U is for Utopia

         (My A to Z Blog Challenge theme this year is Bittersweetness & Light, my new collection of hope-filled, joy-inducing fantasy and sci fi short stories, poems, and art.)

        Utopia was written in 1516 by Thomas More, who coined the word from Greek roots meaning “place that is not a place.”  (Fun Words-of-the-Month fact: he had also considered using the Latin roots, which would have given us Nusquama.)  His book described a society that was supposed to be perfect, and while there’s a good deal of debate over just how satirical More was being and how perfect he actually thought his imagined society would be, nevertheless the name he coined has now come to mean any perfect society.  I don’t want to include too much of a spoiler about my own story here, but in “The Scanner’s Tale,” an asteroid scanner crash-lands in a strange, alien mushroom garden, and has to discover whether it’s a utopia or a nightmare.

        Here’s an excerpt.

        I was lying in the dark, leaning against something firm beneath my head.  The air was fresh, with a faint leafy scent.  There was an incredible sense of security.  Of care.  I opened my eyes to a dim, warm, greenish-yellowish glow, like the light of fireflies.  For a moment I thought I’d entered fairyland, with a million sparkling lights sprinkled through a fantasy garden around me.  Green and blue vines looped like party streamers everywhere.  It was beautiful, serene...  But my body was sore, and although I lay relatively comfortably, my left arm stung and throbbed, and I lifted it experimentally.  As I moved, I felt the faintest sense of resistance, as if I were covered in cobwebs.

        I looked down at myself then, and in that weird light I saw tiny threads laced all over my skin, pale and clinging, like I was already dead and a fungus was growing across my rotting flesh.  I think I shrieked, and found a thicker tendril at the corner of my mouth, oozing some sweet liquid.  I scrambled to my feet, rubbing at myself franticly to tear away the sticky network of tendrils, trampling away the slightly heavier webs that had grown across my feet, up to the edges of my boots where they could find my skin, as if they were drawn vampire-like to the blood on my shins.  An acrid smell filled the air from the ripped vines, and I felt as if something were tearing at me, although the growth was off me now.

        I bolted about five panicked steps in some random direction, flailing at the dangling threads that snagged at my face and hair, before I pulled myself together enough to look around and get my bearings.  I was in a cavern, although I could see the purple sky at one end where the cave became the bottom of a deep crevice opening to the surface.  The glimmering light came from some sort of luminous pods scattered through the growth, which wove across the entire space like a jungle.  I could see the place where I had been lying, propped between the roots of the largest plant-like thing.  I would call it a tree, except that it seemed softer and more flexible, and its skin – too soft and smooth to call it bark – was streaked in bright green and turquoise.  Its twigs and leaves were very slightly moving, and while I tried to tell myself that of course my panicked leap had shaken the branches, it looked more as if the leaves were feeling for me.  Or... smelling for me.

        The alien world in the story was inspired by mycorrhyzal networks, and the recent discoveries about these fungal communities have been blowing scientists’ minds.  If you haven’t read about them, go look it up right now!

        To illustrate the story, I collected a bunch of my various past block prints that included mushrooms and other plant life, and digitally collaged bits and pieces into a sort of jungle scene.  Then I added “alien” color to jazz it up.  Plus I made a variety of little mushroomy  bits to brighten up the pages through the story.  You can see some of the originals that donated parts here and here (but several others are sold out and no longer posted).

        If you’re wondering why some of my illustrations are “faux block prints” and others are these collages instead of original “real” block prints, the answer is in the medium itself.  If you remember the history of relief block printing, it was invented as a method of reproduction.  Before the invention of computers and printers, xerox machines, photography, and other simple methods of reproduction, block prints were the best way to print a repeated design on yards and yards of fabric or create hundreds of copies of a book or poster.  Relief block printmaking is a great way to make multiples — but it’s an incredibly inefficient way to make a single image.  There’s no point in my going through all the effort of carving a physical block, rolling with ink, and pressing on paper, all for a single image to scan, if I won’t be creating an entire edition of originals.  If an illustration for a particular story or poem is too specific to have appeal as a free-standing work of art, it doesn’t make sense to create a whole new block just to scan it once.  Instead, if I won’t have any use for actual originals to offer people as artwork in their own right, and all I really need is the digital image to put into my digital document, it makes a lot more sense just to work digitally in the first place.  (You can read more about my “faux block print” process here.)

        Marketing Moral: Nominate my book for awards and vote for it - if this is something you encounter.  Maybe most of us don’t get to vote on literary awards, but some awards do

involve nominations or votes from the public, so if the opportunity arises, keep my books in mind!

        Proper Moral: You can tell a tree by its fruit.  A utopian society will increase the happiness of all its inhabitants.

        Do you like mushrooms?  Adorable, gross, or tasty?  (And if you like your mushrooms fictional, check out my previous post Fantasy Fungus.)

[Pictures: Mushroom world digital collages by AEGNydam from Bittersweetness & Light, 2025 (See NydamPrints.com).]