

Designing for circularity is one of the biggest benefits of a grown city. Early iterations create the raw materials that will be used later, rather than having to destructively mine for them. Inhabitants of a city can design and grow their own homes without requiring huge capital. Repairs and redesign can be personally driven and tailored to individual circumstances and cultures, reducing dependence on socioeconomics. While no development can ever keep its environment pristine—I will assume strict controls on introducing biological agents onto another world—there is a big difference between building from the surface of a world, rather than eating into it to build around it. The more material that can be grown—particularly from the waste of other industries – the less needs to come from destructive, single-use manufacturing. Since the latter is the main current model of development, even moderate reductions in raw material use allows for increased longevity.

Indeed, mycelium and fungi come into their own in offworld settings. Extremophiles can function in low, indeed very low, temperature environments, reducing or even removing the requirement for energy-intensive manufacturing that requires high temperatures to operate. This leads to much lower initial startup and manufacturing costs, as well as lower initial waste and pollution.

Some fungal species produce calcium oxalate crystals as a natural byproduct of their metabolic process. These sharp spikes or crystals can act as a carbon sink, but also have the potential to be collected and used for other domestic or industrial uses: they can be made into ceramic glazes for creativity and durability, used in the production of cleaning agents, made into a waterproof sealant, or used in manufacturing and pyrotechnology, among others. The more byproducts can be utilised, the more sustainable the city as a whole becomes.

Over time, mycelium has the opportunity to produce negative carbon through its role in sequestration. In terrestrial environments, this has the potential to “lock up” a third of global carbon dioxide uses. In an offworld habitat designed for long-term sustainability, designing for net productivity and habitat stability can be managed from the outset.

The humble fungal city has the potential to create a lot of other benefits that come for free. It has often been said that cities are in a constant state of improvement, but with biogenic architecture the move away from construction to growth creates a fundamental change in how space is used, designed, and respected.

In many ways, this is part of the appeal: traditional construction produces waste, displaces natural ecosystems, and in the worst cases can create areas where it is difficult to survive. Biogenic architecture puts life at the forefront of all design. Moreover, not just human life, but a thriving sustainable ecosystem where other plants and animals exist too.

Time and time again, research has shown that access to nature is an essential part of a thriving neighbourhood. Crime rates go down, house prices go up, and people are more able to reach their potential. In a purely imaginary city, where every structure has a living form, it is easy to imagine that the design itself has a social or reparative role.

Perhaps this is particularly true on bleak, lifeless moons or asteroids. Again and again, science fiction authors have explored the social and psychological consequences of living without access to green spaces, open water, or the blue sky. Perhaps we can only speculate whether a biogenic, but ultimately artificial, environment with no direct Earth comparison would have a similar effect or not.

Novel Relationships and Symbionts

So far, everything we have covered is already theoretically possible with known species and existing technologies, alongside a fair amount of experimentation and imaginary funding. But no speculative non-fiction article would be complete without some forays into the realms of what is conceptually possible but highly unlikely, as well as what is almost certainly impossible but could at least be imagined. These are not limited to fungi, but might include areas with the potential for deep symbiosis.

Electrochemical communication and the “feeling city”: although not strictly a fungus, slime molds can famously navigate mazes, using a novel form of externalised memory.⁵ This is a major growth area of research to potentially provide a novel framework for electrochemical and biogenic circuitry, often termed the “slime mold algorithm.”

Bioinformation storage and bioengineering are of course major areas of growth and development. Researchers at Cornell University developed a biohybrid robot controlled by mycelial electrical impulses.⁶ While there are clear benefits in terms of reduced need for electrical power (living organisms are their own power generators), it also allows for a far more sensitive machine that is more connected, and responsive, to its surroundings. This reduces the need for messy infrastructure and complex code and provides endless possibilities for novel interfaces and unimaginable applications.

Finally, of course, there is the science fiction staple of fungal telepathy. In Brian Aldiss’s classic Hothouse, the symbiotic and telepathic morel attaches itself to remaining humans and controls them for its own purposes. It is not impossible to imagine fungi evolving in such capacity: filamentous hyphae have long been conceptualised as nerve cells, and some species of fungi such as the Split Gill (Schizophyllum commune) exhibit patterns of electrical activity which are even reminiscent of speech and language.⁷

Conclusions

When it comes to the innovative possibilities of growing a city—particularly one on a distant world where we have total freedom to construct every aspect ourselves—perhaps the greatest gain of biogenic architecture comes not from trying to imagine a single species that does everything we might want, but from thinking of how to layer different organisms together to create something multi-symbiotic. This might include growing mycelium in soil held in vertical gables, strengthened by rock and ash, and then havinge larger fruiting bodies extending outwards from these walls for added shelter and growth.

There are endless possibilities.

¹ Viorica Corbu et al. (2023), Current Insights in Fungal Importance – A Comprehensive Review, Microorganisms, 11(6), https://doi.org/ 10.3390/microorganisms11061384.

² Merlin Sheldrake (2020), Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change Our Minds, and Shape Our Futures, Bodley Head.

³ Arjun Khakkar (2023), A roadmap for the creation of synthetic lichen, Biochemical and Biophysical Research Communications, 654,  https://doi.org/10.1016/j.bbrc.2023.02.079.

⁴ Savannah Anez et al. (2026), Ghost Pipe Then and Now: the Influence of Digital Media on the Medicinal Use of Monotropa uniflora in the United States, Ethnobotany and Economic Botany, 79(4), https://doi.org/10.1007/s12231-025-09637-1.

⁵ Chris Reid et al. (2012), Slime mold uses an externalized spatial “memory” to navigate in complex environments, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 109(43), https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1215037109.

⁶ Anand Mishra et al (2024), Sensorimotor control of robots mediated by electrophysiological measurements of fungal mycelia, Science Robotics, 9(93), https://doi.org/10.1126/scirobotics.adk8019.

⁷ Andrew Adamatzky (2022), Language of fungi derived from their electrical spiking activity, Royal Society Open Science, 9(4), https://doi.org/10.1098/rsos.211926.

Editor: Gautam Bhatia.

Copy Editors: Copy Editing Department.

https://strangehorizons.com/wordpress/non-fiction/how-to-grow-a-city-biogenic-architecture-and-symbiotic-evolution/

https://strangehorizons.com/wordpress/?p=58958

Posted by Sonya Taaffe

https://strangehorizons.com/wordpress/poetry/the-cryptogamists/

https://strangehorizons.com/wordpress/?p=59013

Any clot with a crossword
can break a greenshield.
The Admiralty never uses sea tar
except for the decoy of dirty tricks.
We curled to the tradecraft of such things
like wet oak and shoreline, the wind-sponged bricks of Block D.
The wireless crawled with morphogenesis.
Incredible that so much should be entangled
in the traffic of our both-ways world.
Queer lot that we were
with our notebooks crusted like churchyards,
did we breed in secret,
sleeves shedding a lecture of spores?
We found our code
between silence and symbiosis,
our maps and scripts, our audacious sunbursts.

https://strangehorizons.com/wordpress/poetry/the-cryptogamists/

https://strangehorizons.com/wordpress/?p=59013

Posted by Ruthanna Emrys

https://strangehorizons.com/wordpress/non-fiction/from-cosmic-horror-to-solarpunk-futures-the-changing-face-of-fungal-speculation/

https://strangehorizons.com/wordpress/?p=58956

Human relationships with fungi are fraught. They are sources of decay and connection, the mold that ruins our food, and the mycelial networks that keep our crops healthy. Our stories wrestle with them because they so perfectly represent everything in nature that most discomfits us.

At the Field Museum in Chicago, I once found myself in an ancient exhibit full of glass plant models. One particularly dusty corner held a set of glass mushrooms. A typewritten index card, possibly not updated since the World's Columbian Exposition, informed the viewer that “Some scientists now think fungi may be their own kingdom, rather than a type of plant.” We are well past the era when life was easily divided into a countable number of kingdoms, but this early challenge to our neat categories has been as great a source of fungal anxiety as any more physical threat to human well-being. Human philosophers like Borges[i] and Shotwell[ii] have argued for the abitrariness, harmfulness, and ultimate impossibility of systematic taxonomization; fungi embody those arguments.

Weird fiction has long used fungi as a stand-in for the inexplicable and alien. Lovecraft, as frightened of mushrooms as of the open ocean, old houses, and people who don’t speak English, created an oeuvre that includes fungal haunting (“The Shunned House”), fungal brain-stealing aliens (“The Whisperer in Darkness”), and fungal nightmare creatures (The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath). His anxieties reject the ecologically unclassifiable and uncontrollable—and reflect the desire for a world that submits to “civilized” definition and division.

As we’ve come to understand the degree to which we are enmeshed in, and interdependent with, the world’s complexity[iii], writers of ecologically oriented subgenres have welcomed exactly those aspects of the world that Lovecraft (and many others) once rejected. Solarpunk, eco-fiction, and climate fiction treat fungi as not merely necessary, but symbolic of another and better mode of relation.

T. Kingfisher, whose stories often combine classic horror tropes with an appreciation for the inhuman, has one series that particularly illustrates the continuum between weird terror and Anthropocene integration. The Sworn Soldier books follow Alex Easton, a retired soldier of Gallacia, through kan encounters with the dangerous and difficult-to-classify. Alex kanself fits both of these descriptors: a skilled fighter, and with a gender barely recognized outside of kan own small country. (In addition to soldiers, Gallacia also has pronouns for G-d and for rocks—though not, inconveniently, for mushrooms.) Each book typifies a specific attitude toward the things that violate our assumptions and categories, and a specific point on the arc that fungal literature has followed from repulsion through ambivalence and finally to connection.

What Moves the Dead: The Fungal Threat

The first Sworn Soldier book, What Moves the Dead, riffs on Poe’s “Fall of the House of Usher” with a more-or-less classic depiction of weird, frightening fungus. Easton visits the estate of an old friend in trouble, meets a mycologist (Beatrix Potter’s fictional aunt), and discovers that the local fungi have developed into a hive mind that can possess corpses both animal and human—and sometimes the living as well. While the hive mind is young and curious, even sympathetic, it lacks the concepts that would allow it to respect individual selfhood. Negotiation being impossible, it must be destroyed—recognizable human existence is preserved, with a tinge of regret.

Fungal ignorance of boundaries is often a source of horror. Decay, parasitism, merging of things that should remain separate: all break down the lines between human and non-human, life and death, self and other. These concerns reflect, and magnify, genre fiction’s broader discomfort with anything that questions traditional western ideas of individual selfhood. Silvia Moreno-Garcia’s Mexican Gothic follows a similar track to the Kingfisher, although patriarchs use her fungi to keep people in their places (both metaphorical and literal). Other fungal horrors are not so bound. With unlimited growth, they turn the whole world into themselves—something that only human extraction and exploitation are supposed to do. Marc Laidlaw’s “Leng,” Stephen King’s “Gray Matter,” and Amanda Downum’s “Spore” posit super-parasites that control humans. Human vulnerabilities—ranging from curiosity to alcoholism—allow possession and transformation that, once given an inroad, threaten the entire species or even biosphere. Fungi, the original nanotechnology that can remake anything, are also the original gray goo problem[iv].

This fear reaches its apex in stories like The Girl with All the Gifts and The Last of Us. The similarities between zombie plagues and cordyceps are intuitive, a place where mythological study exacerbates fear. Even knowing now that fungi are their own kingdom—indeed, that they have more similarity to Animalia than plants—the ease with which they make use of the other multicellular kingdoms is discomfiting. Cordyceps species have evolved to control insects, forcing them to climb to high places from which spores can easily disperse, then growing out through their heads to release those spores[v]. While the original hypothesis was that they rewrote the bug’s ganglion, it now appears that they puppet movements directly.

