Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, a production of iHeartRadio.

Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, a production of iHeartRadio.

Hi, my name is Robert Lamb and this is the Monster Fact, a short form series from Stuff to Blow Your Mind, focusing in no mythical creatures, ideas and monsters in time. I'd like to offer this episode as an imaginative side show to our core episodes on the moons of Uranus. As we discuss in those episodes, it's not beyond the realm of possibility that one of the icy Uranian moons contains or may have once contained life. But the planet itself is a cold, dead world, and its temperatures, pressures, and materials simply don't correspond to life as we know it. However, if we venture back far enough in science fiction, we can find some interesting dreams regarding what life on the seventh planet might consist of. American author Stanley G. Weinebombs nineteen thirty five story The Planet of Doubt is just such a dream. The story, which you can find in various collections today, is very old fashion in many respects. It takes place in an action packed Solar system where humans have encountered various alien life forms on the inner planets and moons and continue to discover new wonders on the outer planets. Where the story excels, however, is in its imaginative description of strange creatures lurking in the planetary fog. Of this imagined take on Urinus, a planet the author describes as quote a wild, alien, mystery choked planet with only icy Neptune and Pluto between it and the interstellar void. Our human adventurers encounter two dissimilar life forms on the planet. The first encountered organism resembles some sort of vague dark gargoyle in the fog, but the second is a truly inspired creation quote. The thing was featureless, just a dull black circle and a tubular body that stretched off into the fog. Or not quite featureless. Now they could perceive an organ that projected from the center of the circle, a loose, quivering member like a large pancake on a finger thick stem, whose edges quivered and cupped toward them as if to catch sounds or scent. The creature was blind. The adventures in the story are quick to fire their automatics and their flame pistols, but quickly realize they're facing not one creature composed of multiple segments, but multiple individuals joined together in a lengthy chain quote. Suddenly the thing was roaring past them, black and huge as a railroad train. It was a segmented being. It was composed of dozens of eight foot links, like a train of miniature cars. There's three pairs of legs to a section. The adventures in the story quickly learn that if you blast the front or leader segment, the next section behind takes over as leader. Blast a middle segment, and now you have two alien trains to contend with. The biologist on the team and the story, Patricia quickly draws parallels to a real life terrestrial organism processionary caterpillars, the larval form of some Domatopina moths that move in columns in search of food. Only the segment aliens on this fictional uranus actually physically connect their nervous systems in a way that allows them to share sensations and, perhaps pat speculates, even memories. While not mentioned in the story, shrews are known to engage in a similar procession, with a mother's young following behind her, each holding onto the tail of the shrew in front of it with its mouth on this fictional version of Urinus. However, the segm minted aliens prove aggressive and Pat is separated from the party in the fog. But she takes inspiration from actual experiments with processionary caterpillars by French naturalist Jean Henri Fabre, who lived eighteen twenty three through nineteen fifteen, who found that you could manipulate these caterpillars into forming a loop, an unbroken circle that would continue around, say a potted plant, until one of the individuals in the circle in this unbroken segment dies, forcing them to break off in a new leader to emerge, Pat dodges the front of the alien procession as it's coming at her, then doubles back toward the rear segments, tricking this alien train into forming an unbroken, roaring alien freight train circle in the fog. Her crewmates rescue her from the center of the circle with ropes, and they leave the Planet of Doubt, but not before they saw the riddle of the gargoyle like shadow creatures in the fog as well. These strange forms, they realize are the shadows cast in the fog by the flying adult forms of the lauval creatures they've encountered on the ground. It's a fun tale, and one that nicely uses the weirdness of the natural world to populate imagined worlds. Stanley G. Weinbaum only lived nineteen oh two through nineteen thirty five, but pen to number of sci fi tales, including A Martian Odyssey, which has headlined a number of anthologies of his work over the years, including some that are commercially available today. A handful of his stories were adapted for film or television in the nineteen fifties, including nineteen fifty seven's She Devil. Tune in for additional episodes of The Monster Fact each week. As always. You can email us at contact at stuff to Blow your Mind dot com.

