The Science of H.P. Lovecraft

Legendary weird fiction author H.P. Lovecraft revolutionized our understanding of supernatural horror in the early 20th century, but he was also a science writer and lived in a time of tremendous scientific advancement and global war. Join Robert and Julie as they chat with S.T. Joshi about the science of H.P. Lovecraft's fiction and how it influenced popular culture. Plus, hear from a few HowStuffWorks podcast personalities on their own favorite Lovecraft tales.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:03):
Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind from how Stuff
Works dot com. Hey you welcome to Stuff to Blow
your Mind. My name is Robert Lamb and I'm Julie Douglas. Julie.
I probably mentioned before that I am a big fan
of the horror writer HP Lovecraft. Yes you have, yeah,

(00:24):
I um, I think I discovered Lovecraft for myself back
in n I was a junior in high school. The
tool album Auma had just hit the stores, and then
I suddenly discovered this, this brand new horror writer in
the horror section at Barnes and Noble or somewhere in Huntsville, Alabama.

(00:44):
And and up to that point, I'd read a lot
of Stephen King. You know, I was really into Tolkien, um,
you know, sort of the normal assortment of of horror
and sci fi, and you know, i'd read done for
the first time. But then I found this this curious
book on the shelf, and it was just the imaginative,
the freshest, the most to me, the most cutting edge,

(01:04):
uh horror fiction I'd ever read, which and I shortly
discover that this was there was nothing new about it
at all. This was this was stuff from the early
twentieth century that and then the author had been dead
for decades. Yeah, and what's interesting about this is that
HP Lovecraft went on to influence all the writers that

(01:24):
you just mentioned, right, so Stephen King, also Neil Gaiman,
just a whole host of writers, science fiction writers, horror writers.
HP Lovecraft kind of created the blueprint for that. Yeah.
This this this idea of sort of cosmic dread of humanity,
sort of a drift in a moral universe that he

(01:44):
can barely understand. I mean, the notes of Lovecraft I
and Horror do resonate just throughout, certainly throughout horror, but
also into science fiction, into fantasy and our pop culture.
We've got to the point where you're you're gonna see
Getulu shirts and Getulu plush doll as you walk down
the store and through the mall. Yeah. Now, Casulo for

(02:04):
for anybody who is not familiar with flulo, we have
an article called how cula works, and that's not actually
how you pronounce kafulu, and we'll get to that later.
But casulu um is this kind of deep sea creature,
and Lovecraft describes it as a cross between like an octopus,
a dragon, or this kind of human like or anthropomorphic creature.

(02:25):
So Cthulhu is as a sleep deep down in the
ocean and and transmitting thoughts to all those other dreamers
out there, those humans who have sort of a creative
spark to them. That's the idea of cthulh. So you
see these little plushy Cthulhu dolls, which is really funny
because the actual CuO is supposed to be brightening and horrific. Yeah,

(02:46):
my son actually has one of the plush dolls and uh,
he largely ignores it, but once he flew around the house.
But but yeah, but for me, it kind of it
does take away from the power of the of the
idea and uh and and as well we'll discuss later
was this was actually a minor figure in Lovecraft riding.
They're far more interesting for more complex, far more terrifying

(03:07):
entities that he created, But this is the one that's
really taken off and kind of serves as an overall
symbol of of what what he did in the kind
of the worlds that he created. Yeah, but people don't
realize that a lot of our understanding of aliens and
in some ways that you know, the cosmos and other
extra extraterrestrial life forms is based on Lovecraft's ideas about

(03:31):
the world. I mean that permeates a lot of fiction,
a lot of movies, all right. So just to to
to refresh and to and to inform anyone who's not
familiar with Lovecraft at all. HP. Lovecraft was born on
August ninety in Providence, Rhode Island, and he went on
to become a very important American pulp author. Uh. Again,

(03:51):
it had a profound influence on horror fiction and pop
culture as a whole, mostly after his death. And he
died uh fairly young from cancer of the small intestines,
to the age of forty six, still at the height
of his literary powers. Um. Yet despite this relatively short
writing career, you know, immense impact. Um he his work

(04:13):
just seethes with this, uh, with this new form of
supernatural menace, one that's grounded in the darker unknowns of
ancient myth cycles. Would also affix to humanity's increasing scientific
understanding of the cosmos in the early twentieth century. So
we're talking about Darwin's evolution, Einstein's relativity, quantum physics, all
of this playing into into his writing and his in

(04:35):
his works ground humanity in this amoral universe where where
vain humanity understands less than it thinks it does about
its origins, about its ultimate fate. And so we end
up with this sort of loose idea of of of
human civilization residing in a tidal pool of reasoning and
beyond which there's just this endless ocean of madness and chaos,

(04:56):
or at least it's madness and chaos to our our
limited ability to just take it all in. So his
stories generally involve somebody coming to terms with these kind
of revelations and generally generally going at least a little
bit insane with them. And and and it's and it's
it's it's all about the power of the unknown to

(05:18):
inspire us, certainly as a reader, but also to horrify
us as well. Right, this is from the Science Fiction
and Fantasy Stack Exchange, because, by the way, I'm new
to the HP Lovecraft world. Of course I've known about it,
but this is a sort of crash course in HP
Lovecraft for me. So when I was looking at information
on this that the Stack Exchange said the main focus

(05:40):
of Lovecraft's works are indeed aliens. As we mentioned, lots
and lots of aliens. Some visited Earth and lived on it.
Some battle between themselves. Some built cities, as we'll discuss
later in one of the novellas. Some destroyed cities, some
created civilizations, some of which collapsed and left ruins behind them.
Some left. Some of these aliens are sleeping like Fulu,

(06:01):
some are well awake, and some are good, some are evil,
some are neutral, which is a really that's kind of
a big idea that right during this time period, that
you could have this other being that would be neutral,
that didn't care about the human beings, because this is
way outside of the human experience and with in which
we are constantly anthropomorphizing everything. Yeah, and that's key because

(06:22):
it's certainly living in an age of of Star Trek
and in living the shadow of Star Trek, where you
see just all these anthropomorphized visions of what aliens would be, Like,
what what are aliens? They're just humans with funny ripples
on their head. For the most part. I know there's
some more out there, alien extra trust real ideas in
Star Trek's universe, but for the most part, everything is

(06:42):
pretty human and uh, and certainly at the at the
time of Lovecraft's writing a lot of more popular science fiction.
Uh you know, you look at look at some of
the Mars fiction that was out there, etcetera. You see
very human ideas of what aliens would be like. And
it's it's based in the pulp dichotomy of good and evil.
So you have good aliens and bad aliens and that's

(07:03):
a lot of fun. Nobody's saying you shouldn't or can't
enjoy that. But Lovecraft brought in this side idea of
aliens that were very inhuman. That and certainly, as we've
discussed before, if we were to try and figure out
what life would consist of elsewhere in the universe, we
we can only base our ideas on our terrestrial model.

