Non-fictionScrambling the scientific assumptions of the time, fungi and fungi-like organisms also gained new cultural and symbolic meanings. They began to sprout in the claustrophobic houses of gothic fiction and the swamps of horror; in the centre of the Earth and on the distant moons of science fiction; in utopian tracts, revolutionary and anti-revolutionary literature; and in the parasitic infections of the post-apocalyptic. Fungi were metaphors that fruited in many genres, mirroring human preoccupations with communal life and our tangled place in ecologies and economies. Creeping, co-operating, intertwining, fungi continue to feed our cultural dreaming and political unconscious.