Slime Mould Grad Student Stars In New Sci-Fi Novel — SkimNews
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- A Wall Is Also a Road, out 6 October, is built around Gardenpath, a cellular slime mould studying environmental science at a university floating in the circumgalactic medium — the roughly spherical region where the Magellanic clouds orbit the Milky Way.
- Astronomer Molly Peeples at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Maryland walked the author through simulations of the circumgalactic medium (hosted at foggie.science), informing how temperature variations in the gas shape the novel's 'weather.'
- Molecular biologist Wesley Swingley of Northern Illinois University co-developed the slime moulds' communication system — spurting chemicals through membrane apertures — and contributed inventions including the 'gnosome' memory organelle and 'oath receptors' that bind two slimes together like biological friendship rings.
- The slime moulds in the novel store data inside fungi, turning libraries into mushroom-filled nurseries, and express emotion through body language: getting bumpy when nervous, stretching tall to laugh, sprouting extra eyestalks when intrigued.
- Pompeii expert Eric Poehler of the University of Massachusetts Amherst advised on ancient Roman plumbing and pointed the author to the famous 'prosciutto sundial' discovered in Herculaneum, where the protagonist Gardenpath befriends a human woman named Murtis in a city called Pompeii at the foot of a volcano.
Why it matters: The novel is unusual in being built from primary consultations with three named working scientists across distinct fields — astronomy, molecular biology, and archaeology — meaning its slime-mould biology, cosmic setting, and Roman subplot are each anchored to current research rather than invented whole-cloth. For spec-fic readers, that gives 'A Wall Is Also a Road' tangible scientific grounding that most alien-prose sci-fi skips.
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