astray in worlds and words.

Tag: monsters

For He Can Creep (Siobhan Carroll)

Now that there is a 2020 Eugie Award winner, I absolutely have to remedy the mistake of not urging you enough to read her story: “For He Can Creep” by Siobhan Carroll is told from the point of view of a cat. And not just any cat, but distinguished, treat-loving, fierce-clawed Jeoffry, the feline visitor to a 19th century London asylum fighting the demons torturing the place.

“For He Can Creep” is a classic outsmart-the-devil story, but it is so much more: its protagonist’s cattiness is captured in every hiss and every purr, and he has to give his best performance to defend his incarcerated poet against the nastiest of foes. If you love non-human POVs, this one is for you.

And the best thing is: “For He Can Creep is”, title and all, based on a real poem! I had to look this one up, and I was delighted to find that there was a story behind the story.

For He Can Creep, free to read at Tor.com, has also been a Hugo, Nebula, and Locus Award finalist, and is nominated for a World Fantasy Award.

Dogs of War (Adrian Tchaikovsky)

Dogs come with more loyalty and trust than any single human should be allowed to handle, and thus stories about dogs are prone to enter the bitter space of betrayal, in some way or the other, unless you’re going for a trick ending like Richard Adams’ The Plague Dogs.

I like stories focusing on animals, I’m up for the occasional well-written military SF, and I’ve enjoyed all of Adrian Tchaikovsky’s novels I read, so Dogs of War was an insta-buy for me. And I knew from the first sentence I’d love it and it would break my heart.

My name is Rex. I am a Good Dog.
See Rex run. Run, enemy, run. That is Master’s joke.

Dogs of War is a near-future sf novel about modified animals used as forces of destruction in asymmetric, engineered wars. They are built to be terrible, alien, horror-inducing. And one of the most heartbreaking moments happens when Rex, the augmented/uplifted canine and central pov character, begins to suspect this. He’s a dog, one nightmare of a dog, full of all the loyalties, limited forms of understanding, and teeth dogs usually come with. Rex has a complicated (or is it, really?) relationship with his ruthless human master, and his journey into a more sophisticated way of thinking echoes Daniel Keyes’ Flowers for Algernon quite a bit.

As the story unfolds, it turns out to be a real page-turner, too. I wanted Rex to succeed in overcoming the simple truths he harbors to shield himself from a world that is far more complicated. And I loved the other animal characters, too – Honey, Dragon, and Bees. Adrian Tchaikovsky does a brilliant job in giving them personality, sometimes with very little material to work with. And his love for anthropods (as seen in his Shadows of the Apt series) is not diminished! So it’s not all about dogs, and even not all about so-called Bioforms, because Rex’s story is interspersed with different forms of humans and monsters from the beginning. But nothing beats a dog as a stand-in for soldiers and all they have to represent.

Dogs of War by Adrian TchaikovskyDogs of War starts out with military action, but evolves into an observation of a society that has to deal with a new despised worker/soldier class nobody wanted. Humanity’s discomfort in dealing with those creatures they made is understandable to a point that made me want to cringe at my reaction: Adrian Tchaikovsky is not shying away from showing just what a mess, what a horror, these modified animals are, while at the same time letting us peek inside their heads and know their redeeming qualities.

This is not just a novel about how we treat animals. It’s about all the monsters of our making, and somehow a dog can be the perfect amalgamation of both.

Sunday Story Time: Scaredy Cat

This is the Halloween edition, and today’s story morsel is a tiny webcomic made by Heather Franzen in 2012, Scaredy Cat. I love the idea of silent comics, and this kitten’s nocturnal adventures really don’t need any words. No jump-scares or other or other terrifying stuff here; the only thing you’ll need to be afraid of is immense cuteness!

You’ll find the comic on Heather Franzen’s Tumblr, and on the artist’s website, she’s offering a printed version.

My Primal Apocalypse

It all began with Gremlins.

When I was a child, VCR was the shiny new gadget you needed to have. Well-meaning, but ill-informed, my father brought home Gremlins as one of the very first rentals.

