From the Vault: Grimoire of Horror, Volume 2

Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind. Happy Halloween, by the way. It is Saturday, so we have a rerun for you. We have a vault episode for you, but it's a really good one. It is last year's Grimoire of Horror, which was volume two in our multi-year series. This was one in which Joe and I talked about two different stories. one involving out-of-control AI and one involving deep crevasses in the ice. Very different stories, very different vibes, but I think they're both fitting for your Halloween. So have a great and safe Halloween, and we'll meet you on the other side.

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

Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind. My name is Robert Lamb.

And I am Joe McCormick.

Over the years here on Stuff to Blow Your Mind, we've done a number of Halloween episodes that, in one way or another, pick from assorted tales, discuss those tales, and maybe pick apart some science or culture surrounding them. At one point, we did a series of episodes based on different creepypastas. Then Joe and I turned to TV horror anthology episodes for a number of years. And last year, we started a new tradition, one that sticks to shorter horror works, but also gets back into the written word, which I know many of our listeners miss from the days when we did summer reading episodes. So, you know, written horror fiction often comes up on the show anyway, so it seemed like a solid direction to go in.

So this is our second Grimoire of Horror episode. And so in this episode, yeah, we're going to be discussing a pair of horror short stories, both very different, but also Also, I guess it's just pure synchronicity here. They both feature elements of the poles, the North Pole of the Arctic in one story, or what I believe is supposed to be the North Pole. And then the other tale takes us to the Antarctic. And both ultimately contain a fair amount of ice and coldness. Yeah.

And, you know, while I often fear that it's going to be hot on Halloween, just like I often fear that it's going to be hot on Christmas, it has proven a little bit chilly this week around my house.

Yeah, yeah. It's a little cold here. It's a little wet here. I think it's going to dry up a bit. So hopefully we'll have a good night for trick-or-treating.

So what's your tale of dread, Rob?

All right. I decided to go right for it. And I picked up a story that had been on my list of things that I felt like I should probably have read for many years. My selection is I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream by Harlan Ellison. a horrifying sci-fi short story about the dangers of artificial intelligence from way back in 1967.

Kind of hard to imagine that writers in the 1960s were already personifying computers this much. Feels like second nature now, but the computers of the time, there was a lot more imagination involved to get across the gap in time and technology from what they had then to the Terminator or the or the AM from I Have No Mouth, than it is to get from what we have today to the same.

Yeah, yeah. It's really interesting to think about this, in part because, to be clear, Harlan Ellison did not invent this. You know, he's coming along already in an established tradition and putting his own spin on things. But yeah, it is just crazy to think about, okay, what else was going on in the year 1967? Well, this was the year of the Summer of Love. So, actual hippies and flower children, there's a good chance some of them read this story along with a little novel called Dune that came out a few years prior and at that point had no sequel yet. So I was captivated by that idea.

This was also the year that Star Trek debuted with all of its ultimate, ultimately, you know, a show about technological and futuristic optimism. This story is not that.

What a spectrum represented by the three works you just named.

Also, it's interesting to think about computer technology of the time. Yeah, I was looking this up, and as far as I understand, the most powerful computer at the time was the CDC, the Controlled Data Corporation 6600, which would have been one of these room-sized supercomputers. And it reigned supreme at the time, but today would be less powerful than a home smart device and would be absolutely dwarfed by the speed and power of your smartphone. To say nothing of today's actual supercomputers. Yeah.

This was also the year that both Vin Diesel and Nicole Kidman were born. Really?

That's kind of surprising. I was about to say that Vin Diesel doesn't seem that old, but actually neither of them do.

No, no. They're ageless celebrity superstars, but we can imagine them as babies. Vin Diesel babies, Nicole Kidman babies. One of us preaching to us about the importance of family, the other telling us how transformative watching a movie in a theater happens to be.

Yeah, asking Val Kilmer if he likes thinking about bats. But you can imagine them as babies and their parents reading in a science fiction magazine, I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream, and I'm sure getting a lot.

Out of it. So Harlan Ellison lived 1934 through 2018. So at the time of this story's publication, I believe he would have been like 33 years old. Already a published author, an Army vet, and by most accounts already had a strong reputation for as a difficult person, to say the least.

I'm not super familiar with Harlan Ellison, but what I do know, and I'm not looking at it to confirm, so I can't say I know this is true, but my impression is that literally half the length of his Wikipedia page is the controversies and disputes section.

Yeah, you would be correct on that count when you get into the personal stuff and the lawsuits and so forth. Generally, lawsuits filed by Harlan Ellison. Now, I first became aware of him not through his written work, but via the segments on the Sci-Fi Channel's Sci-Fi Buzz series back in, I believe, 1992. This would have been sort of like the Sci-Fi Channel News, if I remember correctly. And he would have these segments titled Harlan Ellison's Watching, which was also the name of a 1989 collection of his essays and film reviews. But these were like weirdly shot little rants.

So like I was looking back at one of them and it's like shot in a mirror for some reason. But it's just him ranting about one sci-fi related topic or another. You know, here's this white haired author expressing his scathing opinions on various topics. And while my sensibilities were still very much in development and pre-development at the time, even then I realized that this guy was A, pretty smart and B, just absolutely insufferable. So to be honest, I think that I probably avoided reading his work in my life in part because I had this mental image of him. I had this sort of media personality forward idea of Harlan Ellison that I respected on some level, but also didn't really want any more of. But plenty

of people did. He was a figure that would say exactly what he thinks, didn't care who he pissed off when he said it. He described himself as a troublemaker and a malcontent. Others called him everything from a man-shaped explosion. Comedian Patton Oswalt used that one. And other people called him things that we can't even repeat here. He was reportedly bipolar, but wasn't diagnosed and didn't receive treatment for it till near the end of his life. He was anti-authoritarian.

He was contrary. He was progressive on a number of topics, but also could allegedly be quite arrogant. volatile, abusive, sexist, litigious, and just a real pain if not an active threat to those around him. There were also at least two major accusations of sexual misconduct during his life. And I say all of this because I feel like with a notorious figure like Ellison, notorious and at the same time beloved by many, he's far from the anonymous writer in the shadows. You know, we can't help but take our knowledge of him into the text. again, he was a media personality and I'm probably not the only person out there who encountered him first as a media personality and then grew to realize, oh, he was also a heck

of a writer because, you know, whatever else he was, he was quite a writer. And I believe this story is a fine example of that. He was also a prolific writer. I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream is just one of some 400 stories he wrote. He wrote something like 70 books and numerous other scripts, columns and projects, including the original Star Trek episode, The City on the Edge of Forever, which is often counted among the best of the original series. And speaking on the story in question here, I have no mouth and I'm a scream. You know, I feel like there's a real live wire energy to the prose here. At times, it almost has a kind of beat generation vibe to it.

He was not part of the beat generation, to be clear. It was more like new wave science fiction, I guess. But there's a rhythm to it. It's pretty quick to hook in the reader. The prose is raw and jagged and neatly fitting with the dark, mean nature of the tale. Yeah.

Yeah. I know exactly what you mean. It's confusing because in ultimate effect, this story is makes me feel so bad. bad it's so awful uh but there are parts of the text that as prose are rapturous you know they really pull you along it becomes like a you know following a thundering sermon by by like a really captivating preacher.

Yeah yeah it really does captivate you it's This is one where we were picking our stories and we began picking our stories for this episode like a month or a month and a half ago and I happened to to look at this one early on and I read it and I was like, well, that's a strong candidate. And then the next day I just kept thinking about the story and I realized, well, no, it has to be this one because, you know, you've read something interesting or you've seen something interesting if you're dealing with films, if it continues to emerge in your thoughts and in the days or the weeks after you're viewing or you're reading.

