Sep. 8th, 2010

randy_byers: (brundage)
I decided to read some modern science fiction for a change, ho ho ho. This was one of the last stories Lovecraft wrote before his death in 1937. According to S.T. Joshi, he had been struggling to sell "At the Mountains of Madness" and was feeling pretty dispirited about his writing career. Then, once he finished this story, he sold both novellas to Astounding in rapid succession. The two stories are similar in a number of ways, and "The Shadow out of Time" even references the alien race of Elder Things from "At the Mountains of Madness," although Joshi says the reference doesn't actually match up to the earlier text.

"The Shadow out of Time" is one of Lovecraft's "cosmic horror" stories, and the point of it seems to be to evoke the absolute enormity of time and space and the insignificance of humanity within that infinite frame. It is the story of Nathaniel Wingate Peaslee, who in 1908 suffers an apparent lapse of amnesia, and for five years acts in very peculiar ways. When he recovers himself, he begins to have strange dreams of wandering around an ancient stone city. Gradually the dreams become more and more elaborate, and meanwhile he is studying old myths and stories that suggest there is an alien race that is able to project itself through time and space and occupy other beings around the universe in different eras. One such era was Earth 150,000,000 years in the past, and Peaslee eventually travels to Australia and discovers the buried remnants of that ancient civilization.

Despite the usual Lovecraftian deep level of unease, the story that unfolds of the alien Great Race isn't all that horrific. While the punchline of the story is a bit of a brainy zinger, it seems a tangent by the time you get to it. What matters is the scope of the Great Race's struggle to survive in a vast and constantly shifting, evolving universe. To a lesser extent it is also the story of Peaslee's growing realization that he has been a pawn in that struggle and has been left imprinted by a literal alienation because of it -- so deeply imprinted that, as typical in Lovecraft, he is no longer certain of his sanity, no longer certain of his self. Above all, it is a story of human irrelevance. Lovecraft gets off a nice joke about how in time humans will be supplanted by a race of intelligent beetles, and the Great Race will prefer them to humanity as a locus of their mind transference techniques. In this dark humor, as well as in the sense of unease and alienation, the story seems very Kafkaesque.

One thing that leaped out at me was a passing reference to the theosophists as having some sort of vague grasp of the reality of the hidden history of the world. Joshi notes that there's a reference to the theosophists in Lovecraft's "The Call of Cthulhu" (1926), too. Madame Blavatsky had elaborate theories of ancient root races on Earth that evolved eventually into humans, who will in turn evolve into other races. I've written about the theosophist connection to stories of lost Lemuria recently, and I'm beginning to think that there's a much deeper connection between theosophy and early science fiction than I had ever dreamed of.

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