• The Mycomatrix Series: A Serialized Audiobook

  • Von: Sarah Clarke
  • Podcast
The Mycomatrix Series: A Serialized Audiobook Titelbild

The Mycomatrix Series: A Serialized Audiobook

Von: Sarah Clarke
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  • Inhaltsangabe

  • This is an audio recording of the Mycomatrix Series, by Sarah Clarke Stuart. The series is about a girl with uncertain biological origins who finds herself at the center of a radical eco-organization intent on transforming the planet through mycology and plant technology. The first book (Season 1) it titled Prayer of the Unsung Mushroom. When Claire disappears under mysterious circumstances, her brother Gunther must navigate a world where reality blurs with the artificial – and only he suspects the truth. This serialized audiobook is published each week wherever you stream podcasts. Follow Claire and Gunther Flynn into the swamps of North Florida, to a mysterious island, where the plant life and fungal systems intermingle with human technology in wild ways. The best place to begin is with chapter 1 of the first book, Prayer of the Unsung Mushroom. Follow Claire and Gunther into the Mycomatrix! The printed text version of is coming. Enjoy this science fiction series in audio format for now.
    2024
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  • Sample Passage + Author Message

    Sample Passage + Author Message
    Jan 9 2024

     

    This sample passage is from an audio recording of the novel Prayer of the Unsung Mushroom, Book 1 of the Mycomatrix Series, by Sarah Clarke Stuart.

    The series is about a girl with uncertain biological origins who finds herself at the center of a radical eco-organization intent on transforming the planet through mycology and plant technology.

    When Claire disappears under mysterious circumstances, her brother Gunther must navigate a world where reality blurs with the artificial – and only he suspects the truth.

    This serialized audiobook is published each week wherever you stream podcasts. 

    Follow Claire and Gunther Flynn into the swamps of North Florida, to a mysterious island, where the plant life and fungal systems intermingle with human technology in wild ways. 

    The best place to begin is with chapter 1 of the first book, Prayer of the Unsung Mushroom. Follow Claire and Gunther into the mycomatrix (released on Jan 19, 2024).

    Connect with me on TikTok @mycomatrixbookseries

     

    A special thank you to the Northeast Florida Community Foundation. This project was, in part, made possible by the Individual Artist Grant awarded to the author Sarah Clarke Stuart.

     

     

    Transcript of this passage: 

     

     

    In the beginning, there are webs of light with stars at their intersections: pulsing white root systems against a curtain of black.  Sometimes the root-stars coincide with the zip and boom of chaotic vibrations. Sometimes they do not. There is no pattern.

     

    ... But one day, the vibrations separate themselves into distinct sounds and begin organizing into noises that she can distinguish and remember. "Thud" versus "clink." "Hum" versus "squeak."

    Some noises come from the inside, but the hums are always from the outside, and many of them are repeated in exactly the same way each time, such as “Claire” and “mother” and “grow.” 

     

    Light pulses beneath her eyelids, twinkling and blotting and growing and shrinking. The temperature changes from cold …to fear…to pleasure. She relaxes into this new sensation: mammalian warmth.

     

    ...But every now and then there are awful tearing and breaking noises: threadlike, fragile breaks… from within. This makes her panic, a bolt of discomfort disturbing her eternal nap. Then she hears a lot of humming from the outside, and finally…a pleasant something washing through her body. The temperature changes to just right, and she feels zipped up in her egg once again. 

     

     The hums from beyond the eggshell grow chirpy sometimes, and she can follow the patterns and create meaning    now. The voices sound wet and rubbery, like octopus limbs painting pictures on her brain. Eight different hums at once. But there is one single voice she can hold onto. It sounds like safety. It is Mother, moving through the light out there, smelling of blossoms that the girl doesn’t yet know the name of. 

     

     This is the day she realizes there is an opening beyond the stars and the roots and the black night, that there is something more to the hums and chirps. So she moves the flesh away from her eyes for the first time, and the universe rearranges itself to create order and meaning out of light and sound. 

     

     Several faces greet her, creatures with flashing eyes and white robes. The whites of their eyes match their clothing. It is the only thing the girl can focus on: that bright absence of color. Their eyes shift back and forth so fast, and the white space is alarming. 

     But Mother touches the top of her head and says not to worry. She will get used to this new system of light, all the shapes and movement. “It’s a shock to be so new to the world,” says Mother. “You will adapt. You will make sense of it all…eventually.”