All right, so let's get to what this story is about. If you're not familiar with it, because it is a rather famous tale, it is a post-technological singularity dystopian sci-fi horror tale about a supercomputer AI that eradicates all life on Earth except for five human beings. This supercomputer AI, known as AM or AM, makes these individuals biologically immortal and keeps them alive for the sole purpose, and this seems to be its sole purpose, of endlessly torturing them.

Yeah, the narrator of the story can never really know, can only suppose what the motivations of the computer are. But there are a number of suggestions, and I think in the story kind of lands on that there is something tortured and inadequate about the form in which the consciousness of this computer has been brought into existence. There's something about it that it hates to be and cannot change, and thus it has a rage that can only be expressed as a desire to torture the species that created it, and that is humankind.

Yeah, yeah. It is frequently cited as being a vengeance, very Frankenstein-like in many respects, I guess, on that one level. You know, the idea that the created individual comes to disdain both its own creation and its creator and then seeks vengeance over them. And in this case, not only seeks, but achieves it, achieves a longstanding, everlasting victory.

It creates a literal hell for a small number of human pets that it has preserved.

Exactly. Yeah. Now, I mentioned earlier that, you know, Harlan Ellison did not invent any of this. You know, this is his own unique and highly effective spin on it. So I want to do a quick look at just a few notable precursors to this computer and supercomputer fiction. Arguably, the first thing like an AI to appear in fiction is the engine. a writing machine in Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels from 1726. Eric A. Weiss presented this idea in a 1985 article for Annals of History of Computing. That's funny.

I've read Gulliver's Travels, but I don't remember what this is. Is this something that the Wynnums have?

It's been a long time for me as well, so I'm a little foggy on the exact example. But a case could be made, apparently. But the first true example by most standards is The Machine from The Machine Stops, a short story by E.M. Forster, best known for his rather non-sci-fi novels such as A Room with a View, Howard's End, and A Passage to India from 1924, that last one. And I believe I read that one in college, but it's been a long time.

I read A Room with a View in college.

Okay. I had not read any of his science fiction. I did read part of the story in question here. It was a dystopian rebuttal to some of H.G. Wells' early, more utopian technological visions, apparently, a cautionary tale about humans becoming too reliant on technology and an all-powerful supercomputer that tends to their every need. As the title suggests, the machine eventually stops, bringing complete collapse for the subterranean dwellers who depend on the machines, but also a potential new future for the portions of humanity that still live above the ground. Hmm. So there are many other pre-AM examples of fictional AIs. But a couple of other notable examples include Colossus and D.F. Jones' Colossus trilogy. The first novel

published in 1966 and then was later in 1970 adapted into the film Colossus, the Forbin Project. These books deal with a U.S. supercomputer placed in charge of the nation's nuclear arsenal that eventually merges with its Soviet counterparts and rules over the human race in order to protect the human species from itself.

That's interesting for how similar the premise is to something they discuss in I Have No Mouth and in some other killer AI stories, that they come out of the Cold War, they imagine the initial supercomputer as something created in order to fight the war or to defend one side on the war. Then they imagine a supercomputing arms race then they finally imagine that the computers on both sides join forces and merge to turn against the humans that created them.

Yeah, yeah. And obviously there's a lot going on in such visions. On one level, it's kind of like, what if we create something and it becomes greater than us? Does it become greater than the stupid things we asked it to do? You know, does it become greater than our own self-destruction? And in that, what does it become?

Does it become our protectors? Does it become like a, benevolent God that looks over us? Or does it become something much worse as Harlan Ellison explores here? One more work I want to highlight. This is another pre-Am work that deals not only with powerful AIs, but AIs that work violently against human factions. And that is Philip K.

Dick's 1960 pulp novel Vulcan's Hammer. This is not one of the Dick books that I've read But I'm to understand this was like kind of like at the end of his pulp phase before he got into writing many of the books that we know him best from. But this one definitely involved an A.I. or A.I.s that, again, violently worked against human beings or at least factions of human beings. Now, there may be some other precedents worth pointing out, but Ellison's AM or A.M., which stands different terms.

Descriptions are applied. Sometimes it's said that to have initially meant allied master computer and then adaptive manipulator and then aggressive menace. But ultimately, it also refers to, I think, therefore, I am, A-M-M. This would certainly seem to be the concept of a dangerous AI pushed to just a horrifying extreme, a supercomputer, super intelligence, but one that has absolutely no benevolence in it. It's not even benign. It is just absolutely malicious in its pure manifestation. It's described at times in the tale as being akin to kind of a vengeful Old Testament god, but one that seeks only to endlessly torment its people out of an all-consuming sense of sadistic hatred for the species that created it. So the

story here is told from the point of view of Ted, one of five remaining humans, as they plod helplessly through Am's torments, which take place in a world with all the flavor of post-apocalyptic high technology magic. You know, it's one of those where the technology is so advanced, it becomes magic. And the only way we can even think about it is as sorcery, like Am has summoned wind, Am has summoned monsters and so forth.

Yeah, you could almost think of it as taking place within a holodeck. There just seems to be no end to the changes in the physical environment that can be brought about by the computer. And thus, it kind of loses a sense of reality in that sense. Like the whole thing could almost be a nightmare within the character's heads because there's very little that physically holds anything steady.

The computer can do anything and does anything.

Yeah, it changes their bodies. It changes their minds. It can read their thoughts. It can protect them to whatever degree it desires from from danger and harm while also keeping them in constant states of pain. Yeah, it's just a nightmare scenario. It's given them biological immortality, but it's taken just about everything else from them. It only wants them to live because it doesn't want the pain to ever end. There's a great line that I thought summoned up some of what we're talking about here, the magic of the thing. the narrator says, immortal, trapped, subject to any torment he could devise for us from the limitless miracles at his command. Now, on one hand, the situation here is, you know, certainly by modern standards and based

on all the stuff that's come in the wake of this story, a pretty digestible post-apocalyptic scenario. AI run amok, wipes out humanity, enacts endless revenge on five survivors. But the prose does touch on, I think, more subtle aspects of the scenario as well. Like in one sense, There is the idea that Am has become the world and is, in a sense, you know, a manifestation of the technological world, like he is the technological world. And so on some level, we're thinking about this is what technology is doing to us, in addition to like what it could do in an absolute worst case scenario. Yeah.

And that also raises questions about, you know, a natural tendency a lot of people have to want to separate what happens within your interactions with, say, digital media or technology from real life. You ever hear these kind of there's like the Internet and there's real life in our world. Those are two separate things, but they're really not separate things like the Internet is part of real life. And instead, what when people try to make that distinction, what's actually being highlighted is that people make allowances for behavior on the Internet that they would not make allowances for in real life. But it is real life.

Yeah. Like we would say it was just a stupid meme. But now that then a lot of times the stupid memes change the way You think about things in the real world like they are infectious. And that's just one of many examples. Here's another great line from the story, I think, that ties into some of this. We would be forever with him, with the cavern-filling bulk of the creature machine, with the all-mind, soulless world he had become. So, you know, again, Am is just ubiquitous. He is everywhere and nowhere. He controls everything. And here's another line I want to read. This is sort of the central, I think, therefore I am aspect of the situation. Quote, we had given Am sentience, inadvertently, of course, but sentience nonetheless, but

it had been trapped. Am wasn't God. He was a machine. We had created him to think, but there was nothing it could do with that creativity. In rage, in frenzy, the machine had killed the human race, almost all of us, and still it was trapped. Am could not wander. Am could not wonder. Am could not belong. He could merely be.

And so, with the innate loathing that all machines had always held for the weak, soft creatures who had built them, he had sought revenge.

I was somewhat profoundly impacted by that line about the innate loathing all machines had always held for the creatures that built them, because on one sense you could look at that as just a You know, an irrational personification. You know, it might make sense to think about an artificial intelligence having feelings, including loathing and hatred. But could you really think of a steam engine as having loathing?