Hi, my name is Robert Lamb and this is the Monster Fact, a short form series from Stuff to Blow Your Mind, focusing in no mythical creatures, ideas and monsters in time. I'd like to offer this episode as an imaginative side show to our core episodes on the moons of Uranus. As we discuss in those episodes, it's not beyond the realm of possibility that one of the icy Uranian moons contains or may have once contained life. But the planet itself is a cold, dead world, and its temperatures, pressures, and materials simply don't correspond to life as we know it. However, if we venture back far enough in science fiction, we can find some interesting dreams regarding what life on the seventh planet might consist of. American author Stanley G. Weinebombs nineteen thirty five story The Planet of Doubt is just such a dream. The story, which you can find in various collections today, is very old fashion in many respects. It takes place in an action packed Solar system where humans have encountered various alien life forms on the inner planets and moons and continue to discover new wonders on the outer planets. Where the story excels, however, is in its imaginative description of strange creatures lurking in the planetary fog. Of this imagined take on Urinus, a planet the author describes as quote a wild, alien, mystery choked planet with only icy Neptune and Pluto between it and the interstellar void. Our human adventurers encounter two dissimilar life forms on the planet. The first encountered organism resembles some sort of vague dark gargoyle in the fog, but the second is a truly inspired creation quote. The thing was featureless, just a dull black circle and a tubular body that stretched off into the fog. Or not quite featureless. Now they could perceive an organ that projected from the center of the circle, a loose, quivering member like a large pancake on a finger thick stem, whose edges quivered and cupped toward them as if to catch sounds or scent. The creature was blind. The adventures in the story are quick to fire their automatics and their flame pistols, but quickly realize they're facing not one creature composed of multiple segments, but multiple individuals joined together in a lengthy chain quote. Suddenly the thing was roaring past them, black and huge as a railroad train. It was a segmented being. It was composed of dozens of eight foot links, like a train of miniature cars. There's three pairs of legs to a section. The adventures in the story quickly learn that if you blast the front or leader segment, the next section behind takes over as leader. Blast a middle segment, and now you have two alien trains to contend with. The biologist on the team and the story, Patricia quickly draws parallels to a real life terrestrial organism processionary caterpillars, the larval form of some Domatopina moths that move in columns in search of food. Only the segment aliens on this fictional uranus actually physically connect their nervous systems in a way that allows them to share sensations and, perhaps pat speculates, even memories. While not mentioned in the story, shrews are known to engage in a similar procession, with a mother's young following behind her, each holding onto the tail of the shrew in front of it with its mouth on this fictional version of Urinus. However, the segm minted aliens prove aggressive and Pat is separated from the party in the fog. But she takes inspiration from actual experiments with processionary caterpillars by French naturalist Jean Henri Fabre, who lived eighteen twenty three through nineteen fifteen, who found that you could manipulate these caterpillars into forming a loop, an unbroken circle that would continue around, say a potted plant, until one of the individuals in the circle in this unbroken segment dies, forcing them to break off in a new leader to emerge, Pat dodges the front of the alien procession as it's coming at her, then doubles back toward the rear segments, tricking this alien train into forming an unbroken, roaring alien freight train circle in the fog. Her crewmates rescue her from the center of the circle with ropes, and they leave the Planet of Doubt, but not before they saw the riddle of the gargoyle like shadow creatures in the fog as well. These strange forms, they realize are the shadows cast in the fog by the flying adult forms of the lauval creatures they've encountered on the ground. It's a fun tale, and one that nicely uses the weirdness of the natural world to populate imagined worlds. Stanley G. Weinbaum only lived nineteen oh two through nineteen thirty five, but pen to number of sci fi tales, including A Martian Odyssey, which has headlined a number of anthologies of his work over the years, including some that are commercially available today. A handful of his stories were adapted for film or television in the nineteen fifties, including nineteen fifty seven's She Devil. Tune in for additional episodes of The Monster Fact each week. As always. You can email us at contact at stuff to Blow your Mind dot com.

Stuff to Blow your Mind is production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from my iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

Stuff to Blow your Mind is production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from my iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.