"Deros And The Ur-Abduction" In Asterisk

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Asterisk invited me to participate in their “Weird” themed issue, so I wrote five thousand words on evil Atlantean cave dwarves.

As always, I thought of the perfect framing just after I’d sent it out. The perfect framing is - where did Scientology come from? How did a 1940s sci-fi writer found a religion? Part of the answer is that 1940s sci-fi fandom was a really fertile place, where all of these novel mythemes about aliens, psychics, and lost civilizations were hitting a naive population certain that there must be something beyond the world they knew. This made them easy prey not just for grifters like Hubbard, but also for random schizophrenics who could write about their hallucinations convincingly.

…but I didn’t think of that framing in time, so instead you get several sections of why it’s evil cave dwarves in particular, and why that theme seems to recur throughout all lands and ages:

This is the ur-abduction. Someone is kidnapped by evil humanoids, dragged underground, and tortured (often in a sexually suggestive way). The Irish worried about it a thousand years ago, Richard Shaver worried about last century, and your neighbor with a “STOP THE STEAL” bumper sticker is worrying about it right now. Why?

Am I doing the thing where I cherry-pick a bunch of myths from unrelated cultures, squint at them really hard until they all look the same, and declare myself to have discovered something fundamental about the depths of the collective unconscious? Read the article and find out!