(07:24):
But our terrestrial model is far more uh varied, and
far far far richer than just the human form. And
Lovecraft was was tuned into that because he was he
was very into the science literature of the day, and
he was aware that the bio diversity on Earth could
get very strange. That's what I love about it, because
he did introduce this idea of an extra terrestrial that

(07:47):
looked nothing like us, that didn't care about us, that
was outside of let's look at it this way the
Christian Judeo experience, right, and in a very scientific way,
as you say, he is looking these creatures in a
very scientific way, saying, just like the cosmoves out there
and the elements in it, perhaps there is not a

(08:10):
care truly about humans. Humans are just another organism that
happened to be on this Earth. And that is a
very I mean, that is kind of a radical idea
during that time period. Yeah. Indeed, one of my favorite
stories that he wrote, and this was one that he
wrote later in life when he was like in just
really firing on all cylinders, is uh, the Whisperer and Darkness,

(08:31):
which concerns this idea that there are extraterrestrial beings that
have been visiting Earth for quite some time. They're carrying
out their own business here. They really don't care about humans.
But the problem is as humans become more and more
technically advanced, as they is, they multiply and cover more
corners of the globe, uh, and just more of the

(08:52):
the planet Earth. There's increased possibility that we run into them,
and and if they keep running into us, then they're
gonna probably have to wipe us out just just in
order to keep carrying on their their own products here
on the Earth, which isn't is again kind of a
scary concept because it's the idea that humanity is not
important in a cosmic sense and uh, and that there

(09:13):
could be aliens that are visiting that that have no
interest in humanity at all. We're just a byproduct. And
now that's somewhat the trope of one of his novellas,
at the Mountains of Madness. And when I started to
read that, I have thought immediately of Prometheus, and I thought, wow,
those that's some far reaching tentacles, right, because of course
that that has colored the whole Alien franchise, right, But Prometheus,

(09:35):
if you guys remember and we did an episode on Prometheus,
we're talking about Elizabeth Shaw and Charles Holloway that the
characters in it, they discover a star map among the
remnants of several ancient Earth cultures and they want to
seek the origins of humanity, and so they set out
on this adventure to the star system to try to
find the elder ones, the old ones. This is very

(09:58):
much and I don't want to do any sort of
um plot spoilers here, but if you look at the
Mountains of Madness. You will see the same sort of
plot points in there, and it's amazing to see the
parallels there, even those so much time has passed. Yeah,
if I remember correctly, Galermo del Toro, who's been wanting
to make a film adaptation of the of at the

(10:19):
Mountains of Madness for some time, registered some disappointment when
Prometheus came out because he said, well, this means I'm
not I'm not gonna be able to get to make
my Mountains of Madness movie for you know, for another
decade or so, because they just hit some of the
major plot points. Yeah, which has got to be really frustrating.
But I will say I hope that he makes that

(10:42):
movie because if anybody's ever seen Hell Boy or Pants Labyrinth,
then you know that this is a director who brings
just this incredible visual element to the screen, not to
mention storytelling. So can you imagine this novella being directed
by Guiermo del Toro. I mean that would be an
amazing thing. Oh yeah, I mean you know that, even
even if he's covering an idea that's kind of a

(11:04):
little more on the just the pop end of the scale,
say Pacific rim Um, which was a fun movie, but
the dialogue was terrible. Idea was great. The idea it
was great. The monsters though, we're the best partner. Then
the robots were great too, but but still it was
it was art directed within an inch of its life.
And you know you're gonna get that with the Lermo
del Toro, no matter what the movie is like. And

(11:26):
and he you know, he tends to have his sort
of art to your pictures like Pan's Labyrinth. Uh, and
then he has his more action oriented pictures like Pacific
Rim like Blade too, which which I love as well.
But yeah, you know you're gonna get something amazing looking,
some amazing creative ideas in his work. And you see
shades of Lovecraft resonating through a lot of what he does. Yeah,

(11:49):
and um, what I think would be exciting is that
perhaps del Toro would be able to bring out the
elements of science, the foundation of science that Lovecraft was
writing on, indeed, the science of Lovecraft. That's the topic
of the podcast here today, because certainly we can't go
through every story and talk about what was was incredible
about each one. We can't really dissect the man's life

(12:12):
in depth here, but one of the the interesting things
about him is that he did have this science background.
He was a science enthusiast from a very early age.
He was himself a science writer, wrote multiple articles a
lot of on astronomy, published articles about astronomy and in
the sciences. Was very well read about the science, the
scientific theories of the day. Again, you know Darwin's natural selection,

(12:36):
Einstein's relativity, uh, some of the the the sprinklings of
quantum physics in the day. So if you look at
something like At the Mountains of Madness, you can really
see the evidence of Lovecraft's training and understanding of various
fields of science. And so it's really densely packed with information. Man,
at first I think it can be a little bit

(12:57):
off putting because it seems dry, but honestly, he gets
in there and he starts to put these little ominous
things in the text and really draw you in. So
if anybody wants to read that novella, I urge you too,
and just stay with it, because by the time you
get to part two, you will be firmly ensconced in
this world that he's built for you, with such fidelity,

(13:19):
in such detail that that's when I think one of
the things about successful fiction that really pulls you in
the ability to really set the time, in the place,
in the details. Yeah, it's a it's it's a really
incredible tale in those respects because you see the you
see elements of geology in it, you see elements of
evolutionary biology, and this this idea of Antarctica is the

(13:43):
last unexplored region of the Earth. Because the story deals
with an Antarctic expedition into the unknown, and and and
exploring the unknown, the investigators end up finding something more
powerful and more troubling than they could have possibly imagined.
And he really is out this expedition in uh, in
depth to the point where you know you're reading it,