Humans, with our larger brains, can imagine the insectile ganglion still struggling to reimplement its normally irresistible instincts, only to find itself usurped by something more powerful. Sometimes the horror is another, alien intelligence replacing our own—but sometimes it’s zombie mushrooms with no thought of their own. Our tendency to turn everything around us to our own ends is bad enough. Something that can do the same, but with no redeeming art or love or regret, implies a wave of  monotonous assimilation with no chance of turning back. Our fears for what the alien can do reflect our fears about ourselves.

What Feasts at Night: The Enemy and Educator

The second Sworn Soldier book, What Feasts at Night, is more definitively supernatural horror—although the mycologist returns from the previous installment—and its dangers stem from traumatic, all-too-human histories. Even here, relationship to the land and what grows in it is paramount. Easton’s Gallacian cabin is plagued by a restless, breath-stealing spirit. Buried beneath the springhouse many decades previously, she’s released when a fallen rock blocks the flowing water that normally keeps food cold and haunts contained. The cabin caretaker’s gentle son is vulnerable to her nightly attacks, but Easton fights her in dreams that mix kan traumatic memories of war and of the first book. It’s kan familiarity with these horrors, and experience living with trauma, that let ka fight in a state where other victims forget to resist. This begins a process of considering how responses to fear are shaped as much by our own psychologies as by the frightening thing itself—and thus considering that there is more than one possible way to respond.

Many stories place fungus in this sort of ambivalent, interstitial role: still frightening, but sympathetic and perhaps even desirable as an alternative to the failures of the Anthropocene. We may recognize that something different is needed while still flinching at that difference. The classic Tumblr post in which a mushroom responds to terrified demands with “You cannot kill me in a way that matters” falls into this liminal space. It’s this resilience that makes fungi so alien, garnering fear, respect, and envy in equal parts, so strongly that we have to make a joke out of the whole thing. There’s a lesson down in the mycelial ooze, if we have the nerve to examine it.

Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, in The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins, suggests that the lesson is about how to live with precarity. The old, ostensibly rational structures have collapsed: we are already stuck in an inhuman world of human making. “The Economy” is an elder god thriving on the sacrifices of gig work, of eighty-hour weeks with no promise of steady income. Capitalism treats people and resources in isolation, alienating them from their embedded webs so thoroughly that we finally acknowledge individual separation as a worse horror than connection. Climate change makes weather, crop growth, even the existence of land itself, unpredictable. But fungi—matsutake in this particular case—grow and thrive in disrupted landscapes. Perhaps, in a time when disruption and precarity are no longer avoidable, we can do the same.

It’s no shock, therefore, that much writing in this space hybridizes the Weird with climate fiction, recognizing that survival requires abandoning our current assumptions about “humanity.” Amelia Gorman’s Field Guide to Invasive Species of Minnesota imagines a world where ecological disaster has broken down boundaries between species and kingdoms, and where adaptation means transformative metamorphosis. “Tiny feathery tips of green eyelashes better absorb the sun in a year that will be wracked with famine and flush with wild vegetable humans.” Max Gladstone and Amal Al-Mohtar’s This Is How You Lose the Time War, similarly, depicts a conflict over the very nature of life on earth: one with nature woven inextricably into technology, the other with technological networks ruling all. Balance is anathema to both sides. Passionate enemies become passionate lovers, and battles for dominance turn at last to inextricable interdependence.

Time War is not the only story where fungal complexity breaks down dichotomies. The same entity may both invade and teach, or change us in ways more welcome than a cordyceps. Tade Thompson’s Rosewater and Adrian Gibson’s “fungalpunk” stories, along with Jeff VanderMeer’s Ambergris universe, put humans into relationships with mushroom entities that can be glossed as conflict, but aren’t quite. Sue Burke’s Semiosis has humans as the colonizers, adapting to a world of sapient plants for whom fungal networks are symbiotic infrastructure.

Easton asks, of the breath-stealing moroi, “Blessed Virgin, why must you keep sending me innocent monsters?” Kan lament surfaces a longstanding conflict: fighting still seems the only possible response, but ka yearns for alternatives. From that place of doubt about whether what we face is destruction or salvation, we can finally reach stories in which other options are on the table.

What Stalks the Deep: The Alien Ally

The third and so far final Alex Easton book, What Stalks the Deep, finds ka in a strange and foreign place (America) to deal with something superficially similar to the first book’s fungal intelligence. (Actually a jellyfish-siphonovore—inevitably, your choices in weird fiction are mushrooms or tentacles.) This time, while kan instinctive reaction remains revulsion, both ka and the intelligence are able to overcome their fears and cooperate to handle a shared threat. The creature is a collective, mimetic organism, yet able to recognize and respect the separateness of other entities. We are now fully in the realm of fungal strategy as a complement to our own mammalian methods of interacting with the world, one that brings its own value.

Recent research—much of which was introduced to non-mycologists in Merlin Sheldrake’s 2020 Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change Our Minds and Shape Our Futures—shows the vibrant and vital role that fungi play in Earth’s biosphere. They share complex relationships with plant life, breaking down the distinctions between parasite, host, and symbiont as well as they do organic matter. They play key roles in communication between trees, and in the “Wood Wide Web” networks that allow plants to pass information. In symbiosis with algae and cyanobacteria, they create the lichen that were the first explorers of dry land. They were also the organisms that first brought symbiosis to the attention of biology in the late 1800s, proving that nature was not always red in tooth and claw.

Along with their natural powers, fungal technologies are an increasingly clear part of any sustainable future. Fungal bricks can reduce the carbon footprint of construction[vi]; mycoremediation can break down toxins and plastics[vii]. You can even make computers with them[viii]. The rate of biotechnological advances is growing, and these advances seem only the initial wave[ix]. Authors looking for inspiration in emergent tech are more and more likely to find mushrooms involved.

A 2023 Strange Horizons article on fictional fungus wraps up with Sheldrake’s book, mentioning only Becky Chambers’s A Psalm for the Wild-Built and Star Trek: Discovery as positive depictions of the kingdom amid a litany of disturbing classics. Discovery’s interstellar mycelial networks are the ultimate magic mushroom trip, but their biggest contribution may simply be spreading the idea that fungus can be wildly useful and transformative. Although even solarpunk discussions still find more fungal horror than hope, a new set of fruiting bodies is growing.

Chambers’s cozy solarpunk provides an early example, with mushroom construction as one of many nature-friendly components in a world that has settled into post-industrial harmony. But Elizabeth Bear’s “Thanksgiving” is a sharper take, flipping the old idea of species-transforming, mind-changing fungus: what if this “apocalypse” is what we need to survive? What if the mycelial perspective, of endless interconnection and permeable selfhood, would be good for us? And, in our world still awaiting that transformation, where we have so much trouble working together, who gets to decide?

This is the difference between fungi and other technologies that find their way into stories of sustainable futures: we can’t help imagining that they’ll change not only our materials science, but our politics, our culture, and our systems of social organisation, and our minds themselves. And we know—as so many stories also imagine new ways of organizing action, breaking down hierarchies, and changing relationships with the rest of the biosphere—that our minds need changing. As in What Stalks the Deep, empathy across seemingly alien gaps is the key to survival.

Nika Murphy’s “Ghost Tenders of Chornobyl” walks these gaps. In a tale that’s equal parts eco-fiction and ghost story, the spirits of the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone (also known, appropriately, as the Zone of Alienation) work with radiation-absorbing mushrooms to heal the land. It’s a natural connection between the dead and decay, collaborating to renew life[x]. But the zone is also a center of fighting in the Russia-Ukraine War, and not all the ghosts come from the same side. Both radioactive and human alienation need to be broken down and remade, and the two processes are not separable. Tentatively, they might even be welcome.

Sienna Tristen’s Hortus Animarum: A New Herbal for the Queer Heart seems a spiritual sequel to Amelia Gorman’s poetry collection above, and more definitive in grasping at change. “Green mushroom wine” and birch trees are the smell of home, “and one day I’ll cease my wandering and come home for good. What I’m saying is when I am done being crude and animal I will call myself sapling in earnest.” Here a move beyond the mammalian is not just tempting apocalypse but inevitable desire. Jarod K. Anderson’s poetry and memoir, too, use mushrooms as metonymy for processes valuable in their own right, and ongoing metamorphosis as a necessary state of being.

Even stories of concrete, practical fungal infrastructure merge into this kind of transformation. Vandana Singh’s “Indra’s Web,” for example, has a mycelia-based power grid start to become self-organizing and self-optimizing. The modifications appear at first to be system failures, but are matched by new human approaches to the apparent crisis: slowing down rather than jumping to first reactions, taking time to understand and analyze, and trusting symbiotic teams to reach the right answer. Working alongside fungi is changemaking even without neural incursions. It may be enough—and inevitable—to learn from their examples.

Sworn Soldier: From Tales of Trauma to Maps of Change

Alex Easton’s final encounter is with a creature that calls himself Fragment, contrasting with the Whole of the larger organism from which he’s been separated. It’s no coincidence that this loneliness and alienation mark the point at which Alex finally moves from rejecting the alien to accepting communication and connection—but the series as a whole suggests the importance of the arc as well as the endpoint. Fungal fiction as a subgenre is starting to shape such an arc: from desperate, defensive isolation to building familial networks where we never expected to find them. From fear to welcome. From being trapped by the patterns of the past to choosing change in concert with the surrounding world. It’s the arc of not only individual protagonists but a species—and from there, necessarily, not only our own species but the fabric of life from which we were never truly separate.

Fictional trends are not perfect mirrors of real-life ones, and human appreciation of the fungal world predates its regular appearance as a positive force in speculative fiction. Mushrooms have long been welcome on our plates, in our medicine cabinets, and in psychedelic experience and philosophy. But research is opening up whole new realms of appreciation, and expanding the preexisting ones. We are going beyond the visible fruiting bodies and into the mycelial network beneath, and learning just how much of fungal wisdom can be found there. Michael Braungart and William McDonough’s Cradle to Cradle, one of the foundational texts of biomimetic technology, encouraged rethinking the industrial world based on the model of the cherry tree—but the cherry tree itself depends on mycelia in order to be part of a sustainable, cyclical process of growth, decay, and mutual benefit with the surrounding ecosystem. We are finally learning what makes that state possible, and writers are understandably eager to play with the potential.

For now, true fungal solarpunk remains rare, but the bibliography is expanding. Beyond earth, Lovecraft’s suspiciously cosmopolitan fungal extraterrestrials give way to imagining how fungal networks might support parallel intelligences to neural ones—and how communing with them might be preferable to running in terror. On earth itself, better futures may involve both new fungal technologies and new fungal perspectives. We can see that the strangeness of those dusty glass mushrooms breaks down not only simple Victorian biological classifications, but assumptions about what problems can be solved and how. Amid the daunting challenges of the Polycrisis, a force that circumvents human limitations is deeply appealing both in the lab and on the page.

This is not to say that we no longer have room for the monstrous fungal. Our relationship with fungi includes both medicinal supplements and insectile sympathy, mildew and morels, the Wood Wide Web and chytridiomycosis. But by recognizing and exploring that full spectrum, we can find stories—and possibilities—that were previously closed to us. Creativity, of all kinds, benefits from breaking down rigid taxonomies. And that decay, whether we fear it or welcome it, provides rich loam for imagining what might come next.

[i] J. L. Borges, The analytical language of John Wilkins, Alamut Bastion of Peace and Information, n.d.. Translated Translated by L. G. Vázquez from 'El idioma analítico de John Wilkins,' La Nación, 1942.

[ii] A. Shotwell, Against Purity: Living Ethically in Compromised Times, University of Minnestoa Press, 2016.

