Star Jelly - in Fiction

In Fiction

• Sir John Suckling, in 1641, wrote a poem which contained the following lines:

As he whose quicker eye doth trace

A false star shot to a mark'd place

Do's run apace,

And, thinking it to catch,

A jelly up do snatch

• Henry More, in 1656 wrote:

That the Starres eat...that those falling Starres, as some call them, which are found on the earth in the form of a trembling gelly, are their excrement.

• John Dryden, in 1679, wrote:

When I had taken up what I supposed a fallen star I found I had been cozened with a jelly.

• William Somervile, in 1740, wrote in The Talisman:

Swift as the shooting star, that gilds the night

With rapid transient Blaze, she runs, she flies;

Sudden she stops nor longer can endure

The painful course, but drooping sinks away,

And like that falling Meteor, there she lyes

A jelly cold on earth.

• Sir Walter Scott, in his novel The Talisman, wrote:

"Seek a fallen star," said the hermit, "and thou shalt only light on some foul jelly, which, in shooting through the horizon, has assumed for a moment an appearance of splendour."

An unidentifiable substance that falls to earth during a meteor-type event forms the background to The Colour Out Of Space, a 1927 short story by the American horror and science fiction author, H. P. Lovecraft.

Some observers have made a connection between Star Jelly and the movie The Blob, in which a gelatinous monster falls from space. The Blob which was released in 1958 was supposedly based on the Philadelphia reports from 1950 and specifically a report in the Philadelphia Inquirer called "Flying 'Saucer' Just Dissolves" where four police officers encountered UFO debris that was described as evaporating with a purple glow leaving nothing.

In the film Invasion Of The Body Snatchers (1978 film), the alien spores that fell to Earth in a rain shower formed blobs of jelly that grew into flowers that produced the seed pods.

In the book The Isle of Blood by Rick Yancey, Star Jelly (referred to as Pwdre Ser in the book) is the saliva of a monster called 'Magnificum' that falls to earth along with blood and shredded human remains, sometimes weaved into a nest or bowl of sorts, known as a 'nidus'. Anyone who comes in contact with the Pwdre Ser becomes 'infected', and will slowly decline in health until they are literally a living corpse.