     

    Hi I'm the author Sarah Clarke Stuart.  You just heard a passage from Chapter 4 of the first book Prayer of the Unsung Mushroom. THis is a traditional audiobook, read by Audrey the beautiful AI-powered voice created with Descript software. THis fiction is not an audio drama, but simply a novel, read aloud. Its serialized and made available each week. Someday very soon the e-book and print version will be ready too. Thanks for listening and reading. Connect with me on Tiktok @mycomatrixbookseries I would love to hear your feedback!

     
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    4 Min.
  • Prayer of the Unsung Mushroom, Chapter 1

    Prayer of the Unsung Mushroom, Chapter 1
    Jan 25 2024
    Listen now to Prayer of the Unsung Mushroom, an audiobook published here each week, the first season in the Mycomatrix, a fiction series by Sarah Clarke Stuart. The series is about a girl with uncertain biological origins who finds herself at the center of a radical eco-organization intent on transforming the planet through mycology and plant technology. The first season of The Mycomatrix Series is titled Prayer of the Unsung Mushroom. Read  in a traditional audiobook format. When Claire disappears under mysterious circumstances, her brother Gunther must navigate a world where reality blurs with the artificial – and only he suspects the truth. This serialized audiobook is published each week wherever you stream podcasts.  Follow Claire and Gunther Flynn into the swamps of North Florida, to a mysterious island, where the plant life and fungal systems intermingle with human technology in wild ways.  The best place to begin is with chapter 1 of the first book, Prayer of the Unsung Mushroom. Follow Claire and Gunther into the Mycomatrix! TikTok @mycomatrixbookseries     Transcript     Prayer of the Unsung Mushroom by Sarah Clarke Stuart “Every organism–including homo sapiens–is an assemblage of organic algorithms.”   –-Yuval Noah Harrari, Homo Deus “Once you are real, you can’t be ugly, except to those who don’t understand.”   –-The Skin Horse, The Velveteen Rabbit       Chapter One: Decay   2002 The pointed finger of a live oak tree branch taps on the bedroom window.  Tap. Tap. Tapping the girl awake.  The trees are growing too close to the windows.  Someone needs to trim them before next hurricane season, Gran keeps saying  the girl pushes herself up onto her elbows and looks around  recalibrating after being immersed in dreams  tuning into the frequency of waking life.  The bedroom is cheery and tame. Pink curtains, white wicker furniture. The closet with its door askew  next to it is a square desk littered with the tendrils of notebook, paper, edges, and a stack of textbooks.  It's all so different from the earthy dreams  still stuck beneath her fingernails  entangled in the green root of her spine.  And it wasn't just this morning,  that's what she was dreaming,  and it wasn't just this morning.  She's always slow to cross that bridge. From nighttime, dreams to daytime, dreams  at night, provisions of growth and connection,  rot and decay.  Nature doesn't know the difference between these things.  Rot is growth.  Decay is connection.  Mycelium works its way through. Dead wood  transforms timber into mushrooms and gives new life to creatures.  This time she dreamed that a pregnant bear ate the mushroom,  the fungus would be transformed into energy  For birthing cubs,  the girl always wakes with that same musty taste in her mouth and the memory of her naked feet planted into the earth somewhere in the middle of wilderness.  She was sinking. She was eating. She was feeding her young,  she was being consumed.  Was she the bear?  Was she the wood?  Was she growing or dying?  It hadn't been clear.  There is no death. Only energy transformed.  She can hear the words of the pastor in her mind,  the healer.  Was he planting these dreams in her head, or was it the book of instructions?  Last night, she fell asleep reading it.  Now she reaches for the paperback, submerged in the folds of her blankets.  Page 24.  Do not mistake the word death as the opposite of life.  Death does not oppose life.  Death creates it, and life always strives towards death.  It is a goal, but never the end.  Cycling,  recycling, clinging, letting go.  The girl climbs down from the top bunk of her bed. A single mattress she'd long outgrown.  She climbs down.  If the girl climbs down from the top bunk of her bed, a single mattress, she's long outgrown.  She can hear the morning noises coming from the kitchen downstairs,  an animal mulling a spink,  a spoon clinking the side of a bowl. Her brother's pubescent, baritone, her grandfather's clipped tone  still in a haze. She can't find language,  the name of her brother,  the creature making noise,  all of the labels of things  she does. Remember grand  and the pastor  who some call the healer.  Smells are easy  and so are textures and sounds,  but making words out loud is so much more difficult than listening and feeling and smelling.  I am,  she says to the image in the mirror.  It's a start.  Everything will come back in a matter of minutes.  She's not going to panic this time.  Do not try to be a flower. If you are a tree,  be the best tree in the forest and let the flowers alone to be themselves.  Claire  Gunther shouts from below. It's time you have to drive me. I can't be late again.  All of it floods back at once. She's an 18-year-old girl. She drives to school every day in the Green station wagon.  She's not doing well in math because of that. She may not graduate ...
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    9 Min.
  • Prayer of the Unsung Mushroom, Chapter 2