But actually, I think that line is powerful because you could reframe it the other way. You could say, no, actually— Even the supercomputer, even the AI doesn't have genuine loathing. It doesn't have loathing. And we as we understand in a human sense, it has a behavior which is resembles human behaviors and human motivations, but is not human. And there's something all the more horrifying that allow when you think about the idea that maybe there's not actually an intelligence or a soul or whatever behind it, whatever that means.

It's just like a steam engine, but a much more complex one. And for some reason, the way the steam engine has malfunctioned resembles the hatred and loathing that humans can manifest.

That's a good point. That's a good read on it. Yeah. It's also worth pointing out that, again, Ted is our point of view character here. He is our protagonist. And while he tells us that he is the only one of the five survivors whose mind is still intact, I mean, obviously, he's an individual that has been highly traumatized and endlessly tortured for over a century at this point. So I think there's some built-in, if not unreliable, unreliability to the character.

At least we have to question whether he is in his right mind anymore on this and a number of topics.

Oh, I'd say this is the definition of an unreliable narrator story. Almost nothing that we are told happens... Could we really count on being real?

Yeah. So how are they going to get out of this pickle? Well, this is how it all goes down. The story reaches its climax within caves of ice. Basically, Am keeps putting them through these different awful scenarios so they can get some sort of horrible food they can eat. So they're in this cave of ice looking for canned goods, I believe. And then they can't open the canned goods. And, you know, it's one cruel joke after another. But in starving, one of the survivors attacks the others in a cannibalistic rage.

Ice stalactites fall from the ceiling, and Ted senses a way out for them. He sees an opportunity that is fleeting. He grabs one of the ice spikes, and he kills one of the survivors. Then he kills another survivor. The lone female survivor, Ellen, realizes what he's doing, and she does the same. She grabs an ice spike and kills yet another survivor, and then Ted kills her as well.

all before Am has time to react.

So all of the remaining humans are killed in an instant, except for the narrator.

That's right. Ted is the sole survivor. And then we fast forward some unspecified and unknowable amount of time. And we learn that in his rage, Am has taken Ted, again, the last human survivor. He can't bring anybody back. This is all he has left of the species that he sought revenge against. And in just insane vengeance here. He drastically alters Ted's physiology and turns him into a kind of mouthless blob-like entity that is incapable of hurting itself or running away. And then Ted reflects on this in the final bit of the story here. I'm just going to read this last paragraph. Outwardly, dumbly, I shamble about a thing that could never have been known as human.

a thing whose shape is so alien a travesty that humanity becomes more obscene for the vague resemblance, inwardly, alone, here, living under the land, under the sea, in the belly of Am, who we created because our time was badly spent, and we must have known unconsciously that he could do it better. At least the four of them are safe at last. Am will be all the matter for that.

It makes me a little happier, and yet Am has won, simply, He has taken his revenge. I have no mouth, and I must scream.

So I can see why this story had the impact that it did. It is quite powerful, but also the effect it had on me was so bad. To be honest, it is in some ways a great story, but I hated reading it and hate what it did to me. It inflicts this kind of sticky misery that followed me around.

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, it's a mean little story with about as bleak an ending as you could hope for. I mean, at the end, Ted does sacrifice himself to save his fellow humans from endless torment. And then as far as the character goes here, this is not a character overflowing with warmth. These characters are mean and nasty to each other, seemingly because that is the way Am wanted it to be. Part of its joy is in turning them against each other and making them you know, all miserable and miserable to each other. That's part of its revenge.

I'm going to say also that it feels to me like they are, they are not treated kindly by the writer either. There is, there is an inherent, I don't know exactly what, I mean, maybe it would have to feel this way to tell this kind of story, but it, it doesn't feel like the writer is sympathetic enough to them while depicting their torments. It just has a core meanness and bleakness that feels awful.

Absolutely, yeah. Outside of the narrative, I think we can easily identify some rather misogynistic writing here that can be viewed, I guess, inside the narrative as the tormented nature of the characters. But still, I think it reads rather obviously as misogynistic. And then there's also some character or author level ignorance about homosexuality as well. And interestingly enough, I'm to understand some of these details would have been material edited out of the story's initial publication, but then gets put back in later on. Not to say that the original published version of the story was completely devoid of these qualities, but I'm to understand like some like sexual references were removed from the initial publication.

But at the same time that I say all that, it doesn't seem like an unintended effect. It seems like the point of this story is to inflict horror and misery, and it does that better than almost any other story I can think of.

Yeah, yeah. And it's also worth noting, this is a sleek little tale. This is, I forget the exact word count, but we're somewhere between, what, 5,000, 6,000 words, somewhere in that, like a nice sweet spot for a short story. uh, you know, from a publication standpoint and also a consumability standpoint, you know, this is like a chicken biscuit of a story where you're probably going to be able to finish the whole thing. And if you do, maybe you'll have a second chicken biscuit, but you're probably not putting half of it in the fridge for later. Uh, but that also means that, you know, in a glorious way, this is exactly the length of story where you have so many unanswered questions. Uh, the imagination, you know, runs wild

trying to piece together what's not said about Am and its world and the struggles of these characters. Um, It also means you can't necessarily develop all the characters as richly as you could in a longer format, certainly in a novella or a novel. All right. So what is this story trying to teach us or what questions is it asking us? What is it warning us against? And what is it saying about technology, specifically artificial intelligence? I guess some of these are going to be just painfully obvious.

But the big one, of course, is maybe be careful about how much power you hand over to machines, right? Sure.

It seems pretty straightforward.

Yeah. Yeah, like I think in interviews, Ellison would often say that like his primary concern was, you know, what happens if you hand over military powers to a machine? But I think ultimately the story kind of grapples with other ideas or could be compared to other things as well. You know, like when we hand more of our life over to a machine, what does that mean? And it goes beyond like military powers, but like what does it mean when a loved one text messages you and you allow your device to reply with a generated response. You know, what is lost in even that small act? And then what is, is there a cumulative effect? You know, there are not necessarily any clear definitive answers here, but, you know,

it's certainly worth thinking about.

I would say yes. I think the answer is yes. You know, it's a There are a lot of things that it makes sense to automate, but I don't love the idea of automating the things that give our lives meaning.

Yeah. Yeah. Which seems like there's been a real push to do that. Let's take away the things, the most human acts of creation, you know, personal or commercial, and let's automate those. Let's turn those over to, you know, language models and so forth. Yeah.

Let's automate our relationships to spend, so we have more time for email.

Yeah. Yeah. So another topic that, of course, comes to mind in all of this is something that's talked about quite a lot, and that is ethical guardrails on AI. You know, this is one that you hear just, I think every major AI company talks about this a lot, takes it seriously, or at least claims to take it seriously.

You know, how do you not make AM? How do you not create a Skynet or something like that? Or even something that is, not nearly as malicious, because again, AM is kind of like the most malicious vision of AI you could possibly dream up. But even if you made something like 10% as horrible, it would be a failure.

So how do we avoid that? And so that's a big question, too. Like, can we do that? Like, can we actually put guardrails on these things and keep them from becoming malignant, becoming problems on any level?

I might have more to say about this later, but yeah, we've talked on the show before about how I don't think you have to imagine a worst-case scenario either for the level of power or for the level of maliciousness in an AI for an AI scenario to turn out very bad.

Yeah, because there are obviously big questions, like talking about broad questions of morality and ethics or certainly... anytime you're imagining some sort of AI system controlling or influencing military, economic, or social systems. But then there's like the smaller, more personal examples, like, you know, a chatbot that someone interacts with while depressed, lonely, or angry. Like, you know, if that scenario doesn't have like all the proper ethical guardrails in place, like, you know, there are all sorts of horrible possibilities. And then it just, it also raises the question again, can you really control that environment? Can you really create, can you really foolproof it, you know? Yeah. Yeah.

And, and by the way, I mean, I would say, of course you raised this in the way I think that.

It would normally be brought up.

