ABSTRACT
This chapter considers two texts, Ling Ma’s 2018 novel Severance and the HBO adaptation of Naughty Dog’s The Last of Us (2023), as emblematic of a new relationship to the global situation in our post-pandemic moment. Focusing specifically on rhizomic networks and the fungal nature of various types of connection, it suggests that both works offer us macro- and micro-political understandings that showcase the sublime and complex difficulties we face when attempting to integrate into a world that is moving at such great pace. While offering a word of caution about some of these emerging fungal networks in areas like economics and disinformation, it ends with a reflection on the hope we might draw from new possibilities of connection and collaboration that the pandemic has, ultimately, forced upon us.
