The Colour Out of Space

His stories often used scientific elements to lend eerie plausibility.

In The Color Out of Space, a strange meteorite falls near a farmhouse, mutating the farm into a nightmarish hellscape.

Others incorporated scientific methodology into their form, At the Mountains of Madness is written as a report of an Antarctic expedition that unearths things better left undiscovered.

In others, mathematics themselves become a source of horror as impossible geometric configurations wreak havoc on the minds of any who behold them.

The Call of Cthulhu by Lovecraft.

The Color Out of Space.

End of section 15, The Favorite Weird Stories of Clark Ashton Smith.

Section 16 of the Collected Writings from the Fantasy Fan Magazine by Clark Ashton Smith.

You know, these characters are still human and mortal and still have a limited span of time in which to exist.

Now, I could leave it all on a positive note, talking about generational change and surviving apocalypses, but it would be remiss not to talk about The Colour Out of Space and Annihilation, both of which are much better known stories.

And I think the problem with comparing The Crystal World with these stories is we can get fixated in the landscape and how weird and frightening it is rather than where the scenario arc finally lands.

And don't get me wrong, the landscape distortion is a point of contact and, just as in Planet Romance, it needs to be present.

But anyway, in the past I've talked about Jeff Vandermeer's Annihilation and how it owes a lot to Lovecraft's The Colour Out of Space.

The Illuminated Man is sort of a stepping stone between the two, I think, the way it introduces the cordoned off active zone in the Everglades and the military mission.

Also, I think the Alex Garland movie owes at least something to Ballard visually, when Natalie Portman passes through that fluid crystal barrier.

Monster Man, episode 639.

Chthonian, sort of, Cold One, and Color Out of Space.

[upbeat music] Hello, and welcome to Monster Man, a show about monsters because monsters are great.

I'm James Holloway, and I'm reading my way through the gaming books of yesteryear.

But it came to my attention because I kept failing to find the episode when I searched through my own [laughs] feed, but it turns out it's because the name is misspelled, by which I mean spelled correctly, but y- you know what I mean.

Anyway, I did a special episode about Chthonians back in 2023, so if you wanna know what I think about them, you can just go listen to that.

So instead, we're gonna move on and tackle the next two monsters, the Cold One and the Color Out of Space.

First up, we have the Cold Ones.

It maintains its mystery, but provides satisfying answers to many of the primary questions, for those that look hard enough.

In my opinion, this trilogy can be seen almost as a retelling of H.P. Lovecraft's The Color Out of Space.

Essentially, it is a first contact story.

And like The Color Out of Space, it points out that our definition of life might be quite limited.

Given the vastness of the universe, who knows what strange forms may come into existence, and who can say how contact with life on Earth would affect said entities, and what effect they may have on us? For reasons that remain obscure, it all began, at least from the perspective of Earth, along the Forgotten Shore, a shore that had long been known to conjure twisted stories among its inhabitants.

There were plenty of eerie whispers about things seen and heard.

The Call of Cthulhu by Lovecraft.

The Color Out of Space.

End of section 15.

The Favorite Weird Stories of Clark Ashton Smith.