In our reality, H.P. Lovecraft died on March 15, 1937 at the age of 46. While it would be a stretch to say that he died "young," he certainly died younger than most men of his era. For example, Clark Ashton Smith, who was born less than three years after Lovecraft, died in 1961 at the age of 68. With a better diet and better access to medical care, it's not at all improbable to imagine HPL living into his 60s or even 70s – long enough for him to see World War II, the end of the Great Depression, and the monumental technological and social changes of the ensuing decades. If he had lived, what might Lovecraft have written and what impact might it have had?
I have no answers of my own to this question, but, back in 1978, at the 38th World Science Fiction Convention in Phoenix, Arizona, several notable science fiction and fantasy writers and commentators held a panel on the very topic. Led by Dirk W. Mosig, the panel also included Donald R. Burleson, J. Vernon Shea, Fritz Leiber, and S.T. Joshi. If you're interested and have the time, you can listen to the panel, which consists of six half-hour audio files.
Average male lifespan in 1937 in the USA is estimated at 61.2 years. Considering that the figure is dragged down considerably by the much higher infant mortality rates of the era and folks who lived to adulthood could easily expect to see 70+ years, he died very early.
ReplyDeleteInteresting as speculating on HPL is, I'm still more fascinated by the idea of REH's suicide having been prevented and what course his life would have taken if he'd survived to (and through) WW2. He could reasonably have lived well into the 1970s himself, long enough to have written a much larger and even more varied body of work. REH was over fifteen years younger than HPL and had a correspondingly longer potential career ahead of him, although he'd have had to make it past the death of the pulps and into more traditional publishing by the later parts of it.
One interesting possibility for both of them is a stint writing for comics, which were still pretty much kiddie stuff when they died. Not hard to imagine them penning stories for EC Comics if they'd survived just a little longer, as well as early Marvel and DC. I can't see HPL doing superheroes, but there were plenty of horror and weird fantasy/scifi titles until well into the 50s (when the Comics Code upset the whole industry). REH would have been even more suited to the field, given his varied interests and proven ability to write Westerns, horror, weird fantasy - and post-WW2, most likely war comics and maybe crime noir and "exotic locale" adventures. A lot of their pulp era peers dabbled in comics to some degree, and a few became giants in the industry, eg the legendary Gardner Fox. Both REH and HPL just died a little too early to see that whole industry open up.
According to a 1939-1941 actuarial table I found after a second of googling, a white man of Lovecraft's age had an average future lifespan of a bit over 30 years. He would have had a decent chance of seeing the first moon landing.
DeleteREH most certainly would have transitioned fairly easily to television. "Pigeons from Hell" was an episode of Thriller in 1961. I could very easily have seen Solomon Kane being adapted for early television. In 1938, the earliest television broadcast of science fiction, R.U.R. (basically about Blade Runner-style Replicants attempting to prove their humanity), was produced for B.B.C.
DeleteIn 1949, horror television like Lights Out and Boris Karloff's show would have been able to adapt the atmospheric action of Solomon Kane, but for higher budget more SFX stories like Conan or Kull, it probably would have taken a year or two to have the Quatermass-kind of stuff of the early 50s. Still, Howard would have been well suited - had he lived - to cash in on the new media, especially considering the popularity and ubiquity of his work in Avon Fantasy during WWII, which led to his hardback collections in the 1950s.
More importantly, Howard had cache and popularity that Lovecraft did not. He was a professional writer, widely published, who had estate/copyright shennanigans immediately following his death. (Basically he willed everything to his friend who lent him the gun used to kill himself, but his dad found the will and tore it up, and had to go through a year of wrangling to take possession of Robert's estate. Lovecraft, died with nothing of value to attract the vultures. Derleth, on the other hand, while self-serving to a degree, was very much a labor of love(craft), certainly not a get-rich-quick scheme.)
The nature of "The Shadow out of Time" leads me to believe that Lovecraft would have moved ever farther away from "horror" and ever deeper into "science fiction". The demythologization of the Mythos began in "At the Mountains of Madness" and I think would have continued apace.
ReplyDeleteI haven't listened yet, but an idea came to mind: what sort of influence would have the UFO phenomenon along with other paranormal activity/events would have made on HPL? It's interesting to think how HPL would have reacted to the Project Bluebook investigations.
ReplyDeleteHe would have been the one to create the x-files.
DeleteJim Hodges---
ReplyDeleteI've spent years trying to decide what Lovecraft would have thought of Star Trek. Anyone have an opinion?
He would definitely have written Robert Bloch with his thoughts on "What Are Little Girls Made Of?" and "Catspaw", which Bloch wrote cosmic horror into.
DeleteMy guess is he'd say something like:
Delete"Despite the current flood of shows dealing with other worlds and universes, and with intrepid flights to and from them through cosmic space, it is probably no exaggeration to say that not more than a half-dozen of these things, including the shows of Gene Roddenberry, have even the slightest shadow of a claim to artistic seriousness or literary rank. Insincerity, conventionality, triteness, artificiality, false emotion, and puerile extravagance reign triumphant throughout this overcrowded genre, so that none but its rarest products can possibly claim a truly adult status.
