A delectable site!

by John Michael Greer
(Cumberland, Maryland, USA)

Zendexor, thank you for hosting this -- I've been lurking here for a month or so, on and off, and decided it was time to say something. On the off chance it's of any importance, I got here via search engine while hunting down some details of Clark Ashton Smith's more SF-ish stories for a fiction project of my own. (Yes, I write -- I have two science fiction novels, a near-future thriller, and the first volume of a Lovecraftian epic fantasy currently in print, with more in process.)

It hadn't occurred to me to think of the pre-space probe solar system as a setting for what I suppose might best be called space fantasy -- this despite growing up in the 1960s and 1970s on a steady diet of science fiction with a lot of OSS in there. Hmm and again hmm. I may want to explore the possibilities. Again, my thanks to you, Harlei, Stid, and the rest of the crew for launching this voyage...

{Comment from Zendexor: Welcome aboard John. You seem like a Jasoomian after my own heart. And the interest in Clark Ashton Smith as a science-fictioneer is extremely welcome. I suppose you have investigated the Smith fragments, collected on the eldritchdark site and in "Strange Shadows". Quite a few opportunities there for expansion into new stories, or at any rate speculation thereon. More comments on this and other topics always appreciated! We hope we shall be hearing more from you.}

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Aug 28, 2016
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shoggoths for tea
by: John Michael Greer

Zendexor, no doubt! I suspect, though, that shoggoths find us just as unnerving as we find them: rigid skeletons, bodies that only flex here and there, and always looking out at the world through the same two eyes in a face that never changes shape at all-- brrr! I bet young shoggoths scare each other with human stories, and tell each other that they'd never invite a human to tea.

Or whatever shoggoths drink instead of tea. Eldritch ichor, probably.

As for the metallic intellects of Neptune, good question! I'll have to consult with them via some bit of fiction. My immediate thought is that they feed on electric charges, generated by some other, quasivegetative life form that catches the ebbs and flows of the tides in Neptune's great planetary ocean and converts the mechanical motion into electricity. I imagine them sliding with terrifying slowness across the sea bottom, communicating with one another in a constant play of longwave radio emissions far too complex for any mere human to understand as they contemplate the secrets of existence...

Or something like that. I'll ask the next shoggoth I meet!

{Reply from Zendexor: wow, this vision of yours is really something - the sooner you tell the world, the better. Great OSS stuff, and I wonder what the title of the first book would be. I don't suppose "A Princess of Neptune" would be feasible title in this particular case. But you never know - you might have "metaphoric deformation" (as in Sheckley's "Mindswap") translating a Neptunian metallic intelligence into the appearance of a princess in the eyes of a Terran visitor, whose overstrained faculties cannot cope with a deluge of alien impressions, and has to convert them into familiar forms.

On the subject of shoggoths, there is some relevant material in Robert Gibson's "The Rise" - third volume in the Kroth trilogy. (And on the question of whether aliens can be evil, there is his "hourless tapede" in "Valeddom".) I reckon shoggoth-human relations would have to remain somewhat distant for a long while, for the sake of both parties.

Your remarks about shoggothian perception remind me of Clark Ashton Smith's "A Star Change", in which a human is scientifically adapted to an alien environment and then finds his organs of perception are no longer fitted for life back on Earth. In that story, of course, there is no Lovecraftian sense of evil, only a sadness at the inevitable separateness of things.}

Aug 27, 2016
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Further re: Darn it
by: John Michael Greer

My turn to utter "would that I could" -- the comment about the metallic intellects of Neptune et al. was mine, rather than A. Nonny Mouse's.

{comment from Zendexor: I guessed that. You get full credit. Can you tell us anything about these metallic intelligences of Neptune? e.g. what did they have for breakfast? I wonder if they are related to Schachner's "spiral beings from Pluto".}

Aug 27, 2016
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Re: Darn it
by: Anonymous

I'm hoping that the vast metallic intelligences of Neptune will someday invent a subjunctive spell checker, which will allow "would that I could!" retroactive corrections. ;-)

With regard to the unmonstrousness of nonhuman "monsters," of course "Out of the Silent Planet" comes to mind, with Weston and Devine convinced that the sorns are malevolent beings who want a human sacrifice -- a projection of their own malign worldview onto the friendly and intelligent sorns.

Lovecraft's monsters are practically begging for that sort of reversal. Who cares about the protagonists of his stories? Even fans have trouble remembering their names -- which is not surprising, given that their basic purpose in existence is to become shoggoth snacks. It's the tentacled horrors that everyone remembers, and cheers on as they munch the protagonists. Putting them at the center of the picture, as the much-maligned protagonists in a struggle of appropriately cosmic scope, had an obvious appeal.

Not least because Weston's attitudes remain alive and well today. It's not accidental that one the buildings in my version of Miskatonic University is named Belbury Hall.

But I'm straying far from the Old Solar System, and for penance I'll see how much Leigh Brackett I can get via interlibrary loan. ;-)

{Note from Zendexor: All the same, I don't think I'd care to invite a shoggoth for tea.}

Aug 26, 2016
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Darn It!
by: Dylan

Would that I could go back and fix it!

I'll have to start putting all my comments through spell check, just to be doubly sure.

