Fantastic Stories of the Imagination #220. Adam-Troy Castro
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damage. This one gives you the exact opposite, and it’s so charming and unexpected in context that attempting any analysis of it would make it collapse like a soap bubble. It’s a movie that could only exist inside itself, and it excuses the slightness of its story and its deliberately anti-climactic conclusion by getting by on charm. It also helps that it has at its center one Louise Bourgoin, who is adored by the camera. The pleasures are slight, but they are undeniable.
Finally, because it has its own sense of strangeness even if it isn't, strictly speaking, science fiction or fantasy, check out the Korean charmer Castaway on the Moon (2014), which contrives to strand its protagonist on a deserted island — in the middle of a major modern city, from which he cannot avoid seeing skyscrapers whenever he looks up. It is a treasure indeed, and should keep you going until we meet again next month.
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In The Magic Lantern, multiple Hugo and Nebula nominee Adam-Troy Castro reviews and reveals under-appreciated films worth talking about. This column will alternate with The Remake Chronicles, in which A-TC examines the stories that movies keep returning to.
Roots of Spec Fic: The Greater Evil of H.P. Lovecraft by Jay O'Connell
I have this t-shirt, pictured below, which says “Hey Cthul-Aid,” with this colorful squid-pitcher thing busting through a wall yelling, “R’Lyeehh!”
People love it.
They stop me on the street and say, Hey! Cool shirt! I’m guessing maybe one in ten of them have read a single word written by H.P. Lovecraft.
I’m fiftyish. I could bore you about rotary dial telephones and three channels of TV and walking miles to the comic book store, about 2001 in cinemascope and my wondering what my job would be when I worked on the moon… I won’t, but you need that background for what’s to follow.
I found myself recently in a Facebook discussion on former Weird Tales editor Darrel Schwietzer’s wall, where people were discussing the rise and fall of deceased grand masters, mostly Heinlein, because of the recent biography, and it emerged that pretty much anything with Lovecraft’s name on it has held its collector value.
While Heinlein’s star is gently eclipsed, his doorstop-thick, overly-sexual novels now eyed with disdain by many, H.P Lovecraft, the far less prolific, far more sexist, racist and generally phobic, remains even more fixedly glued into the genre firmament.
Odd, no? His bust, sculpted by Gahan Wilson, is the World Fantasy Award. (Though this has become controversial. You can see the petition to change the award to a bust of Octavia Butler here.)
Early fandom is passing into memory, my father’s generation who read the pulps in their teens or twenties, the first to buy hardcover and softcover SF, and with them fades the generation who have read The Book that is our genre cover to cover. Our genre is about a century old, and people rarely last longer than a century. Of course folk tales are older than the written word, but when I say genre, I mean that thing we point at when we say it: SF, fantasy, and horror with supernatural elements, with a coherent, systematic core of internal logic.
When we overhear the two Orc guards in the Lord of the Rings referring to each not by name, but by number, we understand that from Tolkien on, Fantasy quivers in the shadow of a mechanized, rationalized post-Enlightenment world. You can run from modernity but you can’t hide.
Of course, you can try — which brings us back to Howard Phillips Lovecraft.
Lovecraft is a bridge between many worlds. His work blends fantasy, science fiction, and horror. Unlike Tolkien or Dunsany, he tips his hat to the primacy of science, but instead of looking forward to Disney’s World of Tomorrow, of lawful Asimovian robots and the heady joys of Galactic Empire, he cowers before the Horrible Truth of Cosmicism.
The Horrible Truth in UFO conspiracy theory resembles Lovecraft: humanity is a transitory speck awash in a vast, violent cosmic sea. Our science is on the verge, always, of revealing to us just how tiny and pathetic we are, and how easily and quickly we will be swept away, should something important wake up and take notice. In the Horrible Truth, the bad news isn’t that there is no God — there are Gods… but they are monsters.
Naturally, this message is immensely popular, and is the basis of endless books, films, role playing games, video games, card games, and t-shirts. What? Say that again? How the hell did that happen?
Cosmicism opposes a religious world view which puts mankind at the center of a sane creation, and, also, repudiates any secular vision of humanity’s ascendants in a rational universe. Regardless of what you think of HPLs prose or politics, the notion that this vision could be compressed into the solid bedrock of so much of popular culture stands as incontrovertible testimony to the man’s peculiar genius.
H.P. Lovecraft gets into your head, and he never leaves.
We live surrounded by a generational echo of HPL, his works reflected through the creations of those who grew up on him, but he still resonates, whistling and vibrating like an extra-dimensional squid god in the universe just next door. More often than not, when we feel a thrill of cosmic fear, whether from a book, movie, comic, or video game, Howard Phillips stands in the shadows, just off stage, nodding his big, gaunt head at us.
Every giant, tentacled monstrosity you have ever seen, that threatened, somehow, everything; that was worshipped by some preposterous sect seeking to help bring it back to life, is an homage to Lovecraft. From the TV show Buffy the Vampire Slayer to the video game Borderlands.
His work spawned what came to be known as the Cthulu Mythos, one of genre fiction’s first shared worlds, with story elements shared by a group of writers including Clark Ashton Smith, Robert E. Howard of Conan the Barbarian fame, Robert Bloch, Frank Belknap Long, Henry Kuttner, and Fritz Lieber.
Nobody but Edgar Rice Burroughs wrote Barsoom novels. Nobody wrote sequels to the work of Edgar Allen Poe. The Mythos was a shared world a generation before Asimov franchised the Foundation and Larry Niven rented out the Ringworld; decades and decades before Dune begat it’s never ending series of ever-attenuating prequels. (Oz predates the Mythos, but that’s a story for a different time.)
Somehow, Lovecraft’s world, or more accurately his worldview, was shared by a generation of horror writers. The Mythos was never a static pantheon of Gods or a set or rules — it was a state of mind. His fictive book within a book, the dread Necronomicon, apocryphal tome of forbidden secrets, is the most famous book never written. People believe in the mythos, and the Necronomicon, like they believe in the Rapture or compassionate conservatism. Lovecraft had to remind his fans that it was all make-believe.
Unlike L.Ron Hubbard of Scientology, or Ray Palmer of the Shaver Mystery, Lovecraft never embraced solipsistic narcissism