[iii] See, for example, J. W. Kirchner, The Gaia Hypothesis: Fact, theory, and wishful thinking, Climatic Change, 52, 391–408, 2002. https://doi.org/10.1023/A:1014237331082

[iv] E. Drexler, Engines of Creation, Doubleday, 1986.

[v] C. de Bekker, L. E. Quevillon, P. B. Smith, K. R. Fleming, D. Ghosh, A. D. Patterson, & D. P. Hughes, Species-specific ant brain manipulation by a specialized fungal parasite. BMC Evolutionary Biology, 14, 166, 2014. doi: 10.1186/s12862-014-0166-3.

[vi] D. Craig, The magic of building with mushrooms, Columbia Magazine, 2022. https://magazine.columbia.edu/article/magic-building-mushrooms

[vii] Y. Dinakarkumar, G. Ramakrishnan, K. R. Gujjula, V. Vasu, P. Balamurugan, & G. Murali, Fungal bioremediation: An overview of the mechanisms, applications and future perspectives. Environmental Chemistry and Ecotoxicology, 6, 293-302, 2024. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.enceco.2024.07.002.

[viii] C. Hu, Inside the lab that’s growing mushroom computers. Popular Science, 2024. https://www.popsci.com/technology/unconventional-computing-lab-mushroom/

[ix] M. G. Roth, N. M. Westrick, & T. T. Baldwin, Fungal biotechnology: From yesterday to tomorrow, Frontiers in Fungal Biology, 4:1135263, 2023. doi: 10.3389/ffunb.2023.1135263.

[x] The realities of the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone are echoed in the science fictional trope of areas where everyday assumptions, sometimes including otherwise-predictable physical and biological laws, break down. See for example Arkady and Boris Strugatsky’s Roadside Picnic and Jeff VanderMeer’s Annihilation.

Editor: Gautam Bhatia.

Copy Editors: Copy Editing Department.

https://strangehorizons.com/wordpress/non-fiction/from-cosmic-horror-to-solarpunk-futures-the-changing-face-of-fungal-speculation/

https://strangehorizons.com/wordpress/?p=58956

Posted by Mary Soon Lee

https://strangehorizons.com/wordpress/poetry/mushroon/

https://strangehorizons.com/wordpress/?p=58832

"Mushroon" © 2026 by Romie Stott

Mushroon: noun
a divine alien organism
with multiple cognitive centers
connected via transport filaments.

Mushroon: verb
to stay rooted in one place
more broadly, to favor
thought over action.

Mushroon: verb, sense 3
to link one’s mind
to the Mushroon
and achieve enlightenment.

Mushroon: etymology
the Mushroon were named
for superficial similarities
to mushrooms.

Mushroonism: noun
the emulation and worship
and fulfilment of the wishes
of the Mushroon.

Mushroon spore: noun
a righteous adherent
dedicated to the eradication
of non-believers.

https://strangehorizons.com/wordpress/poetry/mushroon/

https://strangehorizons.com/wordpress/?p=58832

Posted by Gautam Bhatia

https://strangehorizons.com/wordpress/non-fiction/azimuth/introduction-fungal-dreams/

https://strangehorizons.com/wordpress/?p=59025

Fungal dreams, visions, and nightmares have long been integral to speculative fiction imagery. Within the SFF landscape, fungi are malleable. They feature in horror, both as external threats and in altering human biochemistry in weird and unspeakable ways. They feature in first contact science fiction, signifying an "other" that is both intimately familiar and thoroughly alien. Of late, they have been deployed as an alternative to hyperspace and wormholes, the mycelial fabric of a space highway that allows for faster-than-light travel. They are present in utopian fiction in a more benign form, as literal building blocks of future, non-polluting, and ever renewing urban environments. They occur in fantasy, bases of social organisation that could both undo—or save—the world "above." Perhaps all speculative fiction is just looking for "a shortcut to mushrooms"!

All these uses of fungi in speculation draw on certain qualities that distinguish fungi from the modern human world, and resist anthropomorphism. At the heart of this is the revolutionary idea that fungi complicate the separation between self and other, and blur the boundaries of identity. As Merlin Sheldrake writes in Entangled Life:

There are two key moves by which fungal hyphae become a mycelial network. First, they branch. Second, they fuse. (The process by which hyphae merge with each other is known as ‘anastomosis’, which in Greek means ‘to provide with a mouth’.) If hyphae couldn’t branch, one hypha could never become many. If hyphae couldn’t fuse with one another, they would not be able to grow into complex networks. However, before they fuse, hyphae must find other hyphae, which they do by attracting one another, a phenomenon known as ‘homing’ ... fungal self-identity matters, but it is not always a binary world. Self can shade off into otherness gradually. (p. 39)

For capitalism, which is built upon the separation of the economic and the political, and thrives upon the atomisation of individuals, there must exist, at all times, the firmest of borders separating self from self, and through those borders, creating otherness. Sheldrake, again:

One way to think about mycelial networks is as swarms of hyphae tips. Insects form swarms. A murmuration of starlings is a swarm, as is a school of sardines. Swarms are patterns of collective behaviour. Without a leader or a command centre, a swarm of ants can work out the shortest route to a source of food. A swarm of termites can build giant mounds with sophisticated architectural features. However, mycelium quickly outgrows the swarm analogy because all the hyphen tips in a network are connected to one another. A termite mound is made up of units of termite. A hyphae tip would be the closest we could come to defining the unit of a mycelial ‘swarm’, although one can’t dismantle a mycelial network hypha by hypha once it has grown, as we could pick apart a swarm of termites. Mycelium is conceptually slippery. From the point of view of the network, mycelium is a single interconnected entity. From the point of view of a hyphen tip, mycelium is a multitude. (p. 54)

Instead of giving in to our temptation to anthropomorphise, what might a reversal of that thought process look like? What if we tried to imagine a human world that is built on mycelial logic? To do so would be to fulfil the task laid out by Ursula Le Guin a decade ago, in exhorting speculative fiction writers to imagine alternatives to capitalism. Doing so might just require us to look for the shortcut to mushrooms.

It is not simply about the blurring of the self, and how that interrogates the foundations of capitalism. From the time of Plato, philosophers have justified political structures by reference to human physiognomy. We cannot imagine alternatives to our centralised political structures (mediated through the nation state, itself a vehicle of accumulation for capital) because we cannot think of an organism that doesn't function according to the logic of a brain and a centralised nervous system. But that isn't how it necessarily works in the non-human world. Octopi have three hearts and a distribution of neurons that allow their arms limited autonomy. In fungi, the decentralisation is even more radical. As Sheldrake describes it:

Mycelial coordination is difficult to understand because there is no centre of control. If we cut off our head or stop our heart, we’re finished. A mycelial network has no head and no brain. Fungi, like plants, are decentralised organisms. There are no operational centres, no capital cities, no seats of government. Control is dispersed: mycelial coordination takes place both everywhere at once and nowhere in particular. A fragment of mycelium can regenerate an entire network, meaning that a single mycelial individual - if you’re brave enough to use that word - is potentially immortal. ... Mycelium is polyphony in bodily form. Each of the ... voices is a hyphen tip, exploring a soundscape for itself. Although each is free to wander, their wanderings can’t be seen as separate from the others. There is no main voice. There is no lead tune. There is no central planning. Nonetheless, a form emerges. (p. 59-61)

Communication, reception, decision-making, organisation—all occurring in a radically horizontal context: the imaginative possibilities are endless, and speculative fiction has only just begun to forage for them. To think fungally may even mean to think in another language, a language that Borges imagined a long time ago. In "Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius," Borges wrote of a language without nouns, and which is crafted through verbs. Not "moon," then, but:

... "to moonate" or "to enmoon." "The moon rose above the river" is "hlör ufang axaxaxasmio," or, as Xul Solar* succinctly translates: Upward, behind the onstreaming it mooned ... (Borges, Ficciones, p. 158)

So it is with fungi, where lichens are "are stabilised networks of relationships; they never stop lichening; they are verbs as well as nouns" (Sheldrake, Entangled Life, 99). The Borges language of speculation imagined a grammar for fungi; and fungi, likewise, can nourish the grammar of speculative fiction. Thinking of symbiotic life-forms in the texture of holobionts, for example, can enrich our more traditional SFF staples, the chimera and the cyborg, and can expand the worlds we build.

In this Strange Horizons special issue, we bring to you the magical worlds of fungi, through fiction, poetry, articles, and reviews. Working through different forms, each contribution illumines an aspect of the fungal lifeworlds, from a speculative lens. We hope that this special issue will serve as a platform for our readers to imagine beyond the logic of the anthropomorphic form, and then—in the finest tradition of speculative fiction—turn that imagination back upon the world that we inhabit (alongside fungi, of course!).

It is little surprise that Sheldrake, in the conclusion of his book, turns to a pioneering figure in modern anarchism, Pyotr Kropotkin, and to his lifelong insistence that "‘sociability’ was as much a part of nature as the struggle for existence" (Sheldrake, Entangled Life, 235). In a world in which capitalism is ever more taking on the logic of a particularly brutal and unconstrained Darwinism, we could do worse than seeking our shortcut to the mushrooms. This special issue takes a step along that path.

https://strangehorizons.com/wordpress/non-fiction/azimuth/introduction-fungal-dreams/

https://strangehorizons.com/wordpress/?p=59025

Posted by Alex Kingsley

https://strangehorizons.com/wordpress/non-fiction/the-iron-garden-sutra-by-a-d-sui/

https://strangehorizons.com/wordpress/?p=58893

A. D. Sui’s The Iron Garden Sutra is a religious and existential exploration wrapped in a sci-fi murder mystery. Iris is a death monk of the Starlit Order, a religion that worships an all-encompassing force known as the Infinite Light. Starlit scripture teaches that, since the Infinite Light is everything, it is indifferent to the activities of humans. Even death is neutral from the perspective of a light that does not love. Monks of the Starlit Order thus travel the cosmos to put souls to rest as they rejoin the Infinite Light.

One of the Order’s number, Iris, is summoned, along with the AI implanted in his brainstem that serves as his constant companion, to put to rest the souls of an ancient generation ship called the Nicaea that has recently docked at a space station. When he boards, though, he finds more life than death—both in the form of a sprawling forest that has exploded across the ship, and in academics who are already beginning to pull the ship apart to study it further. A scholarly curiosity becomes a deathtrap when everyone aboard the ship discovers they are trapped, cut off from the station, and that someone (or something) is slowly killing them off. Iris is used to handling the dead, but nothing has equipped him to see his new friends dying all around him. While unraveling the mystery of the ancient ship, then, he must reckon with a crisis of faith. How can he preach the virtues of stoicism when he himself cares too much?

The Iron Garden Sutra is a complex examination of trauma, grief, and spirituality. For Iris, the scripture of the Starlit Order has been a comfort because it allowed him to make peace with the deaths he’s faced. Now that he’s confronted with the living, he discovers that his empathy is also his foible—he cares too deeply about the people around him to claim indifference when they die. While the sutras were a comfort to him in his healing process, meanwhile, not everyone on the ship processes trauma in the same way. Dealing with death in real time, the characters demonstrate a wide gamut of coping mechanisms, ranging from rage, attempts at being useful, and falling back on faith to intellectualization and utter nihilism. The novel is not afraid to grapple with the reality of grief and trauma: there are no neat “five phases” here, but rather a mess of emotion, memory, and pain. In the face of so much violence, Iris must confront the paradox of his religion: His objective is to care for others, but in order to do so effectively he must hold his own emotions at bay, meaning he can’t truly care—a sacrifice he isn’t willing to let himself make.

