A story by H.P. Lovecraft appeared twice in the pages of Astounding Stories, the first of which was At the Mountains of Madness, serialized over three consecutive issues (February–April 1936). Later that same year, in June, another HPL story appeared, "The Shadow Out of Time," which is, in some ways, a thematic sequel to At the Mountains of Madness. (They both feature Professor William Dyer of Miskatonic University, for example).
Like its predecessor, "The Shadow Out of Time" was published with multiple illustrations, several of which are quite worthy of examination, like the one that appears opposite the first page of the story. Here, you can see two examples of the Great Race.
The next two illustrations depict several non-human species Professor Peaslee presumably encounters while a guest of the Great Race. Take note of the creature in the middle, which is similar, though not identical, to the artwork of the Old Ones (Elder Things) that had appeared in previous issues.
Here, we see the Great Race again. I find the fact that, despite their advanced technology, they still use books – and ones suitably large for their size. To be clear, this is a detail that Lovecraft himself includes in the story, so it's not an embellishment of the artist. That doesn't make it any less silly, though.
Excellent. There is a unique character and romanticism to old school art, which we have lost in the intervening decades. The advent of bloody awful AI art threatens to destroy that sense of wonder completely. The horror is in what is 'not' in the drawing or artowrk. Overly horrific modern AI interpretations simply diminish the imagined horror. More please :)
ReplyDeleteYou will get no arguments from me on this. I'd go so far as to say that I dislike any kind of digital artwork, even when drawn by a human being.
DeleteIt’s been decades since I read this: am I misremembering but wasn’t the narrator in the body of a member of the Great Race, except in the end illustration when the only other nonhumans present would have been the flying polyps (offscreen). The aliens look nicely alien, though they too should have been in the bodies of the Great Race, no? Still, nice art and thanks for sharing.
ReplyDeleteNow, are you saying that you don’t use books? What looks silly to me are the dials and clocks dotting the first illo.
And also, who was the artist?
Will Murray, in “The Shadow out of Time” and Time-Defiance, uncovered some fascinating backstory.
ReplyDeleteIn a letter to Derleth (November 1930) HPL wrote:
"“Time, space, and natural law hold for me suggestions of intolerable bondage, and I can form no picture of emotional satisfaction which does not involve their defeat—especially the defeat of time, so that one may merge oneself with the whole historic stream and be wholly emancipated from the transient and the ephemeral.”
On the Halloween prior, Smith had written Lovecraft:
"By the way, your “Whisperer” suggested an idea which you might develop to more advantage than I could. Why not write a tale about some extraplanetary being who has undergone (either at the hands of his own kind, or of some human plastic surgeon) a facial transformation which enables him to pass as a human. His body, of course, would be ‘teratologically fabulous’ beneath his clothing; and there would be all sorts of disquieting suggestions about his personality. I think you could work this up to perfection if the idea appeals to you."
Lovecraft gave the grain of the story back to Smith in response to Smith's separate notion of a time-travelling story:
"Your idea for a time-voyaging machine is ideal—for in spite of Wells, no really satisfactory thing of the sort has ever been written. The weakness of most tales with this theme is that they do not provide for the recording, in history, of those inexplicable events in the past which were caused by the backward time-voyagings of the persons of the present & future."
He then provided Ashton with the structure he could use:
"It must be remembered that if a man of 1930 travels back to B.C. 400, the strange phenomenon of his appearance actually occurred in B.C. 400, & must have excited notice wherever it took place. Of course, the way to get around this is to have the voyager conceal himself when he reaches the past, conscious of what an abnormality he must seem. Or rather, he ought simply to conceal his identity—hiding the evidences of his ‘futurity’ & mingling with the ancient as best he can on their own plane. It would be excellent to have him know to some extent of his past appearance before making the voyage. Let him, for example, encounter some private document of the past in which a record of the advent of a mysterious stranger--unmistakably himself—is made. This might be the provocation for his voyage—that is, the conscious provocation. One baffling thing that could be introduced is to have a modern man discover, among documents exhumed from some prehistoric buried city, a mouldering papyrus of parchment written in English, & in his own handwriting, which tells a strange tale & awakes—amidst a general haze of amazement, horror, & half-incredulity—a faint, far-off sense of familiarity which becomes more & more beckoning & challenging as the strings of semi-memory continue to vibrate. Re-reading awakes still more memories, till finally a definite course of action seems inevitable—& so on & so on. This idea has lain dormant in my commonplace-book for ages; & if you can find a use for it, you’re certainly welcome to it. I might never develop it in years."
