How Oarful

I'M WARNING YOU! 
Conrad is fed up of having to explain that what you take to be a spelling mistake is actually a pun.  A PUN!  So if your eyebrows as much as twitch, I shall propel this intelligent EMP down the cable to your PC and destroy it, your ISP, all their servers and Siri, too*.  Ha!
     <takes sip of calming Darjeeling>
     Okay, today I have a few items that I was going to lead with, along the theme of "De Profundis".  Art?

Wrong one

     Apparently Ol' Osk's DP is a poem, so we i) Automatically detest it and ii)  Shan't refer to it again, ever.  No, what I want to look at is the translation from the Latin <washes mouth out and apologises for having the zombie language on the blog twice in two days>, which means "From the depths".
     Because this is where you normally find - Art?

The Giant Oarfish

     - which is where today's title comes from.  The specimen above is widely reported as being 18 feet in length, or 6 yards**.  They are rarely seen in littoral or shallow waters as they are creatures of the depths, living up to 850 yards below the surface.  Thanks to their shape, length and means of locomotion, which is a kind of undulation, it is a given that several supposed "sea serpent" sightings have in fact been Giant Oarfish.  That one above is rather a baby.  Art?

This is a 23 footer

     And there have been unconfirmed reports of ones up to 56 feet long.  Imagine some credulous, superstitious seaman of the 18th century seeing one of these beasts frolicking in the mid-Atlantic waves, practicing it's dance moves in complete privacy: hard to wonder who experienced the bigger shock.
     Which brings me to that towering figure of Brian Aldiss, one of This Sceptred Isle's premier science-fiction authors, rendered only slightly less towering by virtue of being dead.  Brian didn't have any particular scientific or technical background to drape his stories around, unlike a lot of his contemporaries (Charles L. Harness with your law degree I'm looking at you)***.  Art?

Nothing, I admit, with the point I'm trying to make.  But cool.

     Okay, let us jump abruptly into the present day, when the cheap, affordable drone has helped to transform the media landscape, air traffic control and espionage.  Why, there is even talk of heavy-duty transport drones being able to carry out disaster relief work - what price Thunderbirds, then?  
     Well, Ol' Bri came up with the idea for drones with the capabilities of our present-day ones, and he did it back in the late Sixties or early Seventies, in a novella whose name I cannot remember <blushes>.
     This is where the "De Profundis" bit comes in.  A wave of humanoid aliens, fleeing their home system far far away, so far away in fact that it makes far away look like quite nearby, has settled on Earth.  Because they look Asian, they have nearly all settled in the Far East, and the only way to tell them apart is by physical contact, as their ambient temperature is significantly higher than that of Hom. Saps.  They are the Risk, and their technology is significantly more advanced than humanity's.  A huge fleet of Riskian refugee ships is on their way to planet Earth, and some of those Riskians resident on The Blue Dot have the task of subverting human civilisation to permit a refugee takeover ...

Eye See Eye

     At one point in the narrative our protagonist has a knock-down drag-out fight with a Riskian drone (I forget exactly what they call it), which he describes as "Unarmed, but definitely not harmless".  He wins, but only narrowly.
     Then there's Richard Cowper's "Profundis" - but another day for that, mayhap.
     Motley, let's go jump in the deep end at the quarry!

Not this one, though

The Horror, The Horror ...
If you recall, yesteryon we were discussing scary children's television programs that had undoubtedly traumatised whole generations of young people into frothing madness, which is why the world is in such a state right now.  There was "The Adventures of Mark Twain", then the ghastly "Noseybonk" and today we feature "Pompel and Pilt", two frightening Things that are supposed to amuse and entertain small children.  Art?

The phrase "What on Earth?" springs to mind

     These two - er - mutants out of the wastelands? are paired with not only each other, but another girning gargoyle, whom, if Art will stop hiding behind the settee -

I don't know what it is BUT I DON'T LIKE IT

     And of course the only thing worse than these three apart is these three together.  Art?  Come out from behind that cushion!

"Pay us or we'll send you a copy!"

     Here an aside.  So much for social distancing and staying at home; Rochdale Road has only seen more pedestrians in the summertime, when either a marathon was taking place or people were fleeing the Rochdale zombie semi-apocalypse.

Finally - 
"Angstrom" - the answer to one of my "Collins Big Book Of Crosswords" crosswords - I'm now up to Number 117, thank you for asking - to which the clue was "Very small unit of length (7)".  Now, from items above you may guess that Your Humble Scribe was reading science-fiction stories back in the Seventies, many of which had been published in the Fifties, and they all made extensive use of the "Angstrom" as a unit of measurement, because it was all scientific and trendy and so on.  It being a 10 to the minus-tenth power quantity, so it is indeed verrrrrrrrrrry small.
     The thing is, it seems to have become obsolete.  Conrad cannot remember reading any story or scientific report that uses the Angstrom as a unit of measurement.  My "Collins Concise" doesn't say that it's obsolete or outdated, and I really don't feel like trawling through back issues of "Scientific American" or "Galaxy" to find out.

There is, of course, always "Invincible"'s Angstrom Levy.  Who is full of angst.

     And with that, we are done!


*  Conrad not entirely sure who Siri is, but extortion is extortion.
**  None of that metric rubbish here.
***  Actually Brian wrote some nice critical assessments of Charles' work.  You see?  You see how everything is linked together?