1000 Worlds - The Men of Greywater Station

Yes, yes, exactly. 'Tis why I love this story. The Others are not Others, they are humans, including one of their own. Humans who crash landed and needed help; humans who would have been helpful to them, had they let them in. In their fear and paranoia, our "protagonists" killed hundreds of their own kind. This is exactly the message I'm hoping for in Ice&Fire!!



But was it? Was it really? That part seems to be entirely ambiguous. The fungus didn't make the scientists kill those other men- in fact, one could argue that the dream that Delvecchio had was a warning of what would happen. All throughout the story, we see animals do fairly normal things (like eat, or burrowing animals burrow, bats fly, insects get sucked into an engine) and every time, the men assume the fungus sent them. We have no evidence that this is the case, and this comes up multiple times in the conversations between the men, too.




I don't know. It doesn't seem to be total hostility; in fact, we know that the fungus doesn't seem to be killing (or necessarily even harming?) the animals and plants it takes over. They still do normal animal activities; it's not a dead planet. They might even be in a bliss state like the participants in the greeshka, as we know they never fight with each other. (Although a peaceful, balanced ecology makes me think more of the Pyramids than the Greeshka). Other than that, we know little aside from the fungus taking over everything that inhales its spores.
[This would be an interesting mechanism for wighting. Spores in the air. If the person inhaled such spores before death, they rise as a wight. For now, this is only happening north of the Wall. Once the winds of winter arise, the spores will cross the Wall and everyone who dies will be wighted. ]