(14:04):
you really buy into the idea of it. Oh, this
is what it would take then to to actually conduct
this exploration in the early twentieth century. Yeah, you are
really seeing through the eyes of the narrator. And that's
what I love about successful fiction. And something even like
Virginia Wolves Orlando. I was thinking, these are starkly different texts,
but they have the thing in common in which it

(14:26):
is choccle block with detail that at first doesn't seem relevant,
but then you're realizing these are people who are world
building and trying to give you an understanding of this. So, anyway,
what do we do to uh, to talk about the
science of Lovecraft. We went to the expert. Yeah, that's right. Um,
we turned to the world's foremost authority on HP Lovecraft,

(14:47):
of man by the name of St. Joshi. In fact,
if you've ever read any number of weird fiction, pulp fiction,
genre fiction anthologies, you've likely run across this man's name
because he's He's written tons of introduction, he's to various anthologies,
he's edited anthologies. Um, he's been researching, writing, restoring, and
editing volumes of research on Lovecraft and related authors since

(15:09):
the early nineteen eighties. He's also written pretty extensively on
atheism and race relations as well. So we reached out
to St. Joshi. He was gracious enough to chat with
us and discuss the science of love Craft. We're gonna
get to that interview after one quick break. All right,

(15:30):
we're back, let's get to the interview. Yes, we're gonna
talk with again with St. Joshi, the world's foremost authority
on HP Lovecraft. Thank you for joining us, Mr Joshi. UH.
My first question in addition to writing all of these
weird tales and ultimately influencing popular culture. Lovecraft was a

(15:51):
science writer. Tell us a little bit about Lovecraft, the
science writer and science enthusiasts. Sure, um, you know, really
was one of Lovecraft's earliest interest uh, starting even in
in his uh childhood years. Sure he uh you know,
he read some weird fiction like po And and The

(16:12):
Brothers Grimm and things like that when he was five
or six or seven years old. But by the time
he was eight, he had already discovered chemistry. He became
fascinated with chemistry. His mother bought him a chemistry set
and he was delighted to make little experiments with it. Then,
at the age of eleven, he discovered astronomy, and later

(16:33):
in life he says that that discovery of astronomy was
perhaps the most significant influence in his whole life in
terms of his philosophical attitude, because it opened up the
myriad worlds of of infinite space. Uh and and directly
let to that cosmic attitude that really defined both his
philosophy and his fiction. Uh. And he did a lot

(16:56):
of writing at that time. First, he did these little
handwritten uh little booklets or magazines, as he called them. UH.
He had a paper called the Scientific Gazette that began
as early as eighteen he was about nine years old,
that focus on chemistry. Later on, after he discovered astronomy,
he started something called the Rhode Island Journal of Astronomy

(17:19):
that came out usually every week sometimes then later every month,
full of interesting matter about science and and astronomy and
the stars. Uh. And among his first published works were
scientific writings. As early nineteen o six, when he was
sixteen years old, he began two separate astronomy columns in

(17:43):
local newspapers in in the Providence Rhoe Island area UH
and one of them kept on for a couple of
years UH and still later on around ieen uh fourteen
he was twenty four, he started another series of astronomy
columns month, the columns telling people about, you know, what
they can expect to see in the course of the
month in terms of planets and stars and constellations and

(18:07):
other events like meteor showers and things like that. And
that went on for another four and a half years.
So his his scientific writing published and unpublished is pretty significant.
In your book, I Am Providence, The Life and Times
of HP. Lovecraft. You spend a good bit of time
discussing love Cross philosophy and metaphysics. So what inspired his worldview? Well, um,

(18:30):
there's two major influences. The philosophers of the eighteenth century,
people like Voltaire, Lametry and and others were pioneered the
philosophy of materialism and atheism. Lovecraft declaredan suf be an
atheist as early as the age of five. I think
that's maybe a little too early, but certainly by around
twelfth thirteen he claimed to be quite a determined atheist. Uh.

(18:53):
And the other major influence was the scientific writers and
philosophers of the nineteenth century. Love was very wealth attuned
to the scientific discoveries of of the later nineteenth century.
In particular, he was immensely influenced by Darwin's theory of evolution.
He may not have actually read Darwin's own writings, but

(19:16):
he's certainly read a lot of the writings of people
like Thomas Henry Huxley, who was Darwin's great proponent. In England,
he read a German philosopher and biologist named Ernst Heckel.
I believe that I was pronounced h A e c
k e l, who wrote a book called The Riddle
of the Universe. Uh. This came out in German in

(19:36):
eight and was translated the next year into English. And
that was a hugely influential book for love grass thinking
because it laid out a purely materialistic and purely atheistic
view of the cosmos. And that was tremendously influential to
lovegrass thinking. It's easy to read the works of Lovecraft
and simply lose yourself in the supernatural wonder of the stories.

(19:56):
I lord knows I did when I first read his
work back in high school. But Lovecraft lived and uh
and wrote in a time of great change. To what
extent did World War One and new advancements in relativity
and quantum theory affect his personal philosophy and his fiction.
Well it's funny. Uh. Lovecraft started writing weird fiction as

(20:18):
a teenager. He wrote some some juvenile stories that a
few of which still survive. Uh. They're not bad, they're
they're they're interesting to show his development, but they're they're
pretty minor. Uh. Then he gave up writing for a while, uh,
and started again in nineteen seventeen, right in the middle
of the war, just before America's entry into the war.
But he was following that conflict very carefully because as

(20:39):
a devoted Anglophile, he was very much enamored of England
and was a great devotee of the British Empire. He
wanted America to enter the war on the side of
what he called his blood brothers across the sea. Um Uh.
That that whole period was was really troubling the love ground.

