Weird Murmur

  Jack Vance, The Miracle Workers in Astounding Science Fiction , July 1958. We often look back to our superstitious ancestors with derision, and the people in this novella are no different; however, Vance has flipped the binary: empirical methods of  controlled experimentation become the ancient superstition while jinxmanship and hoodoo are the advanced practice of more civilized and evolved culture. In many ways, this novella turns the work of David Hume on its head. The Principle of Induction, at the core of scientific practice, becomes a mystical platitude. Experimentation is scoffed at and thought to be childish. The effectiveness of scientific methods would be admitting miracles into our ontology, and we know such things are impossible. 

H. G. Wells,  The Island of Dr. Moreau  (1896). "Poor brutes! I began to see the viler aspect of Moreau’s cruelty. I had  not thought before of the pain and trouble that came to these poor victims after they had passed from Moreau’s hands. I had shivered only at the days of actual torment in the enclosure. But now that seemed to me the lesser part. Before, they had been beasts, their instincts fitly adapted to their surroundings, and happy as living things may be. Now they stumbled in the shackles of humanity, lived in a fear that never died, fretted by a law they could not understand; their mock-human existence, begun in an agony, was one long internal struggle, one long dread of Moreau — and for what? It was the wantonness of it that stirred me. The Things were thrown out to live a year or so, to struggle and blunder and suffer, and at last to die painfully. " It may come as a surprise but the above was not written by Thomas Ligotti! It is H.G. Wells from The Island of Doct

  Robert Aickman, "The Fully-Conducted Tour" in Compulsory Games edited by Victoria Nelson   (New York Review of Books, 2018). The magic of Aikman is that he always creates a pervasive and unsettling sense of wrongness that a reader just catches out of the corner of the eye. From the paperwork necessary for the tour to the flaking paint and general untidiness of the manor to the lack of any commentary on an ornate door by a tour guide who has been otherwise thorough, all this contributes to a strange atmosphere wrapped around the theme of being left behind. The thought of being left behind has a strong emotional valence for human beings. It can be a source of fear and alienation but also a source of relief. Like hanging out at the back of a fully conducted tour, we both want to be alone and part of the group. As our protagonist faces being left behind by his wife, who is dying of a terminal illness, he leaves his wife behind at the hotel to tour an old Italian villa alongsid

Haruki Murakami, "Birthday Girl" translated by Jay Rubin from  Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman  (2006). This story is a different approach to typical grant-your-wish tales and raises questions about how one tries to decide what wish to make. What you wish for is certainly tied up with your identity—your hopes, desires, and fears. But, if you don’t know what you would wish for because you don’t know what kind of person you’ll be in the future, and you don’t know what you would’ve wished for 10 years ago because you were different then. What the hell are we?  We start to look rather ephemeral. 

  Chi Hui, "The Woman Carrying a Corpse" translated from Chinese by Judith Huang, from The Way Spring Arrives and Other Stories , 2023. Read for free at Reactor Magazine This story is thought provoking. Issues of futility, how our lives and actions come to have meaning, and our relationship to the dead are all interesting topics brought out in Hui's story; however, I'm going to murmur about something else: The story brings to mind how explanations that involve citing reasons for actions are different than explanations that involve citing causes for actions. While it might be natural on first reflection to think of reasons as simply causes, and as such, reduce all explanations to causal, the story points to a couple of features of reasons-explanations that distinguish them from causal explanations. We tend to muddle the two up, but reasons have a normative component that causal explanations simply don't have; reasons justify an action, but causes can't justif

  Jerome K. Jerome, "The Dancing Partner" in  The Fifth Fontana Book of Great Ghost Stories , ed. Robert Aickman (Fontana Paperbacks: 1969). One important pillar of cosmic horror is the existence of entities that are indifferent to our goals, projects, values, and lives. Even if they take notice of us, which is unlikely, whether we continue to exist or not is none of their concern. This absolute lack of interest in us makes them something to fear. It isn’t that these alien gods show malice toward us or wish us ill; we don’t even register as the least bit interesting or significant. We see something like that indifference at work in the Jerome K. Jerome, first published in 1893. Here, the detachment isn’t found in anything cosmic but rather in something mechanical. The dancing partner’s total dispassion and indifference intensify the horror much more than if the partner showed outright disdain toward Annette. Such coldness adds insult to injury, but, in addition, the fact that

Jack Vance, "Noise" in Startling Stories , August 1952. Read the story here at Internet Archive The planet on which the narrator is stranded is quite strange to him: celestial bodies with unfamiliar orbits, long days and nights, dead suns, and alien species that barely register at the edges of perception due to their almost unfathomable otherness. The story blurs the line between the contribution of the perceiver and what is perceived, suggesting that there may not be any fact of the matter about where that line is drawn. The world offers up something raw to the marooned narrator’s senses, and his mind imposes a pattern onto it, counting some things as mere noise and some things as meaningful. This doesn’t make the world any less real; rather, it elucidates what the objective world consists of. Given the different colors of the heavenly bodies that provide illumination to the world, Vance draws our attention to the idea that color isn’t something that inheres in the objects t

  Michael Shea, "Polyphemus" in  Polyphemus  (Arkham House: 1987).   The cosmic horror of this story is a weird, unknowable, and terrifying alien creature dubbed “Polyphemus.” Of the parts that the characters can see, we are not only provided with a detailed morphological description but also a partial functional description of Polyphemus; that is, the characters, to save themselves from it, offer up theories of how some aspects of the monster biologically work together. The creature’s biological/neurological functions are distributed across what appear to be distinct species. The arrangement of sharks, delphs, squids, and grass in its environment operates as sense organs, among other things. This results in a higher-order unified biological function distributed across individuals of various species—the Polyphemus supervenes on other creatures. This is all cool enough, but within this story, Shea suggests a version of transhumanism as a potential solution to the existential t

R.H. Barlow with H.P. Lovecraft, "The Night Ocean" in The Californian vol. 4, no. 3 (Winter 1936). Read the story here at the H.P. Lovecraft Archive This is a spectacular study of the weirdness evoked by the ocean, particularly the ocean at night. Barlow describes the effects of the sea on our conceptions of self as he recounts an extended stay at a lonely beach house just outside the town of Ellston. The language, the themes, and the way this story's elements work together make it one of the best Lovecraft collaborations ever published.   Human beings have a primal and deep psychological connection to the ocean. As a source of fear, awe, and beauty, the sea represents the unknown, the vast, and the source from which all life evolved. In this story, Barlow handles a well-worn theme of cosmic horror—that is, our insignificance—in a thought-provoking way that manages not to just repeat the same genre theme we've come to expect from cosmicism. Sure the night ocean has th

  Ambrose Bierce, "Haïta the Shepherd," in  Tales of Soldiers and Civilians  (E. L. G. Steele: 1891). Read the story here on Gutenburg In a previous murmur covering Ambrose Bierce’s short story “An Inhabitant of Carcosa,” I argued that Robert W. Chambers takes more from that story than just the name “Carcosa.” Likewise, it is often claimed that while Chambers takes the name “Hastur” from Bierce’s “Haïta the Shepherd,” the influence of that story on Chambers’ work ends there.  I think there is a much deeper connection, and I will argue that important themes in Bierce’s “Haïta the Shepherd” carry over to The King in Yellow .  Although a central theme in “Haïta the Shepherd” focuses on happiness being elusive and that the best way to attain happiness is by not purposely seeking it out, the story is also packed with other interesting themes relevant to certain readings of The King in Yellow . The first line of Bierce's parable like tale: “[i]n the heart of Haïta, the illusio