A few questions on shoggoths:
What do shoggoths feel like other then jellyish?
What do shoggoths sound like?
How do shoggoths move?
What do shoggoths smell like?
What do shoggoths eat?
Nasty, cold, and like having digestive juices poured over your skin
Anything they want, but they usually communicate with a high-pitched warbling whistle, like a rookery of giant albino penguins.
Much faster than you would think.
Decaying fish with a chemical undertone.
Anything remotely organic.
A few questions on shoggoths:
What do shoggoths feel like other then jellyish?
What do shoggoths sound like?
How do shoggoths move?
What do shoggoths smell like?
What do shoggoths eat?
The sound like strange piping and tekili.
As for the rest of your questions I’lll refer you to Elizabeth Bear’s “Shoggoth’s in Bloom” which was published last year. It’s not properly Lovecraftian but it does feature a lot of details about their supposed biology.
What we did see - for the mists were indeed all too maliguly thinned - was something altogether different, and immeasurably more hideous and detestable. It was the utter, objective embodiment of the fantastic novelist’s “thing that should not be”; and its nearest comprehensible analogue is a vast, onrushing subway train as one sees it from a station platform - the great black front looming colossally out of infinite subterranean distance, constellated with strangely colored lights and filling the prodigious burrow as a piston fills a cylinder.
But we were not on a station platform. We were on the track ahead as the nightmare, plastic column of fetid black iridescence oozed tightly onward through its fifteen-foot sinus, gathering unholy speed and driving before it a spiral, rethickening cloud of the pallid abyss vapor. It was a terrible, indescribable thing vaster than any subway train - a shapeless congeries of protoplasmic bubbles, faintly self-luminous, and with myriads of temporary eyes forming and un-forming as pustules of greenish light all over the tunnel-filling front that bore down upon us, crushing the frantic penguins and slithering over the glistening floor that it and its kind had swept so evilly free of all litter. Still came that eldritch, mocking cry- “Tekeli-li! Tekeli-li!” and at last we remembered that the demoniac Shoggoths - given life, thought, and plastic organ patterns solely by the Old Ones, and having no language save that which the dot groups expressed - had likewise no voice save the imitated accents of their bygone masters.
From At The Mountains of Madness ; a shoggoth flowing down a tunnel towards the protagonist.
Ogre
October 2, 2009, 5:17am
5
Watch the Kurt Russell version of The Thing . That’s a shoggoth.*
*It is TOO! You can’t tell me otherwise! Lalalalalalalalalalalalalalalala!
3trew
October 2, 2009, 7:08am
6
A few questions on shoggoths:
What do shoggoths feel like other then jellyish?
What do shoggoths sound like?
How do shoggoths move?
What do shoggoths smell like?
What do shoggoths eat?
Acid. Not the fun kind.
H.P. Lovecraft as through Michael Shea. “The Shoggoth Lord stumbleth unto his belusted, lo, he cometh heavily upon her, upon alien feet. From the sunless sea, from under the mountains of ice, cometh the mighty Shoggoth Lord unto her.”
They stumbleth, unless leaping spry as a cat on pachydermous legs.
Unspecified, but presumably acid.
“…sweet heedless trollop”.
All facts culled from “Fat Face”, by Michael Shea.
Just_Some_Guy:
The sound like strange piping and tekili.
As for the rest of your questions I’lll refer you to Elizabeth Bear’s “Shoggoth’s in Bloom” which was published last year. It’s not properly Lovecraftian but it does feature a lot of details about their supposed biology.
Also a genuinely beautiful story in its own right - would not have through that shoggoths could be made into sympathetic characters, but these guys are.
The mad scientists at the Black Phoenix Alchemy Lab offer a “Shoggoth” scent, from “A Picnic In Arkham: The Lovecraft Collection”
It was a terrible, indescribable thing vaster than any subway train – a shapeless congerie of protoplasmic bubbles, faintly self-luminous, and with myriads of temporary eyes forming and un-forming as pustules of greenish light all over the tunnel-filling front that bore down upon us, crushing the frantic penguins and slithering over the glistening floor that it and its kind had swept so evilly free of all litter.
An amorphous, radiant, incandescent scent. Ever changing, protoplasmic and primordial: white amber, green coconut meat, iris, palmarosa, Chinese peony, lime, water lily, snowdrop, muguet, lemongrass, osmanthus, wisteria, glassy musk, and hinoki.
Other eldritch concoctions available here –if you dare!
detop
October 2, 2009, 8:28pm
9
Or you could listen to the Dunwich Children`s Chorale sing about them.
Damn your eyes, detop.
Now I’m going to spend another three hours on YouTube…
(I had a shoggoth, he pleased me, but he drove me to insanity.
I read that story after it was posted here and I’m impressed.
I wasn’t impressed with “Shoggoths in Bloom” the first time I read it; I thought it was a bit trite. Then I read it as a response to Lovecraft’s xenophobia and it made the whole thing click for me.
Bear won the Hugo award this year for that story and it was well deserved.
Wow. That is an amazing story – thanks for the link.
Shoggoth make terrible housepet!!!
detop
October 3, 2009, 8:37am
15
DrFidelius:
Damn your eyes, detop.
Now I’m going to spend another three hours on YouTube…
(I had a shoggoth, he pleased me, but he drove me to insanity.
We all serve the Dread Lords in our own ways