Furthermore, while for Iris and some of the other occupants of the ship religion is a comfort, religion also serves as a source of tension—not just between the academics, but for the former occupants of the ship. As the characters unravel the mystery of the malevolent force attacking them, they also unearth records of past holy wars on the Nicaea, forcing them to reckon with the ways in which faith can turn from something that preserves to something that destroys.

The heart of this novel lives in the relationships between its characters, and especially in the tension between Iris and Yan, the head engineer and leader of the academic party. From the outset, Yan is resentful of Iris’s order, dismissing and belittling Iris every chance he gets. Iris tries and fails to keep himself from reciprocating in kind. The major source of friction between them is that Iris strives to be useful, and Yan is convinced that he is useless. This conflict dances around a crucial question: What does it mean to be useful in times of crisis? What are the myriad forms that caring for others might take? It’s not always as straightforward as protecting them from harm and providing comforting words. In fact, Iris often allows himself to be the target of blame simply because he knows that giving others an emotional outlet is an act of service.

The forced proximity of the setting takes all these character relationships and amps up the stakes. The Nicaea, however, is not the only thing keeping the characters in close quarters: Iris lives with another person in the confines of his own mind. All monks of Iris’s order have sentient AI constructs implanted in their brain at a young age, and Iris has named his VIFAI (Vessel Iris’s Friendly AI) because it refused to have a name of its own. The novel doesn’t shy away from engaging with the ethics of an AI implant. While some of the academics are appalled by the notion that Iris has a conscious passenger trapped in his mind, Iris has grown accustomed to the fact that another person is constantly party to his thoughts, feelings, and physical sensation. The power dynamic is a complex one—VIFAI has a level of privacy that Iris doesn’t, but Iris has the ability to accidentally injure VIFAI if he loses control of his emotions. The repercussions of Iris’s previous fits of rage are evident in the ways that VIFAI falters and lags. The AI, too, experiences its own form of trauma, just by virtue of being attached to the emotional experiences of someone else. The effect of their close but strained relationship is a second source of tension: There’s friction between the academics on the ship and tension within Iris’s head. Still, the latter two depend on each other. VIFAI challenges Iris without being adversarial, and Iris shows VIFAI the same compassion that he shows the humans around him.

By contrast, the Nicaea’s AI was developed long before conscious constructs like VIFAI existed, so it has developed just like the greenery on the ship—wild and unrestrained by human input. Not only has it discovered abilities that the humans thought were impossible, but it’s also grown a peculiar kind of cognition that is alien to the main cast of characters. The Nicaea’s logic, as well as its ethics and values, are like a puzzle that the humans must sort out. This exploration of alternative cognition is particularly relevant in an age during which machine learning is always turning up unexpected results. It’s important now more than ever to imagine the ways that emergent properties of AI might have unexpected—and potentially dangerous—consequences.

The richness of the characters’ relationships makes the novel’s discussion of trauma all the more poignant. From the start of the novel, Iris hints at a childhood tragedy that pushed him into the hands of the Starlit Order. Becoming a monk of the Order, and serving those who saved him, was his way of finding meaning after a disaster that took everything from him. In subtle ways, he tries to exert control over a life that he knows is largely out of his control. His relationship with food, sleep, and pain all suggest a desire to exert control. Though it’s never outright stated that Iris struggles with disordered eating or self-harm, the narrative alludes to these issues in such a way that anyone who has dealt with them can see themselves reflected in Iris without it becoming the focal point of the story. Instead of focusing on one particular manifestation of PTSD, the novel is a nuanced examination of the various ways in which trauma affects how people perceive and respond to the world around them.

The Iron Garden Sutra is, then, tender and deeply meditative—not adjectives one would expect to attached to a murder mystery, and yet the novel manages to weave poignant relationships and psychological realism into a gripping thriller.  Rarely is a murder mystery brave enough to grapple with the real-life implications of being faced with mortality; Iron Garden Sutra, however, not only embraces death, but pulls it into an intimate and intricate dance.

https://strangehorizons.com/wordpress/non-fiction/the-iron-garden-sutra-by-a-d-sui/

https://strangehorizons.com/wordpress/?p=58893

Posted by David Lewis

https://strangehorizons.com/wordpress/non-fiction/beings-by-ilana-masad/

https://strangehorizons.com/wordpress/?p=58882

Ilana Masad’s Beings overlaps three stories, genres, and narrators in each chapter. Readers who love literary puzzles can latch on to so many links between the stories: connections in chapter headings, crossover characters, contrasting narrative points of view that form bridges between characters across time; sensitive readers will put the book down thinking about our responsibility to understand where truth can diverge from fact and how belief or disbelief in either has consequences. All this in a novelistic triptych that’s beautifully written and a fun read.

In every chapter is an episode following a modern-day protagonist, “the Archivist,” a recluse who can’t remember anything relating to their childhood encounter with a spaceship. The other narratives in the novel are subjects of the Archivist’s research. One is the story of Betty and Barney Hill, a real-life couple who claimed to be abducted by aliens in the 1960s. The other is a semi-epistolary, queer bildungsroman of a lesbian SF writer, Phyllis Egerton, also in the 1960s. Science fiction, historical fiction, found fiction, and epistolary fiction; multiple narrators with multiple narrative points of view: Masad isn’t afraid of merging styles and genres. In a less meticulous writer’s hands, that could make for messy reading. But Masad navigates between the narratives deftly and with clear intent, showing how these characters, who never meet face to face, still manage to support each other.

The Archivist is central to the novel. It’s a great piece of ironic characterization to have a character who’s made a profession of preserving historical documents but who can’t remember anything of a well-documented piece of their own childhood:

On their way back to the apartment, swaying with the movement of the train, their spine curves and their head droops, their body echoing the question mark filling their mind. Why don’t they remember that interview? Why don’t they remember any of it? (p.  16)

With the Archivist, there’s a physicality to their interior life. Their body expresses their feelings and thoughts more than their words. Why? Perhaps because it reinforces the idea that English doesn’t have an adequate vocabulary to describe their gender and, with little faith in language, they only trust their body to convey their thoughts. Or it could be the simple fact that the Archivist doesn’t have anybody to talk to. They have no close friends; they rarely interact with their colleagues; and they avoid contact with their mother.

In fact, at the beginning of the book their most intimate physical moment is when they take the train to work.

It is a blessing, this crush, the irate and hurried sleepiness of the general public preventing their body from being the subject of glares, assessments, confusion, or the raised eyebrows of recognition. Normally, this is also when they most vividly come up against the musky, damp, buzzing reality of other people. It’s the most they’re touched by others. But the scent of coffee on the neighbor’s breath and her golden-brown eyes meeting theirs with ease stick with them today. To be looked at, to be seen, however fleetingly, is to exist. (pp. 23-4)

This is an experience any queer reader can instinctually recognize: the fear of recognition alongside the need for it. Few people would consider the crush of commuters on a train a “blessing.” But the desperate are an exception, those for whom the most human touch they receive is in that cramped space. Only here, where most of their body is hidden in the press of an overpacked train, is the blessing of being seen as uncomplicated. Hanging over the lovely warmth of the coffee-drinking neighbor’s glance is the promise that it will end once they disembark the train and the Archivist will again be “the subject of glares, assessments, confusion, or the raised eyebrows of recognition.” To be seen may be to exist. But to be visibly queer is to exist with the knowledge that recognition can lead to judgement, rejection, and violence.

Perhaps that is the reason the Archivist is unable to remember the child version of themself they see in an old news report about a spaceship sighting: They didn’t even remember the clipping existed until a filmmaker contacted them wanting to do a documentary on alien sightings. But now they’re confronted with an image that they don’t recognize. Whether this selective amnesia is their body acting in self-preservation or the result of alien influence, they must now confront it. It’s time for action. And what, fellow readers, is a more exciting way to face this extraterrestrial, existential crisis than through archival research?

Yes, the quiet work of rummaging through crates, organizing letters, and sifting through computer files is infinitely rewarding; but it doesn’t make for much of a story and Masad doesn’t subject us to it. Instead, the Archivist presents us with their research, telling us their subjects’ histories and, in doing so, becoming a part of them. The search through the archives of their childhood memories and their opening up to the outside world become intimately linked with Phyllis Egerton’s tale of self-acceptance through SF, and with the Hills’ journey of self-discovery through alien abduction.

The parallels between the Archivist’s story and Phyllis Egerton’s portrait of the SF author as a young lesbian are perhaps the most obvious. Phyllis is an aspiring writer who runs away to Boston after high school in order to escape her homophobic mother. It’s the 1960s and she gets work at a newspaper without having to prove any credentials. She writes in the evening, has a few disastrous dates with men, and goes to a psychiatrist for conversion therapy. After realizing that therapy can’t make her straight, she discovers Boston’s underground lesbian scene.

On one hand, Phyllis’s sections tell a classic story of societal and state-approved oppression of queer Americans, a reminder that in the ’60s and ’70s no meeting point was safe from police raids. Violence against queer people went unpunished. Society made no distinction between sexuality and gender expression. And coming out would often mean the end of a career. Still, within a homophobic society, we see expressions of joy and love as well as signs of hope, even in the homophobes.

But this isn’t the kind of story in which the heroine ends up at the Compton’s Cafeteria or Stonewall Inn riots. While those events are in the background, Phyllis’s story is also one of trying to be seen. This comes across in form as well as content. Her story begins right after running away to Boston and it’s narrated in the form of letters to Rosa, a friend with whom she had a high-school romance. But, as Phyllis’s letters to Rosa show a journey of self-acceptance, they also show tension and rejection:

Dear Rosa,

Until you tell me otherwise, I’ll keep writing, even if you don’t respond. You sent such a short letter from Sacramento, and you didn’t respond to the two I sent in reply, but the letters haven’t been returned to sender, so they seem to have arrived somewhere. If you throw them away, so be it. I’ve tried writing in a journal and it’s not the same. I bore myself. When I write to you, I can imagine you caring, even if you don’t. (pp. 64-5)

Phyllis’s story is in line with much queer literature from the mid twentieth century. Like in Brideshead Revisited (1945) and Giovanni’s Room (1956), here we have one queer character seeking love while the other opts for self-erasure into cis-heteronormativity, abandoning their former lover and sometimes destroying them in the process. But knowing the script doesn’t make it easier to see Phyllis’s angst-ridden lines (“I can imagine you caring, even if you don’t”). Instead, it puts tragic emphasis on the need to communicate, on how our exchanges with one another allow us to understand ourselves better. So even after Phyllis realizes that communication with Rosa is one-sided, she’s driven to continue her epistolary self-expression. Her thoughts are uninteresting if kept to herself. As the Archivist said, “to be seen, however fleetingly, is to exist”—even if we’re only seen in our imagination.

That brings us to the Hills’ story. Few characters are seen as much as this couple, who claim to have been abducted by aliens. But even with the media attention, a well-received book about their experience, speaking engagements, and a huge stream of fan letters to which they must respond, their story is ultimately about a couple learning to see themselves.

Before the media attention, they have neither solid proof of their abduction nor any memories they can trust. Affected by a lighter version of the Archivist’s full amnesia, the Hills only remember the aliens’ arrival, and then they flash forward to when they were running away. Any other details come from Betty Hill’s recurring dreams. This uncertainty begins to affect their health and the unremembered event takes over their lives. They subscribe to newsletters on aerial phenomena, their pastor invites them to talk to the congregation and finally, after speaking at a UFO study group, they realize that they need help:

When they drove home that night during an early fall sunset, they agreed that it had been an overwhelming and unexpected afternoon. They also agreed to finally consult with a psychiatrist who could help them unlock the memories of what had occurred during those missing hours. The memories had not returned naturally, and they were both tired of speculation. If a professional could help, then it was high time to seek one out. (p. 58)

For these lost memories, they have no archive to help them. They have to recover their experience themselves. And the only way seems to be hypnotherapy. Putting this mystery to rest isn’t a search for the truth for its own sake, and nor are they doing it for the sake of science and humanity (though they believe that would be a nice side effect). They’re doing it because they’ve lived happily and honestly up until that abduction and, until they can see the entirety of their experience, they don’t know how to look at themselves or continue living normally. They need the truth.

