I blog today through a feverish haze, which is appropriate given the hallucinatory subject matter. In my debilitated state I’m just going to summarize comments on yesterday’s post, which make clear my numerous personal and nerdly shortcomings.
— Several readers brought up large organic space vessels from Babylon 5 and Star Trek as well as Farscape (turns out the ship on Farscape is called Moya). An earlier example of the same meme crossed my mind after I posted: the Brood, those alien X-Men bad guys, used to tool around in whale-like organic starships, which were actually a spaceborne race whom they’d lobotomized, the bastards.
— I also missed several other living planets: Unicron from the Transformers, and Mogo the living planet, who’s apparently a Green Lantern? And there’s, you know, Gaia. And the living moon from John Varley’s Titan.
— re: the Cthulhu, Tripp evokes the hideous Azathoth. There’s a Lovecraft quote on Wikipwedia that begs to be cut and pasted: “[O]utside the ordered universe [is] that amorphous blight of nethermost confusion which blasphemes and bubbles at the center of all infinity—the boundless daemon sultan Azathoth, whose name no lips dare speak aloud, and who gnaws hungrily in inconceivable, unlighted chambers beyond time and space amidst the muffled, maddening beating of vile drums and the thin monotonous whine of accursed flutes.”
— there’s that giant amoeba in a TOS episode called The Immunity Syndrome
— Fred Hoyle’s The Black Cloud
— lots more examples from Alan Dean Foster, Gene Wolfe, Frank Herbert, Orson Scott Card, Dr. Who…sorry, I need more Dayquil…