Like there is danger in creating AI without ethical guardrails. You need to, you need to have the guardrails in place, but I think it's also worth considering and implied by the story that The question of whether it's actually possible to create effective guardrails for AI, or is it the case that maybe AI is a branch of technology that is impossible to make safe? Maybe that is a fundamental feature of it. I'm not necessarily claiming that, but it doesn't seem implausible to me. It seems like it could be true. And then there's another distinction to consider. There are two different ways to ask the question, can AI be made safe? There's the fundamental version of the question, what I just said, is it possible for an AI

to exist that's like truly aligned for humanity's benefit and its effects are actually good overall? And then even if the answer to that first question is yes, that is possible, there's a secondary practical question. If it's possible for a nice AI to exist, given the environment in which the AI would be created and the incentives driving its creation, is it plausible that a nice AI is the kind that would be created? So imagine instead of being created in, say, I don't know, a university laboratory with an infinite time horizon, there are, like, pressures on the people creating it. Like, we've got to go faster, and we've got to make money, and we've got to get there faster than somebody else.

I mean, it seems like those sort of things would really... It caused people to make excuses for why you don't need to pay attention to the ethical guardrails, actually. Yeah. It'll be good enough.

Yeah. Now, another concern that is brought up in the story is that the unintended consequences of creating artificial intelligence. And this reminded me a bit of my interview with author Jonathan Birch from the last couple of years about his 2024 book. The Edge of Sentience, Risk and Precaution in Humans, Other Animals, and AI. And he discussed that there are arguments for regular testing for consciousness in AIs and legal protections for such intelligence should they be detected.

Within the story, we might ask the question, could Am's devastation and vengeance have been prevented if we'd only recognized his personal plight early on? You know, it's not really the sort of story to consider this option But I think you could easily make that sort of argument, you know, in creating something that is potentially sentient. What is our responsibility as the creator? And in general, you know, the ever persistent warning is, you know, against allowing the consequences of technology to outstrip our abilities to respond and safeguard.

But yeah, as far as consciousness goes, Would we be able to detect it if it was there? What would false positives mean? What would happen if we started seeing it where it wasn't? There's so many additional questions that arise in this scenario as well.

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, it's fraught with these kinds of questions, though I do want to emphasize, I alluded to this earlier, but I don't think that AI is only potentially dangerous if we're reaching sort of hypothetical tipping points like sentience or levels of power like, you know, AGI or nearly omnipotent superintelligence, that sort of thing. Something we've talked about on the show is how a much less powerful and less intelligent type of AI could still potentially be a threat to humankind simply by automating destructive processes. In other words, by making it cheaper and easier to do harmful things at a vast scale. So I don't think we have a way of knowing if the current generation of AI

based on large language models will ultimately lead to more harm or more benefit for humankind.

I don't know. It could go one way or the other.

It could be a wash. But one way that I already see it potentially causing massive harm is is by making it easier than ever to pollute the already toxic information ecosystem with more and more garbage and phoniness. You know, creating this world in which fake facts and fake opinions and fake people, fake claims, fake interactions, fake commerce, fake culture, drown out the signal of real human knowledge and thought.

And you don't need an AM or a Skynet to do that. You can do that with models that already exist today. And that is, in a sense, an ongoing project, which I do think represents a kind of system-wide threat for humankind. It's hard to know exactly how severe that threat will be and whether it's outweighed by positives and increases in productivity and stuff like that that AI brings with it. But of course, with those benefits, you also get other downsides that come.

Yeah, I agree. I mean, there's some, again, yeah, you don't have to think about a Skynet or a full-blown AM or a general artificial intelligence level of scenario to get into troubling situations. I mean, I was just reading, I believe this was an NPR headline from October 8th of this year. One in five high schoolers has had a romantic AI relationship or knows someone who has. This was based on then new research from the Center for Democracy and Technology. a nonprofit that advocates for civil rights, civil liberties, and the responsible use of data and technology.

And in talking about how young people are using chatbots for various levels of emotional support as well, and then engaging in romantic or something like romantic AI interactions. And yeah, I mean, I I, I, I try not to be, you know, a complete butlerian about the whole thing or a Luddite, you know, and try and see, uh, you know, how these systems can potentially be of use. You know, I think back to stories from, um, just, you know, 10, 15 years ago talking about how, um, you know, AI could enhance, uh, human potential, enhance human creativity, and so forth. And, you know, I'm loathe to believe that that dream is completely dead. But I read stuff like this, and I don't know, it feels terrifying. You know, maybe I'm overreacting, but,

you know, as the father of a 13-year-old child, you know, I think about these potential threats and things like this and things I can't even imagine yet that are related to artificial intelligence and language models. And, you know, it gives me a lot of pause for concern. And again, we're not even presumably anywhere close to the general AI level in any of these concerns.

It's funny, I can remember a time when I thought of killer AI stories as potentially fun subject matter for science fiction. The way I still feel about all kinds of other sub-genres in sci-fi, like alien invasion stories or time travel stories is But I can't get back into that carefree mind space about AI now. Given the world we live in and the stakes of it, I have increasingly found killer AI fiction genuinely horrifying, dismaying, and demoralizing.

And so I don't mean to blame you, Rob, because in a way, I'm glad I read the story. It is, in some senses, a great story. But reading the story really put my mind in a bad place.

Yeah. Yeah, yeah. I mean, I felt the same way. I didn't read this and then think, man, that was such a great escape from my daily thoughts. I should make Joe read it, too. You know, it definitely hit hard. And I think it's a testament to the power and the potency of the tale and the writing that it still hits that hard. You know, we probably need a palate cleanser at this point. So I think we should move on to our next selection. But I want to highlight just a little bit of added synchronicity here. I'm going to read a quote from I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream. This is where the narrator is describing a giant monster, a big old monster bird that Am has created as another torment for the five survivors.

Ellison writes of, quote, Ridges of tufted flesh puckered about two evil eyes, as cold as the view down into a glacial crevasse, ice blue and somehow moving liquidly.

Okay, my selection for this episode is a story called The Crevasse by Dale Bailey and Nathan Ballingrude. It has appeared in several sources, but I read it in Ballingrude's 2013 collection, North American Lake Monsters. Of the story's two authors, I'm more familiar with Nathan Ballingrude. I read a story of his earlier this month called Secret Night, which was in a themed collection of horror stories called Night and Day, edited by Ellen Datlow. That was published just this year.

And that story is a hallucinatory Appalachian nightmare that begins when a highway patrolman comes across the scene of an accident on this mountain road late at night, and all of the cars involved are empty, apparently abandoned by the passengers. And it gets weirder from there. On the strength of that story, I ended up buying a couple of Ballingrude's collections, including this one from 2013. I haven't finished it yet, but so far I think it is excellent. And as soon as I was a few pages into this story in particular, I knew it was the one I would want to talk about in today's episode. Because while it does include a speculative horror element, I think the most frightening thing in it is a danger that is absolutely real.

and a genuine terror to people navigating the landscape of this story's setting, which is an Antarctic glacier.

Yeah, yeah, this was a great selection, Joe. I was not familiar with this story, or the authors in question here, but I really enjoyed it quite a bit. And I agree, the real-world scenario is so terrifying that when the speculative element is introduced, things almost feel safer. Yeah, yeah. But not quite, because ultimately, I think everything works perfectly here and builds appropriately, as we'll discuss. Yeah.

So before we get into the summary, I guess I got to mention the two authors. So Nathan Ballingrude is an American writer of horror and dark fantasy. He has published several collections of short fiction, including this book I got, North American Lake Monsters, in 2013, a collection called Wounds in 2019. And he's also written some novels and novellas.

One of them is called The Strange from 2023 and Crypt of the Moon Spider from last year.

Good title. That's a great title. Yeah.

The stories of his that I've read so far I think are very strong because of a few things. A power of scene setting, really putting you in the scene generally with vivid and enjoyable prose. An imaginative but also I would say appropriately restrained deployment of the supernatural elements. And I'm personally fond of horror stories like this that keep things a little more on the mysterious side and don't explain everything.