But truth isn’t the same as fact, as their psychiatrist tells them: “[E]ven if they were telling the truth as they saw and understood it, it did not mean this truth was objectively factual” (p. 123). In other words, even if they’re being honest about their experience, and the experience was the same for each of them, that still doesn’t mean it actually happened. This blurring of the lines between perception and fact is a statement on how we understand communication and interpretation, the writer and the reader. The narrator, who inserts their observations into the Hill’s story periodically, gives further texture to this reflection, detailing the interdependent powers of both author and reader:

My memory is fallible, as are the memories behind my various source texts. I hold up what I find most interesting, even if that’s not what’s most important. Or I hold up what I find important, even if it might be uninteresting to you. We’re playing a game, you and I, and while I hold the power in the telling, you hold it in the reading. You get to decide what is or isn’t real. (p. 198)

Eventually, the Hills listen to their recorded hypnosis sessions on tape. And in doing so, they interpret and revise themselves. They’re both authors and readers of their own story and once they can hold both those positions, they can move on with their lives … to a certain extent, anyway.

All three stories can be viewed through this power dynamic of author and reader. In Phyllis’s story, a virulently homophobic society tries to either force her to conform to a false heterosexual framework like Rosa or to disappear from a society that can’t allow itself to believe in happy homosexuals. American public consensus tries to remove her power to be both the writer, one who tells the truth, and the reader, one who determines what’s real in her own life. Phyllis has her memories, her emotions, and her imagination intact. The Hills, meanwhile, need outside help to write the missing parts of their lives, and the Archivist is so entrenched in interpretation that they’ve practically forgotten how to communicate. Phyllis has all the resources she needs to write her own life and the lives of countless characters in her imagination; but all these protagonists must fight this same fight, to be able to both speak their truth and understand their reality. These are important stories to which Masad’s elegant and thoughtful prose does justice wonderfully.

https://strangehorizons.com/wordpress/non-fiction/beings-by-ilana-masad/

https://strangehorizons.com/wordpress/?p=58882

Posted by S.L. Dove Cooper

https://strangehorizons.com/wordpress/non-fiction/that-soft-and-gentle-feeling-relationships-in-cosy-sff/

https://strangehorizons.com/wordpress/?p=58710

Everyone knows what cosy speculative fiction is. No one actually seems to agree on that definition, though. Early in 2025, author Jenny Sandiford compiled a list of all the cosy fantasy books she could find for that year on her website. Of these 42 books, 35—that’s 83%!—of them are fantasy romance novels. When Book Riot made a list of “20 Must-Read Cozy Fantasy Books” in 2023, 7 of those titles did not have a romance plot strong enough to be mentioned in the description or in reader reviews. 5 of those 7 books are considered middle-grade[1]. That leaves 18 books aimed at adults or young adults and, like with Sandiford’s list, it puts around 89% of those books firmly in the fantasy romance category. As such, it would not be surprising if people believed that cosy speculative fiction books must be a subgenre of Romance. There is no such requirement, and the volume of Romance novels in a non-Romance subgenre is crowding out a wealth of other stories.

© S. L Dove Cooper

What actually constitutes cosy speculative fiction can be difficult or tricky to discuss because for many readers the most important, sometimes sole, criterium for the genre is the elusive element of ‘vibes’ or, more ungenerously, the feeling of “it felt comfortable and contained nothing upsetting to me, personally”. This results in discussions on whether books like Rebecca Thorne’s Can’t Spell Treason without Tea is actually cosy fantasy or not because some readers will think the stakes are too high and others feel it hits the vibes are just right.

I have previously examined and compared literary critics’ definitions of cosy fantasy to find points of agreement, but within popular discussions among readers and in marketing it is consistently the subjective quality of ‘vibe’ that wins out. Casey Blair defines cosy fantasy as “vibe. It's mood, tone, atmosphere.”, while Sarah Beth Durst describes it as “a new name for the type of optimistic fantasy / comfort read that’s descended from books like Howl’s Moving Castle by Diana Wynne Jones and Beauty by Robin McKinley. It’s often described as low stakes or slice-of-life fantasy. It’s not about saving the world; it’s about saving a heart or a soul.” Both authors provide a fuller discussion of how writers can achieve that particular feeling, but these quotes are how they chose to explain what it is authors are looking for.

The books Durst mentions as inspiration for cosy fantasy both include a romantic subplot, though neither are fantasy romance. Howl’s Moving Castle is a children’s book while Beauty is more focused on the main character’s daily life with some reviewers remarking on how disappointing it was to see how little romance the book actually contained. Another frequently cited inspiration for the genre is Terry Pratchett’s Discworld, notably the Watch subseries, which is likewise not a series that includes a strong romantic element, based as they are on crime novels. Like the other two, it has a romantic subplot in the relationship between Vimes and Sybil Ramkin, but it a very small element of the narrative.

Tellingly, Durst also specifically describes cosy fantasy as a comfort read. As Sarah Wendell from Smart Bitches, Trashy Books notes in a Kirkus article, “comfort read” is a “familiar term to romance readers” and goes on to explain that

[r]omance is, if you haven't gathered, a very intimate genre, not only because it depicts the emotions surrounding courtship, but also because it invites empathy from the reader based on those same emotions. So if you think about the emotions you feel in a relationship – love, fear, joy, attraction, for example – and you think about the fact that romance is asking the reader to identify with or even feel a portion of those same emotions, you can understand how re-reading a much loved book can be a heady, absorbing experience.

Comfort reads are a specific type of re-reading. Comfort reads are those books that are the reading equivalent of your favorite pajamas, the most fuzzy blanket, the familiar recipe, warm beverages, and everything that makes your body feel cared for and, well, comforted. Books that inspire that same feeling of being cared for are what I call comfort reads, and each reader's comfort read list is a little different.

This emotional connection and invitation for empathy Wendell describes also occurs in cosy speculative fiction and the ways she describes comfort reads are often used to describe cosy speculative fiction reads as well. Julie Leong’s The Teller of Small Fortunes includes 12 review quotes/blurbs. Half of them explicitly use ‘cosy’ or ‘comforting’. It is likened to a hug thrice, with another twice for a warm cup of tea. It is explicitly described as comfort read once as well. The emotions that are most mentioned in the quotes are ‘love’ and ‘joy’, two of the ones Wendell mentioned as important ones to connect to in a romance novel.

© Julie Leong

Though Teller has a romantic subplot, it is very small and the book as a whole does not centre romantic relationships, meaning that it serves as a strong example of how cosy speculative fiction and romance rely on similar emotions within their storytelling. The ubiquity of romance in cosy speculative fiction, even in books like Teller that don’t centre on it, makes sense when one considers how much of society is structured around romantic (and sexual) expectations for individuals. It is expected of people, as they grow from child into adult, to develop an interest in romance (and sex) and to find a partner to build an exclusive romantic (and sexual) relationship with.

Sherronda J. Brown defines compulsory sexuality as “the idea that sex is universally desired as a feature of human nature, that we are essentially obligated to participate in sex at some point in life, and that there is something fundamentally wrong with anyone who does not want to—whether it be perceived as a defect of morality, psychology, or physiology”. (Refusing Compulsory Sexuality, p.7) Amatonormativity is slightly different. In her preface to Minimizing Marriage, Elizabeth Brake describes the term as “the focus on marital and amorous love relationships as special sites of value” and she offers as an example that “the assumption that the most valuable relationships must be marital or amorous devalues friendships”. These two concepts often go hand-in-hand as they do here.

Discussion is frequently made fraught by vocal puritans who think sex and romance has no place in (speculative) fiction as well as by the frequency with which asexual and aromantic people affected by compulsory sexuality and amatonormativity are thrown under the bus as a counter-argument to this puritanical rhetoric. This essay is not the space for either of those. Romance and/or sex are, for the majority of people, an important element of their lives and, as such, it frequently shows up in fiction. As children grow into teenagers and young adults, they are expected to start dating and to find a partner to form a nuclear family with. By thirty, media seems to suggest, a person is supposed to have found their partner and started a life together, if not have gotten married and had at least one child.

It makes sense, then, that romantic plots show up frequently in general. Not only that but Romance is the biggest and best-selling genre overall. Factor in that, as mentioned, there is a level of overlap between Romance and cosy speculative fiction in the emotional connection readers are looking for and the techniques used to create those connections and it is little surprise that so many cosy speculative fiction books are also romances. So what, more concretely, does this overlap look like?

For a book to be considered a Romance, it needs to have a happy ending, whether for now (HFN) or forever (HEA). This is, Romance readers and writers will tell you, the one thing an author cannot skip. If the book does not end with the protagonists in a for-them happy relationship, it is not a Romance, full stop. Likewise, for a speculative fiction story to be considered cosy it must end with the protagonists in a better place than they started. This frequently means the protagonist finding a group of friends, and with social norms dictating that a show of success and happiness require a (monogamous) romantic (and sexual) relationship, by the end of the story that group of friends tends to include a partner or the promise of one. Romance’s stakes of two people getting together, especially combined with the surety that they will, is, arguably, the type of low stakes that people are looking for within cosy speculative fiction.

The narrative devices to create, maintain or diffuse tension are often similar as certain elements of tension are simply not going to be as stressful, especially in stories that require the author to make and hold to a promise for a certain ending. If the couple in a Romance breaks up, the very fact that it is a Romance novel already diffuses that tension because they are guaranteed to resolve the reasons why and get back together. What authors are exploring is less the racked-up tension of whatever caused the fall-out, but the ways in which the couple resolves that tension and reconnects.

In the historical romance The Duke Who Didn’t by Courtney Milan, for example, one of the points of tension for Jeremy is that he has not told Chloe, the protagonist, that he is the Duke so ridiculed in her village. Rather than a huge emotional fall-out, wherein both Chloe and Jeremy deal with the betrayal once that truth comes out, Milan resolves this by noting that everyone already knew and spent years indulging Jeremy in his deception. Chloe, meanwhile, has been burned by Jeremy before and is determined not to be hurt again. Milan’s narrative, as is common in Romance, is character-driven, focused not on the ways Chloe and Jeremy come together to get one up on the white men who cheated Chloe’s father out of a fortune or who bullied Jeremy for being half-Chinese, but on the intimate connections both characters make to each other and the supporting cast. To echo Durst’s description of cosy fantasy, it’s not about saving the world (or in this case punching upwards against racists) but about saving one heart or soul (two, here since the connections they make to each other and, to a lesser extent the people around them, allow them to heal from past hurts and move on into a brighter, romantically entwined future together).

© A. T. Qureshi

Similarly, A.T. Qureshi’s The Baby Dragon Café stars Saphira and Aiden, both people who have lost the person dearest to them and who find healing and growth in each other. Aiden is an introverted gardener unwilling to bond with or effectively train his baby dragon, Sparky, due to the pressures of his family. Saphira is struggling to run a baby dragon-friendly café and finds herself accepting Aiden’s request for her to train his dragon. The emotional tension of Saphira eventually losing Sparky takes a backseat to exploring how she finds joy and beauty in the dragon’s antics and how this affects Aiden in turn.

