Slime Mould Grad Student Stars in New Sci-Fi Novel — SkimNews
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- Author's new novel "A Wall Is Also a Road," out 6 October, features Gardenpath, a cellular slime mould environmental science graduate student studying in a floating university in the circumgalactic medium, a region the author says contains metals, water, and other resources that could support advanced life.
- Molly Peeples at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Maryland walked the author through her lab's simulations of the circumgalactic medium (foggie.science), informing the setting's "weather" of swirling gas at varying temperatures.
- Wesley Swingley, a molecular biologist at Northern Illinois University, helped brainstorm slime mould culture including a memory-storing organelle the author dubbed a "gnosome," chemically swappable communication through skin apertures (with methane serving as a question mark), and "oath receptors" akin to biological friendship rings.
- The slimes' data storage and networking relies on fungi: libraries look like nurseries of mushroom containers, and sending information means releasing spores through a vent.
- Gardenpath's body language includes growing bumpy when nervous, stretching tall to laugh, sprouting extra eyestalks when intrigued, and dangling a long arm for sarcasm — making humans look perpetually distracted and condescending by comparison.
- Eric Poehler, a Pompeii expert at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, advised on Pompeiian plumbing and the famous "prosciutto sundial" from nearby Herculaneum, details that shape Gardenpath's Earth-side subplot with a human friend named Murtis in a city at the foot of a volcano.
- Scientists' life experience shaped the premise: the author wrote that they "spent most of graduate school feeling like an amoeba," motivating a protagonist who fumes silently as professors dismiss Gardenpath's proposed study of a spiral-arm planet as utterly uninhabitable.
Why it matters: The novel models a concrete workflow for hard sci-fi: real researcher consultations produced specific worldbuilding choices — from circumgalactic medium geography informed by Molly Peeples' simulations to slime mould signalling architecture built with Wesley Swingley. For readers and writers, the piece shows how speculative biology can be anchored in actual molecular biology and astrophysics rather than hand-waved, with each invention (gnosomes, oath receptors, spore-databases) traceable to a named scientific conversation.
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