(20:59):
He actually attempt to do enlist, not in the army
as such, but in the Rhode Island National Guard UH
and actually got enrolled momentarily, but then his mother pulled
some strings and had him withdrawn from there. But that
very One of the first stories he wrote was called Dagan,
which is set in in the war. It takes place

(21:20):
on the sea after a presumably a British soldier is
captured by the Germans on a boat and then escapes
on a rowboat and then UH encounters these this these
this horrible creature UH in the ocean. But you can
see how that war setting plays the critical role in

(21:43):
the story. But but more critical there is the fact
that that that story is really based on not so
much on Spiens, but on some conjectural advance of science.
That is to say, what love Fraff is postulating, there
is the discovery of an alien species lurking beneath the ocean.
There's really nothing supernatural in that particular story. That story

(22:06):
could actually have occurred. It's realistic in the sense of
depicting it's it's topography and the basic events in a
very realistic manner. So Lovecraft, in the course of his career,
danced between the supernatural and what might be called quasi
science fiction. He really was a kind of proto science
fiction writer right from the beginning of his career. And

(22:28):
in terms of of things like relativity, he was tremendously
affected by the Einstein theory of relativity, which he came
upon first or around nineteen twenty or thereabout, and then
by nineteen twenty three the theory had really been confirmed
by various experiments, and he was forced to accept it. Uh,
I'd say forced to accept it because the theory, of course,

(22:48):
really shook up the foundations of nineteenth century science, the
the the rather cock sure materialism of writers like Huxley
and and and others of that period. UH and love
went through a period of turmoil where he had to
wrestle with the theories of relativity, with quantum theory with
UH and later the theories of of Heisenberg. UH, and

(23:12):
still try to maintain a basically materialist point of view.
And I think he successfully did it in the end,
but it really did affect his writing throughout the course
of nineteen twenties. In the Cannon of Love cust stories,
Which stories do you think standout? Is employing science the
most effectively, especially for the time period well to to
stand out in my mind and in my judgment, they

(23:35):
actually are among his best stories, if not the very best.
At the Mountains of Madness, Uh, this is a short
novel written nineteen thirty one, but it draws upon his
fascination with the Antarctic, going all the way back to
when he was about ten years old. He had become
fascinated with Antarctic exploration because right around that time, around
nineteen hundred or thereabouts, Uh, there was a whole new

(23:56):
wave of scientific exploration that left left uped up on
what people like uh, you know, Scott and Amondson and
the number of these other explorers, and it fascinated him.
UH And for years he wanted to write a novel
or or a story about the Antarctic because really, UH,
that's content was perhaps the last genuinely unknown terrain it

(24:20):
left in the world. I mean, some of his other stories,
I said, in the wilds of Africa or the Middle East.
But Antarctica at that time was really almost untouched, and
so it allowed a vast expanse of of imagination unfettered
by reality or or or what was known about about

(24:45):
that area at the time. So finally, around nineteen thirty one,
he took up his pen and wrote this incredibly detailed
short novel about Antarctica. UH. But it becomes much more
than just a just an Antarctic novel. It becomes a
cosmic narrative, UH, detailing the the advent to this planet
of an alien species that established itself on Antarctica to

(25:07):
be sure, millions of years ago, but also throughout the
world UH, and engaged in battles with other species and
finally died out. Uh. It's a tremendous historical panorama that
really takes the entire universe as its backdrop rather than
just just the Earth. In a very similar way still
later uh novella called The Shadow Out of Time, it

(25:30):
does much the same thing, UH, here again. This one
is set chiefly in Australia in the in the Australian desert,
again a relatively unknown area at the time. UH and
again depicts an alien species that comes to the Earth.
But in this case, the alien species has not come physically.
It has come mentally. That is to say, it has

(25:53):
perfected the the ability to exchange its minds with the
minds of creatures over time. Uh. They can send their
minds forward through through time and inhabit the bodies of
other creatures. Uh. And the narrator of that story, UH,
a professor from Miskatonic University, experiences uh mental or psychic

(26:19):
possession by one of these alien alien creatures. Again, a
great deal of scientific erudition is incorporated with that story. Biology, physics, geology, anthropology, paleontology.
It is it is definitely a science fiction story. Infect
both those stories amounts of Madness and the shadow time
we're published in a science fiction pulp magazine, Astounding stories.

(26:43):
Reading his work, it really seems like he was a
man at the top of his talent right up until
illness overcame in. What's such a trajectory of his work?
What more would we have likely seen from Lovecraft, what
were his long term plans with his fiction? Lot first
started out as I'm writing stories in the late teens,
beginning nineteen seventeen, and then died in nineteen thirty seven.

(27:06):
So his career was really very short as as far
as fiction writers go, less than twenty years really speaking.
And in that period he wrote only about sixty stories,
of which maybe three are short novels. There are several
novellas UH and other short stories, so he really wrote
no full scale novel um. But throughout that whole period

(27:27):
has in the first ten years of his life he
basically alternated, as I mentioned, between fairly conventional supernaturalism and
a sort of budding UH interest in science science fiction,
or rather in the in the scientific justification or accountability
of his supernatural creations. Was a central year for Lovecraft,

(27:52):
because that's when he wrote the Call of Clue Do.
That's the first story in what later came to be
called the Clulu mythos. He never used that, by the way,
that was a term invented by one of his editors,
but nevertheless it's a convenient term to use for this
UH pseudo mythology that he devised and that dominated the
last decade of his writing. But as what we see

(28:14):
in that decade from up to his death is that
he wrote fewer stories but much longer ones. He required
a larger and larger canvas to convey his ideas. The
short story was no longer adequate to his purposes. He
wanted to write novellas and short novels oftes um because

(28:35):
he needed that expanse to to uh get across the
precision and detail that that dominated his later work. And
of course that later work is also dominated by by
this interest in science. I should have mentioned another key
story in this evolution, called the Colorado Space, which many people,
including himself I thought might have been his the very

(28:56):
best story he wrote from a purely artistic point of view. Uh.
That story also appeared in a science fiction magazine, Amazing
Stories and deals with the meteorites that bear that that
apparently contained some very bizarre creatures that cause a kind
of withering of the of the landscape where this meteor lands.
Uh tremendously atmospheric piece. That's that's one critic felt anticipated

(29:21):
the effects of atomic radiation. Of course that's purely accidental,
but nevertheless, it gets to the idea of the scientific
elements underpinning that story. The problem with no Draft is
that his later work, these long novellas, tended to be
unsuitable for publication in the pulp magazines. They were so

(29:43):
far beyond what conventional pulp editors wanted that they many
of them were rejected. At the Mounts of Madness was
rejected by Weird Tales of the pulp magazine that add
up to that time published most of his stories because
the editor felt it was simply probably beyond the power
of his readers to understand it uh and that it

(30:05):
couldn't be easily divided into sections and things like that.
And love Fraff took these rejections very hard and actually
ended up writing less and less with the passage of time,
I mean, and and lost confidence in his work. If
he had lived on beyond ninety seven, I think his
work would have become still more scientific, and probably would