In The Tea Princess Chronicles by Casey Blair, the relationship between Miyara and Deniel is secondary to Miyara’s desire to find a place within the town she finds herself in after having rejected her life as a royal princess as much as she can. Unlike Milan and Qureshi’s books, The Tea Princess Chronicles are not Romance, but fantasy. The series just happens to include a fairly prominent romantic plot. Like the other two books, though, Blair’s novels are character-driven and focus on the dynamics and relationships Miyara develops with the other cast members. Tensions between the characters are often solved by improved communication and the focus is shifted from exploring the potential fall-out to how such a fall-out can be defused. Though its plot and stakes gain prominence as the series continues into saving the world territory, which makes the stakes too high for some readers, the way the books accomplish this is by focusing on the individuals and the connections they make with each other.

Similar threads emerge in cosy speculative books that don’t focus on (or include) romantic subplots. Claudie Arsenault’s Chronicles of Nerezia novella series, for example, is a character-driven (science) fantasy narrative in which the stakes gradually grow larger. In Awakenings Horace meets Aliyah, an amnesiac elf with the unique ability to absorb Fragments, dangerous motes that can take over or kill people. As the series progresses, they learn more about Aliyah’s history and strange powers, slowly shifting the plot from the small-scale narrative of people trying to find their place in life into something shaping up to involve a more traditional epic fantasy Chosen One narrative. Yet, for all that, it is not Aliyah, the potential Chosen One, who takes centre stage in these novellas. It’s Horace, the series’ main viewpoint character, who is the series’ central figure and the story’s driving force. Whenever the novellas have a chance to move into a plot-driven quest fantasy, they do not. Arseneault will provide enough details to imagine the world and understand the plot, but the novellas’ focus remains on the character dynamics between Horace, Aliyah, Rumi, and Keza. Flooded Secrets focuses far more on Keza and her reasons for joining the others than it ever does on discovering anything about Aliyah’s mysterious powers. Motes of Inspiration does not hesitate to upend readers’ understanding of the world and its history, but grounds itself deeply in Rumi’s discovery of self-worth. The stakes may involve saving the world, but that world is saved by caring about people.

© S. L Dove Cooper

Arseneault’s work is explicitly and deliberately aromantic and asexual and it often engages with elements and tropes that readers strongly associate with Romance in a non-romantic light. In The Chronicles of Nerezia this further highlights how little cosy speculative fiction itself relies on romance, specifically. One of the romance tropes Arseneault specifically subverts in this novella series is There’s Only One Bed, utilising it to showcase Horace and Aliyah’s close friendship.

Horace froze, eir back against the now cold wall, eir chest and toes uncovered, and eir heart hammering. Aliyah settled, sleeping still, clinging to the blanket, shoulders hunched and knees brought up into a small protective ball. They seemed minuscule and frail, and Horace fought the urge to wrap eir big arms around them and bring them into a reassuring embrace. Aliyah wasn’t one of the kids from home who’d run to em after nightmares. They didn’t know each other, and from the way Aliyah had pushed away earlier, they needed space. Horace pushed emself harder against the wall in a pointless attempt to give them most of the bed. (Awakenings, chapter 5)

In this scene, Horace and Aliyah don’t yet know each other fairly well, but they are clearly sharing a single bed with nary a romantic or sexual thought to the experience. In fact, Horace is trying to give Aliyah as much space as they need and the closest emotional relationship contrast Arseneault has offered is one of Horace acting like a family member. Later in the book, after the two have been travelling and have fought off Fragments together, the description becomes

When they slipped into bed again, they did away with the forced space between them. Horace still leaned against the wall, but this time e brought one arm over Aliyah, bringing them closer. For a time, eir mind drifted to eir desperate run through the possessed dead and the way Aliyah’s thin frame had bucked and tensed against eir chest. E wondered how much they remembered, if anything, and if eir presence would evoke the countless bodies crushing them. But Aliyah only nestled in the space with a quiet sigh, and e felt the tension ebb from their muscles little by little until sleep found them. (Awakenings, chapter 8)

As can be seen, Horace’s viewpoint is practical. The novella links eir experience exclusively to bed-sharing with friends or other children. Physical descriptions initially exist to create distance and when Horace and Aliyah settle into sharing the mattress properly, while there is clear intimacy and trust in the sharing, Horace’s only thought is whether eir weight will remind Aliyah of a recent traumatic experience. The second half of this citation is the emotional release of the novella, the quiet before the story ends. Arseneault’s use of the trope drives home the depths a friendship can have. Sharing a bed platonically is something readers may recognise from their own lives, though they may have to think back to their childhood and realise that this gradually became less acceptable as they aged and amatonormativity and compulsory sexuality pushed sharing a mattress or a blanket into something strictly romantic or sexual.

Arseneault’s exploration of found family goes further than Horace and Aliyah’s closeness, of course. Keza and Rumi have an abrasive yet protective friendship, while Horace and Keza settle into a mentor/mentee role division. Aliyah’s love for the others is shown through subtle gestures and quiet attentiveness. Throughout the novella series, the characters are shown to share meals or play games, the ‘downtime’ from the plot of discovering Aliyah’s past being treated as just as, if not more, important than said plot. Always, at the heart of each story, the reader finds Horace’s desire for connection to others and eir willingness to treat people with openness and kindness, as well as Horace’s deep affection for eir friends. It is not a story about how Aliyah defeats the Fragments with magic and skill. It is a story about how support and care makes us stronger and more resilient. Aliyah may be the key to saving the world from Fragments, but this story is about who saves Aliyah from losing themself, who they are, wholly to that purpose.

That said, explicit aromantic and asexual fiction is of course not the only type of fiction which prioritises relationships other than romantic/sexual. The earlier discussed Teller of Small Fortunes is another prime example. This too is a story about friendship and (found) family. While it does have a romantic subplot present between Silt and Kina, it is a minor thread and treated more as comic relief than anything vital to the narrative. Indeed, by the end of the book, the romance between them has not progressed beyond “[Kina] looked upon the thief with something soft and unspoken—something perhaps just a little more than friendship.” (Teller, Chapter 18) The quote also tells us that the book is not an aromantic one since it linguistically prioritises romance over friendship even as the narrative keeps its focus largely on friendship and family ties, with Mash’s relationship to his wife Anna as the one exception thanks to his deep love for his daughter.

Throughout the book, small hints indicate that Tao has never considered romance (or sex) before and chapter 9 even states it outright: [Tao]’d never been in love herself—funny how romance didn’t seem to feature much, when you lived in a wagon and never stayed in the same place longer than a week—and it seemed rather a messy business, altogether” (Teller, ch 9).

Tao’s experience contrasts to the travelling innkeeper, Eino, from Kate Valent’s The Driftcap Inn whom the reader first meets, in chapter 1, after a one-night-stand, inviting that person to travel with him, and expressing that he invites people he has known for less than a day along frequently because he is lonely and his friendship with his cook is not fulfilling enough to him. It must be noted that a part of the implied reason why Tao has no expressed experience with or interest in romance is racism, which does not appear to be the case for Eino. Reading Tao through an aromantic lens would put her firmly in an Outsider trope, unlovable and undesirable precisely because she is foreign and Other, denied a proper place within Eshteran society because she is not like them and incapable of experiencing feelings the same way.

Intersectionally, this is an explicit part of the narrative as Tao is a Shinn immigrant who moved to Eshtera as a small child and lost much of her cultural heritage trying to fit in with Eshteran society. Throughout the book, Tao struggles with the question of who she is and where she belongs. When she attempts to avoid reading a great fortune, the book actively and explicitly calls out the idea that Tao does not care about Eshteran people, or the country she spent most of her life in.

It will not even let Tao pretend to herself that she only cares about her friends and is only helping the High Mage because their guild can leverage resources and people to look for her friend’s missing daughter. Like Durst’s definition of cosy fantasy and shown in Nerezia, Teller is a story that chooses to prioritise saving one person without narratively sacrificing the potential for higher stakes. “There’s no such thing as greater good—there’s just good, and the more if it we can do, the better[,]” Tao tells the High Mage in chapter 16. Tao is not there to save the kingdom or to save the world, to be heroically sacrificing for some nebulous impact on a country she has ambivalent feelings about. She is there, at the story’s core, because it is something she can do to help others, to help a friend who has repeatedly given up his chance to find his daughter to save Tao. Tao reads her great fortune, saves the kingdom of Eshtera in essence, simply because she wants to help her friend.

Becky Chambers’ Monk and Robot series (Monk) is about Dex, a tea monk who is looking for … something, a robot looking to understand what humans need, and the journey they go on together to discover whether there even is an answer. The two novellas focus first on Dex’s dissatisfaction in life as they leave their comfortable life in the human half of Panga behind to look for a monastery in the wilderness, then on Mosscap’s exploration of human settlements and its own dissatisfaction as it discovers robots too can struggle as much with the question of what a person needs. Just as in Nerezia, Teller and Driftcap, the forward momentum of Monk comes in the form of a road trip. The second novella especially explores the ways in which someone existing is enough, that people don’t need a purpose or fulfil a function to be of value. Monk is a philosophical series, and a more introspective presentation than other cosy speculative fiction narratives.

When the vast majority of a non-Romance genre has become Romance, platonic relationships such as these are pushed to the wayside, perpetuating the idea identified by Brake that non-romantic relationships such as friendship, parenthood, collegiality, siblingship, etc aren’t worth exploring or telling stories about. Viv from Travis Baldree’s Legends and Lattes may end up with a romantic partner, but that plotline is an element of the community and home she has found rather than the core answer to what she was looking for. It is, in effect, a bonus, not the grand prize.

Guerric Haché’s A Slice of Mars is as much about the sibling relationship between Hett and San, as they work out how to run a successful restaurant together, as it is about the friend group they build through that work and the tensions between people with vastly different experiences and views.

© Guerric Haché

Joyce Chng’s Water into Wine, a novella written and published in 2017, about half a decade before cosy fantasy became an apparent juggernaut of a term, is a story about a single parent, qar family and qar relation to gender identity during an interstellar war. Though the book has a romantic subplot between Xin and Galliano, the fact that the novella isn’t a romance allows for a vastly different relationship dynamic between them and a more bittersweet ending. In chapter 13 of book 1, Xin says nothing as soldiers come to take Galliano, a traitor, away from the vineyard. Though the narrative keeps a distance from Xin’s emotions at this point, it has already demonstrated that qar will kill to protect qar children, and protesting Galliano’s arrest would threaten everyone’s safety. When he returns in book 2, after having escaped the prison he was in, Xin lets him stay even though his presence could endanger them all, but when Galliano walks out to meet the ship looking for him, Xin does not try to stop him and qar even comments on this choice in the narrative.

© Joyce Chng

Without the imperative that Xin and Galliano need to be in a happy relationship in the end, Chng is able to tell a story that centralises familial and self-love. At the start of the novella, Xin learns qar was left a vineyard by qar grandfather. Xin had forgotten once telling qar Ye Ye that this was what qar wanted, but he hadn’t and, out of love for his grandchild, he made sure Xin’s childhood dream could come true. There are hints suggesting that now, as an adult, Xin does not want a vineyard at all, but qar is determined to make the venture a success both because that was a promise qar made qar grandfather and because doing so allows Xin to be true to qarself.

Unlike the other cosy speculative fiction novels discussed, one can argue that Xin is worse off than when the novella started thereby breaking the rule for a cosy ending. After all, Xin’s lover gave himself up, incarcerated or dead; qar closest neighbour and friend on the planet fled the war and may not return; qar mother has died; qar son has joined the army and one of qar daughters wants to leave to become a nurse. Yet the novella ends with a promise of new life, hope for what the future will bring, and with Xin fully embracing who qar is.

© S. L Dove Cooper

A few years before Chng’s novella, I published A Promise Broken, a cosy fantasy novel about a young girl, Eiryn, and her uncle dealing with grief and bullying. Unlike most cosy speculative fiction, this book does not feature a romantic plotline. Its focus is on both exploring the bonds between Eiryn and her uncle as he, and the community around him, work out how to raise a precocious, sensitive child as well as the friendships between the characters around them.

