Image from the Intercept article by Froomkin & Fang.

What is that enormous albino space whale flying overhead? The gray, nearly monotonal photo of the Pentagon surveillance blimp published by The Intercept’s Dan Froomkin and Lee Fang gave me chills—not because I’m afraid of Big Brother government surveillance (I am, but that’s for another article), but because I’ve always been terrified of giants in the sky.

Goya’s The Colossus also strikes this same chord in me. The giant figure on the horizon is familiar, even commonplace, but the perspective is wrong, all wrong, and so what ought to be natural is unnatural. Not only does the giant’s size render me personally insignificant, it also suggests that everything human is also insignificant. How could anything we do matter when impossibly enormous creatures loom on the horizon?

We are lucky that dinosaurs are extinct, Earth’s most massive animals exist only beneath the surface of the ocean, and the world’s largest organism lives underground out of human sight and comprehension.

Shadow of the Colossus fan art by Lionsketch on Deviantart.

Giants on the horizon may seem like a ridiculous thing to fear, but there’s a reason that horror and SF authors mention vast, dark shapes blotting out the stars. There’s a reason that Lovecraft uses phrases like “a mountainous white bulk beyond the remotest trees.” We like to tell ourselves that we humans are at the top of the pyramid: we rule this world, and our concerns trump those of all other living beings. God forbid that anything should ever appear on this planet that might give us a tiny taste of what it’s like to be the nameless, faceless, insignificant insects caught under our boot heels.