(no subject)
Jan. 21st, 2005 11:14 amTerrible dreams.
Colonists on an alien planet (I know, I know, bear with me, okay?) the indigenous lifeform of which was a sort of a cross between soldier ants (the really bad South American ones in the short story that everyone and their dog has to read in junior high and then can never remember author or title of ever again) and jellyfish (stinging-tentacle style jellyfish, like in the Sherlock Holmes story) each about the size of a small car and with a hive-mind. I'm not sure whether they were just not sapient or whether they were as Lovecraftian as they seemed and therefore Evil. But anyway, swarms of them. Each batch of colonists got set down with a handwavium generator that produced a forcefield that would keep the aliens off, but the generators weren't very big, and each batch of colonists only got one. So one of the older colonies, which had degenerated, politically and socially, into a sort of reverse-Handmaid's Tale matriarchy, would wait until a new colony had landed and then lay siege. You could surrender, in which case all the women would be killed and the men enslaved and all the books burned, or you could fight, in which case they'd just bash a hole in your forcefield, and the aliens would come pouring in and you and everyone you loved would die terribly as the aliens' secretions ate the flesh off your bones.
The colonists in my dream were trying to fight back, but they were outgunned and outnumbered and they knew they were going to die.
Not a great way to start a Friday, in case you were wondering.
But hey! The L. A. zoo has a baby pangolin.
Colonists on an alien planet (I know, I know, bear with me, okay?) the indigenous lifeform of which was a sort of a cross between soldier ants (the really bad South American ones in the short story that everyone and their dog has to read in junior high and then can never remember author or title of ever again) and jellyfish (stinging-tentacle style jellyfish, like in the Sherlock Holmes story) each about the size of a small car and with a hive-mind. I'm not sure whether they were just not sapient or whether they were as Lovecraftian as they seemed and therefore Evil. But anyway, swarms of them. Each batch of colonists got set down with a handwavium generator that produced a forcefield that would keep the aliens off, but the generators weren't very big, and each batch of colonists only got one. So one of the older colonies, which had degenerated, politically and socially, into a sort of reverse-Handmaid's Tale matriarchy, would wait until a new colony had landed and then lay siege. You could surrender, in which case all the women would be killed and the men enslaved and all the books burned, or you could fight, in which case they'd just bash a hole in your forcefield, and the aliens would come pouring in and you and everyone you loved would die terribly as the aliens' secretions ate the flesh off your bones.
The colonists in my dream were trying to fight back, but they were outgunned and outnumbered and they knew they were going to die.
Not a great way to start a Friday, in case you were wondering.
But hey! The L. A. zoo has a baby pangolin.