Even earlier in 2014, Becky Chambers published The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet (Planet). In her 2012 Kickstarter video, Chambers describes that “what [she’s] really interested in is what it’s like for an ordinary person to live in one of those fantastic futures” (Kickstarter video). Though Chambers never mentions the word ‘cosy’ in her video or her main Kickstarter promotional material, her description of the story she wants to tell fits neatly onto the hallmarks of what would, several years later, become known as cosy fantasy. Planet contains a central romance arc between Rosemary and Sissix as well as one between Lovey and Jenks. However, the overarching story would resolve itself just fine without either as it is focused on the crew’s overall dynamics and not Rosemary’s romantic relationship status.

The books noted at the start of this essay as inspirations on cosy speculative fiction—Howl’s Moving Castle, Beauty and Discworld—would all function without a romantic plot element. Studio Ghibli’s most cited work in cosy speculative fiction fields—Kiki’s Delivery Service—may have some hints of romantic feelings between Kiki and Tombo, they are only hints. The majority of the film[2] centres around Kiki’s relationships with the townspeople in general. Like in many of the other cosy speculative fiction titles mentioned so far, it is friendship, family and mentorship that takes centre stage in the types of relationships the viewer experiences, from Osono’s maternal instincts towards Kiki to Kiki’s friendship with the artist Ursula and with Tombo. The story itself is a coming-of-age story, with Kiki setting off into the wider world on her own to find her independence and build a life of her own away from her parental home.

Diana Wynne Jones’s Howl’s Moving Castle (Castle), whether one takes the book or the Ghibli adaptation, is likewise a story about a girl leaving home and discovering who she is. After a witch’s curse transforms Sophie Hatter into an old lady, Sophie sets out to find a cure and ends up working as a cleaning lady in the titular moving castle of the wizard Howl. Castle’s central romance between Sophie and Howl fits more within the bounds of amatonormative storytelling than Kiki’s relationship with Tombo. As Sophie is an adult, part of finding herself and her place in the world involves finding a romantic partner, but she also befriends the demon Calcifer and Howl’s young apprentice. Throughout the story, Sophie learns to have self-confidence and in the later sequel House of Many Ways one of Sophie’s main relationships is to her son, Morgan. Though Howl is present, he is pretending to be a child and Sophie’s nephew, effectively casting Sophie in a parental role rather than that of a romantic and sexual partner there as well.

Terry Pratchett’s Discworld series explored a wide variety of relationship types, but its most cited subseries in relation to cosy speculative fiction, City Watch, tends to keep its focus on the relationships between Vimes and his squad and Lord Vetinari. Though Sybil Ramkin and Vimes get engaged in the first book in the series (Guards! Guards!), and married in the second, their relationship is kept largely to the background, as can be expected from a series that draws on crime novels for its plots. Even cosy mysteries do not concern themselves overly with the detectives’ personal lives. When in Thud! Vimes (finally) snaps and loses control after an assassination attempt on his wife and son as well as having had a near-Death experience himself, his fury shows in a recital of the story he tells his son every evening. It is fatherly love, not romantic or sexual, that takes the central spot in his mind in this moment.

The origins of cosy speculative fiction have always treated romance as an element of a larger whole, exploring the breadth of relationships and affections people may have. Yet as the numbers showed, contemporary cosy speculative fiction has a strong tendency to push its romance plot front and centre, leaving the story’s platonic relationships without a spotlight and upholding the ideas that romantic relationships and sex are the ultimate goal of community-building. It reduces a broad spectrum of relationships into a single, narrow point and pushes out the variety that once was set up to become part and parcel of the genre. Cosy speculative fiction with its focus on community and everyday life is uniquely shaped to celebrate the power of all types of relationships and to demonstrate a world of what people can achieve by working together and respecting one another. Yet much of this potential is currently not being realised as so many narratives have become less about finding family and more about fitting oneself into amatonormative society.

References

Arseneault, Claudie. Awakenings . The Kraken Collective, 2024. ebook.

—. Flooded Secrets . The Kraken Collective, 2024. ebook.

—. Motes of Inspiration. The Kraken Collective, 2025. ebook.

Baldree, Travis. Legends & Lattes. Tor, 2022. ebook.

Blair, Casey. A Coup of Tea. self-published, 2017. ebook.

—. Cozy Fantasy Starts with Narrative Outlook. 18 December 2024. 15 January 2026. <https://www.campfirewriting.com/learn/cozy-fantasy-starts-with-narrative-outlook>.

—. Royal Tea Service. self-published, 2022. ebook.

—. Tea Set and Match. self-published, 2018. ebook.

Brake, Elizabeth. Minimizing Marriage: Morality, Marriage, and the Law. Oxford University Press, 2012. ebook.

Brown, Sherronda J. Refusing Compulsory Sexuality: A Black Asexual Lens on Our Sex-Obsessed Culture. North Atlantic Books, 2022. paperback.

Chambers, Becky. A Prayer for the Crown-Shy. Tordotcom, 2022. ebook.

—. A Psalm for the Wild-Built. Tordotcom, 2021. ebook.

—. The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet. 22 August 2019. 15 January 2026. <https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/beckychambers/the-long-way-to-a-small-angry-planet?_pxhc=1657459177273>.

—. The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet. self-published, 2014. ebook.

Chng, Joyce. Water into Wine. Annorlunda Books, 2017. ebook.

Cooper, S.L. Dove. A Promise Broken. Dovelet Books, 2015. print.

—. Cosy SFF: A Comparison Of Definitions. 31 March 2024. 15 January 2026. <https://medium.com/@dovelynnwriter/cosy-sff-31aaa6599bc4>.

Durst, Sarah Beth. What Makes Fantasy So Cozy – GUEST POST by Sarah Beth Durst (THE SPELLSHOP). 18 September 2024. 15 January 2026. <https://fantasy-hive.co.uk/2024/09/what-makes-fantasy-so-cozy-guest-post-by-sarah-beth-durst-the-spellshop/>.

Haché, Guerric. A Slice of Mars. self-published, 2023. ebook.

Leong, Julie. The Teller of Small Fortunes. Ace, 2024. ebook.

Milan, Courtney. The Duke Who Didn’t. Femtopress LLC, 2020. ebook.

Popp, Isabelle. 20 Must-Read Cozy Fantasy Books. 26 December 2023. 15 January 2026. <https://bookriot.com/best-cozy-fantasy-books/>.

Qureshi, A.T. The Baby Dragon Café. Avon, 2025. ebook.

Sandiford, Jenni. Snuggle Up with These Cozy Fantasy New Releases in 2025! 24 April 2025. 15 January 2026. <https://www.jennysandiford.com/book-reviews-latest/cozy-fantasy-new-releases-2025>.

Valent, Kate. The Driftcap Inn. Valiant Ink, 2025. ebook.

Wendell, Sarah. Smart Bitches, Trashy Books: Comfort Reading. 21 November 2012. 15 January 2026. <https://www.kirkusreviews.com/news-and-features/articles/smart-bitches-trashy-books-comfort-reading/>.

[1] Which for people not used to the English book classifications means they’re aimed at around 8-12-year-olds and, though romantic plots can occur, are less likely to have them.

[2] Itself based on Eiko Kadono’s 1985 children’s fantasy novel of the same name.

Articles Editor: Joyce Chng.

Copy Editor: The Copyediting Department.

https://strangehorizons.com/wordpress/non-fiction/that-soft-and-gentle-feeling-relationships-in-cosy-sff/

https://strangehorizons.com/wordpress/?p=58710

Posted by Electra Pritchett

https://strangehorizons.com/wordpress/non-fiction/when-among-crows-and-to-clutch-a-razor-by-veronica-roth/

https://strangehorizons.com/wordpress/?p=58288

The question of what makes a monster in speculative fiction goes all the way back to founding mother Mary Shelley in Frankenstein (1818), and since then authors have never stopped coming up with plausible answers. With her novellas When Among Crows (2024) and To Clutch a Razor (2025), the first two entries in her Curse Bearer series, Veronica Roth puts her own Polish folklore- and fantasy-inflected spin on the topic, sketching out a world where monstrosity is hotly contested between self-appointed paladins and their prey.

When Among Crows introduces an urban fantasy-esque vision of contemporary Chicago through the eyes of Dymitr, one of the Knights of the Holy Order, who have made it their mission to slay so-called monsters. The Knights are global, and their “monsters” are quasi-mortal creatures of folklores the world over; but as Dymitr and his family are Polish, and he comes to Chicago and its Polish diaspora in search of Baba Jaga, the majority of the creatures in the story are drawn from Polish folklore: owl-shapeshifting strzyga, zmora who are masters of illusions and can taste emotions, południca (noonwraiths), upiór (vampires), and many more.

To find Baba Jaga, Dymitr seeks out a zmora named Ala, who bears a cruel family curse that shows her visions of the Holy Order’s murders. The curse drove Ala’s mother to her death, and now it haunts Ala, but Dymitr offers her a bargain: an end to the curse via a special flower he possesses, in exchange for an audience with Baba Jaga. Dymitr’s efforts to keep his own identity as a Knight under wraps are complicated by his sister, also a Knight, repeatedly showing up to try to help him—for Dymitr is regarded by the rest of his family as suspiciously soft. But if Ala and her strzyga friend Niko Kosta find out who Dymitr really is, they may never trust him again.

As it happens, however, Dymitr’s intentions are genuine: he says he wants to destroy a Knight of the Holy Order, and he means himself. Dymitr’s past with Ala’s family goes deep, and his seeking her out isn’t so random as it appears. The exchange that Baba Jaga eventually offers him is appropriately twisted: she’ll transform him into a zmora, in exchange for the sword that is sheathed next to his spine. The sword is the symbol of the Knights. Like Wolverine’s claws, drawing it hurts every time.

The Knights’ magic, it transpires, is not natural to them and is thus built on pain. Even the naturally magical creatures are apt to ask for things like a fingernail removed from a living donor to fuel their spells. The magic with which Roth imbues her world is bloody, then, and weighty for it, and the characters who walk through her magical Chicago are appropriately complicated, none more so than Ala, Niko, and Dymitr. It’s a tribute to Roth’s character work that Dymitr and Niko’s burgeoning relationship feels completely natural, even when their roles threaten to drive them apart.

Roth mentions in her author’s note for the series’ second volume, To Clutch a Razor, that writing the books has given her an excuse to learn more about Polish folklore and her own heritage, and the books will certainly pique the interest of people who are interested in that sort of thing, or who, like Roth (and me), are of Polish descent but didn’t grow up hearing these stories. There’s a huge variety of folklore creatures featured in the books, very few of which, besides Baba Jaga, I’d ever heard of before, and Roth is particularly good at weaving an individual creature’s unique characteristics into plot threads, especially in To Clutch a Razor. If you think of the genre as a whole, “Polish-inspired fantasy” isn’t a particularly robust category (particularly if you set aside The Witcher series), and Roth seems to have struck a rich vein of inspiration for these books.

