Lovecraft was a serious-minded scientist. One of his fascinations was with mars, and a penultimate thrill for him was to meet Perceval Lowell. In two essays, he discusses Mars. Fascinatingly, a recent article discussed habitation fo Mars by terraforming.
“No planet in the solar system has been the subject of more baseless speculation. ... If living beings dwell on a world they must have air, water, light and heat.” [1]
“The atmosphere of Mars must be infintely thinner than is that of the earth .. the temperature vastly lower. .. The public press has ... overflowed with senseless written matter of the habitableness of Mars. Now, baseless as most of these speculations may be, it is nevertheless not impossible that living beings of some sort may dwell on the surface of the planet ... however left to the imagination of the reader ... or to the ingenious novelist.” [2]
“Little green men from Mars have long been a part of human lore ... but the scuttlebutt bouncing around the resort hotels on Waikiki Beach at the recent Pacifichem conference suggested that real people might attempt to inhabit the red planet.
“Joseph S. Thrasher of the U. of Alabama ... suggested that SF5NO2 {a complex fluorosilica nitrate} would be a greenhouse gas {and} appropriately dispersed into Mars' atmosphere could warm the planet enough to make it habitable. {quoting Angew. Chem. Int. Ed. 2006, 45, 938}
“{An earlier} paper {2001} on terraforming ...outlines a supposition that if the martian atmosphere could acquire ... an earthlike atmosphere and pressure ... a parts per billion cocktail would include chlorofluorocarbon, fluorocarbons, and sulfur fluorides.” [3]
All that technobabble should do two things. One is to see the exciting (shades of Gene Roddenberry) possiblilties of humanity's future. The other is to shudder at how carelessly and lightly we feel we can impose our potential manifest destiny on other worlds.
Lovecraft the scientist might have been giddy at the merger of science and astronomy. He also might have speculated that should we trespass on eldritch lands, we might just get exterminated ourselves.
___
1 Is Mars an Inhabited World?, (Sept. 1906) Collected Essays: Volume 3: Science, Joshi, 2005
2 VII. Mars and the Asteroids, op.cit. (March 1915)
3 Newscripts: Life on Mars, February 20, 2006, Chemistry and Engineering News. p. 72.
Thursday, March 02, 2006
Wednesday, March 01, 2006
Lovecraft Controversy: Sexual Deviancy?
The blog will not shy away from controversy. Chrispy wants to repesent all sides - and all possible reasonable speculation - of Lovecraft's life and literature. I will let two of the leading writers and devotees of Lovecraft's legacy sqaure off on this one. Here is an abridgment of the essay.
***
“Just how perverse was Lovecraft? ... Stanley Sargent states his revolutionary theory that “The Dunwich Horror” was autobiographical.
“One would think, perverse old queen {Pugmire is openly homosexual} that I am, that I would welcome such a theory ... that Wizard Whateley, as sexual proxy for Yog-Sothoth had carnal relations with his daughter, the offspring which were Wilbur ... and his noxious twin.
“To Stanley it is obvious that Wilbur is ... Lovecraft.
“I refuse to believe that Lovecraft was a closet homosexual, but that is not the point ... that disturbs me. ... To give credit to his wild idea, Stanley has pointed out ... a sexual energy between Lovecraft and his mother.
“I was quite astonished when ... Alyssen Bills {reported a passage from Peter Cannon's Lovecraft Remembered} I nearly fainted when I read in Wilfred Townley Scott's ... essay ... The psychiatrist's record takes note of an Oedipus complex, a 'pscho-sexual contact' with the son...” {elipsis is Pugmire's}.
“It is ... foolish to determine what Lovecraft's characters are meant to represent. I have long been of the opinion that Lovecraft's best work contains much that is astonishing in its perversity.
{By association, Pugmire rebukes Sargent's ideas} “Satnley's theory .. that Armitage is meant ... to represent the narrow-minded social system that would repress Wilbur's dark nature. This is refuted by Joshi {Biography, p. 450} 'I found myself psychologically identifying with one of the characters [an aged scholar who finally combats the menace] toward the end.'
“Sargent's distressing suppositions may hold more truth that I {Pugmire} want to credit.
___
Pugmire has long been a writer of a special kind of Mythos. His writing is excellent, disturbing, and thought provoking. More here.
Sargent's The Black Brat of Dunwich is a classic story hailed by all critics. His many Mythos stories have created a new standard for late 20th century Mythos and boldly pve a way into the new millennia. More here.
