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| H.P. Lovecraft |
As a young man H. P. Lovecraft would have
thrilled to the sword-and-planet adventures of John Carter in Under the Moons of Mars (1912), and the
intimation of ancient alien presences on Earth in A. Merritt’s The Moon-Pool (1918); but by the time he
was writing his own adult material he had largely turned to fantasy—but it was
the fantasy of the pre-Atomic age. E. E. “Doc” Smith’s Lensmen policed the
galaxy in the pages of Amazing Stories,
Robert E. Howard’s Hyborian Age city of Xuthal was lit by radium lamps, Leigh
Brackett imagined a solar system full of habitable planets, C. L. Moore’s
Northwest Smith was an outlaw on many planets with ray-gun in hand, Clark
Ashton Smith’s last survivors of Atlantis and Hyperborea journey to far
Sfanomoë (Venus) and Cykranosh (Saturn), and Lovecraft’s monsters were not the
typical witches and vampires, but stranger, alien entities.
A
keen amateur astronomer, Lovecraft largely eschewed the dynamics that made
space opera feasible. In his 1935 essay “Some Notes on Interplanetary Fiction”
he railed:
A good
interplanetary story must have realistic human characters; not the stock
scientists, villainous assistants, invincible heroes, and lovely
scientist’s-daughter heroines of the usual trash of this sort. Indeed, there is
no reason why there should be any “villain”, “hero”, or “heroine” at all. These
artificial character-types belong wholly to artificial plot-forms, and have no
place in serious fiction of any kind. The function of the story is to express a
certain human mood of wonder and liberation, and any tawdry dragging-in of
dime-novel theatricalism is both out of place and injurious. No stock romance
is wanted. We must select only such characters (not necessarily stalwart or
dashing or youthful or beautiful or picturesque characters) as would naturally
be involved in the events to be depicted, and they must behave exactly as real
persons would behave if confronted with the given marvels. The tone of the
whole thing must be realism, not romance. [...] Hoary stock devices connected
with the reception of the voyagers by the planet’s inhabitants ought to be
ruled rigidly out. Thus we should have no overfacile language-learning; no
telepathic communication; no worship of the travellers as deities; no
participation in the affairs of pseudohuman kingdoms, or in conventional wars
between factions of inhabitants; no weddings with beautiful anthropomorphic
princesses; no stereotyped Armageddons with ray-guns and space-ships; no court
intrigues and jealous magicians; no peril from hairy ape-men of the polar caps;
and so on, and so on. [...] It is not necessary that the alien planet be
inhabited—or inhabited at the period of the voyage—at all. If it is, the
denizens must be definitely non-human in aspect, mentality, emotions, and
nomenclature, unless they are assumed to be descendants of a prehistoric
colonising expedition from our earth. The human-like aspect, psychology, and
proper names commonly attributed to other-planetarians by the bulk of cheap
authors is at once hilarious and pathetic. Another absurd habit of conventional
hacks is having the major denizens of other planets always more advanced
scientifically and mechanically than ourselves; always indulging in spectacular
rites against a background of cubistic temples and palaces, and always menaced
by some monstrous and dramatic peril. This kind of pap should be replaced by an
adult realism, with the races of other-planetarians represented, according to
the artistic demands of each separate case, as in every stage of
development—sometimes high, sometimes low, and sometimes unpicturesquely
middling. Royal and religious pageantry should not be conventionally overemphasised;
indeed, it is not at all likely that more than a fraction of the exotic races
would have lit upon the especial folk-customs of royalty and religion. It must
be remembered that non-human beings would be wholly apart from human motives
and perspectives.
In his own fiction, Lovecraft largely kept to
these principles, the main exception being “In the Walls of Eryx” (1936),
written in collaboration with Kenneth Sterling and published after Lovecraft’s
death. In his own fiction, Lovecraft allowed horrors from the stars to come to
Earth—most notably Cthulhu in “The Call of Cthulhu” (1926), “The Colour Out of
Space” (1927), the Mi-Go in “The
Whisperer in Darkness” (1930), the K’n-Yans of “The Mound” (1930), the Elder
Things in At the Mountains of Madness (1931),
and the Yithians in The Shadow Out of
Time (1935), with passing references in other tales; he also touched on
interplanetary fiction in “Through the Gates of the Silver Key” (1932) with E.
Hoffmann Price and in his part of the round-robin “The Challenge from Beyond”
(1935).