As a protagonist, Dymitr is especially interesting. In When Among Crows he’s playing his cards close to his chest, both in the narrative and with the other characters, and the impression the reader gets is that he’s coolly, steadily strong and in control even as he recounts the moral awakening that led him to turn his back on his family and seek out Baba Jaga. Certainly, when he crosses blades with his sister there’s no impression of weakness. In To Clutch a Razor, by contrast, his transformation into a zmora has left him existentially off balance, and he’s not very good at illusions yet. This weakness is exacerbated by the fact that Baba Jaga retaining his sword will slowly weaken, drive him mad, and eventually kill him. In his weakened state, he can’t easily fall back on his prior Knight’s skills and has to rely on Ala for help: Not only has he been crashing in her tiny apartment, but together, they travel to his family compound in Poland to try to steal his family’s grimoire in hopes of trading it to Baba Jaga for Dymitr’s sword. Just as Dymitr tried to keep secret his being a Knight from those he met in Chicago, he’s now trying to keep his transformation into a zmora from his family of Knights, including his sister. Meanwhile, Niko—who serves as his community’s zemsta, an appointed avenger/fighter who takes on the Knights so others don’t have to—has been assigned to kill Dymitr’s mother. But this is an impossible task meant to kill him, as a punishment for not following his superior’s orders to the letter in the previous book.

To Clutch a Razor’s going back to semi-rural Poland is a nice contrast to the prior story’s Chicago setting, and initially there’s an element of grim comedy to everyone sneaking around the Knights’ family compound during a funeral. That air is quickly dispelled when people start getting tortured: Baba Jaga wants Dymitr to kill his beloved grandmother, but Dymitr’s grandmother is completely ruthless, and his mother is worse. Dymitr says he can’t kill his grandmother, but as we see her and his mother through his eyes and as well as Ala’s (since she still remembers the murders that she saw in her visions, even though her curse has been lifted), it’s clear that Dymitr’s relatives have killed many, many “monsters,” a lot of them terribly. Dymitr found the moral clarity to realize that he himself had done wrong, and sought to change his ways. But what do his unrepentant family of torturers, bullies, and murderers deserve? And will he and Niko still be able to look at each other by the end of the book, assuming any of them survive the Knights?

The Knights’ magic is powered by their own pain, and it’s made them self-righteous and cruel, as they prey on those they deem inhuman with no more justification than that assumption. Dymitr’s journey away from the Knights seems like something that’s already completed in When Among Crows, but To Clutch a Razor demonstrates that it’s an ongoing process, and one that Dymitr actively chooses to continue: He doesn’t want to die, even if as a Knight he was prepared to, and so he keeps walking a road that leads farther and farther away from his family and who he was. Where it ends is an open question, but I would happily read as many books as Roth wants to write about this trio.

https://strangehorizons.com/wordpress/non-fiction/when-among-crows-and-to-clutch-a-razor-by-veronica-roth/

https://strangehorizons.com/wordpress/?p=58288

Posted by Amritesh Mukherjee

https://strangehorizons.com/wordpress/non-fiction/witchcraft-for-wayward-girls-by-grady-hendrix/

https://strangehorizons.com/wordpress/?p=58855

Women are controlled, have always been. Their bodies, their minds, their agency—all are always up for someone’s taking, always up for negotiation. As Grady Hendrix’s Witchcraft for Wayward Girls explains:

“We’re loathed and despised in every time, in every country, in every culture. In New Guinea they say we dig up the bodies of dead babies and eat them. In Zambia they say we sleep with our brothers and fathers and murder newborns. The Hopi say we kill our kin to prolong our lives. In Germany they say we steal men’s penises and hide them in birds’ nests. (…) They say we spoil milk and steal children. That we murder the innocent and ruin crops. That we bring disease and eat human flesh. You know why they say all this?”

“Because you’re witches?”

“Because we’re women. Muslim, Christian, Hindu, Jew—the one thing they all have in common is that they hate us. For hundreds of thousands of years, they’ve hated us.” (p. 219)

The horror in this world needs no monsters kicking up a storm. Instead, it stems from authority, and from its supposed guardians: parents, social workers, doctors, the “grown-ups.” This isn't Hendrix's first exploration of girls under patriarchal control, and the novel participates in horror’s larger project of voicing what gets silenced elsewhere. Yet the genre itself has been marginalised, denied critical recognition, despite, or because of, its popularity. The study and recognition of horror remains sparse relative to the attention devoted to fantasy or science fiction.

As Hendrix notes in his history of the genre's ’70s and ’80s boom, Paperbacks from Hell (2017), “...horror appeared nowhere on best-seller lists. Horror was for children. It was pulp. If it was any good, it couldn't possibly be horror and so was rebranded as a ‘thrilling tale.’ Horror seemed to have no future because it was trapped in the past” (p. 16). But then the needle moved. The genre exploded:

Between April 1967 and December 1973, everything changed. In a little more than five years, horror fiction became fit for adults, thanks to three books. Ira Levin’s Rosemary’s Baby, Thomas Tryon’s The Other, and William Peter Blatty’s The Exorcist were the first horror novels to grace Publishers Weekly’s annual best-seller list since Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca in 1938. (p. 24)

This mutation had roots. As Bernice M. Murphy argues in her essay from Xavier Aldana Reyes’s Horror: A Literary History (2016), “Horror Fiction from the Decline of Universal Horror to the Rise of the Psycho Killer”:

Horror fiction began to enter the literary and publishing mainstream during the post-war era because it had increasingly begun to reflect the myriad anxieties found in everyday life. Authors such as King, Barker, Campbell, Straub, Herbert, Blatty, Ketchum, Thomas Tryon, Joan Samson, Kathe Koja and many others (...) added further depth, sophistication, frank sexuality and outright gore to the genre.

They would do this by variously utilising the four major characteristics of the genre: a tendency to deal with horrors arising from the conditions of everyday life; an accompanying preference for mundane, contemporary settings; a movement away from the supernatural and towards the depiction of aberrant psychology as a source of terror (as epitomised by the soon-to-become iconic figure of the serial killer Hannibal Lecter); and a tendency to depict the supernatural in a much more ‘grounded’, naturalistic manner.

This vision of horror materialized out of a changing nation's shifting anxieties. Steffen Hantke in his essay for the same volume, “The Rise of Popular Horror, 1971-2000,” identifies this: “Not by coincidence did the American small town, the epitome of the conservative vision of the nation, become the prime setting for 1980s horror fiction: a sunny, cheerful place of white picket fences and apple pie where something would always be really, really wrong.”

The genre's commercial success followed from this shift: horror that respected no authority, broke taboos, and took risks mainstream literature might not even touch. In Paperbacks from Hell, Hendrix shows why they worked: “Thrown into the rough-and-tumble marketplace, the writers learned they had to earn every reader’s attention. And so they delivered books that move, hit hard, take risks, go for broke. It’s not just the covers that hook your eyeballs. It’s the writing, which respects no rules except one: always be interesting” (p. 14).

And interesting they were. Hendrix, inspired by that era and its books, carries that sensibility. His horror lies very much in the world around his characters in mundane, ordinary settings. In his homage to 1980s pop culture, My Best Friend’s Exorcism (2016), when Gretchen gets possessed, neither she nor the dear reader is certain if it’s something supernatural or simply puberty’s hormonal chaos. The supernatural always pales in comparison to the complexities of the material realities, particularly when filtered through his characters' skepticism.

Likewise, in Witchcraft for Wayward Girls, even after successfully “transferring” a sickness to a condescending doctor, the girls remain unconvinced. Magic? Coincidence? Their own mistake? They don't know. Can't know. This uncertainty is a sign of changing times, changing minds, changing bodies. But we're getting ahead of ourselves. Let’s backtrack.

To understand the stakes of Hendrix’s novel, you have to understand the time it’s set in. Witchcraft for Wayward Girls is set in the Baby Scoop Era, a euphemistic label for a system built on forced obedience. In the decades after World War II, stretching into the early 1970s, countries in the English-speaking West saw an exponential increase in pre-marital pregnancies—four million parents between 1945 and 1973 in the US alone—as well as a rampant increase in adoptions. Children could be literally “scooped up” by adoptive couples, hence the name. As always, the burden of that “crisis” fell on women. [1]

Pregnant girls and women were secretly sent to maternity homes across the country, where they were forced to surrender their children in secret. Witchcraft for Wayward Girls is set in one of these maternity homes. Neva Craven, fifteen years old and pregnant, is driven there by a father who no longer sees her as a daughter but as a problem requiring institutional management. She’s told to stay there until she gives birth and her baby is taken away. Then she can return home and go back to being a “good girl.” Hide her, wait for the birth, take the child, send her back. Pretend nothing happened. [2]

For six months, she’d been holding on by her fingernails, but at least she’d been around people who knew she could tell a joke, and made straight As in English, and loved Patty Duke. Now she was surrounded by strangers who only knew one thing about her: she’d been stupid enough to get pregnant. (p. 34)

Every girl carries her own version of the same violence. One embroiders napkins for a wedding that will never happen, still trusting a boy’s broken promise. Another fantasizes about escape, building a future with her daughter that no one will let her keep. One girl dreads returning home, knowing exactly what awaits her—the priest who raped her, waiting to do it again. Each arrives with a different story, but Wellwood erases those distinctions, reducing them all to the same diagnosis—wayward girls. Under the claustrophobic, invasive gaze of the House and its custodians, the girls discover the only power available to them: each other. Bonds have to be formed, resistance built from whatever materials are at hand.

What Hendrix understands is that the supernatural is never the main event. Witchcraft might be the book’s premise, but true magic lies in the friendships, in girls finding each other in a hostile system. Despite the cruelty and hopelessness engineered into Wellwood, this is a story of sisterhood first.

Witchcraft, in this context, comes as an equalizer. Not empowerment, with its sanitized, corporate connotations, but power seized when every other possible avenue has been shut down. “When you are at your lowest, when you feel your least powerful, know that this dark legion is there for you. Witches will catch you when you fall, carry you when you are tired, heal you when you are broken” (p. 223). The witchcraft here is grisly, macabre, nothing like the aestheticized versions sold in bookshops and Instagram feeds. The greater the magic, the more blood, the more pain it demands. The book presents witchcraft as a tool to fight patriarchy, to defy a society that oppresses women at every juncture, to resist a world hell-bent on taming them into docility, to create a world of their own. “A true witch does not fear change. She is in an eternal state of revolution” (p. 184).

Women’s bodies have always been a site where power is exercised. The specifics shift, the system adapts, but the fundamental equation keeps women’s autonomy provisional, always requiring justification, always up for negotiation by someone else. The Baby Scoop Era has a name now, a historical distance. We look back at maternity homes and tell ourselves we’ve moved past that brutality. And yet, women’s bodily autonomy continues to be legislated away. Girls are again being told their choices matter less than someone else’s morality. The system adapts faster than we do, finding new ways to exercise the same control while insisting it’s different this time, better, necessary.

Witchcraft for Wayward Girls sits at that uncomfortable intersection where past and present collapse into each other. Hendrix shows us 1970, but it’s easy to recognize 2026. The architecture that built Wellwood is still standing under different names. And the girls trapped inside it—then, now—have to keep finding ways to say no. Then. Now. The specifics shift. The fight doesn’t.

Endnotes

[1] Hendrix describes this in the novel’s acknowledgments: “whether girls had been raped or sexually abused, believed a promise that wasn’t kept, didn’t have access to contraception, or simply didn’t know it existed, they were told that getting pregnant was all their fault. Doctors and social workers labeled unwed mothers “neurotic,” newspaper columnists suggested they be hounded in Alcatraz, and politicians blamed them for everything from high taxes to crime to the collapse of Western civilization” (p. 475). [return]

[2] In a TIME piece about this period, Kelly O’Connor McNees—the author of another novel set during the era, The Myth of Surrender (2022)—remarks: “Almost no one asked the young women themselves about their wishes. During the Baby Scoop era, an unmarried pregnant woman sent away to a maternity home had no say in whether she would carry her pregnancy to term, no agency over the birth itself and, once the child arrived, no choice about whether she could raise the baby.” This is the ground on which Hendrix plants his witches. [return]

https://strangehorizons.com/wordpress/non-fiction/witchcraft-for-wayward-girls-by-grady-hendrix/

https://strangehorizons.com/wordpress/?p=58855