Urban Decay: Fungal Urbanism in Jeff VanderMeer’s Ambergris

Abstract “Next time you walk through a forest, look down. A city lies under your feet,” writes Anna Tsing. In metaphorizing mycorrhizal networks as cities, Tsing entangles the urban with the fungal to visualize an interstitial city that is typically beneath human notice yet exerts nonhuman agency over the environment. This essay reads Jeff VanderMeer’s Ambergris fictions, set in a weird cosmopolis so overrun by fungi that it exists in a constant state of literal urban decay, as a mode of “fungal urbanism,” in which interstitial spaces, whether infrastructure or “para-site,” contaminate, intervene in, and transform the entangled city in literature.