Viewing posts tagged terror of the zygons
Posted by:
Jack Graham
7 years, 8 months ago
Okay, first a quick (well... relatively quick) recap and a few clarifications... because we've come a long way. And then onto some hot Zygon action.
The Story So Far... |
| If only 'Pirates of the Caribbean II' had looked this good. |
According to China Miéville, the
tentacular monster was introduced to Western SF/Horror literature in the late 19th and early 20th centuries by the loose style/affect/trend known as 'the Weird'. Lovecraft, Hodgson, Machen, etc. They used various new forms of the monstrous, especially tentacles, as a 'novum', unfreighted with previously accreted meanings and associations, which could express something of the unprecedented, inexplicable, inexpressible catastrophic horror that was engulfing modernity with the onrush of world war, mechanised imperialism and endemic economic crisis. (There were a couple of important pre-eruptions of the tentacular and Weirdish courtesy of SF pioneer H.G. Wells and 'ghost story' writer M.R. James.) Mieville says that the Weird represents a way of trying to express anxieties that is alternate and incompatible with the gothic. The gothic - or hauntological - is an expression of something we already know which has been hidden (or repressed) and which haunts us, threatening to return. The Weird is what we ...
Posted by:
Jack Graham
9 years, 4 months ago
Yes, I know I've already done that joke... but it's too good not to overuse. Here's my stuff from Timelash II for the first three years of Tom's tenure, generally regarded as the "golden age" (or something) of the old show. Not much extra stuff. Sorry. Oh, one warning: at several points in the essay below I will be going into gush mode. You have been warned.‘Robot’Dafter than the Rt. Hon. Lady Daftetta Daftington-Dafton of Daftwood Hall, Daftfordshire. A robot that grows to the size of King Kong (and starts acting like him)... a disintegrator gun kept in pieces and scattered in different locations... a government think tank that turns out to be a cover for fanatical right-wing scientific 'progressives' who think a good way to take over the world would be to destroy it first... umm, well actually the last ten years or so have made that last one seem quite plausible.
This is set in a world in which 'bad' scientists are spottable by their evil suits and ties, their evil black armbands and their evil black leather gloves; meanwhile 'good' scientists all work on renewable fuels ...