(30:25):
have he probably would have written for full length novels,
perhaps for paperback publishers or or science fiction magazines. The
problem with Lovefraff in his time was that his work
was not really suited to the markets that would accept him.
The mainstream markets were simply not interested in this kind
of work. They had determined that any kind of fantasy

(30:47):
or horror or science fiction was somehow to literary. So
he was not going to get published in places like
Saturday Evening Post or Atlantic Monthly or Harper's. Uh. He
had to publish in the pulp magazines, and even they
started acting his work because again, it just went beyond
their formulaic conceptions. If Marcus had emerged in Lovecrafts later

(31:07):
in love you know, in the forties, uh, that might
have accommodated love grass work. He probably would have done
very well. Now we can go back for a second.
How does how does one pronounce the name of the entity? Yes, yes, well,
the pronunciation you just gave is has become pretty standard.
But Lovecraft declares in a letter of nineteen thirty four
to some friend of his that the pronunciation is actually

(31:30):
only two syllables. That T is not pronounced as a tg,
is pronounced as a kind of guttural l uh. He
actually renders it as c l's you l you clue Lou,
and you have to sort of cough or market out.
A lot of people don't pronounce it that way because
it seems counterintuitive to do so, but nevertheless, that is

(31:51):
how he apparently pronounced it. But of course he says, well,
you know, this word, this name is not meant to
be pronounced by human vocal corps, so no human could
ever give anything but an approximate pronunciation of it. That's
actually kind of comforting to me, given how how commercial
Cthulhu has become. I mean you see see it on
T shirts in the form of plush dolls. Well, yes,

(32:12):
there's been a tremendous commercialization of Klulu and and and
a sort of u expansion of of that name and
that concept into the popular culture. I dare say a
love Grave would have amused by it. But the and
if it's you know, if it brings more attention to
the love Craft, well and good. The funny thing is

(32:33):
that Lulu the entity is actually a fairly minor god
or creature in the entire panoply of love Crafts pseudo mythology.
There are much more powerful entities in his stories than that,
and Clu only figures really in one story, the Call
of Clulu. You have other entities like Yao and as

(32:53):
a thought, and Nilasita and Shovnigrov and all these other
creatures who actually in many ways are more interesting, uh
and certainly are more powerful in the narratives in which
they appear, but they don't have quite the cachet of Lulu,
so they don't get quite the attention. Why do you
think that is why has Catulu become such a pop
culture Darling? Well, I think the name has something to

(33:16):
do with it. It is such a bizarre name, uh
that that you know, and as we've just discovered, nobody
really knows how to pronounce it. Nobody can pronounce it
really correctly. Um. It has a sort of magic aura
to it that the people apparently find fascinating. I will
say that the term with Clulu mythos was coined by

(33:37):
August Derleth now that he was Lovecraft's posthumous editor and
his friend. He corresponded with love Graft over about a
ten year period um, and he felt that that term
was appropriate to designate those stories that used this mythology,
because it was in the call of Cluu that the
mythology was first expounded in a tailed way. Some people

(34:02):
feel that that that term is misleading bit precisely because
Toulu is not really the major entity, but because Derluth
sort of gave the staff of approval to it, and
because he himself was lovecraft publisher for many years, that
term eventually caught on, first in a sort of limited
way among Lovecraft devotees, and then when Lovecraft became hugely

(34:23):
popular in the nineties seventies, the term that just took off.
In your book, I believe you mentioned that Lovecraft referred
to this mythos is author. Yes, he never, he never
gave it a name. Um. In fact, Derluth, writing to
Lovecraft and a tame thirty one, uh, suggested, why don't
you call this the mysthology of Hosteur a name? And

(34:44):
we don't even know if it's an entity or a
place or whatever mentioned once in Lovecraft in The Whisper
and Darkness. Uh. And in fact, that name is borrowed
from Robert W. Chambers, who wrote The King in Yellow
and who himself borrowed it from Rose Bears. Uh. And
love Graff said, well, you know that's that name doesn't
really uh convey what I wanted to convey. But he

(35:07):
never determined on a name for this, uh, this whole
mythology himself. He yeah, whimsically called it yaks as authority
at one point. But it shows that that he was
not concerned with with naming it, and he also was
not concerned in mapping it out precisely. This mythology evolved
very radically in the course of his UH last ten

(35:30):
years of his life and changed significantly from from one
story to the other. He was did not feel bound
to be necessarily consistent UH in referring to these names
and entities from one story to the other. UH, And
and that drove some later writers and critics crazy because
they wanted that kind of consistency. But love I've realized

(35:51):
that that's you know, to make it too consistent, too
specifics would would rob it of its of its UH power.
As an imagine, to stimulant UH, it had to remain
mysterious and unknown and covert for our listeners and readers
interested in horror. What summer reading selections would you recommend?
There's so many, um. I. When I first got into Lovecraft,

(36:16):
I became interested in some of the writers that he
liked UH and was influenced by. He was very well
read in the field of supernatural or weird fiction. In fact,
he wrote a little treatise about it called Supernatural horror
and literature, which himself is worth reading as a very
interesting historical account of of of that field from you know,

(36:37):
the dawn of literature up to his own day. And
he was tremendously influenced by writers as diverse as Arthur Mackin,
the great Welsh writer of horror fiction, who really wrote
mostly the eighteen nineties uh and wrote some tremendously powerful
work about about horrible creatures on the underside of civilization,
and that that was a tremendous influence on Lovecraft. He

(37:00):
was a Lovedraft was very taken with the fantasy writer
Lord Stunsany, the Irish writer who wrote tales of fantasy
in an imaginary world setting, not horror at all, really speaking,
but but beautiful works of fantasy. I myself have a
great admiration for Dunsany, and I think he was one
of the one of the great writers of our field.
Algernon Blackwood, the English writer, wrote the stories like the Willows,

(37:23):
which Lovecraft thought was the best story, best weird tale
ever writs, and I'm not entirely sure he's wrong about
that tremendously atmospheric piece about these two people who sailed
down with Dan you've been a canoe and encounter bizarre
creatures along the way. And of course his great American
predecessors Edgar Allan Poe and Ambrose Bears are always worth reading.

