Boojumverse

The Boojumverse is a fictional setting for a series of short stories written by Elizabeth Bear and Sarah Monette. The stories combine elements of the Cthulhu Mythos with the bestiary of Lewis Carroll in a space opera setting. 
==Stories==
*"Boojum" (2008)
*"Mongoose" (2009)
*"The Wreck of the Charles Dexter Ward" (2012)
==Creatures==
Bear and Monette's Boojumverse features a number of alien creatures, some derived from the Mythos, some with names from Lewis Carroll, and at least one monster combining both.
===Boojums===
Boojums, introduced in the short story "Boojum", are titanic creatures at home in outer space, used by humans as living spaceships. The gigantic race of "deep-space swimmer[s]" "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 (the liveship featured in "Boojum") 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". Her interior smells of ozone and nutmeg.
Other Boojum liveships mentioned are, in "Boojum," the Henry Ford, who tends to bite, and the Marie Curie, who is reputed to have eaten her crew; in "Mongoose," the Manfred von Richthofen, Erich Zann, Harriet Tubman, and possibly the Arthur Gordon Pym; and in "The Wreck of the Charles Dexter Ward," the titular Ward, a derelict hospital ship, and the Richard Trevithick.
Boojums are named for the creatures in Lewis Carroll's "The Hunting of the Snark"; they are the kind of Snark you don't want to hunt, as those who do tend to vanish forever.
===Toves===
Interdimensional vermin with sluglike, segmented bodies, a little short of a meter long, introduced in the story "Mongoose". They often attach themselves to ceilings with a foul-smelling secretion; a tove infestation can be identified by itd "sharp stink...ammoniac and bitter." They hunt by dangling glowing, sticky lure-tongues, half a meter long, which they use to catch prey which they then attack with "flesh-ripping pincers".
Despite this, toves are less a threat than a nuisance, "with their tendency to use up valuable oxygen, clog ductwork, eat pets, drip goo from ceilings, and crunch wetly when you stepped on them." They are lazy creatures--or "energy efficient"--"never crawl[ing] farther than was necessary to find a usable anchoring point." Their real danger is that they weaken the barriers between dimensions, attracting raths, their natural predators--and worse things.
===Raths===
Vicious interdimensional predators first seen in "Mongoose". They normally feed on toves, but are also known to eat "weakened humans or small gillies." They "weren’t sapient, not like cheshires, but they were smart." They have "strange starlike bones."
They come in a few forms: juveniles, who are "small flitting things... near-transparent in their phase shift"; "sexually dormant adult rovers," who appear as "blots of shadow"; and the massive breeders, who may be older rovers or an entirely separate caste. The juveniles are harmless, being too young to bite, though one expert notes, “If we stood perfectly still for long enough...they could probably leech out enough of our body heat to send us into hypothermia."
A breeder rath has "no recognizable features, save for its hideous, drooling, ragged edged maw." Though very slow, breeders are the most dangerous form of rath, and very hard to kill, as they are "armored like titanium armadillos." When threatened, they gather their offspring to themselves and curl up in a ball, in which position "it would take a tactical nuke to kill them." Their only truly vulnerable point is the organ through which "little baby raths came into the world," and that can only be attacked by a cheshire when the breeder is an upright position. Their feet, while not vulnerable, are sensitive, and attacking them can provoke the rath into exposing their ovipositor.
===Bandersnatch===
"Bandersnatch", as revealed in the story "Mongoose," is the common name in the Boojumverse for what are known elsewhere in the Cthulhu Mythos as the Hounds of Tindalos. (The bandersnatch's scientific name is Pseudocanis tindalosi; the Arkhamers refer to them as "hounds".) They are mostly known for being exceedingly deadly, with no one known to have survived an encounter with them who didn't immediately flee. Footage of a bandersnatch attack shows "flickering angular limbs appearing like spiked mantis arms from the corners of sealed rooms." For a boojum, however, a bandersnatch is "not much more than a case of indigestion."
===Cheshires===
Small, predatory alien creatures, adapted for vacuum, with the ability to phase between dimensions. They form intensely close bonds with human partners; they are deaf, but can sense and understand speech when in physical contact. They change the colors of their skin for communication and self-decoration--though flat representations mean nothing to them.
They have wedge-shaped heads on extensible necks, four compound and twelve simple eyes. They have catfish-like barbels and flick their tongues out to taste the air. Their teeth are a "needle-sharp crystalline array".
Cheshires are bred by Arkhamers, a spacefaring culture of knowledge-seekers whom outsiders view with suspicion. There is a theory that cheshires are sub-adult bandersnatches--“trained and bred and intentionally stunted so that they never mature fully”--though the main cheshire in the story firmly rejects this theory.
===Doppelkinder===
Mentioned but never encountered in the story "The Wreck of the Charles Dexter Ward," doppelkinder are extradimensional terrors that "hunt in mirrors" and "eat people's eyes." They rely on optical illusions to hunt, which makes cheshires and boojums--which cannot perceive two-dimensional images--immune to their powers.
===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 Lovecraft's 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". They have "big wet eyes" and communicate through "fingersigns" and other gestures.
===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. Brought into Bear and Monette's continuity in "Boojum," 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." One character 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.
Category:Locations Originating From Expanded Mythos Works