Smith fully intended to develop this, but basically got too busy, kicking it back to HPL, and he only developed his original time-vault story instead.
Lovecraft didn't start on the story for another 4 years or so, and then, rewrote it entirely once he completed it, then when he finished was so unsatisfied with it that he nearly destroyed it.
ReplyDeleteIn fact, he admitted to Derleth upon completion of it that " And then again, it is possible that I have wholly lost the knack of fictional formulation, & ought to cease altogether from attempting stories. . . . this is the only thing since “The Thing on the Doorstep” which I have not destroyed."
He sent the notebook manuscript to Derleth (with the PS " Don’t try to wade through if it seems too utterly repellent—either chirographically or literarily. I am utterly sick of it—the very sight of it turns my stomach!"), who couldn't finish it in time due to the length of the story and the unusually bad chirography (possibly due to Lovecraft's anxious writing combined with a dearth of ink! Lovecraft's material possessions - always meagre, had dwindled.) He sent it on to Barlow who, unbeknownst to Lovecraft, typed up the whole thing into a more readable manuscript.
This brings me to the odd - seemingly ill-fitting - giant books of the Great Ones. Why don't they use their advanced unworldly technology to keep their most foundational knowledge? I actually think the presence of large oversized books in the surviving publication version of the story, whether thoughtfully or thoughtlessly included, represent the very essence of Lovecraft's driving hunt for numinous natural revelation housed in the protected tomes of impossible keepers. I don't want to wax into blasphemy, but I believe the model of the Creator Elohim-God, the Word (as living son) and the Word (as written record) illustrate the architecture of Lovecraft's lifelong Dreamquest.
He frequently acknowledged the sad truth that the "forbidden tomes" of the material world are dull and unmysterious. (He was far too diplomatic to ever express it too directly, but he clearly lampooned the true-believers and cultic elites, and their writings in his fiction, skewering --like a gentleman, of course-- the foundational nonsense works of Crowley and Blavatsky. He invented the Necronomicon, after all, because real spell books of the esoteric traditions are dreary, self-important, vain, stupid and useless (though again, he was a diplomat about this, only expressing that they are not as "fun" or "exciting" as imaginary ones for the purposes of fiction. )
The Magic Books of the Great Ones, and their books, are wish-fulfillment. Of course they use books: they are refined and civilized and more connected to the Great Beyond, and at the heart of the Great Beyond, suspected Lovecraft, lay The Book. While working on "A Shadow Out of Time", he wrote that it was a printed newspaper that contained his earliest encounter with the numinous, life-altering conception of time:
"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."
Heavy ink. Secret knowledge. Time-defiance. To me, it makes perfect sense that, just as Lovecraft created cosmic, life-changing fictional secrets for the printed page, the Great Ones beyond humanity would, in fact, as their essential expressions of meaning, use books .
Lovecraft thought that a profusion of technology made modern life unsatisfying, thus the star headed old ones and the great race used technology in a minimal fashion, unobtrusively.
ReplyDeleteAlso, books make sense in another way. Books (if they survive) can potentially be read millennia (or, in the story tens of thousands of millennia) later. Our modern data storage techniques are unintelligible without the right sort of device following the correct standard.
"they still use books"
ReplyDeleteMaybe they moved away from books at some point, and it was a disaster eventually as the "advanced" storage bit-rotted (or equivalent) so they went back to books with decay-resistant pages and inks.