(37:46):
And some writers subsequent to Lovecraft have done some tremendous work.
I just mentioned Kitlin Kiernan. I think she is perhaps
the leading writer of weird fiction of her generation, a
tremendously talented writer, both in the short story and in
the novel. An older writer, although still working, is Ramsey Campbell,
the British writer who started writing Lovecraft pastiches in the

(38:07):
nineteen sixties but then evolved into a a really profound
writer of weird fiction, with volumes like Demons by Daylight
and Waking Nightmares. Uh, you can't go wrong by reading
anything of Campbell's he is always on the top of
his game. In terms of science fiction. What volumes might
our listeners seek out for the sort of less known

(38:28):
sci fi wonders? I've been interested in how lovecrav may
have influenced some later science fiction writers. That the evidence
is fairly scant, but some writers do come to mind. Uh.
Fritz Lieber, who who wrote science fiction, fantasy and horror,
did corresponded with Lovecraft for just about a year right

(38:49):
at the end of Lovecraft's life and and after that,
and he was clearly was was hugely influenced by That's
that that association UM and the fact he had its
later on that Lovecraft and Shakespeare were his two great
influences in terms of the development of his early writing. UH.
And and one of the first books that Libra published

(39:09):
was a short story collection called Knights Black Agents, which
has some great great stories in it, UH, several of
which were were significantly influenced by Lovecraft, but at the
same guy remained really original U contributions. The Libra then
wrote this uh short novel called Conjure Wife, which is

(39:29):
about witchcraft in the modern day, and that that bears
some Lovecraft influence. UH. Love Craft road a story called
The Dreams in the Witch House, which talks about a
witch who develops these uh scientific powers and possibly transports
herself into the fourth dimension. And I think Libra picked
up some clues from that. UH. There has been some

(39:52):
influence of Lovecraft, apparently on Arthur C. Clark and Philip K.
Dick UH. Some some recent scholarship has investigated that that
influence so that's all very interesting to me. Now for
listeners who are interested in checking out your own work,
what do you have coming out in the immediate future
that our readers and listeners might want to check out? Well? UM,

(40:14):
I was happy to compile a volume called American Supernatural
Tales back in two thousand seven for Playman Classics. This
is This was a an anthology of trying to give
a sense of the history of supernatural writing in this country,
starting with Washington, irving at the early nineteenth century, and
going all the way up to the present day. In fact,

(40:35):
I think Caitlin Kiernan was the last author I included,
but I certainly have writers like UH, Paul and Beers
and Robert W. Chambers and Lovecraft and UH, Mary Wilkins
Freeman and Edith Wharton, Henry James UH, and all the
way up to people like Ray Bradbury, Richard Matheson, UH

(40:56):
and a number of others. I think that was a
pretty good UH piece of and that that book, along
with UH, was one of the books that was reprinted
in a series that Penguin reprinted under the title under
the series title UH Penguin Horror, which had a long
introduction by Yamo del Toro, UH, and those books are

(41:17):
worth getting just for his introduction. Del Toro has a
tremendous feel for horror and a tremendous knowledge of the
whole range of horror fiction early and and recent. UM.
And he's written a very long introduction to that book
and the other books in that series. UM. I just
completed a history of supernatural fiction starting with Gilgameshin going

(41:41):
up to to today. That was that came out in
two volumes a year or two ago out of the
title Unutterable Horror UH, and it's going to come out
in paperback later this summer. I'm working on yet another
new edition of Lovecraft. I should explain that one of
the first things I did as a Lovecraft scholar back
when I was uh in my twenties actually, and even

(42:02):
even a little earlier than that, when I was at
Brown University as an undergraduate. At Brown University, UH, the
library wholes lovecrafts most of Lovecraft's papers and manuscripts. And
as I investigated those, I found that the standard editions
of Lovecraft stories as published by Arkham House uh and
and end in paperback, were full of errors, textual errors,

(42:24):
typographical errors, whatnot. And I spent years cleaning up those texts,
and I produced new editions of Lovecraft using corrective texts
in the nineteen eighties, and I've been sort of thinkering
with those editions ever since. But I'm going to build
a new edition now in which all the textual variants
are actually listed. That's what it's called a very Hormam edition.
And I think it's very interesting to see how Lovecraft

(42:45):
stories were sort of mangled by by magazines and book
publishers in the course of of their of their literary life.
So that's coming out in three volumes from a publisher
called Hippocampus Press, and I'm doing some interesting work for
a specially president Colorado called Centipede Press. I started what
it's called a Library a Weird Fiction, in which each

(43:06):
of these volumes are large collections of the best writings
of major horror writers like Blackwood, like mac and like
William Hope Hodge them a great British writer who's now
coming into his own UH and Lovecraft and po. I
believe those are the first volumes of that series, and
I can't do many more finds of that sort, and

(43:27):
that gives readers a comprehensive view of the major writings
of these of these coviews. So the reps of our
interview with St. Joe, She and UH. I definitely want
to check out that anthology because it's got that history
of supernatural writing. I mean, everybody from Po Chase Lovecraft,

(43:49):
of course, Edith Wharton, Henry James, Richard Matheson, also Joyce,
Carol Oates, and Caitlyn cren In. So if anybody's interested
in that, I think that would be that seems like
a really great place to start for a foundation in
sci fi and horror. Indeed, indeed, I know that after
the interview, I was adding some items to my to

(44:10):
my kindled list online, so that stuff that I I
haven't checked out yet that I really must. So I've
already taken some time to discuss my history with Lovecraft's
work and UH and some of the stories that I'm
particularly fond off. You have discussed your your initial immersion
into the world of HP Lovecraft. But here at the
House Stuff Works office, we have actually several co workers

(44:32):
who are really into Lovecrafts work, that have been really
inspired by it, and they're big fans. So we reached
out to a few of them to share their personal
favorite tales from lovecrafts Cannon, as well as some some
other thoughts on the man. So so let's hear from
some of our co workers. Hi. There, This is Josh Clark,

(44:56):
co host of the Stuffy Snow podcast and the Lovecraft
store that I picked is called The Case of Charles
dexter Ward. Not only is it my favorite Lovecraft story,
it may be my favorite work of all horror fiction
of all time. Back in Lovecraft Road a lengthy essay,
kind of a treatise on what horror is called supernatural

(45:19):
horror and literature, and in it he essentially chronicles what's
made us humans afraid, from the druids fertility rights to
Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, to the writers of his day like
Aldern in Blackwood, who, if you're not familiar with him,
will surely delight you when you settle down finally to
read one of his Haunted House stories. Perhaps because supernatural

