4 ms·
>There could be anything underneath all the permafrost, including new biodiversity which we haven't catalogued yet. Hey, that was the plot of H.P. Lovecraft's
by leggomylibro 9y ago
>There could be anything underneath all the permafrost, including new biodiversity which we haven't catalogued yet.
Hey, that was the plot of H.P. Lovecraft's At the Mountains of Madness!
http://www.hplovecraft.com/writings/texts/fiction/mm.aspx http://www.hplovecraft.com/writings/texts/fiction/mm.aspx
Spoilers:
"...But we were not on a station platform. We were on the track ahead as the nightmare plastic column of foetid black iridescence oozed tightly onward through its fifteen-foot sinus; gathering unholy speed and driving before it a spiral, re-thickening cloud of the pallid abyss-vapour. It was a terrible, indescribable thing vaster than any subway train—a shapeless congeries of protoplasmic bubbles, faintly self-luminous, and with myriads of temporary eyes forming and unforming as pustules of greenish light all over the tunnel-filling front that bore down upon us, crushing the frantic penguins and slithering over the glistening floor that it and its kind had swept so evilly free of all litter. Still came that eldritch, mocking cry—“Tekeli-li! Tekeli-li!” And at last we remembered that the daemoniac shoggoths—given life, thought, and plastic organ patterns solely by the Old Ones, and having no language save that which the dot-groups expressed—had likewise no voice save the imitated accents of their bygone masters."
- cgh 9y ago> crushing the frantic penguins There are no penguins in the Arctic (Antarctica only) so nothing to fear.
- leggomylibro 9y agoOh, then we're probably safe - he was only worried about the Antarctic: "I am forced into speech because men of science have refused to follow my advice without knowing why. It is altogether against my will that I tell my reasons for opposing this contemplated invasion of the antarctic — with its vast fossil-hunt and its wholesale boring and melting of the ancient ice-cap — and I am the more reluctant because my warning may be in vain. Doubt of the real facts, as I must reveal them, is inevitable; yet if I suppressed what will seem extravagant and incredible there would be nothing left." Whatever, drill away!
- arca_vorago 9y agoThis was always one of my favorite lines of Lovecraft. It's the sense of hopelessness that he manages to get into his writing that really sets the atmosphere more than just about any other writer I know of, other than perhaps Clive Barker.
- Cyberdog 9y agoOh, the Arctic penguins were frozen under the ice too.
- fancyfacebook 9y agoFalse, penguins now roam the Arctic as well after being introduced.
- seszett 9y agoThat's really not true.
- stan_rogers 9y agoPenguin is also an old name for an auk or puffin; it didn't become a name for what are now called penguins until after Europeans got down there to see them, and didn't become exclusively the name for them until quite recently. So no reason, really, not to be afraid. Lovecraft would have preferred it that way.
- mlloyd 9y agoGod that is hard to read. The guy might be thought a genius but I got absolutely nothing from that passage save the penguins.
- leggomylibro 9y agoHonestly, I think he's more seen as a pulp-y xenophobe than a genius. But could he write portentous purple prose, or what?
- ekianjo 9y ago> xenophobe More than the people of his time?
- scandox 9y agoYes extremely more. And I like his stories.
- ekianjo 9y agoSomeone born in 1890 like Lovecraft would have been educated in the early 1900s where it was all about the White Race superiority to all other ones (check school books of the time) on top of hundreds of years of such thinking, so my guess is that you'd find people thinking like Lovecraft pretty much everywhere in his time. And regarding antisemitism, it's not like Lovecraft was an exception, antisemitism was rampant in early 20th century. So while Lovecraft was vocal about it in his letters, I doubt his peers and folks of his time would have very, very different.
- scandox 9y agoI make my argument from his work, not from history. And I am responding specifically to the word Xenophobe. I think Houellebecq's analysis[1] is correct - the force of his work derives from the very extreme nature of his Xenophobia, which is personal and psychological in nature rather than ideological. Certainly he garlanded it with all the ideological backup he could find, but I don't think that's where it came from. [1] https://web.archive.org/web/20060507063256/http://blog.urbanomic.com/dread/archives/houellebecq-lovecraft.pdf https://web.archive.org/web/20060507063256/http://blog.urban...
- richardpoole 9y agodescribes thing “It was a terrible, indescribable thing...” continues to describe thing
- kregasaurusrex 9y agoGood catch! I hadn't read this myself but some college friends and I ran a Call of Cthulu campaign inspired by his works.