___
Lustcraft: A column by Wilum Hopfrog Pugmire, Esq. In Crypt of Cthulhu, Number 105, 2002, pp. 33-34. ed. Robert M. Price.
***
“Just how perverse was Lovecraft? ... Stanley Sargent states his revolutionary theory that “The Dunwich Horror” was autobiographical.
“One would think, perverse old queen {Pugmire is openly homosexual} that I am, that I would welcome such a theory ... that Wizard Whateley, as sexual proxy for Yog-Sothoth had carnal relations with his daughter, the offspring which were Wilbur ... and his noxious twin.
“To Stanley it is obvious that Wilbur is ... Lovecraft.
“I refuse to believe that Lovecraft was a closet homosexual, but that is not the point ... that disturbs me. ... To give credit to his wild idea, Stanley has pointed out ... a sexual energy between Lovecraft and his mother.
“I was quite astonished when ... Alyssen Bills {reported a passage from Peter Cannon's Lovecraft Remembered} I nearly fainted when I read in Wilfred Townley Scott's ... essay ... The psychiatrist's record takes note of an Oedipus complex, a 'pscho-sexual contact' with the son...” {elipsis is Pugmire's}.
“It is ... foolish to determine what Lovecraft's characters are meant to represent. I have long been of the opinion that Lovecraft's best work contains much that is astonishing in its perversity.
{By association, Pugmire rebukes Sargent's ideas} “Satnley's theory .. that Armitage is meant ... to represent the narrow-minded social system that would repress Wilbur's dark nature. This is refuted by Joshi {Biography, p. 450} 'I found myself psychologically identifying with one of the characters [an aged scholar who finally combats the menace] toward the end.'
“Sargent's distressing suppositions may hold more truth that I {Pugmire} want to credit.
___
Pugmire has long been a writer of a special kind of Mythos. His writing is excellent, disturbing, and thought provoking. More here.
Sargent's The Black Brat of Dunwich is a classic story hailed by all critics. His many Mythos stories have created a new standard for late 20th century Mythos and boldly pve a way into the new millennia. More here.
___
Lustcraft: A column by Wilum Hopfrog Pugmire, Esq. In Crypt of Cthulhu, Number 105, 2002, pp. 33-34. ed. Robert M. Price.
Tuesday, February 28, 2006
Cosmic Nihilism: Loren Eiseley, A Different Voice
Chripsy wants to continue to push the philosophical limits of Lovecraft's thoughts. The late archaeologist and ecological philosopher, Loren Eiseley, had a profoundly conservative passion and unique perspective on mankind as a blight, a "world-eater".
Lately, Chripsy has been considering the effect of parasites and viruses on humans. If a virus can allow a rat to be eaten by a cat to pass on the virus' genetic material - perhaps our madness - and even the madness of the old ones - is caused by an as yet undetected virus. All the yog-sothery by men and alien gods alike, is all caused by an unthinking bundle of RNA trying to make star hoppers and dimension walkers infect that madness to as many as possible throughout time and the universe?
Well while you ponder that brain-searing thought, read a true philosophical genius. I've abridged these comments to make them easier to read and digest.
"It came to me in the night, in the midst of a bad dream, that man, like the blight descending on a fruit, is by nature a parasite - a world eater. Under a microscope mold amoebas streaming to their meeting places ... single amoeboid frontiersmen swarm into concentrated aggregations .. thrust up overtoppling spore palaces, like skyscrapers. ... man's motor throughways resemble slime trails ... man's cities are only the ephemeral moment of his spawning - that he must desend upon the orchard of far worlds or die.
"The cycles of parasites are often diabolically ingenious .. to the unwilling host ... tehir ends appear mad. Has earth hosted a new disease - that of the world eaters?
"Everyone imagines that he knows what is possible and impossible, but the whole of time and history attest our ignorance. ... The future, formidable as a thundecloud, is still inchoate and unfixed upon the horizon.
"Not many years ago I fell to chatting with a naturalist who had .. experience among the Cree ... What had struck him ... was their remarkable and indifferent adjustment to their woodland environment. ...while totally skilled ... in their surroundings, they had little interest in experiment on a scientific sense ... they were ... careless with equipment ... given them ... things might be discarded or left hanging on a branch. Their reliance on their own powers was great ... based on traditional accomodation.
"Not all tiny beings of the slime mold escape to new pastures ... some are sacrificed to make the spore cities ... it is so in the cities of men.
