“shoggoths in bloom”

[sergebroom]

”Well, now Professor Harding,” the fisherman says, as his Bluebird skips across Penobscot Bay, “I don’t know about that. The jellies don’t trouble with us, and we don’t trouble with them.”

Thus begins Elizabeth Bear’s Shoggoths in Bloom, which graced the March 2008 issue of Asimov’s. The jellies are what the local Maine fishermen call the shoggoths that every November come rest on the Bay’s rocky outcrops, for reasons that nobody understands. Is it for mating that they gather? There is little about Oracupoda horibilis in the scientific literature beyond the illustrations by Audubon. This isn’t a research subject that’ll grant Harding fame and tenure at the Negro College where he teaches, but he hopes he might find some compounds that’ll unlock the secrets of immortality because no dead shoggoth has ever been found aside from rare fossils dating back to the Age of Dinosaurs.

But this is the 1930s and worse monsters are at work in Europe.