THE DEEP ONES: Winter 2022 Planning Thread

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THE DEEP ONES: Winter 2022 Planning Thread

1paradoxosalpha
Dic 3, 2021, 2:07 pm

This thread is for nominations and voting on stories for inclusion in the January-March reads in this group. Please feel free to draw on the ongoing brainstorming thread for nominations, but don't limit yourself to items discussed there. There is no further obligation--even to participate in the resulting discussion if a nomination is selected! It's perfectly okay to gamble on stories the nominator has never read, although also welcome for nominators to put up stories they've enjoyed and would like to revisit. In all these years, we've never been known to dog anyone for nominating a story where readers end up taking a dim view of it.

As in past rounds, any story that gets more "No" than "Yes" votes won't make the cut; otherwise they'll be prioritized according to net-yes-minus-no, and the final list will be in OPD sequence. Ties will be broken in favor of author and period variety.

To propose a story for voting, place the title and author between HTML-style angle-bracket tags. The open tag says vote (in brackets); the close tag says /vote (ditto). Multiple polls need multiple posts. If you put the name of the author in double square brackets, it will make it a linked "touchstone" for the LT database, and first publication dates of nominated stories are appreciated. Also welcome are remarks about the story, the author, and your nomination motives, and/or a link to an online version. Here is an example (from a previous thread):


A useful resource for general bibliography info including OPD and inclusion in collections is ISFDB.

You can see a sortable list of all previous discussions here. The persistent brainstorming thread is here. Nominations repeating old discussions will be disqualified, but revival of dormant discussion threads is always welcome. "That is not dead which can eternal lie," etc.

VOTING is scheduled to END on the Winter Solstice: Tuesday, December 21.

2paradoxosalpha
Dic 3, 2021, 2:13 pm

Vota: "The Grey God Passes" by Robert E. Howard (1962)

Corrispondenza attuale: 8, No 1
First published posthumously as "Twilight of the Grey Gods" in the Arkham House collection Dark Mind, Dark Heart, and subsequently in various collections. T. E. D. Klein writes of this story, "Left unpublished at the time of his death, the tale is the fruit of Howard's deep interest in Celtic Britain. With typical Howardian vigor it recounts the Battle of Clontarf in 1014, that final apocalyptic struggle in which the Viking overlords were pushed forever from the green and bloody meadows of Ireland."

(Renominated from its position at the cutoff in the Fall voting.)

3AndreasJ
Modificato: Dic 3, 2021, 4:34 pm

Vota: H. P. Lovecraft, "Herbert West - Reanimator" (1922)

Corrispondenza attuale: 7, No 1, Incerto 1
Probably the most well-known HPL story we haven't done yet. HPL himself regarded it as hackwork, but it's good fun (of a macabre variety).

Online here, and audio here.

4AndreasJ
Dic 6, 2021, 5:20 am

Vota: Tanith Lee, "Clockatrice" (2009)

Corrispondenza attuale: 9, No 1
A story of time and petrification. Online here.

5AndreasJ
Dic 6, 2021, 6:37 am

Vota: Jeffrey Ford, "After Moreau" (2008)

Corrispondenza attuale: 10, No 1
A revisionist take, you could call it, on The Island of Dr. Moreau. Online here.

6AndreasJ
Dic 6, 2021, 6:54 am

Vota: Vernon Lee, "Dionea" (1890)

Corrispondenza attuale: 9, No 0
A story of a pagan irruption into modern (well, once modern) life; a LT reviewer compares it to "The Great God Pan". Available in this Gutenberg edition of Hauntings, though you have to scroll down manually to find the start of the story as there's no internal links.

7AndreasJ
Modificato: Dic 6, 2021, 7:09 am

Vota: John Wiswell, "Open House on Haunted Hill" (2020)

Corrispondenza attuale: 6, No 2
Hugo nominee with a haunted house as viewpoint character. Online here.

8RandyStafford
Dic 6, 2021, 6:20 pm

Vota: "The Enemy", Isaac Bashevis Singer, (1980)

Corrispondenza attuale: 9, No 1
A supernatural tale from Singer and found in Dark Forces, Macaber Carnaval (also edited by McCauley), and LOA's Collected Stories: One Night in Brazil to the Death of Methuselah.

9paradoxosalpha
Modificato: Dic 9, 2021, 3:58 pm

Vota: "The Cage" by Jeff VanderMeer (2002)

Corrispondenza attuale: 10, No 0
Originally published in City of Saints and Madmen and reprinted in The Weird (and elsewhere). It "chronicles the dangerous impulse to deliberately seek out the weird." We haven't yet read a story by VanderMeer. I'm a fan of his Southern Reach books and thinking about taking a dive into Ambergris.