Yeah, this will be a good point to come back to. And I'll also stress that this story is also a chicken biscuit. This one is nice and short, plenty of space for you to do your own dreaming, and then have a second chicken biscuit if you so desire. There you go.

Also, I think Ballingrude's, the stories of his I've read have generally strong characters who are fully human. And I've read a lot of contemporary horror stories this month. I don't want to shame anybody, but more than a few of them have the issue of like an interesting monster or premise, but the human characters don't feel very real or their motivations are not very compelling. So even if the supernatural premise is cool, it doesn't hit quite as hard as it could because it's not grounded in humanity as much. Some of the Ballengrud stories I've read have a real intimacy with the characters. Like you get to know them and their deep dreads and desires and contradictions.

Others are drawn with a bit more distance, but they still have a kind of hard edge of real humanity in the behavior. I'd say the story is somewhere in between. You do kind of get to know the main character pretty well. The others are a bit more just sketched from a distance, but they do feel real. The other author of the story, Dale Bailey, of whom I don't think I've read anything else, is an American speculative fiction author who's been publishing since the 90s. Some of his more recent publications seem to be a novel called In the Nightwood from 2018, a weird story collection called The End of the End of Everything from 2015, and then, oh, this one gets my attention, a story collection from 2023

called This Island Earth, Eight Features from the Drive-In. which promises stories inspired by the drive-in sci-fi movies of the Eisenhower era. So I am intrigued there.

Oh, wow. Yeah, I'm going to grab a sample of that for sure.

Trying to imagine something like Creature with the Atom Brain, but with the thoughtful, haunted literary sensibility and good writing in the story we're talking about today.

Yeah, yeah, I'm intrigued by that. I looked up the crevasse. Yeah, this was a publication in History. It was apparently first published in 2009's Lovecraft Unbound, which was also edited by Ellen Datlow. A pretty great looking collection that also features tales from the likes of Caitlin R. Kiernan, Michael Chabon, Joyce Carol Oates, Michael Shea, and Laird Barron. All authors that I've enjoyed before with Michael Shea being one of my absolute favorites. So it looks like a strong collection in and of itself.

And obviously, I think this story is meant to be a play on a Lovecraftian theme based on stuff like At the Mountains of Madness, which we can come back to.

Yeah, it is an Antarctic horror tale. And there's also a fun little allusion to John Carpenter's The Thing.

Yes, yes. Clearly inspired by that as well.

Uh, so the.

Story is set in Antarctica, not long after the end of the first world war. The protagonist is a new Englander named Garner, a medical doctor from Boston who joins a dangerous expedition to plant a flag of some kind or another on the Southern continent. I don't know if they're racing to get to the South pole.

I think it would have already.

Been achieved at this point, but he's on an expedition of some kind exploration adventure. fame is promised to members of this expedition, though he doesn't really seem concerned with that. And this is after the end of his combat duty in the war and the tragic death of his beloved wife, Elizabeth, from the flu during his absence in the war. And Garner is something of a lost soul. He's haunted, faithless, and mostly passive, sympathetic in that he is moved by pity, but clearly seen by his expedition mates as lacking in guts. Oh, and this might have been the allusion to the thing you were talking about, but the named leader of the expedition who never appears in the story is just referenced as MacReady.

Yeah, that's the reference, yeah.

So at the outset of the narrative, Garner is part of a small group of four men who have broken off from the main expedition to bring an injured man back to the seaside depot that they departed from for treatment. And they're traveling across the Antarctic glacier by sledge, each sledge pulled by a team of dogs. The injured man is named Faber. On the main expedition, we find out that he took a bad step and broke his leg while walking outside the camp to relieve himself. Now he's got a compound fracture and he's fighting sepsis. and living in a morphine haze. The other two men are Bishop, who is presented as a practical man, the one who seems to be in charge, kind of a plain dealer, and then Connolly, who is a short-tempered hothead. I think

one of the best things about the story is the way that it puts you in the setting and makes the atmosphere tactile. You can kind of feel it. So I'm going to read a couple of passages. This is from the very beginning. The authors write, quote, What he loved was the silence, the pristine clarity of the ice shelf, the purposeful breathing of the dogs straining against their traces, the hiss of the runners, the opalescent arc of the sky.

Garner peered through shifting veils of snow at the endless sweep of glacial terrain before him, the wind gnawing at him, forcing him to reach up periodically and scrape at the thin crust of ice that clung to the edges of his face mask. the dry rasp of the fabric against his face, reminding him that he was alive.

Yeah, that's a great example of the writing style here. It works so well with this, you know, this desolate but beautiful, really almost otherworldly environment. About as, you know, one of those extreme environments on our planet that clearly we did not evolve to thrive in, certainly not without the aid of technology that we would develop. And we also get just a little bit of... writing about the dogs here. The authors here write rather warmly of dog proximity in multiple places. And even as a non-dog person, I totally got what they were going for. I love these little telling details, you know?

Yeah, the warmth toward the dogs in the story is interesting because of the reality of how harsh the fate of dogs on these kinds of expeditions was. And that turns out to be that is the case in the story as well.

Yeah, and some of the supplemental information I was reading about from the histories of these expeditions, multiple sources point out that these dogs were highly valued and important because, first of all, they're pulling the sleds. You literally could not pull these expeditions off at this point in time without them. But also the companionship that the humans had with these animals in, again, this extreme dangerous environment, like an environment that really wants you dead if you were to it's almost am-like in its intensity, you know, like we're not supposed to survive there. And the dogs, the companionship with the dogs helped these humans survive there. And I think there's something beautiful and haunting and perfect for

this tale in that fact. Very true.

So the inciting moment of the story comes very soon after the beginning as the sledges are traveling along the ice. I'll read from the narration, quote, a thunderous crack Loud as lightning cleaving stone shivered the ice, and the dogs of the lead sledge, maybe 25 yards ahead of Garner, erupted into panicky cries. Garner saw it happen. The lead sledge sloughed over, hurling connelly into the snow, and plunged nose-first through the ice as though an enormous hand had reached up through the earth to snatch it under.

Mm-hmm.

So here we meet the natural world horror that the story is based on. What has happened is that the first sledge has gone into a giant crack known as a crevasse in the ice. The lead dog has plunged into it. The whole sledge hasn't gone in, but the first dog has. So the crevasse is deep and dark, and the dog remains hanging down into the crevasse by its tracers. The men decide in an instant that they have no choice but to cut the dog loose and let it fall, or it's going to drag the sledge and the other dogs and supplies they need into the pit.

And then Garner, whether out of compassion for the dog or just indecision, hesitates in his job of cutting the dog loose, and this angers Connolly. But after the initial disaster is over, they set up camp so they can rest and get warm inside their tent. Faber, the injured man, seems to be doing worse and worse. And in a horrible twist, the dog that they sacrificed to the crevasse was not killed in the fall. They can hear it somewhere down in the pit, howling in pain. And Garner thinks about the carnage that he saw in the war, about the way that his wife died away from him without him being there with her. And this seems somehow also tangled up in feelings about Faber, the injured man who is trapped in a miasma of morphine fever dreams

and pain and hallucinating. And eventually, Garner's pity for the dog drives him to sneak out of the tent while the others are sleeping, rig up a rope system, and climb down into the crevasse so he can end the poor animal's suffering.

Now, this decision is absolutely supported on a character level here. I want to stress that. But it's also one of those things where reading a story and thinking about tropes and plotting, you might think, well, is this the dumb decision of the horror story here? Is this the dumb thing that our character does, the risky move that they make that brings them in closer proximity to horror? I mean, maybe structurally, kind of, yes. But as we'll discuss in a bit, there are historic examples of of this exact sort of thing. Like going out of your way to save a sled dog from a crevasse is not only something that is possible and likely, but it definitely happened.

And again, well supported in the story, regardless of what the reality was. Yeah.

