May Cthulhu be good to you.

 

"There is snow on the ground

And the valleys are cold

And a midnight profound

Blackly squats o'er the wold:

But a light on the hilltops half-seen hints of feasting unhallow'd and old."

from Yule Tide by H.P. Lovecraft

https://kmalexander.com/2016/12/21/h-p-lovecrafts-creepy-christmas-poem/

On Safari in R'lyeh and Carcosa with Gun and Camera by Elizabeth Bear.

  I have, I believe, remarked about how coincidence plays a large part in my life and my reading. Lately, I have been reading non-fiction from the library. As normal, the topics reflect my choice of fiction; the Sirens of Mars by Johnson discusses the search for life on Mars, Ancient Bones by Bohme, the evolution of apes and hominids in Europe and Kindred by Sykes provided an overview of the current research on Neanderthal's. The last two works that I discussed on my blog Jagged Orbit, Simak's "The Whispering Well," and Bradbury's The Halloween Tree touched on evolution and early man. Obviously, something is going on. Perhaps deros are shooting rays into my brain to direct my reading (see Richard Sharpe Shaver), or maybe stuff just happens.

Early this morning, Bear's story appeared on the Tor.com banner and, well, it had both R'lyeh and Carcosa in the title. I was up with insomnia anyway, so here was a gift. I just discussed three of Bear's mythos stories, and this did not disappoint. It starts in true pulp fashion with the protagonist and her companion reloading their weapons as they shelter behind a flimsy barricade. A tentacle has just smashed her GoPro, so we are in reasonably familiar territory. Then Bear proceeds to tell us how we got here. "My name is not Greer Griswold. I’m approximately fifty-two years old. I don’t know who my birth parents were, and my adoptive parents are dead. I have never married; I have no children; I have very few close friends. I’m a physicist at a notable northeastern US institution you would have heard of if I named it." 

Spoilers ahead, I suggest you read the story first, then see if you agree/disagree with me.

And while your there I recommend Lavie Tidhar's stories "Judge Dee and the Limits of the Law" and "In Xanadu".

  

Greer decides to take a DNA test; she is nearly one-twentieth Neanderthal (yeah!!), but 10.2% is undetermined. Luckily one of her few friends is Michael Roberts, a geneticist at the same institution. Roberts initially dismisses her results as contamination in the sample. But after additional research, he finds similar results appeared in a thesis that eventually was rejected. This leads them to the author Albert Gilman a recluse living on Cape Ann. I will stop the summary; the story is available on the Tor website. Why did I like it. Bear is a fine writer; I loved this line, "Unless his peculiar transformation had been more than merely cosmetic and he’d returned to the deeps like a hatchling sea turtle." She is also very inventive. Her story Dolly is a lovely discussion of the rise of sentience in a robot.

https://ajaggedorbit.blogspot.com/2017/03/dolly-by-elizabeth-bear.html

I fully intend to discuss her story 'The Deeps of the Sky', a brilliant first contact story that can be read here. 

http://clarkesworldmagazine.com/bear_06_18_reprint/

How inventive since Lovecraft's "The Call of Cthulhu", writers have struggled with describing his concept of non-Euclidean geometry. Bear does not struggle, she nails it 

“Octagons,” I said. “Traditionally, they don’t interlock without small squares to make up the corners.”

“But honeycomb?”

“Hexagons,” I said. “Like the basalt pillar we were on. Your bathroom tiles, those are octagons. With the little black squares between the corners, because that’s how topology works.”

Well, that was how topology worked where we came from. Here, apparently octagons interlocked." 

I love good mythos tales, I love prehistory, and I am interested in DNA and evolutionary science and increasingly, I love Elizabeth Bear's sf short stories and mythos tales. 

Photos

Detail from "Moving to New Hunting Grounds" by Zdenek Burian, I received my first book in the Augusta/Burian series on prehistoric life, Prehistoric Sea Monsters (they aren't) as a child and the die was cast.

Kindred, I borrowed this from the library and realized I would want to reread it and make notes in the text. So I returned it so the next in line could enjoy it and got my own copy from a local bookstore who delivered it and some Jeff Vandermeer books. 

On my next visit to my local library branch I found three more books on Neanderthals on the shelf. I had to request Almost Human on Homo naledi from another branch but I was able to get it before the library closes again until the new year and I thought it made a nice addition to the photo. 

Be careful out there.