"Boojum" is a short story by Elizabeth Bear and Sarah Monette that first appeared in the anthology Fast Ships, Black Sails (Night Shade Books, 2008). It is the first of three stories in the Boojumverse, a series that blends the Cthulhu Mythos and the bestiary of Lewis Carroll in a space opera setting.
"Boojum" tells the story of the boojum Lavinia Whateley--an enormous spacefaring creature that serves as a liveship for a crew of (mostly) human space pirates--and Black Alice Bradley, a member of her engineering crew who comes to love her. Trouble comes when the pirates loot a cargo of Mi-Go brain cannisters; when the owners come to reclaim what's theirs, Black Alice is forced to make a desperate choice.
Boojums[]
“‘But oh, beamish nephew, beware of the day,
If your Snark be a Boojum! For then
You will softly and suddenly vanish away,
And never be met with again!’"
--Lewis Carroll, "The Hunting of the Snark"[1]
Boojums are a gigantic race of "deep-space swimmer[s]"; they "evolved in the high tempestuous envelopes of gas giants, and their offspring still spent their infancies there, in cloud-nurseries over eternal storms." They don't name themselves, so are given names by the humans who use them as liveships.
The Lavinia Whateley (named for the mother in "The Dunwich Horror") was born over Uranus. She looks "like a vast spiny lionfish to the earth-adapted eye. Her sides were lined with gasbags filled with hydrogen; her vanes and wings furled tight. Her color was a blue-green so dark it seemed a glossy black unless the light struck it; her hide was impregnated with symbiotic algae." Vinnie, as she is affectionately known to her crew, has many teeth, "the diamond edges worn to a glitter," and "dozens of bright sapphire eyes"; she bears "an ugly ring of scars where the Henry Ford had bitten her." Her interior smells of ozone and nutmeg.
Another Boojum mentioned in the story--besides the bitey Henry Ford--is the Marie Curie, who is reputed to have eaten her crew.
Boojums are named for the creatures in Lewis Carroll's "The Hunting of the Snark";[1] they are the kind of Snark you don't want to hunt, as those who do tend to vanish forever.
Mi- Go[]
The Mi- Go are an alien race created by H. P. Lovecraft in the story The Whisperer in Darkness; they are also known as the Fungi from Yuggoth, but apparently in the Boojumverse, they don't like to be called that. They are said to come "from the outer rim of the Solar System, the black cold hurtling rocks of the Öpik-Oort Cloud. Like the Boojums, they could swim between the stars." Black Alice compares them to "the pseudoroaches of Venus...with too many legs, and horrible stiff wings."
For reasons unknown, they like to extract human brains and carry them around in silver canisters. They do not like people messing with their brain canisters.
Gillies[]
Gillies are a non-human species that are encountered working with humans on spaceships and space stations. While it's possible that they are deep ones, they seem very meek to be the creatures encountered in The Shadow over Innsmouth. Another possibility is that they are natives of "the teeming seas of Venus".[2] They have "big wet eyes" and communicate through "fingersigns" and other gestures.
Characters[]
- Black Alice Bradley: After "working in the sunstone mines on Venus," she signed up with crew of the Lavinia Whateley "back in ’32, after the Venusian Riots." She is considered "reliable," since "she didn’t smoke hash and she didn’t cheat at cards." As she "couldn’t hit the broad side of a space freighter with a ray gun," she works in Engineering. She is a mostly self-taught engineer, whose "implants were second-hand, black market, scavenged, the wet work done by a gilly on Providence Station." And she "loved her ship."
- Captain Song: The captain of the Lavinia Whateley. She is widely feared; everyone remembers how she keelhauled a crewmember, and after since a fellow pirate captain double-crossed her, she's kept his head in a jar. She is a pragmatist; she "didn’t mind other people worrying about souls, so long as they didn’t do it on her time." She has long legs, dark eyes, and "extraordinarily white strong teeth".
- Dogcollar: "the closest thing the Lavinia Whateley had to a chaplain". Partnered with Black Alice, he discovers the cargo of brain cannisters with her.
- Wasabi: Black Alice's supervisor in Engineering.
- Half-Hand Sally: A pirate acquaintance of Black Alice.
- James Brady: A crewmember who was keelhauled by Captain Song, apparently for not obeying orders fast enough.
- Captain Smith: Captain Song's predecessor on the Lavinia Whateley; he is not spoken of.
- Captain Edwards: The captain of the boojum Henry Ford, who tried to double cross Captain Song; she now keeps his severed head in a jar.
- Gogglehead Kim: He taught Black Alice the vocabulary of engineering before he was killed in a "stupid little fight" with a ship named the V. I. Ulyanov.
Publication History[]
After its initial appearance in Fast Ships, Black Sails (Night Shade Books, 2008), "Boojum" was quickly reprinted in a number of "best of" collections, including Year's Best SF 14 (Eos/HarperCollins, 2009), The Year's Best Science Fiction: Twenty-Sixth Annual Collection (St. Martin's Griffin, 2009), The Mammoth Book of Best New Science Fiction: 22nd Annual Collection (Robinson, 2009), and The Year's Best Science Fiction & Fantasy, 2009 Edition (Prime Books, 2010). It was later included in The Very Best of the Best: 35 Years of The Year's Best Science Fiction (St. Martin's Griffin, 2019).
It was later included in various specialized science fiction anthologies, including Space Opera (Prime Books, 2014), The Mammoth Book of SF Stories by Women (Robinson, 2014), Cosmic Corsairs (Baen, 2020), and The 2020 Look at Space Opera Book (Infinivox, 2020). It was selected for The Best of Elizabeth Bear (Subterranean Press, 2020).
It was part of the anthology of Lovecraftian fiction The Book of Cthulhu II (Night Shade Books, 2012).
External Links[]
- "Boojum" full text at Lightspeed
- "Yo Ho Ho and a Bottle of… Um: Elizabeth Bear and Sarah Monette’s 'Boojum'” review at The Lovecraft Reread
References[]
- ↑ 1.0 1.1 Lewis Carroll Resources, "The Hunting of the Snark".
- ↑ The Lovecraft Reread, "Yo Ho Ho and a Bottle of… Um: Elizabeth Bear and Sarah Monette’s 'Boojum'", by Ruthanna Emrys and Anne M. Pillsworth, June 7, 2017.