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Episode 406 - Mimic (Patreon)

Published:
2018-06-09 08:50:44
Edited:
2019-01-04 03:47:40
Imported:
2021-07

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Content

We're back covering Mimic by Donald A. Wollheim!

Special thanks to reader Greig Johnson!

Next up: The Vegetable Man by Luigi Ugolini.

Comments

Anonymous

Well timed! I'm just going for my Saturday morning walk and I enjoy some horror in the sunshine.

Anonymous

I was thinking the new videos weren’t uploading lol. Looking forward to listening to this one 👍👍

Anonymous

Brilliant show guys, happy 400s. What an amazing and bizarre story, and the ending was so cool. As always you are fun, entertaining, and educational. I’ve been listening since episode one, many thanks for all your great work ❤️

William Rieder

With the Michael Shea, this story, and the fact you have a copy of the Vandermeers' "The Weird", might I suggest Fritz Leiber's "Smoke Ghost" to continue the gritty urban horror theme?

Anonymous

I've always found the title "Mimic" strangely fascinating. Now that I've actually read the story I'm sort of underwhelmed. Honestly though, I don't know what my expectations were in the first place. I guess it's just one of those situations where the actual thing can never quite live up to the vague but very powerful suggestion a mere name or fragment will carry sometimes. Anyway, great show as always!

Fred Kiesche

Just a request: can you put the author name in the episode information? Just so I know how to tag the file when I download it for later consumption. Thank you!

Anonymous

Awesome show but it “bugged me” not the writing but The Bugs!So for next week I am watching “The Great Vegetable Rebellion” from the Lost in Space series to look for similarities,I doubt there will be any.

Anonymous

That final reveal elevates this story into the Lovecraftian idea of horror for me. What is otherwise a weird tale that has the creepy idea that we are sharing our world with a race of big monsters, suddenly opens to the idea that we are living alongside an entire eco-system of monsters we aren’t aware of. For me, that really brings home the cosmic horror of just how little we know, how insignificant we are and how horrifying it is to glimpse a much, much larger universe.

Anonymous
>>12962508

I love Smoke Ghost but the guys don't generally have a great track record with M.R. James, and Smoke Ghost (like Leiber's later Our Lady of Darkness) is very consciously Jamesian.

Anonymous

I think the writer's mistake was in choice of narrator. If you're going to take us through the POV of a very well educated museum curator specializing in bugs that imitate other things, we're going to expect brilliant insights and well-honed phrases. If, on the other hand, we were seeing all this through the eyes of the building's janitor, a certain clumsiness and confusion with how to express what he'd experienced might actually have added to the story's impact.

Anonymous

I knew I had read this story a long time ago, not remembering the title, just that final image of a giant cockroach thing taking flight in the moonlight. It was creepy. Well, once again this podcast reminds me of some lost horror story that delightfully scared me and then was forgotten except for vague recollections. I never connected it to Guillermo's movie. Thanks as always guys.

Anonymous

Ant speed Mr. Sulu

Raoul Kunz

Nice choice of story guys! I really liked Fifer's micro excursion into gender roles - reminded me of my sister who does this all the time whenever we meet, completely independently from the, oh, ACTUAL topic... ;). The connection to the Del Toro's film now seems even more tenuous - well I guess there is only so much that you can add to a rather tiny story to blow it up into a feature length narrative ;). Best regards Raoul G. Kunz

Anonymous

I quite liked the narrator's reaction to the scene in the apartment, being able to act in the moment and the horror not striking him until later - very much reflective of "The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents." It seemed odd to me that the mimic's reaction to women, to avoid their attention, was to freeze in place. I would have thought most women's reaction to a man with a long black cloak that came to his ankles and a wide-brimmed black hat hiding his face suddenly stopping as soon as he saw them would be to suspect he was a flasher! It would have been a better tactic for the mimic to find someone more noteworthy and shadow them - if it followed around the guy with all the baby doll legs hanging off his belt, no-one would give the mimic a second glance. And as for the 'instinctive feminine jealousy' thing, I can see it now... NEXT TIME ON MAURY - A GIANT CROSS-DRESSING COCKROACH WITH NO NOSE STOLE MY MAN MAURY: Meet Daisy-Sue - her husband Dwight says he is leaving her for an insectoid mimic. DAISY-SUE: Maury, I must have passed this home-wrecking floozy on the street a hundred times, but I thought he- she- was just a harmless flasher! I never dreamt that I'd come home to find Dwight in bed with... with that! I mean, how does that even work?!? IS SHE A MAN-STEALING HO, OR IS THIS A CROSS-SPECIES ROMEO AND JULIET? DWIGHT: Maury, I love her, from her tiny extra set of arms to her cute little drawn-on nose. Mimic, will you marry me? MIMIC: CLICK CLICK CLICK SEE THE SHOCKING TEST RESULTS!!! MAURY: And the test results show... Mimic, you are pregnant! DAISY-SUE: You son of a bitch, Dwight! I knew you weren't buying all that sheet metal for building a rat rod!!! DAISY-SUE GRABS A CHAIR AND SMASHES IT OVER THE MIMIC'S BACK - SUDDENLY THE LIGHTING RIG UNROLLS ITSELF, DROPS TO THE STAGE AND STARTS EATING EVERYONE

Anonymous

Hey guys, I enjoyed the episode, and was particularly amused by the Chad's imitation of the reader making fun of the writing. I have to say, though, that the concept, the payoff, and particularly the implications of the final scene make the story powerful and worthwhile. I can see why this story struck Del Toro in such as way as to drive him to adapt it. Would love to see what I he would have done with it now, when he would have full creative control.

