A good deal of Lovecraft's works involve something that is definitely technological. Several of his crazy "alien" races (sometimes Earth-based) have their extre

A good deal of Lovecraft's works involve something that is definitely technological. Several of his crazy "alien" races (sometimes Earth-based) have their extreme powers due to technological progress, such as the Elder Things (genetic engineering), the Great Race (time-traveling & mind-swapping), and the Yi-Go (brains-in-jars and inter-stellar travel). Many of his human antagonists are also developing forbidding science/technology, although usually with some alchemy thrown in. Even crazy creatures obey physical laws that happen to not be known; more than one creature disintegrates on death because its body is an exotic type of matter, and at least one creature is invisible for the same reason. A lot of the horror of Lovecraft's works stem from a fear of science-gone-too-far. I read an interesting essay that said that his regression-to-past-generations works were actually founded in the contemporary revulsion many people felt they were first introduced to this newfangled "evolution" business (augmented by Lovecraft's notorious racism). You'll also notice that a lot of the science in Lovecraft's stories isn't, uh, good. Like, it's really bad. Creatures that flap their wings and fly out of the atmosphere, and to a different dimension. Stars that are far away have different laws of physics. That sort of thing. Imagine someone who is a mild conspiracy nut (of the email-forwarding variety), and not scientifically literate but reading pop-science articles about new breakthroughs in the 20s and 30s. The majority of Lovecraft's writings are a fair description of this hypothetical person's fears about scientific progress. Lovecraft's cosmic horror is still fairly rules-based, i.e. it's magic of the Clarke's-Third-Law variety. The dreaming in Call of Cthulhu is a natural force that obeys laws. Humans don't know what those laws are, but something does and can manipulate that force. Cthulhu itself doesn't obey our laws of physics, but there are laws of physics that he obeys (possibly from another dimension), and he is also subject to the alignment of the stars. It's all described as rationally explainable, but not within the bounds of what human intelligence can graps. The actual Dreamlands stuff with Randolph Carter is different, though. It's not even horror, really. It's Lovecraft making an explicitly Fantasy setting, in emulation of Lord Dunsany. It's got a much more whimsical and adventurous vibe, and the various fantastical elements (horrific or otherwise) generally aren't as rationally-explainable.