(45:41):
horror and literature is so dense and even scholarly, I've
never done more than Skimmitt. By the way, the best
known line is the first sentence, the oldest and strongest
emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest
kind of fear is fear of the unknown. You can
put that on it shirt, you know. It's kind of

(46:01):
a funny thesis for Lovecraft in particular to have, because
if ever there was a writer who paid out in
his introduction just about everything you needed to know about
what's going to take place in the rest of the story,
it was Howard Phillips Lovecraft. He loved to tease his readers,
always in every work, giving away everything at the beginning.
And when you read him you get the sense almost

(46:23):
that he believes he still maintains control over the secret
information to follow. But you continue reading anyway, even though
you know what's coming. You generally know how things will
turn out, what eldritch cosmic horror will be at work,
whether it's gonna be Witchcraft, the old Ones, Cathulu, vampires,
fish people, or whatever, and usually who will die. And

(46:45):
yet Lovecraft is such a great author that he doesn't
need that mystery. He has imagination in the details, and
he makes you want to bathe in the tissue he
uses to fill in the skeleton he constructs in the
introduction of his stories. And this is the case Charles
Dexter Award. The reader has a pretty good idea of
what weird thing will befall the protagonist. Chapters before Lovecraft

(47:06):
reveals the horrible truth in his characteristic mounting flourish, and
even when the truth is finally revealed, the cosmic horrors
of the fairly pedestrian variety, at least as far as
Lovecraft goes. But still, The Case of Charles Dexter Award
sucks you into every one of its fifty one thousand
words and has it all. It's perhaps as close to

(47:27):
a made for film story as lovecrafts ever created, and
he is notoriously unfilmable, as is evidenced by most of
the attempts to adapt his stories into film proof. The
story has a gumshoe family, physician, historical investigation, a masked
mob of local tufts, simultaneous action scenes taking place as

(47:48):
the climax mounts. It has everything. I could go on,
of course, but I wouldn't want to give away too
much of the story. I just say, read the Case
of Charles Dexter Award and you will be entertained. Hi
am Holly Fry from stuff he missed in history class,
and I love Lovecraft. Uh. One of my very favorites

(48:12):
is The Color Out of Space and this was a
short story that Lovecraft wrote right after he finished The
Case of Charles Dexter Award, so this was in And
one of the things that really makes this singular, particularly
for the time, is that Lovecraft wanted to create an
alien uh entity in a book that was not humanoid

(48:34):
in form. They didn't look like humans. We don't understand them.
They are truly alien in every way. And the story
never you know, really uh conveys to the reader what
the goals or the intent of this extraterrestrial entity r
which makes it sort of really fascinating. And what really
ends up being portrayed is sort of how this rural

(48:55):
community deals with a completely incomprehensible thing that they just
they have no way to define what it is or
comprehend what it is. They're just sort of dealing with
it and fearful of it. And you know, it's told
in that layered form that he often uses, where there's
a narrator who is a professional who goes looking for

(49:16):
this story about this place which is in the in
Massachusetts outside of Arkham, and you know, he finds this
elderly gentleman who is the only one that knows the tale,
and so it's it's layered in terms of who is
telling the narrative, and it's just a really beautiful story
of sort of the creepiness of people learning to cope

(49:36):
with a thing that they have no tools to cope with.
And that is why I love it. So hey, there,
this is Jonathan Strickland with the Tech Stuff podcast. And
when I was approached late one Eldridge evening by a
gibbering blab of stuff that I couldn't identify nor would
my brain allow me to think on for more than

(49:56):
a second before going totally mad, I realized that needed
to talk about my favorite Lovecraft story, At the Mountains
of Madness. Now, I'm a big fan of Cthulhu in general,
and that character was introduced in the Call of Cthulhu
short story. We get to hear a little bit more
about Cathulho's followers in At the Mountains of Madness, and

(50:19):
it helps set up the elements that would become the
cornerstone of the Cthulhu mythos which a lot of writers
have built on over the years. This is stuff that
Lovecraft kind of established, but didn't really um flesh out
until other writers came along and added to it. So
some of the elements include the introduction of the elder Ones. Now,

(50:41):
Lovecraft was fascinated with this idea of ancient races that
came to Earth well before humans ever evolved, and they
ruled the planet for eons before we showed up. In
this case, the elder Ones are pretty much the oldest
of the versions that we get, because you've got ancient ones,
you have old ones, and then elder ones pretty easy

(51:03):
to to confuse. In this case, you actually get some
backstory about the fact that these elder Ones had conflicts
with other ancient entities, these Cthulhu spawn, because you have
this Antarctic expedition that uncovers evidence of a society of
these elder Ones, and they're higheroglyphs that tell the story

(51:24):
about their conflict with the Cathulho spawn, as well as
other elements that that show up in the Cthulhu mythos. So,
while the story itself is fascinating, what I really love
about it is that it became this jumping off point
for all these other authors to kind of add to
this mythology and expand it and you get lots of
references to classic Lovecraft elements, things like Miss Katonic University

(51:50):
and the Necronomicon and Cathulhu and shog Offs and all
of this kind of weird stuff that together has created
this rich mytholo g So if you have not read
At the Mountains of Madness, you should definitely check that out. Also,
keep your fingers crossed, because Guillermo del Toro has been

(52:10):
trying to make a movie version based off this novella
for years. From why I understand, he's going to make
one more attempt because all of his tries previously have
fallen short, and he he really wants to make this,
so he wants to make one more try in making it,
and if that happens, we're gonna have some pretty mind
bending stuff to watch. So I'm holding out hope you

(52:32):
should too. Hi. I'm Christian Seger. I write and host
shows like brain Stuff and Stuff of Genius here at
How Stuff Works, and I also write comic books in
the horror genre. And one thing that people like to
talk about in horror, especially supernatural horror, is that they
categorize it into three areas. Stephen King in particular, does
this in his book Don's macab about how horror literature

(52:54):
is written, and you see it in a lot of
literary criticism as well. And the idea is that these
three areas can be narrowed down to the vampire, the
thing without a name, which is often Frankenstein, or the werewolf.
But when literal a criticism like this talks about horror,
it often leaves out HP Lovecraft's great contribution, which is

(53:14):
cosmic horror, which does not fall into any of these
three categories. Basically, the idea is that we as human
beings like to think of ourselves as important. We like
to think that we're at the top of the food chain,
but maybe we're not. Maybe there's something out there that's
bigger than us and we're insignificant. So I'm going to
talk about the Lovecraft story The Shadow out of Time,

(53:36):
and I'm going to talk about it in conjunction with
this really interesting book about HP Lovecraft called Lovecraft Against
the World, Against Life, and it's by Michelle Wellbeck, who
is like a French postmodern author. Briefly, I'm gonna summarize
the Shout out of Time. Uh. In it, a man
forgets everything that's happened to him for the last five years,

(53:57):
and during that time he seems to have been possessed
by some kind of consciousness that isn't his own. This
consciousness seems to be seeking out occult knowledge the entire
time that it's in possession of his body. And when
he regains his identity, he starts dreaming about these weird,
intelligent creatures that live in these giant underground cities that
have been collecting knowledge across space and time basically forever.