I wasn’t old enough to read stories on my own then (and to choose from any shelf I wanted to), so I had mostly encountered children’s stories. Gremlins might have started like a totally acceptable children’s story, but it soon turned out to be pure horror for me.

Gremlins movie posterI didn’t even make it very far, and my father, who must have felt that I was a little bit too terrified, sent me to bed before it got wild. Which was a bad decision. I knew that suspiciously cute Gizmo would turn into something nasty, and I had learned the rules: The thing with the water and the thing with the feeding. I got it all mixed up when I applied my own logic to the concept: So they turn nasty and grow bigger and multiply when they get wet and eat? You can get wet anytime. And they are monsters, so they’d want to eat people, and BAM! They become even bigger and nastier!

I didn’t only lie awake the whole night in terror. Over the next few days, my imagination led me into a desolate, dark future, where fat, ugly, grown-huge-as-houses Gremlins roamed the streets, looking for more people to feed upon. I thought about how I would sneak through the shadows to hide from them. I felt a little better when I realised that at some point, they would have eaten most of us. Then they wouldn’t find anything else, and the cycle of feeding and growing and multiplying would come to an end. But most of the time, I was half crazy with fear. It could happen anytime. It would be the end.

It couldn’t have been too long until my father noticed something was wrong, but as I remember it, I spent something like a fortnight silently descending into fear and depression. At some point, my father reassured me it was just a movie. A funny movie, even. And it had a happy ending.

But it didn’t matter. I knew now. I knew that something like this could happen, that the world as we knew it could end. That everything could (and would) be gone. And it terrified me.

But it also fascinated me. It was my first what-if extrapolation, my first post-apocalyptical world. I don’t think my final disaster scenario had a lot to do with Gremlins anymore. But until today, I haven’t watched the whole movie, and every time I see a picture of those little pests, they give me the creeps. Even the “real” gremlins, the mechanically inclined imps, make me shudder because they remind me of them. But I’m not entirely sure whether I should condemn director/writer team Joe Dante and Chris Columbus (and my father, I guess) for introducing existential crisis into my life, or thank them for fueling my doom-driven imagination.

Small Crush: Paper Girls (Vol. 1)

Brian K. Vaughan has written so many interesting comic stories that he was bound to show up here eventually. Some of them I love (Pride of Baghdad will get an entry, too!), some I found intriguing, but they didn’t draw me in.

Paper Girls Vol. 1Paper Girls immediately got me by reminding me of two other immensely popular tales: Like Stranger Things it features teenage heroes riding bikes and getting involved in fantastical and mysterious events, and it seems to hop on the train of 80s nostalgia. Like Lumberjanes, it’s focussed on friendships between girls and shows what a girl gang is capable of, even when confronted with the most improbable events straight out of the cheesiest b-movie inventory.

Paper Girls transcends them both. While the combination of space age and suburban life provides a charming backdrop for the events, the ongoing story doesn’t get stuck in the 80s formula. And there is a distinct sf feel from the beginning, anchoring the onslaught of the supernatural we soon face.

What I liked most – besides the brilliant before-sunrise color scheme – were the characters. Paper Girls develops four very different girls into firmly grounded heroines, without adhering to common types and clichés. Tiffany, the geek, is teenage girl first and geek second, and I’d even hesitate to call her “the geek”, because she’s drawn as a human with many facets (and all four girls are geeks). They have poignant, sometimes shockingly sad backgrounds, and their tough decisions and hasty reactions when their neighbourhood is beleaguered by more than leftover stragglers from Halloween feel all too real. As do the consequences of their actions.

I’m curious about where the story will end up, and I hope there’s at least a half-decent plot in the end. But for the moment, I want to see more of Cliff Chiang’s rad art, and enjoy what turned out to be the most relatable and likeable girl gang of all the all-female casts I encountered in the sf comics field recently.

Sunday Story Time: Kaiju Parenting

Ultra-short story time today with a light and adorable tiny comic about parenting among monsters by Iguanamouth. I’m always fascinated by comics without words and love to see what kinds of stories artists are able to tell relying only on images. Check it out!

Iguanamouth is a tumblr celebrity with her drawings of unusual dragon hoards.

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