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He was definitely ahead of his time in some ways. He predicted and distilled the creed of reactionary fundamentalism in Call of Cthulhu. "The most merciful thi
by Procrastes 11y ago
He was definitely ahead of his time in some ways. He predicted and distilled the creed of reactionary fundamentalism in Call of Cthulhu.
"The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. 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 deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age." -- The Call of Cthulhu
- digikata 11y agoIn a modern context, it makes me think of climate change denialism.
- panzagl 11y agoI would have loved to read Lovecraft's reaction when we did unlock knowledge capable of destroying mankind with the atom bomb...
- aaronem 11y agoWell, we didn't, did we? We could make an unholy mess with nuclear weapons, but hubris aside, we can't kill ourselves with them. Lovecraft survived to the very verge of the atomic age, and it shows in his writing; one of Azathoth's epithets is "nuclear chaos". In other words, he took it about how his writings would lead you to expect.
- panzagl 11y agoHe missed the really good stuff though (fission, etc). It's one thing to say 'the end is nigh' another to actually have it come relatively close to happening.
- aaronem 11y agoHe knew about radioactivity; fission was theorized well before it was discovered, and his circle of sf/fantasy nerds was precisely the sort which would both know about what was then still a relatively obscure branch of physics, and contemplate at length its possible implications. It sounds like you're fumbling toward the question of what Lovecraft would've made of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Obviously there's no way to know for certain, but I think Charlie Stross has come as close as anyone could in his short "A Colder War", which is freely available online and quite engaging.
- Delmania 11y agoHis short story The Color Out of Space has an amazingly accurate depiction of the effect of nuclear fallout on the land. People in it go crazy and shun the valley, but I think it's a good way to see what he would have thought about that development.
- Moshe_Silnorin 11y agoVariants of modal realism and quantum immortality did this to me. There are some good reasons (human mind is finite, universe may be infinite or very, very, very large, finite patters recur in infinity) to expect something like modal realism, Egan's Dust Theory or Everett's many worlds to be true. These are neat ideas but not helpful for my sanity.
- wfn 11y agoI've found myself wondering at times, has there been any new development/thought put into Egan's Dust theory which you mention? As I take it a more rigorous but very close formulation is articulated in Max Tegmark's Mathematical Universe hypothesis (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mathematical_universe_hypothesis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mathematical_universe_hypothes...)