"A span of three centuries has been enough to produce a planetary virus, while on that same planet others with brains the biological equivalent of our own peer in astonishment from the edges of their last wilderness. ... Such an episode parallels the rise of a biological mutation as potentially virulent ... there is no comparable episode in history. ... To climb the fiery ladder that the spore bearers have used {space rockets} one must consume the resources of a world ... the accessible crust of the earth is finite, while the demand for minerals increases ... so quick and insidious has been the rise of the world virus that its impact is just beginning to be felt.
"Like all earth's other creatures, man had previously existed in a precarious balance with nature ... it was impossible for his numbers to grow in any one place. Only with plant domestication is storage granary possible and three primary changes: a spectacular increase in numbers, diversification of labor, and the ability to feed the spore cities.
"Modern man and his bush contemporaries have arrived at the same conclusion by very different routes. Both know they are shape shifters and changelings. Modern man, the world eater, respects no space and no thing green or furred or sacred, the march of machines is in his blood. The bushmen speak softly the age old ritual words.
"Beginning on some winter night the snow will fall steadily for a thousand years and hush the spore cities whose seed has flown. Halley's comet will pass like a ghostly matchflame over the unwatched grave of the cities.
____
Abridged from The World Eaters of The Invisible Pyramid by Loren Eiseley.
Lately, Chripsy has been considering the effect of parasites and viruses on humans. If a virus can allow a rat to be eaten by a cat to pass on the virus' genetic material - perhaps our madness - and even the madness of the old ones - is caused by an as yet undetected virus. All the yog-sothery by men and alien gods alike, is all caused by an unthinking bundle of RNA trying to make star hoppers and dimension walkers infect that madness to as many as possible throughout time and the universe?
Well while you ponder that brain-searing thought, read a true philosophical genius. I've abridged these comments to make them easier to read and digest.
"It came to me in the night, in the midst of a bad dream, that man, like the blight descending on a fruit, is by nature a parasite - a world eater. Under a microscope mold amoebas streaming to their meeting places ... single amoeboid frontiersmen swarm into concentrated aggregations .. thrust up overtoppling spore palaces, like skyscrapers. ... man's motor throughways resemble slime trails ... man's cities are only the ephemeral moment of his spawning - that he must desend upon the orchard of far worlds or die.
"The cycles of parasites are often diabolically ingenious .. to the unwilling host ... tehir ends appear mad. Has earth hosted a new disease - that of the world eaters?
"Everyone imagines that he knows what is possible and impossible, but the whole of time and history attest our ignorance. ... The future, formidable as a thundecloud, is still inchoate and unfixed upon the horizon.
"Not many years ago I fell to chatting with a naturalist who had .. experience among the Cree ... What had struck him ... was their remarkable and indifferent adjustment to their woodland environment. ...while totally skilled ... in their surroundings, they had little interest in experiment on a scientific sense ... they were ... careless with equipment ... given them ... things might be discarded or left hanging on a branch. Their reliance on their own powers was great ... based on traditional accomodation.
"Not all tiny beings of the slime mold escape to new pastures ... some are sacrificed to make the spore cities ... it is so in the cities of men.
"A span of three centuries has been enough to produce a planetary virus, while on that same planet others with brains the biological equivalent of our own peer in astonishment from the edges of their last wilderness. ... Such an episode parallels the rise of a biological mutation as potentially virulent ... there is no comparable episode in history. ... To climb the fiery ladder that the spore bearers have used {space rockets} one must consume the resources of a world ... the accessible crust of the earth is finite, while the demand for minerals increases ... so quick and insidious has been the rise of the world virus that its impact is just beginning to be felt.
"Like all earth's other creatures, man had previously existed in a precarious balance with nature ... it was impossible for his numbers to grow in any one place. Only with plant domestication is storage granary possible and three primary changes: a spectacular increase in numbers, diversification of labor, and the ability to feed the spore cities.
"Modern man and his bush contemporaries have arrived at the same conclusion by very different routes. Both know they are shape shifters and changelings. Modern man, the world eater, respects no space and no thing green or furred or sacred, the march of machines is in his blood. The bushmen speak softly the age old ritual words.
"Beginning on some winter night the snow will fall steadily for a thousand years and hush the spore cities whose seed has flown. Halley's comet will pass like a ghostly matchflame over the unwatched grave of the cities.
____
Abridged from The World Eaters of The Invisible Pyramid by Loren Eiseley.
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