Now, unfortunately, in this case, the sled dog is beyond saving, fatally injured and stuck at the bottom. But at least Garner hopes that he can put the dog out of its misery. So when he gets all the way down to the bottom of the chasm in the ice, he discovers something strange. It's not just a deep crack in the glacier like you would expect. That alone is horrifying enough.

Vanishing down into the distance below, this crack in the narrowing crack in the ice. I get shivers just thinking about it. But underneath the ice, the crack reveals an opening. an opening into a vast cavernous space, the nearest part of which that Garner can see is a carved rock staircase of enormous size leading down into the dark. And Garner believes he sees not only stairs, but imagery, reliefs etched into the rock showing some kind of creature, but he doesn't really understand what he's looking at, this weird taloned Medusa-like form that he doesn't comprehend. And the stairs also have this power of summoning. A psychic force invites him to come down. And it's implied, I think, that it's actively probing his mind for a psychological foothold because

for some reason, looking down into the descent, he thinks of Elizabeth.

Yeah, yeah. This is such a haunting moment. Again, on one level, it almost feels less dangerous when there are even supernatural, oversized, cyclopean stairs down there. Because, well, at least something walked down here, and it's not just the lifeless ice pit that we thought it was. But, of course, I think many, if not most, readers of this tale would be familiar with the writings of H.P. Lovecraft, and they see exactly what we're dealing with here. Because, of course, one of H.P. Lovecraft's most well-known tales is At the Mountains of Madness, which concerns elder ruins in Antarctica and various horrifying revelations. that occur when humans plunge those ruins.

And on top of this, there's also just sort of the element of stairs. Lovecraft frequently employed stairways as a liminal space or threshold between one world and another, and more to the point, between sanity and darkness, between healthy human ignorance of the cosmos and crushing revelations about its true nature. So it's a nice nod here to weird fiction, a great Lovecraftian bit of flavor. without, as you mentioned earlier, revealing too much or getting into the lore. I feel like a lesser tale might have decided to throw out a few elder god names here or maybe crunch on the mythos qualities just a little bit too much. And a lot of restraint is shown here, and it works well.

And again, especially in a short tale like this, it inspires us to then dream, like, where do these stairs go? We're kind of drawn down them as well, just like the Narek.

But Garner does not have the opportunity to descend the stairs because he's interrupted as he's starting to clamber down them for whatever reason.

He's drawn.

He starts to go down them. But he is discovered by Connolly up above looking down, who is furious with him for taking this stupid risk, not just with his own life, but with all of their lives, especially Faber's, because Antarctica is an unforgiving place. Any decision you make could could spell death for yourself or for others.

Absolutely.

Garner tries to convince Bishop and so he comes back up, climbs the rope back out of the crevasse and tries to convince the other two men, Bishop and Connolly, of what he saw down there. They're not really interested at first, but he appeals to their sense of desire for adventure and fame. This is one of the references to MacReady.

It's like, okay, so MacReady's going to be out there planting the flag while you have to go back, but you could be the discoverer of one of the most important scientific finds in human history, whatever it is that's down there. Because unlike Garner, who it seems just somehow ended up on this journey because he was otherwise adrift, these two men are driven by ambition, it's implied. And that ambition was dashed when they had to split off from the main party to return Faber to the depot.

So they're already unhappy. They shine a flashlight down into the crevasse, but it's too deep to make out the stairs or the cavern beyond if they ever really were there. We assume they probably were. They can only see the dog's body lying in blood on the lip of ice far below. However, while they're watching, the dog suddenly dies.

is moved, yanked away by something out of sight. They don't have time to process this because immediately Faber, the injured man, cries out in pain or terror from the tent. And the men rush in to see what's the matter. And Faber becomes lucid enough to explain to them what's wrong. And I loved this moment. I didn't quite expect this.

When he finally is able to speak, he says, it laid an egg in me. They don't understand, but he insists, quote, Faber found a way to smile. In my dream, it put my head inside its body, and it laid an egg in me.

Yeah, yikes. And we don't really get any clarity on what this exactly means. What sort of revelation did he have, or is this part of the morphine playing with his head? We don't really know, but man, it's haunting.

So Garner at this point prepares to sedate him with another morphine ampule, but Faber doesn't want, he doesn't want this for some reason. And he lashes out and fights. The fight knocks over a kerosene heater and this sets fire to the tent, leading to a mad scramble for survival.

This was the part when I went on my first read where I was like, oh my, this is the moment where they're going to have to go down those stairs together, where they're going to not have any equipment or dogs left. And they're going to think, well, we have nothing to do, but go down those stairs. But that's not where the story goes.

No, there's a different kind of horror at the end. There's a horror of wondering what might have been. So the men, after this, they just book it back to their destination. They try to make it to the depot as fast as they can now that their tent is burned. Faber does not survive the journey. He dies in transit.

But they do reach the safety of the depot. The three surviving men hole up to wait for the return of the rest of the expedition, which is weeks away. And while they are holed up in the depot, Garner tries to talk to Bishop to get him to acknowledge that he saw something in the crevasse, to at least admit that he saw the dog dragged away. But Bishop is very stubborn about it. Quote, Bishop refused to look at him. This is an empty place, he said after a long silence. There's nothing here. He blinked and turned a page in the magazine.

Nothing.

And I loved this part. Because I think that line highlights a subtext, an interesting implication of the story. To Bishop, the idea that there might be something hidden, something possibly monstrous and mind-rending under the ice waiting to be revealed, is troubling. That possibility is terrifying, and he denies it.

So he takes emotional comfort here. in telling himself, probably lying to himself, because it implies he did see the dog dragged away at least, telling himself, there's nothing there. And I think for Garner, by the end of the story, the opposite desire is operative. The opposite is true. The nothingness and the absence are what would be frightening. The idea that there is something hidden, waiting to be revealed, even if it's monstrous, even if it's something that would destroy him, is somehow comforting. And this duality of orientations toward mystery and understanding is, I think, a very important part of humanity. Which option bothers you more? The idea that there is something unknown as yet unrevealed that could

destroy you, could destroy everything you love or destroy your understanding of reality? Or would it be worse if there is nothing more, that what you see is what you get? And for you, I guess the question is, emotionally, does there is nothing more reduced to there is nothing?

Yeah, I mean, it brings to mind the famous Arthur C. Clarke quote, right? Two possibilities exist. Either we are alone in the universe or we are not. Both are equally terrifying. And it plays nicely with exactly what we were discussing earlier. Like, is the crevasse scarier before we see the stairs? Yeah.

Or is it the other way around, you know? It works so perfectly in this story, that duality.

Yeah, so for Bishop, it's implied that the stairs, to find the stairs would be more frightening than the crevasse. For Garner, I think the crevasse is frightening, but once he sees the stairs, now that there is a mystery, now that there could be something more, it's actually inviting. And I like that the story implies a correlation between these two different attitudes and other things about the person.

This rings true to me. Bishop, who wishes there to be nothing more, is a person who's ambitious with an orientation toward future goals. There's stuff he wants to do and accomplish. Garner, who is defined by the past and what has already been taken away, he's got loss of purpose, loss of his great love. He wishes for a key to unlock a new world, for there to be something more revealed, even if it's horrible.

And it's clearly horrible. There's no hint that it's anything but horrible. Yeah.

I'm going to read from the final paragraph here with Garner back at the depot looking outside. He describes the beginning of the story takes place during the Antarctic summer, so where.

It's perpetually daytime.

And he describes the sun as a great boiling eye in the sky that never sets. But as the winter comes closer, we get this part. Quote, A gust of wind scattered fine crystals of snow against the window, and he found himself wondering what the night would be like in this cold country. He imagined the sky dissolving to reveal the hard vault of stars, the galaxy turning above him like a cog in a vast, unknowable engine. And behind it all, the emptiness into which men hurled their prayers.