10paradoxosalpha
Dic 9, 2021, 4:04 pm

Vota: "One Tree Hill (The World as Cataclysm)" by Caitlín R. Kiernan (2013)

Corrispondenza attuale: 4, No 3, Incerto 1
In Joshi's intro to Black Wings of Cthulhu 3 he credits the "brooding melancholy" of this story with shedding "light on the human condition as well as the condition of the infinite cosmos." The story was first published in The Ape's Wife and later reprinted in a couple best-of Kiernan collections as well as Black Wings III.

11paradoxosalpha
Dic 9, 2021, 4:15 pm

Vota: "When the Green Star Waned" by Nictzin Dyalhis (1925)

Corrispondenza attuale: 9, No 0
A popular contribution to Weird Tales, this story has been in various later collections. It's a fantasy that starts with a claim for the planetary exceptionalism of the world of Venhez, and proceeds melodramatically from there.

12paradoxosalpha
Modificato: Dic 9, 2021, 6:23 pm

Vota: "A View from a Hill" by M. R. James (1925)

Corrispondenza attuale: 9, No 1
The T.E.D. Klein notes to this story in Beyond Midnight emphasize the origin of James' ghost stories in the custom of English Christmas amusements, and this one starts by transporting its hearers to the mild pleasures of a summer vacation. I'm sure the story is available variously online in addition to its myriad printed editions, and the BBC put it on screen in 2005.

14PLANETBUDS
Dic 10, 2021, 4:04 am

Questo utente è stato eliminato perché considerato spam.

15AndreasJ
Modificato: Dic 10, 2021, 7:04 am

>11 paradoxosalpha:

That one's online, but LT really doesn't like the formating of the link.

ETA: This shortened URL seems to work:
https://tinyurl.com/ycknbku8

16paradoxosalpha
Dic 12, 2021, 1:52 am

Vota: "Lorelei of the Red Mist" by Leigh Brackett and Ray Bradbury (1946)

Corrispondenza attuale: 9, No 0
This tale set on Venus has been collected/reprinted several times per decade since its original appearance in Planet Stories. According to Brackett, she handed off the incomplete MS to Bradbury when she got the opportunity to work on The Big Sleep, and he simply wrote the second half.

17AndreasJ
Modificato: Dic 12, 2021, 3:55 am

>16 paradoxosalpha:

"Lorelei of the Red Mist" is online here.

18housefulofpaper
Dic 12, 2021, 1:28 pm

Vota: "The Crab Spider" by Emile Erckmann and Alexandre Chatrian ("Erckmann-Chatrian")(1860)

Corrispondenza attuale: 9, No 0
There's something in the waters of a Black Forest spa. Online (link below) under an alternative title (the original French title is "L'araignée-crabe")

https://dmdujour.wordpress.com/2016/04/25/erckmann-chatrian-the-waters-of-death/

19elenchus
Dic 12, 2021, 9:50 pm

>18 housefulofpaper:

That is an early Weird, nice find.

20AndreasJ
Dic 16, 2021, 10:00 am

We seem to have a bit of a shortage of nominations this far (13, one of which threatening to to be disqualified for too many No's), so let's throw in an extra:

Vota: Clark Ashton Smith, "The Planet of the Dead" (1932)

Corrispondenza attuale: 9, No 0, Incerto 1
Funereal decadence with a dash of Zhuangzi. Not really sf in any sense despite the title and extraterrestrial setting of the bulk of the story. Typo-riddled online version here, collected a reasonable number of times.

21housefulofpaper
Dic 16, 2021, 6:45 pm

Vota: "The End of the Garden" by Michal Ajvaz (1991)

Corrispondenza attuale: 8, No 0, Incerto 2
I can't say much about this one, as I haven't read it yet. It's the next story I have to read in The Weird (excepting the past Deep Ones selections I've skipped ahead to!).

I do know Ajvaz is a Czech novelist and poet, and his work apparently has a Surreal or Magical Realist feel to it.

22RandyStafford
Dic 17, 2021, 12:54 am

Vota: "The Spectre Bridegroom", Washington Irving (1819)

Corrispondenza attuale: 9, No 1
Of course not the most famous of Irving's fantastic tales but influenced by German Romanticism and widely anthologized and available online.

23paradoxosalpha
Dic 21, 2021, 12:04 pm

Last chance to vote! I will start the tallies in an hour or two.

24paradoxosalpha
Dic 21, 2021, 1:22 pm

Counting now.