The present commentator does not believe that the idea of space-travel and other worlds is inherently unsuited to literary use. It is, rather, his opinion that the omnipresent cheapening and misuse of that idea is the result of a widespread misconception; a misconception which extends to other departments of weird and science fiction as well.
Inconceivable events and conditions form a class apart from all other story elements, and cannot be made convincing by any mere process of casual narration. They have the handicap of incredibility to overcome; and this can be accomplished only through a careful realism in every other phase of the story, plus a gradual atmospheric or emotional building-up of the utmost subtlety.
The emphasis, too, must be kept right—hovering always over the wonder of the central abnormality itself. It must be remembered that any violation of what we know as natural law is in itself a far more tremendous thing than any other event or feeling which could possibly affect a human being. Therefore in a story dealing with such a thing we cannot expect to create any sense of life or illusion of reality if we treat the wonder casually and have the characters moving about under ordinary motivations. The characters, though they must be natural, should be subordinated to the central marvel around which they are grouped. The true “hero” of a marvel tale is not any human being, but simply a set of phenomena.
Atmosphere, not action, is the thing to cultivate in the wonder story.
The events of an interplanetary story—aside from such tales as involve sheer poetic fantasy—are best laid in the present, or represented as having occurred secretly or prehistorically in the past. The future is a ticklish period to deal with; since it is virtually impossible to escape grotesqueness and absurdity in depicting its mode of life, while there is always an immense emotional loss in representing characters as familiar with the marvels depicted."
As a matter of fact, he did say much more about this in his pre-critique of Star Trek (other than the Gene Roddenberry addition of mine, which replaced H.G. Wells from the original), appeared in his beautiful essay:
"Some Notes on Interplanetary Fiction."
In short, HPL would have loathed Star Trek. Star Wars would have fared better, as it is set in a prehistoric past, but even so was a too familiar with the atmosphere to be "adult".
"The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the light into the peace and safety of a new dark age."
ReplyDeleteHe would have been very upset about the progress made in the area of civil rights
ReplyDeleteOr, maybe feel completely vindicated by it
DeleteHe definitely would be wearing the silly red hats.
DeleteThat dude would have been driven more insane by eugenic "weak strains" (he kind of "was one" himself, ironically), more red terror, nuclear paranoia (this would have been huge, I think), neo-Romantic beatnik's in the 50s giving way to 60s counter-culture (more "scum" dirtying up "culture"), etc, etc.
ReplyDeleteLovecraft, like many of the classic fiction writers, was a turbo authoritarian. He wrote some interesting fiction in terms of literary/philosophical concepts...
But I just don't buy the "product of his time" line of bull crap people use as an excuse. He chose his biases willingly with a ton of academic literature, media and historical events (and even being friends like James Morton as a force of countering ideas).
I think over time as Scientism and modernity's "demystifying" project carried forward it would have been harder for him to find a similar breadth of veiled, allusive, noumenal topics in his speculative horror. And without a doubt he would have became more reactionary.
Please. By the end of his life he was a Socialist - New Dealer. He hadn't been reactionary for a decade. Please get your timeline straight. You may just as well accuse Joe Biden today of being anti-abortion because he questioned the practice in the 1970s.
DeleteIt is one thing to predict a man's future by his trajectory towards death. It is folly to predict a man's future by his trajectory towards birth.
I always saw Lovecraft as a prototype of the modern opinionated Nerd/Geek.
ReplyDeleteI personally do not buy the "product of his times" line: people hold a series of different beliefs for different reasons in different ages.
And I agree with the line of thought that sees him as becoming even more reactionary as time passed.
Somehow, however, I don't think he would have become a Conspiracy Theorist (my mind on this has changed over time, a few years ago I thought he would have fallen for stuff like that).
As for how his fiction would have changed, Geoffrey said he could have moved more towards a harder Science Fiction approach and that sounds believable with what I know about him.
I think he would have thoroughly hated most of the New Wave SF and Cyberpunk.
Lovecraft, even in his own timescoping perspective, anticipated that he would live to see 1960:
ReplyDelete"My first acute realisation of time was when I saw newspapers bearing the heavily-inked date-line TUESDAY, JANUARY 1, 1895. 1895!! To me the symbol 1894 had represented an eternity—the eternity of the present as distinguished from, such things as 1066 or 1492 or 1642 or 1776—& the idea of personally outliving that eternity was absorbingly impressive to me, even though I fully realised, in an abstract way, that I would do so . . . that I had been born in 1890 & would probably (in view of the average death-ages of near kinsfolk) live till about 1960. I shall never forget the sensation of moving through time (if forward, why not backward?) which that ’95 date-line gave me."