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| Clark Ashton Smith |
Lovecraft’s
friends and compatriots had no such qualms, and followed their own muse. Clark
Ashton Smith set stories on Mars, Venus, and Saturn, blending cosmic horror
with space opera. Robert E. Howard occasionally dropped Lovecraftian monsters
from “the Outer Dark” into his Hyborian Age setting for Conan to face, and
wrote the sword-and-planet novel Almuric,
published after his death. C. L. Moore, who was part of the Lovecraft circle
and major contributor to Weird Tales from
1933-1937, was not a direct contributor to the Mythos, but her space opera
outlaw Northwest Smith faced monsters no less Lovecraftian for their lack of
direct ties to the Cthulhu mythology.
In
the decades since then, many writers have expanded on the creations of
Lovecraft and his friends, taking them into every conceivable setting—including
space—such as Richard A. Lupoff’s classic “The Discovery of the Ghooric Zone”
(1977). In the late 80s a short-lived magazine focused on tales of
scientifiction called Astro-Adventures (1987-1989),
which included tales both old and new worth seeking out and reading. The best
of the new tales might be Elizabeth Bear & Sarah Monette’s Boojumverse
(“Boojum,” “Mongoose,” and “The Wreck of the Charles Dexter Ward”) full of space pirates and living ships which
are fantastic.
Lovecraft
himself never gave a single, consistent approach to the Mythos he created—nor
did he require his friends and co-creators to adapt themselves to his
philosophies of writing. The Mythos of his stories takes place in a dark and
strange cosmos, where beings from distant stars and planets had visited Earth
in the distant past...and some of them still survived, or their relics at
least. The different approaches that the creators of the Mythos took, the occasional
contradictions and fans’ efforts to reconcile disparate representations of the
Mythos and its relationship to space, are all part of the fun of the setting.
Mythology need not be consistent, and it need not all be true...lies,
distortions, omissions, and forgotten truths underlay the mythology of Cthulhu
and Hastur, Shub-Niggurath and Tsathoggua. It is up to the readers to decide
where exactly is the cold planetoid Yuggoth from whence the Mi-Go come, or
whether Mars and Venus ever bore life and were habitable by human beings.
In
the decades before humanity split the atom, they looked up at the stars at
night and dreamed of walking on other planets—not knowing what they would find
there. There was a sense of limitless possibilities, with their feet upon the
dusty earth, and their imaginations flying through Venusian skies, disturbing
the dust in some million-year-old ruin on Mars. It was an age when solar
empires were planned out with pencil and paper, and realized on typewriters.
Much of it never happened, and what did happen not the way they thought it
would—but it’s a fun dream to visit sometimes.
Suggested Reading
Elizabeth Bear &
Sarah Monette: “Boojum,” “Mongoose,” “The Wreck of the Charles Dexter Ward”
Ramsey Campbell: “The
Insects from Shaggai,” “The Mine on Yuggoth”
Robert E. Howard: Almuric, “The Vale of Lost Women,” “Xuthal of the Dusk”
H. P. Lovecraft: At the Mountains of Madness, “The Call
of Cthulhu,” “The Colour Out of Space,” The
Shadow Out of Time, “The Whisperer in Darkness”
H. P. Lovecraft & Hazel Heald: “The Horror
in the Museum,” “Out of the Aeons”
H. P. Lovecraft & Zealia Brown Reed
Bishop: “The Mound”
H. P. Lovecraft & E. Hoffmann Price:
“Through the Gates of the Silver Key”
H. P. Lovecraft & Kenneth Sterling: “In
the Walls of Eryx”
Richard Lupoff: “The
Discovery of the Ghooric Zone,” “Documents in the Case of Elizabeth Akeley”
C. L. Moore: All of
the Northwest Smith stories, but especially “Shambleau,” “Julhi,” “Yvala,”
“The Cold Grey God,” and “Lost Paradise.”
C. L. Moore, A.
Merritt, H. P. Lovecraft, Robert E. Howard, & Frank Belknap Long:
“The Challenge from Beyond”
Clark Ashton Smith:
“A Voyage to Sfanomoë,” “The City of the Singing Flame,” “The Demon of the
Flower,” “The Door to Saturn,” “The Dweller in the Gulf,” “The Immortals of
Mercury,” “Master of the Asteroid,” “Mnemoka,” “The Plutonian Drug,” “Seedling
of Mars,” “The Vaults of Yoh-Vombis,” “Vulthoom”
E. E. Smith: The
Lensman series, especially the core four novels (First Lensman, Galactic Patrol, Grey Lensman, Second Stage Lensman)
Bobby Derie’s latest work is Space Madness!, a
roleplaying game of adventure & horror in an atompunk future inspired by
the works of H. P. Lovecraft, Clark Ashton Smith, & other Mythos writers.