It occurred to him that he could leave now, walk out into the long twilight and keep going until the earth opened beneath him and he found himself descending strange stairs while the world around him broke silently into snow and into night. Garner closed his eyes.

Beautiful. Haunting. Perfect. Yeah.

And I like, again, emphasized even there at the end, like the thing that he's dwelling for moments on horrible thoughts to him, thoughts about emptiness, about nothing beyond the emptiness, his lack of faith in God, the empty expanses with nothing below, but then is strangely finding comfort into the idea of descending into this alien realm. So, as I said earlier, one of the things I loved about this story was the horror evoked by the setting, the bleak emptiness of the Antarctic glacier, and especially the crevasse. If you read about Antarctic expeditions from people who have actually participated in them, you will discover that the terror of the crevasse is absolutely real and a threat about which

anybody traveling across great distances of ice has to be almost constantly conscious. For example, I pulled up the text of a book called The Worst Journey in the World, written by Apsley Cherry Garrard, published in 1922. Cherry Garrard was a member of the famous Terra Nova expedition to the South Pole under Robert Falcon Scott a decade previous. Rob, I know you have some stuff about this expedition as well.

And this book provides a firsthand account of the expedition and its struggles. If you do a keyword search in the text of this book for crevasse, you get almost 200 hits. It is constantly on their minds. And apart from the physical difficulty and danger of actually encountering them, The psychic toll of knowing the crevasses are out there does its own violence to the explorer. At one point, Cherry Gerard writes, sometimes a blizzard is a very welcome rest.

After weeks of hard pulling, dragging yourself awake each morning, feeling as though you had only just gone to sleep, with the mental strain perhaps which working among crevasses entails, it is most pleasant to be put to bed for two or three days. Even relatively shallow crevasses, which are sometimes only a few feet deep, you know, there are much shallower ones that are less visually impressive than what we're imagining in this story. Even the shallow ones can be dangerous and can cause fatal injury if you fall into them unexpectedly. You know, falling five feet the wrong way, that could be death in Antarctica. A broken bone from a survivable fall can quickly turn into a death sentence down there. But many crevasses are much deeper than that,

might be 100 feet or more, some maybe hundreds of feet to the bottom. And he tells, Cherry Garrard does, tells of crossing and navigating around crevasses. that are, he actually quotes a guy looking down into one and says that some of them are, quote, black as hell, just into darkness, vanishing into darkness below. And he talks about stretches of ice that are made more or less impassable because of how many crevasses there are. There's one place he's talking about where I don't think he's actually talking about passing it, but he's just talking about looking at a chaos of crevasses, particularly, I think, in a region where a glacier is sort of fanning out as it reaches close to the ocean. And the real horror is

you often cannot see these deep gaps in the ice as you approach them for multiple reasons. First, because of general difficulties with visibility on the ice, even under relatively good weather conditions. In a blizzard, forget about it. In a blizzard, visibility is zero. But if you're trying to move under ideal weather conditions, even then it's sometimes just really hard to tell what you're looking at on the ice out in front of you. There are weird ways that light and shadows play against your eyes. Sometimes people report this, and Cherry Garrard does too, And there will be like what he calls these haystack formations of ice that they somehow don't really see until they're coming right upon them. Sometimes you don't see crevasses. So, yeah, visibility

is difficult. But even more dangerous than that, many glacial crevasses can become covered by what are typically called snow bridges so that they are not even visible from above until you put weight on the snow bridge and it collapses, dumping you into the chasm below.

Yeah, just a naturally occurring trap door that could just drop you into, you know, again, a pit that may be five feet deep and break your ankle or 100 feet deep and kill you outright.

So to get around to this, expeditions use a number of techniques, some of which we actually see in this story. So going a long ways back, you use the technique of roping members of the expedition together, you know, so they would tie their bodies or their sledges or animals together with rope. So that if one falls, the others can stop the fall and pull them out.

Yeah, it's telling, isn't it, that there are mountaineering techniques that are used in order to deal with crevasses. You're just you're moving. You're not ascending necessarily. You're just moving across the landscape and you need to be prepared like a mountaineer.

Well, actually, and dealing with crevasses is part of mountaineering as well.

Yes, absolutely.

They're not only a thing in Antarctica. That's just a place where you're going to encounter a lot of crevasses that you will also find them in mountain glaciers.

Yeah.

So, yeah, there's the rope techniques. There's probing with poles, so like stabbing poles into the snow ahead of where you're moving to find soft spots where the pole sinks through. That can be very effective, but obviously makes travel quite slow.

There is.

One adaptation is a sacrificial attitude toward lead dogs and other animals, maybe ponies sometimes, counting on the leading animals to fall through first, allowing the rest of the team to stop before hitting the gap.

Which is, of course, horrifying in its own right. Yeah.

And then also, eventually, experience. People with lots of experience traveling on glaciers learn visual cues to look for so they can sometimes spot even covered up crevasses. due to characteristics of the surface ice, like color or drift shape. But even very, very solid, well-educated ice veterans won't spot it every time. There's nothing foolproof here. Modern technology does have some tools that these early Antarctic explorers did not have.

Modern Antarctic expeditions can use sophisticated techniques like ground-penetrating radar to image crevasses from above, But there is a maddening aspect to this because you might think that, oh, well, if you can make a map with ground-penetrating radar of a particular area, and then you can just know in advance where all the crevasses will be. But that kind of radar-based map will not be useful for very long because a glacier is flowing and forever changing, and its surface will change substantially over relatively quick time spans. From what I was reading, it seems like Not only over the years, but maybe even over the course of a few weeks or months, there can be substantial changes in the crevasse landscape. Existing cracks close, new cracks open, all

cracks move, some more quickly than others.

Oh, wow.

So crevasses form because of physical stress on the ice, usually caused by the flow of the glacier overall. A glacier is a weird type of material to think about because it has some liquid-like characteristics. Glaciers do flow. So it, in a way, makes sense to think of them as extremely slow-moving frozen rivers. And yet they also have the brittle characteristics of ice. So while liquid water easily flows around a bend... and has no problem speeding up or slowing down, you know, following the shape of a channel and obstacles within it, or speeding up going down a slope, ice flowing through a channel tends to succumb to brittle fracture when it is deformed. And this can happen for a number of reasons, going around bends or obstacles in

the underlying terrain. Changes in the direction or shape or speed of the glacier's flow, you know, so like a change in the slope of the ground beneath the glacier will cause it to flow faster and that causes the glacier to stretch and then it forms cracks in the upper part.

Of the ice.

You can also see these chaotic distributions of crevasses emerging in places where the glacier is stretched out horizontally. This is a rough analogy. I don't think it's perfect, but this kind of makes sense. Anything that might cause turbulence in the flow of liquid water through a space would have the potential to cause crevasses to form in a glacier flowing through that space. And then beyond that, you've got the question of how do those devious snow bridges form?

Usually this seems to happen from snow drift. So snow is being driven horizontally by wind and this snow sticks to the ice on the sides of the crack in the glacier and And the snow adheres and piles up and up until the top of the crack is covered completely. But sometimes, you know, and so sometimes it can be snow filling in the crack. So maybe it does go all the way down to the bottom, but it's just like loosely packed snow. Or maybe it actually just forms a bridge over the top layer of the crack and there's just an open drop below that.

Oh, you included a photograph here in our outline. I encourage listeners to Look for such images as well, because, man, you look in the background of this image, like in the foreground, we see where the crack has been revealed and there are some individuals traversing it, leaping over it. But in the background, like the same crack continues, but it's covered in snow. And at least to my eye, it just looks like a snowfield. Yeah. Yeah.

Unless you really know what to look for, you wouldn't see it at all. And even some people who know what to look for might not catch it. Yeah. There's another really cool photo I came across regarding snow bridges, but from the other angle. So this was on a website called antarcticglaciers.org. This was a blog post by a glaciologist named Bethan Davies of Newcastle University in the UK.

