setting of both novels, the city of Ambergris, is a place where the original inhabitants, a race of sentient mushrooms called the gray caps, were forced underground. Vandermeer’s book is an oddity of form constituted by a thrice edited manu…The sight of Severini’s shack is unbearable to the narrator as he states that “I never looked directly into the pools of oozing life” and that, unlike the others, he did not “wish to exist as a fungus exists or as a form of multi-colored sl…
Severini
fictional · 2 mentions across 1 reading
In this course
Severini appears to be a minor character in Thomas Ligotti's work, likely a figure whose dwelling or presence embodies the horror of biological dissolution and posthuman transformation that Ligotti uses to explore anxieties about consciousness and form. The character functions as a manifestation of the course's concerns with non-human agency and the dissolution of human boundaries—Ligotti positions Severini's existence (possibly as or alongside fungal/slime forms) as precisely what the narrator finds philosophically unbearable rather than acceptable. This invocation of radical biological otherness, paired with the gray caps in Vandermeer's Ambergris, grounds the seminar's interest in how speculative fiction imagines artificial or alien intelligences as fundamentally inimical to human subjectivity.
Mentioned in 1 reading
Appears alongside
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