Okay, no one expects eldritch horror in LA. Not that I know what eldritch horror really is. My old boyfriend (about fifteen boyfriends back) called anything that inspired dread “eldritch horror.” I guess that would describe my entire job, really…
Another story from Lovecraft month – elder horror in LA. Dread Unlocks is on the job!
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Achtromagk shuddered, lost in nightmare images: crimson lightning dotting a wasteland, twilight despair and feeble railings, isolation in a mewling throng. It thrashed and twisted but could not escape, could not stop the unwanted vistas in its mind.
It was silent. And soft. And dark…
Next up in Lovecraft month, a heart-warming tale of an extra-dimensional Lovecraftian horror (an ‘oh so huggable’ one) by Drabblecast favorite Eugie Foster.
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My earliest fear, the one I remember anyways, was of great pulp magazine robots with hot water heater bodies and vacuum tube eyes. My brother forbade me to touch his precious magazines, so I wouldn’t. I’d stare and stare at the covers through; hourglassed damsels in diaphanous gowns draped over thick slab altars, and the robots, always the robots with their cylindrical torsos and pincer claws for hands….
In Search of the Brain-Eating Nandi Bear Part III
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Cynthia couldn’t explain what she’d just seen in the vegetable patch.
She didn’t want to look again. She considered going back into the house, crawling back into bed with Mikey, and putting it down as a beer-inspired dream.
But that pinkish dome with the fuzzy down had felt soft under her fingers, and there had been the smell of manufactured newness, like a dusting of talcum powder wafting up to her nostrils, as she had pulled the coarse outer leaves of the cabbage apart…
Tales of parental love gone awry in this week’s unsettling Drabblecast.
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The sound of running water came from ahead. The trail emerged from the woods and he looked up at the side of a rocky hill. A narrow waterfall trickled down the side of the rock, splashing into a pool of water.
His father claimed the water here was the most amazing color he’d ever seen – a vivid blue-green he’d dubbed Hokkaido green…
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And so came Creature out of the wasteland and into the city, bouncing from hilltop to hilltop like a bulbous ballerina skipping across the knuckles of a great hand. He was big as the moon and black as the night, and he came crashing into the city like a silent meteor. The cityfolk watched his approach with wide eyes and open mouths, and then scattered like leaves…
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The first sign was the chief engineers frowning and going into huddles at odd moments. And then Black Alice began to feel it herself, the way Vinnie was… she didn’t have a word for it because she’d never felt anything like it before. She
would have said balky, but that couldn’t be right. It couldn’t. But she was more and more sure that Vinnie was less responsive somehow, that when she obeyed the captain’s orders, it was with a delay…
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The ship had no name of her own, so her human crew called her the Lavinia Whateley. As far as anyone could tell, she didn’t mind. At least, her long grasping vanes curled—affectionately? — when the chief engineers patted her bulkheads and called her “Vinnie,” and she ceremoniously tracked the footsteps of each crew member with her internal bioluminescence, giving them light to walk and work and live by…
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“Are these fiddlebacks ferns mommy?” Cindy asked. Fiddlehead honey. Margery said absently. “Fiddlebacks are nasty spiders.” It was only later that she would realize Cindy, for once in her vacuous, Barbie obsessed life, was right.”
The first episode of Women and Alien’s month 2011 featuring three stories, each exploring nasty, insectile alien menaces. Fiddleback Ferns, a space infestation sends a mother to her breaking point. Killipedes, a dark, humorous tale where a doctor breaks down a patient’s nasty parasitical infection. In The Difficulties of Evolution, a mournful parent contemplates her child’s anthropomorphic metamorphosis.
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The book opens in New York where hedge-fund manager Tony Wolfe- completely convinced that his success proves him a superman straight out of an Ayn Rand novel- wakes up groggy and realizes his new hair transplant appears to have fallen out. If only.
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It all had a beginning in the original cosmic explosion, whatever that was, and it’ll all have an end when all the stars run down. The sun will last twenty billion years and maybe the dwarfs will last a hundred billion for all the good they are. But just give us a trillion years and everything will be dark. Entropy has to increase to maximum, that’s all…
On this special episode celebrating the Drabblecast’s 200th episode, we feature sci-fi milestone The Last Question by the ubiquitous genre giant Isaac Asimov. Norm takes listeners along for a thankful, whistful retrospective of the podcast’s history. The episode then moves in to a full cast, sweeping production of the sci-fi epic. The Last Question is an existential piece occurring over a grand timeline in the fullness of outer space, as mankind and artificial intelligence alike consider immortality, the end of all things, and what it means. The episode features chapter illustrations, and announces the 2010 People’s Choice award winners.
Winners of 2010 People’s Choice Awards!
Best Story: Elizabeth Bear and Sarah Monette
Best Drabble: Chris Munroe
Best Art: Liz
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I woke to this new darkness, swirling about me. A phrase sticking in my mind — “Lazarus Syndrome.” What happened to people when they had died, but, for some reason, some lack of death’s completion — some unfinished business — had rejoined the living.
In this episode of the Drabblecast, with a theme ‘Control,’ Norm speculates on zombies as dependents. In the drabble, we visit the zombie apocolypse. In the feature story, the consciousness of a slain man forms a being out of his remains, and the sea life around the. What is the nature of this entity, what is its place, and ultimately, what is its sinister purpose?
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We discover old scrolls that we wrote to each other in high school, back in the Early Pneumatic Tube Era. That was back when a PT message took five minutes to get across the city.
We shake our heads. Now you can send a living butterfly to Dubai in ten seconds…
This Valentine’s Day episode of the Drabblecast’s theme is centered on odd love. Norm rattles off a staggering set of fart/love puns, and waxes on about the travails of staying together in the digital age. In the drabble, we experience love through a fighter’s eyes. In the feature story, two soul mates seperated by great distance negotiate an alternate, steampunk (tube punk?) future. In addittion the Drabblecast 2010 People’s Choice nominations are announced.
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As always, he took delight in my interest in the scientific pursuits. ‘My assistant took the journey yesterday, by way of a shot to the heart. Prior to that, our trials on convicts included strangling, drowning, and beheading. By Jove! That reanimation was a sight to see…
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