Bi-Fi, or Biosemiotic Fiction: A Review of and Interview with Ray Nayler’s The Mountain in the Sea, Ned Beauman’s Venomous Lumpsucker and Sue Burke’s Semiosis

Science fiction has met biosemiotics, writing biosemiotic fiction, or ‘bi-fi’. Ray Nayler’s The Mountain in the Sea (2022) stages the emergence of symbolic communication in an octopus population and refuses to let it resolve into translation. Ned Beauman’s Venomous Lumpsucker (2022) describes the conceit of de-extinction relying on genome banking but without habits or habitat as a name and an accounting trick. Sue Burke’s Semiosis (2018) builds a code between human colonists and clonal bamboo originating from a series of juxtapositions across several human lifetimes. In dialog with all three authors, this review proposes ‘bi-fi’ as a genre designation alongside cli-fi (climate fiction), distinguished by three formal markers: a novum that is semiotic rather than technological, a narrative engine of translation that fails, and ethical stakes following from semiosis rather than sentience, so that extinction becomes legible as semiocide. The essay argues that these novels perform work biosemiotics cannot currently do for itself. Through first-organism perspectives, they install Umwelt as a habit of perception rather than an abstraction, they license abduction under conditions our research culture rarely permits, and they carry Uexküllian and Peircean percepts to publics the discipline does not reach. The review closes by proposing that narrative Umwelt modeling under explicit scientific constraint be treated as a research instrument in its own right.