Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos

“W
hy in the name of science-fiction did you ever print such a story as ‘At the Mountains of Madness’ by Lovecraft? Are you in such dire straits that you
must
print this kind of drivel?… If such stories as this—of two people scaring themselves half to death by looking at the carvings in some ancient ruins, and being chased by something that even the author can’t describe, and full of mutterings about nameless horrors, such as the windowless solids with five dimensions, Yog-Sothoth, etc.—are what is to constitute the future yarns of
Astounding Stories
, then heaven help the cause of science-fiction.”

The object of the preceding epistolary animus, taken from the letter column of the June 1936 issue of
Astounding Stories
, was of course one of two Cthulhu Mythos works by H. P. Lovecraft that were being published by the magazine during that same year. Reader response to the Lovecraft stories was not unremittingly negative, but the favorable commentary tended to be overwhelmed by wails of indignation, bemusement, dismay.

During the 1930s American magazine science fiction was largely the province of a ghettoized group of action/adventure hacks who simply transformed the Lazy X ranch into Planet X and then scribbled forth the same formula stories, substituting space pirates for cattle rustlers. For readers accustomed to hopping aboard a starship, flipping on the faster-than-light drive (never mind Einstein’s special theory), and blasting the bejesus out of the eight-legged men of Betelgeuse, Lovecraft’s painstakingly detailed and overtly atmospheric sojourn across the Antarctic wilderness, in which his two intrepid explorers gibber and shriek before the culminant horror, was largely incomprehensible to the SF enthusiasts of 1936.

And the difference between Lovecraft’s Mythos fiction and the galaxy-bustin’ ebullience of Doc Smith and his cohorts is more fundamental than a simple action-versus-atmosphere dichotomy. Many of
the space-opera exponents of the era, such as E. E. Smith, Nat Schachner, and Ralph Milne Farley, had been born in the previous century when the universe was still perceived to function in terms of an immutable Newtonian order. Each star was a sun just like ours, and as nineteenth-century astronomers directed their spectroscopes to the heavens, they received back the reassuring message that the stars contained hydrogen, helium, magnesium, sodium, and other elements precisely like those found within our own solar system. Toward the end of the century, when physicists were congratulating themselves on what they thought was their complete understanding of the universe, was the ultimate human conquest of the cosmos really so improbable?

Not according to Albert Einstein, who in 1905 inaugurated the revolution in twentieth-century science that ultimately would forever shatter the tenets of classical physics. With subsequent developments in relativity, quantum mechanics, subatomic particles, and the like, the universe no longer seemed so comprehensible. Just as Copernicus and Galileo had wrenched humanity from the center of creation, so too has modern man come to realize that not only is he not at the center of the cosmos, but that he is a singularity in the cosmos. The universe with its neutron stars and quasars and black holes is strange to us, and we are a stranger in the universe.

Of all the science-fiction writers whose work appeared in the magazines during the 1930s, only H. P. Lovecraft transcends the gosh-wow insipidities of his colleagues to convey this twentieth-century sensibility of the essential mystery of the cosmos. “All my tales,” wrote Lovecraft in a 1927 letter, “are based on the fundamental premise that common human laws and interests and emotions have no validity or significance in the vast cosmos-at-large,” a statement that virtually encapsulates the revolution then occurring in modern science, as wide-eyed physicists were in the process of discovering a strange new world not vouchsafed by Newtonian mechanics. Thus the non-Euclidean angles of Cthulhu’s sea-sunken city (see
this page
) represent the same non-Euclidean geometries with which Einstein had to grapple in formulating his general theory, while the unearthly emanations from the meteorite in “The Colour Out of Space” replicate the radium experiments undertaken earlier in the century by Becquerel and the Curies. Even current developments in higher mathematics—the phenomenon of chaos—are presaged in the Mythos tales, for the supreme deity in Lovecraft’s imaginary pantheon, the blind idiot god Azathoth, reigns “in the spiral black vortices of that ultimate void of Chaos.” Suitably accoutred in Mandelbrot fractals and equipped with the Feigenbaum constant, Azathoth would feel eminently at home amid the permutations and perturbations of contemporary chaos theory.