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Feb. 22nd, 2022 11:29 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
skygiantsOkay I am sorry but I am also incapable of not making the joke that I'm sure has already been made a hundred times before: Merlin Sheldrake, the author of Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change Our Minds & Shape Our Futures, seems like a really fun guy ....
And that's important! I needed a fun guy to guide me through mushroomland without fully activating my fight or flight response! Eukaryotic organisms are mysterious and terrifying to me -- I know all about the zombie ant fungus, I've read a lot of freaky Yumi Tamura evil mushroom plots, and I don't particularly like how most of them taste so I don't even have the satisfaction of culinary conquest -- but Merlin Sheldrake is just so genuinely delighted by the wide, weird world of fungi that it helped me suspend my innate discomfort and experience some of his joy vicariously. Do I, personally, want to take LSD and bury myself in a rotting leaf mound in order to fully participate in Mushroom Decay Vibes? No! Absolutely not! But it's quite fun to read about Sheldrake throwing himself wholeheartedly into all forms of The Fungus Experience in between deep dives on mycorrhizal networks and slime molds.
This also ended up being a great accidental wine pairing with the nineties science fiction novel I just finished and loved, Amy Thompson's The Color of Distance. This is a first contact novel set on a planet populated by intelligent amphibioid aliens with extremely minimal mechanical technology but incredible skill at biological modification, called Tendu. When the Tendu find stranded biologist Juna on the verge of death due to being fatally allergic to everything on the planet, a Tendu elder decides to save her life as his final and most impressive project; Juna wakes up to find herself a.) suddenly the first human to have successfully communicated with an intelligent alien species and b.) significantly more amphibioid than she used to be.
Meanwhile, the elder's heir Anito reluctantly takes on the responsibility of bringing this new weird creature that they've found into harmony with the rest of the Tendu world. All adult Tendu are given responsibility for managing a certain part of their environment and maintaining its harmony in this way; at one point later in the book Juna has to train in someone else's area of responsibility after accidentally killing an off-season creature and spends weeks studying a single tree, inside and out, learning all the ways that the plants and bugs and birds and fungi around it are interconnected, in a chapter that reads like something straight out of Entangled Life which is also tremendously concerned with complex ecosystems and symbiotic relationships.
Then of course she has to give a Ph.D. presentation on it to an audience of jugmental Tendu in order to prove she's understood well enough that the delicate, careful process of cross-cultural communication can continue. (There are several stressful alien-frog academic presentation scenes throughout the book and all of them were extremely fun for me.)
Anito and Juna both spend some time coming to terms with the fact that regardless of what they'd originally planned or hoped for themselves, the task of helping their species to understand each other is their life now, and the most difficult and important work that they will ever do. Most of the events in the book are portrayed through both Juna's perspective and one of the Tendu's -- in addition to Anito, the other main Tendu POV are Ukatonen, a wandering elder who finds the Juna situation the most interesting thing he's been a part of in centuries, and Moki, a junior Tendu that Juna ends up adopting in order to save his life, with extremely complex consequences -- which works really well to express the difference in viewpoints and expectations from both sides, and make the reader feel how much of a triumph it is when understanding is eventually reached.
The overall tone of the book is surprisingly optimistic: Juna and the Tendu who are most involved with her all end up situated in complicated positions somewhat in between the two cultures, and the loss and loneliness of those positions are extremely real and significant, but so are the gifts and the gains. The connection between human and Tendu will inevitably bring enormous change, and it's not a given that they'll be able to come into harmony with each other, but because of the work that the characters put in, there is a solid chance for it.
(There is apparently a sequel, but I've been strongly warned not to read it and I do not intend to do so; this book works tremendously well as a standalone!)
And that's important! I needed a fun guy to guide me through mushroomland without fully activating my fight or flight response! Eukaryotic organisms are mysterious and terrifying to me -- I know all about the zombie ant fungus, I've read a lot of freaky Yumi Tamura evil mushroom plots, and I don't particularly like how most of them taste so I don't even have the satisfaction of culinary conquest -- but Merlin Sheldrake is just so genuinely delighted by the wide, weird world of fungi that it helped me suspend my innate discomfort and experience some of his joy vicariously. Do I, personally, want to take LSD and bury myself in a rotting leaf mound in order to fully participate in Mushroom Decay Vibes? No! Absolutely not! But it's quite fun to read about Sheldrake throwing himself wholeheartedly into all forms of The Fungus Experience in between deep dives on mycorrhizal networks and slime molds.
This also ended up being a great accidental wine pairing with the nineties science fiction novel I just finished and loved, Amy Thompson's The Color of Distance. This is a first contact novel set on a planet populated by intelligent amphibioid aliens with extremely minimal mechanical technology but incredible skill at biological modification, called Tendu. When the Tendu find stranded biologist Juna on the verge of death due to being fatally allergic to everything on the planet, a Tendu elder decides to save her life as his final and most impressive project; Juna wakes up to find herself a.) suddenly the first human to have successfully communicated with an intelligent alien species and b.) significantly more amphibioid than she used to be.
Meanwhile, the elder's heir Anito reluctantly takes on the responsibility of bringing this new weird creature that they've found into harmony with the rest of the Tendu world. All adult Tendu are given responsibility for managing a certain part of their environment and maintaining its harmony in this way; at one point later in the book Juna has to train in someone else's area of responsibility after accidentally killing an off-season creature and spends weeks studying a single tree, inside and out, learning all the ways that the plants and bugs and birds and fungi around it are interconnected, in a chapter that reads like something straight out of Entangled Life which is also tremendously concerned with complex ecosystems and symbiotic relationships.
Then of course she has to give a Ph.D. presentation on it to an audience of jugmental Tendu in order to prove she's understood well enough that the delicate, careful process of cross-cultural communication can continue. (There are several stressful alien-frog academic presentation scenes throughout the book and all of them were extremely fun for me.)
Anito and Juna both spend some time coming to terms with the fact that regardless of what they'd originally planned or hoped for themselves, the task of helping their species to understand each other is their life now, and the most difficult and important work that they will ever do. Most of the events in the book are portrayed through both Juna's perspective and one of the Tendu's -- in addition to Anito, the other main Tendu POV are Ukatonen, a wandering elder who finds the Juna situation the most interesting thing he's been a part of in centuries, and Moki, a junior Tendu that Juna ends up adopting in order to save his life, with extremely complex consequences -- which works really well to express the difference in viewpoints and expectations from both sides, and make the reader feel how much of a triumph it is when understanding is eventually reached.
The overall tone of the book is surprisingly optimistic: Juna and the Tendu who are most involved with her all end up situated in complicated positions somewhat in between the two cultures, and the loss and loneliness of those positions are extremely real and significant, but so are the gifts and the gains. The connection between human and Tendu will inevitably bring enormous change, and it's not a given that they'll be able to come into harmony with each other, but because of the work that the characters put in, there is a solid chance for it.
(There is apparently a sequel, but I've been strongly warned not to read it and I do not intend to do so; this book works tremendously well as a standalone!)
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Date: 2022-02-27 05:25 pm (UTC)