Mycorrhiza and Metaphor in Twenty-First-Century Science/Fiction

Abstract Metaphors abound for mycorrhiza in both science and fiction. From the “wood wide web” to “mother trees,” “social networks” to “neurological networks,” analogies expand and transform public understanding of the complex and elusive interactions between plants and fungi occurring under our feet in forest ecosystems. However, the line between metaphor and the more-than-metaphorical, fact and fiction, is not always clear, causing heated debates about the role of metaphor in the scientific imagination and science communication. As a mycologist and literary scholar, we enact an interdisciplinary symbiosis inspired by mycorrhiza themselves to explore the mycorrhizal metaphors in the past decade, which are entangling and enriching both science and fiction, from Tade Thompson’s Rosewater (2016) to Merlin Sheldrake’s Entangled Life (2020), Richard Powers’s The Overstory (2018) to Suzanne Simard’s Finding the Mother Tree (2021). We reaffirm the fundamental value of metaphors in how scientists and nonscientists alike seek to understand fungi in a world increasingly fascinated by and dependent upon them.