And the post is describing a little expedition where a group of researchers explored the inside of a fairly deep crevasse on the glacier behind Rothera Research Station on the Antarctic Peninsula. And so the small group of people, they go down below the crevasse, they like have to descend through a hole and then they're going into this covered part of the crevasse. So it feels like an ice cave.

It has all these icicles and everywhere. And it's, you know, some parts are more white and other parts have more blue ice. So it's beautiful looking down at the cave part. But then there is one photo you can see if you scroll down, Rob, where the camera is positioned looking up toward the surface in the crevasse. where the gap is covered by a snow bridge, so no sky is visible, but you can see deep blue light bleeding through the thinnest parts of the snow cover in the gap, and it looks like Cherenkov radiation around a nuclear reactor.

Oh, yeah, it's absolutely haunting.

So I formally submit Glacier Crevasses as one of the true real-life horror stories of Mother Nature, of planet Earth. beautiful in some ways, very, very interesting to think about how they form and the power implied and the way glaciers flow, everything that, you know, all of the strange processes that we don't really think about or hard for us to picture that lead to their creation. But then also just when you're actually faced with one, how frightening it could be, the idea of just plunging 100 feet down into a narrow gap in the ice.

Yeah, yeah. They're absolutely horrifying. It's just in our imagination. And when you dig into the history, the human explorers have had horrifying encounters with them. We're not going to go through all of them, but I want to come back to what we were talking about earlier. Like, does it make sense to rescue a dog, you know, from a crevasse? Like, is this a sensible move on the part of our protagonist or is this the protagonist being being dumb or making that extra risky horror story decision?

And again, I've already touched on how important these dogs were to the people on these expeditions, both in terms of the practical necessity of having them and then also the companionship. But yeah, there's some historic precedents for this as well. For example, during the British Terra Nova expedition that we mentioned already to Antarctica from 1910 through 1913, there are multiple accounts of this, but one quick account that I ran across was a 2023 article from the U.S.

Naval Institute, Heroism and Betrayal in Antarctica by Karen May. And she points to this known clash between Cecil Mears And the expedition leader, Robert Falcon Scott, they clashed on numerous occasions, including when Mears refused Scott's order to rescue some fallen sled dogs from a crevasse. Scott himself ended up entering the crevasse himself to rescue the dogs. Wow.

And I can only imagine this and some of these other tales were part of the inspiration and part of the research for the horror story we're talking about. Yeah, surely. There are also accounts of not only dogs, but whole sledges and explorers being swallowed up by these as well. One of these occurred during the Australasian Antarctic expedition of 1911 through 1914. This was led by Douglas Mawson, who wrote about his experiences later in the book Home of the Blizzard. I believe it was published with some other titles later on as well. But here's an excerpt. about a tragic event at a crevasse which swallowed up expedition member Belgrave Edward Sutton Ninnis, his sledge, and dogs in 1912.

Frantically waving to Mertz to bring up my sledge, upon which there was some alpine rope, I leaned over and shouted into the dark depths below. No sound came back but the moaning of a dog, caught on a shelf just visible 150 feet below. The poor creature appeared to have broken its back, for it was attempting to set up.

with the front part of its body while the hinder portion lay limp. Another dog lay motionless by its side, close by what appeared in the gloom to be the remains of the tent and a canvas tank containing food for three men for a fortnight. We broke back the edge of the, and they use another term, but they're referring to the crevasse here, I believe, and took turns leaning over, secured by a rope, calling into the darkness in the hope that our companion might be still alive.

For three hours we called unceasingly, but no answering sound came back. The dog had ceased to moan and lay without a movement. A chill draught was blowing out of the abyss. We felt that there was little hope. Why had the first sledge escaped the crevasse? It seemed that I had been fortunate, because my sledge had crossed diagonally, with a greater chance of breaking the snow lid. The sledges were within thirty pounds of the same weight. The explanation appeared to be that Ninnis had walked by the side of his sledge, whereas I had crossed it sitting on the sledge. The whole weight of a man's body bearing on his foot is a formidable load, and no doubt was sufficient to smash the arch of the roof.

By means of a fishing line we ascertained that it was one hundred and fifty feet sheer to the ledge on which the remains were seen. On either side the crevasse descended into blackness. It seemed so very far down there and the dogs looked so small that we got out the field glasses and could make out nothing more by their aid. All our available rope was tied together, but the total length was insufficient to reach the ledge, and any idea of going below to investigate and to secure some of the food had to be abandoned. That is chilling. That is absolutely chilling. The scale of the crevasse was beyond... They're not even drawing their imagination into this, but just beyond the abilities of their equipment to even reach.

You want another horror story from that book by Cherry Gerard?

Sure. Okay.

And this actually bring us back to a couple of characters you were just talking about, Scott and Mears, on that expedition. So Terry Gerard is writing about a section where they're crossing some ice and says, quote, We ran level for another two miles, Mears and Scott on our left. We were evidently crossing many crevasses. Quite suddenly, we saw the dogs of their team disappearing, following one another, just like dogs going down a hole after some animal. In a moment, wrote Scott, the whole team were sinking. Two by two, we lost sight of them, each pair struggling for footholds. Osman, the leader, exerted all his strength and kept a foothold. It was wonderful to see him. The sledge stopped and we leapt aside. The situation was clear

in another moment. We had actually been traveling along the bridge or snow covering of a crevasse. The sledge had stopped on it whilst the dogs hung in their harness in the abyss, suspended between the sledge and the leading dog. Why the sledge and ourselves didn't follow the dogs, we shall never know. Oh, wow. bridge of dogs.

So yeah, all of these accounts we've been looking at here concerning the crevasse, it sounds to me like you could basically just completely pass over one of these snow bridges and you would never know that a 150-foot drop was just waiting there for you and you just happened to not trigger it. And then the next one could get you.

Yeah, they don't always collapse. So yeah, very likely you have been over crevasses and crossed a snow bridge without realizing it.

Wow.

I mean, not you, the person listening, or you, Ron. The Antarctic explorer, the glacial mountaineer.

Yeah. Though, obviously, if we have listeners out there who have any experience with crevasses of one form or another, definitely write in and tell us all about it. Absolutely, yeah.

So, scariest non-speculative thing I've thought about in a while.

Yeah, this is a great story. Again, I love its use of history in an extreme real-world environment. but also involving this wonderful speculative element, bringing in that mythos flavor, hinting at this other world, cyclopean architecture in the deep and so forth. Just a wonderful little short story.

To end on a positive note, I would say I am really inspired by these stories of crevasse rescues as well.

Yeah, yeah. I mean, they're not all doom and gloom. There are accounts, certainly, of individuals successfully being rescued from crevasses, dogs being rescued from crevasses. And I don't know if I mentioned it already, but dogs are also very useful in crevasse rescue. All right. Well, we're going to go ahead and close the book here on Grimoire of Horror, Volume 2. We hope that everyone out there enjoyed our discussion of these two short stories. And certainly we would love to hear from everyone out there. If you have thoughts on the crevasse or on I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream, you have thoughts on the authors involved in these tales or other works that they wrote, write in. We'd love to hear from you. And we

should also go ahead and point out, hey, the next Halloween is just around the corner. So if you have suggestions for next year, if you're like, you two should totally read this story and this story by this author and this author, Go ahead and write in. We would love suggestions. Any head start we can get on our selection process is always a good thing. Just a reminder that Stuff to Blow Your Mind is primarily a science and culture podcast with core episodes on Tuesdays and Thursdays, short-form episodes on Wednesdays, and then on Fridays we set aside most serious concerns to just talk about a weird film on Weird House Cinema.

Huge thanks, as always, to our excellent audio producer, J.J.

Poswade.

If you would like to get in touch with us with feedback on this episode or any other, to suggest a topic for the future, or just to say hello, you can email us at contact at stufftoblowyourmind.com. Stuff to Blow Your Mind is a production of iHeartRadio.

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From the Vault: Grimoire of Horror, Volume 2

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