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Article focuses too much on Cthulhu, not enough on Lovecraft's other interests -- his early and enduring fascination with poetics (he seems to have been a bit o
by cstross 11y ago
Article focuses too much on Cthulhu, not enough on Lovecraft's other interests -- his early and enduring fascination with poetics (he seems to have been a bit of a 19th century hipster, permanently disgruntled about being born a century too late to be Edgar Allen Poe) and with astronomy (during his lifetime the scale of the cosmos expanded shockingly with the use of photographic plates for astronomical observations, the development of spectrophotometry, and the discovery of other galaxies and then the red shift and the Hubble constant) -- indeed, the universe increased during his life in both volume, contents, and age by about the same extent that Moore's Law has impacted computing performance over the past 40 years.
Still a hugely influential writer in SF/horror, despite his highly regrettable (read: bigoted) and misanthropic outlook. I attribute his enduring relevance to his fiction providing the opposite of a science fictional sense of wonder: he brought a sense of cosmic dread at our insignificance in the face of an uncaring universe front and center, and in the post-nuclear age this resonates loudly.
- TillE 11y ago> permanently disgruntled about being born a century too late In fact Lovecraft wrote a whole short story, "A Reminiscence of Dr. Samuel Johnson", mocking himself about this.
- waterlesscloud 11y agoHe expanded the phrase "intellects vast and cool and unsympathetic" to a whole body of work!
- digi_owl 11y agoShould have guessed that the guy that turned ol' squidface into a WMD would make a comment on this, except i keep forgetting you're active on this site.