Dry Ice Factory

'Can it be possible that this planet has actually spawned such things; that human eyes have truly seen, as objective flesh, what man has hitherto known only in febrile phantasy and tenuous legend?'

--H.P. Lovecraft, "The Shadow over Innsmouth" (1931)

'The face beside me was twisted almost unrecognisably for a moment, while through the whole body there passed a shivering motion -- as if all the bones, organs, muscles, nerves, and glands were readjusting themselves to a radically different posture, set of stresses, and general personality.

'Just where the supreme horror lay, I could not for my life tell; yet there swept over me such a swamping wave of sickness and repulsion -- such a freezing, petrifying sense of utter alienage and abnormality -- that my grasp of the wheel grew feeble and uncertain. The figure beside me seemed less like a lifelong friend than like some monstrous intrusion from outer space -- some damnable, utterly accursed focus of unknown and malign cosmic forces.'

-- H.P. Lovecraft, "The Thing on the Doorstep"

Those of you who enjoyed the H.P. Lovecraft Historical Society's wonderful silent film adaptation of Lovecraft's "The Call of Cthulhu" might be interested to know that they are nearing completion of their next film, an adaptation of "The Whisperer in Darkness". They have a blog with the latest news and developments. I assume it will be premiered at the upcoming H.P. Lovecraft Film Festival in Portland, Oregon.

'Lest you think me a biassed witness, another’s pen must add this final testimony, which may perhaps supply the climax you expect. I will quote the following account of the star Nova Persei verbatim from the pages of that eminent astronomical authority, Prof. Garrett P. Serviss ... '

--H.P. Lovecraft, "Beyond the Walls of Sleep" (1919)

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.

Ah well, the genre fiend will out. Clark Ashton Smith also leads to H.P. Lovecraft, of course. I've taken a look at his numbered sonnet sequence, Fungi from Yuggoth, and I quite liked this one, which tells a little story with faint, maddening echoes of blasphemous flutes.

XXXII. Alienation

His solid flesh had never been away,
For each dawn found him in his usual place,
But every night his spirit loved to race
Through gulfs and worlds remote from common day.
He had seen Yaddith, yet retained his mind,
And come back safely from the Ghooric zone,
When one still night across curved space was thrown
That beckoning piping from the voids behind.

He waked that morning as an older man,
And nothing since has looked the same to him.
Objects around float nebulous and dim—
False, phantom trifles of some vaster plan.
His folk and friends are now an alien throng
To which he struggles vainly to belong.

H.P. Lovecraft (1890-1937)

From a message board discussing favorite Lovecraft stories:

"My favorite is the one where the guy is driven insane by an incomprehensible horror."

I just finished reading The Dream Cycle of H.P. Lovecraft: Dreams of Terror and Death -- a collection published by Del Rey Books, with an introduction by Neil Gaiman. I picked it up a couple of years ago because the blurbs talked about Dunsany's influence on Lovecraft, which caused a lightbulb to go off in my head. The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath has always been my favorite story by Lovecraft, but I read it before I read Dunsany and never put two and two together.

( Where 2 + 2 = the unreverberate blackness of the abyss )