Anonymous

As a woman I am definitely instinctively jealous of females who get all the benefits of male privilege as well as extra arms.

Anonymous

Great show again guys! I feel sure that the fear The Mimic has for other females is a product of Wollheim's research for the story. For many colonial insects the only breeding female is the "Queen" and the only serious threat to the queen is the appearance of another queen.

Anonymous

I once argued with a naturalist who believed all genetic mutations were indeed random and accidental, caused by the sun's radiation making changes to the DNA of creatures over thousands of years. Certain mutations benefited creatures and certain ones did not. It was all chance. Yet, no well-respected member of the scientific community actually believes this theory, it seems. There are many, also, that believe random mutations happen at the cellular level when DNA is not copied perfectly over time during reproduction and this causes a new genetic alteration that is either beneficial to a creature or detrimental, yet still all an element of chance. I'm not sure where all this begins myself, and how much the element of chance is actually involved, but it's crazy to me to think that out of all these "random" mutations we would have so many beneficial ones. It does seem to be an "insanely specific" process, as mentioned in the show, like there's more order to the universe than we might suppose through the scope of Lovecraftian cosmicism.

Anonymous

So wait, the guy was a bug creature with essentially a bit of makeup on, and as a result no one realised he was in fact not a human at all? Wow, turns out bug creatures are god tier makeup artists.

Anonymous

It seemed like the author meant that this insect and human women might be jealous of each other in sort of a territorial sense - like they’re each afraid the other will be competition for mates. But that’s a weird thing to suggest. I am not afraid that non-human females would be competition for human men. What does the author think women are like?? “I was having a really good time at the beach, but I’m pretty sure that female pelican is flirting with my boyfriend so we’re about to throw down.” Also, I think a female insect which has evolved to mimic a creepy guy in a big black coat would be pretty safe from discovery around women. We’re not going to be looking closely at him, we’re going to try desperately to avoid eye contact or drawing any attention to ourselves while getting away from the dude as fast as possible. "That guy in the big black coat has a thorax and is staring at me. Oh god. Keep walking. Don't make eye contact."

Anonymous

Great show guys. Since you're already looking through the Weird anthology maybe you could check out The Shadowy Street by Jean Ray also. Looking forward to the next episode.

Anonymous

I really enjoyed this episode gents. Well done.

Anonymous

While accident isn't quite the right word, it does sum up the way evolution has no agency. 'Coincidental' might be a better way of phrasing it.

Cameron Lee

Loved this episode guys! This story feels like a goosebumps episode or book. Like I could totally see changing the perspective to a child talking about the creepy guy that moved in nearby. Even the reveal of the other mimic at the end had a very goosebumps or twilight zone feel in my head. Could be because the author also wrote children's stories?

Anonymous

I think the current, most modern take on evolution is that there are other mechanisms involved that we are trying to understand, some of which can happen as s result of environment and stimuli within a single individual. I've always wondered about that myself because certain things don't make any sense from the purely random viewpoint. Animals adapt to their environment to quickly and too specifically at times for it be completely random. Like moths in a certain areas turning dark to match soot blackened trees during the industrial revolution. Then again, what about stuff that doesn't really make any difference to survival? You can’t tell me that having or not having eyes in a dark cave makes much difference in the survival rate of a fish, but fish and other creatures that live perpetually in caves become eyeless. This can’t be random. This is some process by which the body understands these things aren’t needed and starts to turn them off genetically.

Anonymous

To me, the coolest thing about this story is the implication that anything around you could be a monster. The main character walks out into the world, his eyes opened by the revelation he has just had, and immediately sees another giant insect disguised as part of a building. They must be everywhere. He has seen beyond the ordinary and can't un-see it. Very Lovecraftian.

Anonymous

I'd like to call your attention to a short story called "Or All the Seas With Oysters" (1958), very similar to "Mimic" in certain respects, which you can also read online: <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Or_All_the_Seas_with_Oysters" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Or_All_the_Seas_with_Oysters</a>

Anonymous

OMG since you mentioned william s burroughs...why not covering "The Wild Boys"?! It's.........weird.

William Rieder
>>13045133

And after reading the story, here's a nice little write-up on it: <a href="http://scottnicolay.com/stories-from-the-borderland-3-or-all-the-seas-with-oysters-by-avram-davidson/" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">http://scottnicolay.com/stories-from-the-borderland-3-or-all-the-seas-with-oysters-by-avram-davidson/</a>

Anonymous

Here's the PDF of Fantastic Novels magazine where it was published. Located at The Internet Archive where you can find a bunch of public domain goodies: <a href="https://archive.org/details/Fantastic_Novels_v04n03_1950-09" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">https://archive.org/details/Fantastic_Novels_v04n03_1950-09</a> I love the illustrations done engraving style that accompany this story too.

Anonymous
>>13032004

You could make the argument that developing and maintaining the physical structure of eyes has a metabolic cost to the animal. Not having eyes means not wasting resources building and healing what's become a vestigial organ and those without come out incrementally ahead. The darkness is an environmental pressure upon the population. With regards to the moths, there were always dark moths, it's just they did better on trees. Smog created a greater cost to being light/white so more of them survived. But, perhaps, this tendency towards the light or the dark is never truly extinguished or is a mutation that happens over and over again because the overarching mutation if you will, is to have this variability. Then of course, you come down to the underlying why of it all. At that point it all becomes a bit Fortean. It makes very little difference to me whether you say God or random chance. It's an interpretation our brains are comfortable making.