(54:20):
He locates one of these cities, he actually finds it
beneath Australia, and he finds evidence that, first of all,
that he was possessed by one of these creatures from
across time, and second that the creatures that lived there
themselves were actually killed off by another, even more powerful
and terrifying species of monster. And these later monsters he

(54:41):
discovers are still alive somewhere beneath the earth. So that's
the basic gist of the Shadow out of Time. The
things that are really interesting about it thematically that tie
into cosmic horror, the idea that your mind and your
body are not your own, and that they have been displaced,
you know, across time and space. Uh. Then the creatures

(55:01):
that do this, they're called Gythians in the story. Whatever
killed them is still here, even they are not fully
invulnerable to you know, the horrors of the universe. Uh.
And if we're nothing to them, then how insignificant would
we be to their enemies. The human race basically disappears
at the end of this story, the ideas that they

(55:23):
will be destroyed and Earth will you know, be home
to a new set of monsters. Well Beck looks into
this and he says, if other beings existed, we would
be like rabbits to them. He actually says, like we
would basically be either food or even worse, they would
kill us simply for fun, the same way that we

(55:43):
do for small animals. Possibly the best case scenario is
that they would dissect us. Here's a quote from The
Shadow out of Time that I think really ties into
the cosmic horror thing. Man must be prepared to accept
notions of the cosmos and of his own place in
the seething vortex of time whose merest mention is paralyzing. Now.

(56:06):
Welbeck looks at this and he says, Lovecraft's whole thing
is that everything disappears. Humans are basically as important as
the elementary particles of the universe. Everything is essentially just electrons,
even these monstrous entities that travel through time and space
and are able to mess with this one man's life
so importantly. Um it's their discovery that, you know, his

(56:29):
discovery really that he has no power to affect any
change in the vast, huge, incomprehensible universe all around him,
and that in itself can be way more terrifying than
a vampire or werewolf or Frankenstein. In the shadow of Time,
there's constant reference to this vast library of knowledge that

(56:49):
the Athians have. It's far beyond anything we as human
beings could comprehend. And the narrator actually like remembers through
dreams and nightmares this vast knowledge that he was able
to tap into while he was possessed. And what's interesting
about this is it also ties into the cosmic horror
thing and that it looks at human beings as being
particularly insignificant in the larger scheme of intergalactic existence. Perhaps

(57:14):
we're just a small species that's projecting our own, you know,
mental identity onto the universe. But really we're just susceptible
to being wiped out at any moment. Well Beck looks
at this as well, and he says that HP Lovecraft
hated realism. For Lovecraft, the real world was too much,
and well Back even goes so far as to say
that for most of us that read any fiction at all,

(57:37):
we do not love life. He says that there's a
comfort to reading Lovecraft if you're sick of the real world,
if you're sick of life. And I think that that's
really interesting. I don't know if I'd go that far,
but it's kind of fascinating. There's something beautifully is zen
about this idea too, that that the world is too
much for us, so we turned to this uh fantastic

(57:57):
horror that's created in order to sort of balance ourselves
again our placed in the universe. And there's a letter
to Bell map Long that HP Lovecraft wrote, and Wellbeck
actually got to take a look at it, and in
it he wrote too Long. He said, I do not
think any realism is beautiful. So it's pretty well confirmed
that he was not into the real world at all.

(58:18):
He wasn't into materialism. He was he lived his life
through his stories. Uh so, yeah, that's the gist of it.
The Shadow of Time, I think is a great look
at the importance of how Lovecraft uses cosmic horror to
show human insignificance in the genre. Uh, and that supernatural

(58:38):
horror isn't just those three genres. Those are great genres
and and we've gotten lots of stories and films out
of them. But Lovecraft has really made a great contribution
to the genre by you know, creating this whole well
of stories. And there was an entire group of writers
that worked with Lovecraft, and even after he passed away,
ended up writing stories within his own mythos to keep

(59:01):
this theme going. So we may like to think of
ourselves as important, we may like to think of ourselves
as being at the top of the food chain, but
stop and think about it for not what if we
weren't all right? So there you have some some good
stuff there, some some solid recommendations from our fellow how

(59:21):
stuff workers. And thanks again to St. Jo She for
taking the time to speak with us. And if you
guys are interested in finding out more about his works
and his writings, you can go to St joe She
dot org. Indeed, and then you know, you can also
always just go to Amazon throwing St. Jo she and
you can see all the various works that he's he's
been involved in, either as an editor or just stuff

(59:42):
supplying a very informative introduction. So there you have it,
HP Lovecraft, the science writer as well as the horror
and science fiction writer. UM. I thought it was pretty fascinating.
Uh and thanks well, thanks Doulie for letting me explore
this in an episode. Thank you for the immersion. I
don't really I'm really excited. This is definitely what in

(01:00:04):
my appetite for our summer reading. Um. And that's gonna
be coming up in a future episode in which we
will recommend some books and we'll have some other staff
recommendations as well. That's right as a summer tradition, so
look for that in the weeks ahead. In the meantime,
if you want to check out more of our content,
be sure to visit stuff to Blow your Mind dot com.
As always, that is the mothership. That is where you'll

(01:00:25):
find all of our blog posts, all of our videos,
all of our all of our episodes, everything that we do. Uh.
And there if you do a search for Lovecraft in
the search bar, you'll find a various blog post that
I've written over the years that at least slightly involve
the man in his work. Um, check us out on
social media. We're on Facebook, Twitter, and Tumbler, and uh,

(01:00:47):
you know, there's an old fashioned way of getting in
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