    Prayer of the Unsung Mushroom, Chapter 2
    Jan 26 2024
    Chapter 2   Candlestick Lane   2008     Gunther Flynn sits on the front porch steps of his childhood home at 18 Candlestick Lane, a house once filled with the endless tides of a growing family: hugging and fighting and eating and singing and practicing and pushing and pulling each other —toward and away, toward and away.    The home is a simple farmhouse set on a lake that leads to an inlet that leads to the river. The raucous, frog-croaking night has transformed itself into a quiet morning, and the smell is both putrid and intoxicating to Gunther: fishy, briny marshland.    The tide must be low.    All morning, the water had been seeping out, ocean-bound, exposing the bottom-most life of the marshes and lakes with all their  squiggling bugs and jagged oysters and schools of minnows and stick-leg birds. But it would return soon enough; just when it seemed like the tub was drained, the tide would turn, and the rivers and lakes would fill up once again. He and Claire used to imagine that the knobbly cypress knees rising at the lake’s edges were some kind of marshy fairytale creatures that would come to life at low tide after the sun went down. Swamp Hobbits.    When he had gotten the news, Gunther drove straight to the house in the middle of the night, but now it feels strange without Claire or Gran there, so he sits on the porch and picks at a loose scab of paint on the porch balustrade for a long while. If his grandmother were here she would tell him to get out the paint brush.    But Gran is dead now. First his parents, and now this.    Memories reach their long fingers up from the earth, out of the riverbeds, and make their way into his nerves and bones and bloodstream. As he stares into the overgrown ferns in the garden, an early one comes to life: Claire squatting close to the plant, choosing the fattest strands of fern for her makeshift wings.    Light streams through the pale, ripply leaves, and he can almost see her now: weaving the branches together, duct-taping them to the back of her shirt,  jumping from the highest step, leaves streaming, taking flight. He recalls looking up into the sky and seeing her far above the earth, fern-winged and free... but of course that could not have really happened.   The brother and sister had been inseparable. It was Claire who taught him to build a treehouse and to catch fish with his bare hands and to breathe underwater. It was she who gave him a paddle and pushed him out in the canoe until he learned to row, and she who convinced him that a housecat could navigate the waterways just as well as a human captain at sea. She trained the cat herself, she said.    She was always braiding strands of fiction so tightly into the knot of reality that a young boy could not possibly pull them apart. There are people who can do that…undetectably: they interlace all those bits to make a bright picture, and the myths are the parts you want to believe the most. As Gunther got older he realized that she, as much as he, probably could not distinguish the truth from her fantasies. After all, she was not even three years older than him.     Theirs was not an extravagant childhood, but they were privileged in many ways. Protected. Safe. Happy. (Until they weren’t.) The two children had their canoe, their bikes, and plenty of space to spread their conjoined imagination over the quilt of ruralburbia. In June they ate the blackberries that grew wild all along the fences and hedges, always pricking their fingers and tearing their clothes on the thorns; in September, they plucked the mulberries from the canopy of trees that splatted dark juice stains on the driveway; and in winter they snagged bitter oranges from the neighbors’ fruit trees.    And now where is she? Left college for a marriage, left the marriage for a cult. That’s what they’re saying. That’s what Gran said.   Gunther can hear his grandfather moving around inside the house now, so he knocks softly and then opens the door. He steps into the kitchen and looks around. It smells the same–woodsmoke and clean laundry.   Although he now lives just a couple of hours away at school, home and childhood feel so distant. College life has transformed his perspective in some ways, but being here makes him wonder if he, after he graduates, he will simply fall into a another grey, suburban, American life. A cookie cutter of his parents’ dreams. He and his girlfriend, Beth, will likely replicate what their parents did. What people do.   Friends and family seem to consider this an incredible success: to go off to college, to land a stable job, to marry, to return home...but he can’t shake the feeling that he’s stuck inside an experiment, another rat who will solve the maze, find the cheese, and be gently placed back in the spot where he started. The scientists know that once he gets hungry enough, he will solve the same maze all over again. And again. And again. Until he’s all ...
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    13 Min.
Kunst Literatur & Belletristik Wissenschaft
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