I have to give thanks to my friend Nancy for this one, who pulled it off one of rec.arts.sf.composition. Squidly fiction at its best.
The TCL offers this definition, for which I request clarification.
>Squid on the Mantelpiece. Chekhov said that if there
are
>dueling pistols over the mantelpiece in the first act, they
>should be fired in the third. In other words, a plot
>element should be deployed in a timely fashion and with
>proper dramatic emphasis. However, in SF plotting the
>MacGuffins are often so overwhelming that they cause
>conventional plot structures to collapse. It's
>hard to properly dramatize, say, the domestic effects of
>Dad's bank overdraft when a giant writhing kraken is
>leveling the city. This mismatch between the conventional
>dramatic proprieties and SF's extreme, grotesque, or
>visionary thematics is known as the "squid on the
>mantelpiece."
Umm, but... huh? I don't get this one at all. The pistols should be fired (at the squid?) in act one? The pistols are fired in act three with no previous acknowledgment of their existence? Assume pistols and squids, but don't mention mundane matters like the mantelpiece because this is SF?
I have heard/told ACTUAL squid stories, and I'm trying to imagine such a story set with an aquarium over the fireplace, hosting a large dextrous mollusk, who plays any role whatever in the plot -- such that the squid should NOT be deployed in the same plotter's fashion as black powder pistols.
Our jar of marshmallows, kept atop the mantle beside the aquarium, seems to suffer mysterious depredations...The last example would seem to be precisely the way to personalize and contrast ordinary domestic disasters with the extraordinary sort. Not a mismatch, but a approach to verisimilitude. But I'm obviously missing something. Are we talking about a setpiece that is there just to establish how weird the character or the venue is?Well, Detective, this small valuable artifact was, briefly, stolen. But when we cleaned the aquarium we discovered that the thief had tried to hide it in the squid's bubbling castle...
The room should have been cold. It was not. But kindling has been mysteriously moved from the woodpile into the fireplace...
An eldritch ectoplasmic kraken oozed out of the ancient stones of the mantelpiece, which has been built from the slabs of the tombs of the pre-human intelligences of an primordial and malevolent civilization ...
Stone-like, the alien seed/egg/pod had lain dormant for millennia, in the cold clear water of a river bottom. For another dozen years the decorative-only mantelpiece harbored true stones and the ancient chrysalis in cool safety. But only now, warmed in the flames of the new homeowner's roaring fire, is it starting to hatch. A narrow crack -- a hissing in the inferno -- then, slithering towards the unsuspecting couple romantically entwined on the Persian rug, a slimy tentacled _thing_ emerges ...
POV character LilPouncer is worried about her Dad, who has been so totally obliviously distracted about trying to port over his Quicken-for-DOS checking account records to the new Quicken-for-Win98 that he fails to hear her warnings of a Godzilla-like giant squid, awakened by H-bomb tests, who has stomped ashore to level the city -- in dire pain from radiation poisoning and really only seeking a quick end: he _is_ The Suicide Squid -- the city: including the room where Dad is about to sledgehammer his new computer anyway ... LilPouncer might be willing to fight the squid but Dad has moved the shotgun off the mantelpiece and locked it away someplace...
The mad scientist's den was littered with micro- oceanography journals, sea shells, surgical instruments, and plastic buckets of scummy water. On his desk were piled three PCs of various vintages, networked to a single antique and greenly glowing monitor. Journals and old bound copies of forgotten student's master thesis provided a contrasting red glow as they burned cheerily in the fireplace, over which, on a mantelpiece built from whale vertebrae, a large aquarium housed a trained squid. The squid reached out a suckered tentacle to toss magazines and manuscripts from a nearby pile into the fire, periodically. ...Nope, still doesn't work. Yes, that room implies a great deal about the mad scientist's character. But given the squid-trained-as-a thermostat in the first paragraph, I can't neglect her for the rest of the story. This is going to drive me crazy all day. I can just tell. It's like those bad writing contests: Bad Hemmingway or Bulwyth-Lyton or whatever. The squid-on-the-mantelpiece is going to drive everything else out of my head and insist on a ridiculous story of its own. It's not a silly metaphor anymore; it's a story demanding to be told!
"Oh, Darling," she cooed as she opened the gift box. "You _shouldn't_ have!" I had already found a tall crystal vase from the china cabinet and filled it with water. "I have the perfect spot here on the mantelpiece," she declared, removing the delicate creature from the damp packaging and artfully arranging colorful tentacles symmetrically around the vase's rim...I can't do it. If I'm doing a story with a squid on the mantelpiece -- she shows up in act one and becomes active and important right away. Certainly no later than act three. What would be different about SF?June sipped at her Scotch, grateful for the respite. Even a mother deserves a little time for herself, she thought. She had just settled down in the big wingchair with the latest volume of the Digest's Condensed Books, when a clattering squish alerted her. Lassie, her son's pet octopus, emerged from the chimney and dangled from the mantelpiece by two arms, six more signalling frantically. "Surely that boy hasn't fallen into the well _again_?" June wondered...
I called my six-armed alien deputy Del Ray, from an author I'd read as a kid. She referred to me with a smoke ring and dot of purple ink. We patrolled our beat: the rocky geologic shelf where the shallows of new human settlement bordered the lava-lit ocean depths of her kind's ancient civilization. The mantelpiece, humans called it...
HELP HELP HELP. I'm going MAD, *MAD* I tell you.