“It was an abstract expressionist painting that portrayed a story of conflicting cultures with every violent brushstroke.”
Gibson’s stunning debut is a dark detective noir, a weird and ‘Giant Puffball’ of a sci-fi novel. Through hard hitting themes and visceral storytelling, Adrian has created a truly unique world. One inhabited by a fungal people called the Hõpponese, who see the world in a different way and are therefore despised and feared because of that. Welcome to fungalpunk!
Set in the city of Neo Kinoko, the native Hõpponese are suffering from the fallout of The Spore War, a conflict instigated by the human Coprinians, as a colonial conquest to oppress the fungal’s way of life. Detective Henrietta, a human detective, is assigned there as punishment and she must not only navigate this powder keg of a city, but also her own prejudice and her ingrained, propagandist disgust of the fungal people.
When the mutilated body of a fungal child is found by the river, Henrietta is not only assigned to the case, but is also forcefully partnered up with the only fungal police officer in the force, Officer Koji Nameko, who has his own reasons as to why he applied to the the NKPD.
“Why in the hells did you go and become a blue?” Oze asked.
“The missing children,” Koji said.
Gibson has created an utterly immersive, strange and uncompromising world for the characters to inhabit. All the fungal people have a connection to their world through a vast mycelial network and to their fellow fungals via the fungalnet. They have their own religion, their own rituals and culture. The cities material infrastructure is all fungi related; mould forms structures as well as mycocrete, clothes are made from mycofabrics, mycelium covers and branches out across the city like rust on metal. Music, art, trade are all prevalent in Neo Kinoko and Gibson is so good at including these into the fabric of the story. He does an incredible job of pulling you in with all the worldbuilding details, making you feel the humidity and moisture of the native Hõpponese environments. There is of course a Japanese influence here as the bare bones of Gibson’s worldbuilding, but he elevates that and makes it his own, expertly avoiding any possible cultural appropriation.
The two main characters of Hoffman and Nameko are both excellent characters, both with trauma and complexity. Hoffman is a middle-aged woman struggling in a considerably misogynistic police force. She is bitter, angry and her past trauma informs on her problematic views and prejudice. The book is written in first person pov and this presents a challenging problem. Hoffman’s racism against the Hõpponese and her disgust of the mycelial environments is palpable, uncomfortable and sometimes, blatantly hateful. This can sometimes make for a difficult read and especially hard to sympathise with her at first. But gradually, as Gibson starts to unpeel the hard shell of prejudice and ignorance that surrounds Hoffman and we discover about her past trauma and why she has the views she has. Her character not only becomes a sympathetic one, but one that we can root for and admire how she allows herself forgiveness. And allow herself to face her fears and begin understanding a people that are alien to her.
Nameko, our Hõpponese officer is a closed book at first. He hold secrets that knaw at his already tenuous relationship with Hoffman, but as these gradually come to light, the implications of a fungal in the police force becomes something much more impactful than Hoffman could ever have thought. Nameko, as an officer of the NKPD, has to also deal with his conflicting loyalties between being a ‘blue’ and representing his family and people, who, by the way, have no love for the police force. How do you work for the very people that oppress and govern you with cruelty? This is a question that is considered in Nameko’s arc and not wholly answered. One particular scene involving a family reunion is wrought with tension and anger.
Gibson populates Neo Kinoko with a supporting cast of fungal and human characters that all have some impact on Hoffman and inform the story. At times some characters can feel a little cliché for the detective noir genre; the detective with a dark past, the precinct captain who shouts and swears, the betraying poison ivy etc. But Gibson has the talent to make sure these characters rise above the generic and become fully realised people with complex emotional journeys.
What struck me the most about this book is the underlying themes that Adrian M. Gibson explores and does so with uncompromising aplomb. He is certainly not afraid to tackle difficult issues, ones that could make readers uncomfortable. Racism, which both Coprinians and Hõpponese express, is front and centre of the conflicting cultures and racial slurs, albeit created by Gibson, are frequently used in dialogue. Colonial oppression, mind rape, hateful political propaganda and child murder are all explored as well and if any of these are possible triggers for you, it may be best to avoid reading Mushroom Blues. But I think Adrian handles these with thoughtfulness, care and intelligence and I applaud him for that. The fact that I did not like Hoffman for a large portion of the book and still found that I was compulsively turning pages, is testament to Adrian as a writer and author.
The theme of memories and how they can connect us on a deep and profound level is also an underlying theme that I found. A mycelial network is many branches, all reaching in different directions, but have a hive mind, a communal mind and this is at the very heart of the Hõpponese way of life. Community, unification, the criminal underworld and corrupt governments all connect Gibson’s fungalpunk story together and enrich the reading experience. Gibson shows us the real dangers of the world and how we are both vulnerable to them, but also stronger together against them.
Gibson’s pacing hardly falters. His skill at presenting frenetic, life threatening action scenes with the more introspective conversations and inner musings of Hoffman is fully apparent in this debut novel. The police procedural element is the perfect foundation for the powder keg events to build around like scaffold.
In a world of sleepers, forgiveness and acceptance were fragile concepts.
Mushroom Blues is an astounding debut novel. Confident, uncompromising and a relentlessly compulsive read, its one of my favourite reads of the year so far. With a mycelial mash-up of sci-fi, noir, body horror and social commentary, Adrian M. Gibson has only given us a glimpse of what he is capable of. I admire him for creating a book that demands you to look at yourself and the world around you, but also offers hope that love and acceptance will prevail if we open our eyes to that which we don’t understand. Ariari Do, Adrian.
