THE DEEP ONES: "Remnants" by Fred Chappell

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THE DEEP ONES: "Remnants" by Fred Chappell

2AndreasJ
Mar 13, 2024, 4:58 am

I guess that, technically, this is an alien abduction story.

I enjoyed the sections about Vern and family rather more than those about Ship and crew, but convergence was pretty well done I thought.

The Old Ones seemed rather more, well, cosmic here than in AtMoM. There they "merely" built titanic cities during hundreds of millions of years on Earth, and apparently maintained no contact with conspecifics elsewhere in the cosmos, whereas here they in a few years at most radically reconfigure the very shape of the Earth and Moon, and maintain an interstellar empire. They're also do the sort of extradimensional stuff that they in AtMoM, unlike the Cthulhu spawn and mi-go, do not do.

I wondered if the "Great Ones" were supposed to be anything to do with either the "Great Ones", aka the gods of Earth, in the Dreamlands stories, or with the Great Race of Yith, but it doesn't seem so. There's a whiff of the divine, though, in that Seeker's real name is Inanna.

3paradoxosalpha
Edited: Mar 13, 2024, 1:24 pm

I liked that the Great Ones were somewhat morally ambivalent despite their role as the rescuing power, what with the possible expendability of the Ship's teenage crew and a few other hints.

The end was curiously unresolved. There had already been some implication that Seeker would come to trouble. Was she unable to say her own name?

4RandyStafford
Mar 13, 2024, 6:57 pm

I had read this year's ago and didn't remember as being anything special, but I appreciated it a lot more this time.

I liked the horror of the Earth not only being occupied by the Old Ones but that the survivors had to lead not only a solitary existence but an emotionally muted one.

The callbacks to the Cherokee, another group displaced and violently hunted by an advanced culture, were well done.

I thought the utter despair of Moms on the plateau was welldone as well as the vomit-inducing architecture of the Old Ones.

Finally, I appreciated poet Chappell figuring out a way to justify the alien narrator using some odd, but poetic, language.