SOURCE: "Fungus Isle" by Philip M. Fisher (Argosy All-Story Weekly October 27, 1923)

DESCRIPTION: "Great man-thick trunks soared fifty feet into the air here, trunks warted and noduled  with masses of parasitical fungi. Huge fluted fangs of leather-surfaced brown spread on either side of us. Giant puff-balls loomed beside us like gray-scum surfaced balloons at anchor on the purple bloated earth. Things spread out in poison splotched yellow greens like enormous fungoid octopi, lying in wait with their thousand warted suckers to trap the unwary and take his life that their own might rush onto completion. But the path itself, save for that first obstacle, was smooth, spread before us with its carpet of brilliant vermillion and orange." ("Fungus Isle" by Philip M. Fisher)

NOTES: The Fungus Forest covers all of Fungus Isle except for an empty strip of beach all the way around. The forest has many varied fungal types including tall spore-puffing mushrooms to colorful mildews. The collective fungi possess an intelligence that tries to infect and keep anyone who comes to the island. Only the salt in sea water can combat the spores. Clarke surmises that the fungus is a survival of some long-lost sunken continent, a single seed that has drifting into warm seas and found a hold on a deserted coral island. The infected live on the island as fungus men.

HISTORY: Obviously inspired by William Hope Hodgson's killer mold in "A Voice in the Night", Fisher's tale has a happier ending and a bit of a mystery to it. Both or either of these stories may have inspired Matango (1963), the Japanese film (released as Attack of the Mushroom People in the US). This film may be part of the inspiration of Gilligan's Island, the Sherwood Schwartz TV show.

 

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