Category: Science Fiction

The Art of the Elder Thing (Part II)

In Part II of this series I’ll be taking a look at the Elder Things interacting with their natural environment — either the snowbound Antarctica of At the Mountains of Madness, or their titanic cities of long ago. This illustration of the creatures shows them checking out a ship that has been stuck in the …

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Roadside Picnic
[Reading Challenge 2022]

Roadside Picnic by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky Translation by Olena Bormashenko Chicago Review Press, 2012 (Originally published 1972 in the USSR) [ Challenge # 34: A book by more than one author. ] Roadside Picnic is an SF classic. Originally published in the USSR at the height of the Cold War — and Communist censorship …

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The Art of the Elder Thing (Part I)

The Elder Things are one of Lovecraft’s crowning creations, an  exercise in speculative biology that also includes the Yithians (The Great Race) and the Mi-Go, also known as the fungi from Yuggoth. These trifecta of beings stand the test of time even today of what an alien intelligence could be like. Lovecraft based his creatures …

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City of the Elder Things

The City of the Elder Things (it didn’t have a proper name) is the most well described of Lovecraft’s alien cities, which also includes Pnakotus, the city of the Great Race of Yith that lay in the Australan outback, and R’lyeh, Cthulhu’s tomb. Immense, alien, frozen in time both literally and figuratively, half of the …

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At the Mountains of Madness [Reading Challenge 2022]

At the Mountains of Madness by H. P. Lovecraft Originally published 1936 in Astounding Stories [ Challenge # 1:  Reread a book you have already read. ] Finished my first challenge this year, H. P. Lovecraft’s At The Mountains of Madness. I first read it back in college some decades ago, and enjoyed it, but …

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Worldbuilding Wednesday 3/2/22: Battle of the Gargantuas (Syfy monster movies)

In the 2000s and 2010s, that purveyor of quality entertainment, the SyFy channel, released over 200 original made-for-TV movies, which, given the network’s name, could only peripherally be called science fiction. Most were what was once called B-movies, variations on disasters, monsters both mythic and human-created, and horror… and often all three, with the addition …

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Worldbuilding Wednesday 1/19/22: The Best of Twittersnips (Playing in Another’s Sandbox)

Very occasionally over the past years I’ve stepped out and created random characters for existing media —  books, movies, or even toy lines. Here’s a selection.   Franchise and fanfic characters Middle Earth (J. R. R. Tolkien) Smerri Peachlake, Nol Bluffbuggin, Gosti Threeclasp (Hobbits) Yevenglazar, a giant spider Prince Thrindhöil Gandian Graymurgh, a wizard Islands …

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Alien Mrs. Claus

It’s wearing a skirt, so it must be the Mrs!