{Z: I can fix it if you tell me what you wanted to say - I have absolute power, being Supreme Archon of the Solar System (SASS).}

Aug 26, 2016
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The Eldtitch Heroes
by: Dylan

I'd like to read that, too, as I've been in a Lovecraftian mood of late!

Thenjoy idea of "horrors" being anything but is the stuff great books are made of. {Z: your smartphone's predictive text is acting up again, Dylan!} In "The Forever War", the soldiers are conditioned to see the Taurans as vicious, slobbering monsters, when nothing could be further from the truth. (Incidentally, that book also added another planet, Charon, after Pluto. This was before the moon was discovered.)

Similarly, the Martians of H.G. Wells' "War of the Worlds" seem malevolent by action and appearance, but Wells is quick to remind us that they act only out of self preservation, and that humans have done far worse to each other. Not quite the same as if they had been good guys all along, but neither are they devils from space.

{comment from Zendexor: here's a nice quote from Eric Frank Russell's "Three to Conquer" re the lethal Venusian invading parasites:

"In so far as their actions affect us, we must look at them from our own viewpoint. It may well be that they are justifiably rated as the greatest adventurers and biggest patriots in Venusian history. But if their loyal shenanigans are going to cost me a toe-nail, they're a trio of prize stinkers so far as I'm concerned."}

Aug 26, 2016
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OSS stories yet to come
by: John Michael Greer

Zendexor, OSS stories are certainly something I'll want to explore as I get more into writing fiction; there's a lot of fun to be had, and also some serious themes to work (and play) with. Just at the moment I'm having way too much fun standing the Cthulhu mythos on its head -- the conceit at the center of my Lovecraftian epic fantasy, "The Weird of Hali," is that Lovecraft got it all wrong and the tentacled horrors and their much-slandered multiracial cultists were the good guys all along -- but that's coming together very quickly and other prospects beckon.

I need to read a lot more classic OSS fiction first, though. Your site reminds me that my youthful divagations through that end of the science fiction world were relatively spotty, and there's a lot of good stuff (and presumably a lot of enjoyably trashy not-so-good stuff) in which I'll want to marinate my brain, so I don't just rehash Captain Future. (Whom I'd only encountered before in the pages of J.D. Post's "An Atlas of Fantasy," one of the fixtures of my teen years; much reading ahead...)

{comment from Zendexor: So - a revisionist, eh? I await the result with bated breath. Seems likely to me it could be deeply relevant to the site - the scope of which I have taken care to ensure includes the history of planet Earth.

On the subject of the horrors being the good guys after all: in a sense that idea reflects the plot of "The Shadow Over Innsmouth" - not in the sense of absolute good and evil, but in the sense of allegiance, of what is "good" for oneself. The narrator ends with a thorough change of mind and nature, after all! Talk about the difficulties of growing up!!}

Aug 25, 2016
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SF and fantasy
by: John Michael Greer

With regard to the distinction between science fiction and fantasy, that really is a challenging one, isn't it? I recall an old newspaper review of Tolkien's "The Lord of the Rings" that described it as a science fiction novel! Before the 1980s, when parapsychology was considered scientifically respectable, a lot of hard SF authors included telepathy and the like in their stories -- I think it was John Campbell who coined the term "psionics" to give a shiny new technological-sounding name to psychic phenomena -- and Asimov's inclusion of mentalics wasn't anything like as fantastic at the time as it's become since then.

Zendexor, "The Door to Saturn" really is a good test case, since the only "magical" item in it is the Door itself, and that could as well be the kind of dimensional portal beloved by SF authors of a certain era. I'm scratching my head at the moment, trying to think of other stories that do so elegant a job of being science fiction and fantasy at the same time, depending solely on the assumptions the reader brings to the tale!

{note from Zendexor: C S Lewis' Cosmic Trilogy is perhaps a key example. As I have argued - on the Mercury page, I think - his "angels" are in principle scientifically verifiable, whereas God of course is not - but then I'm assuming that religion (at any rate, monotheistic religion) is philosophy and metaphysics rather than fantasy. I take it that the difference between metaphysics and magic (fantasy) is that the latter entails symbols having a feedback effect on reality: in magic, "the map is not the territory" doesn't apply. I seem to remember that there is actually some discussion on that last point in - believe it or not - Doc Smith's "Skylark DuQuesne".}

Aug 25, 2016
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druids, novels, et al.
by: John Michael Greer

Kaor, Dylan! Yes, that's me. True confession -- I originally set out to become a science fiction and fantasy writer, picked up a fine collection of rejection slips (many of them richly deserved), finally got into print in a couple of nonfiction genres, and finally learned enough of the author's craft in those fields to get some science fiction and fantasy published.

My two science fiction novels are "The Fires of Shalsha" and "Star's Reach," both currently available. I don't have Zendexor's admirable facility for acronyms, so will have to type out at length that the first one is set on a colony planet settled by refugees from a pollution-killed Earth, and the second is set about four centuries after the decline and fall of industrial civilization and involves radio contact with distant aliens.

{from Zendexor: I'm looking forward to when your current plans blossom into some OSS sf, so that I'll have the occasion to compose a John Michael Greer discussion-page to go with the other author-pages on site. I foresee many links between the CAS, HPL and JMG pages...}

Aug 25, 2016
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Smith and Lovecraft
by: John Michael Greer

Zendexor, thank you for the welcome! Yes, I spent a lot of hours at eldritchdark.com reading unpublished and hard-to-locate Smith pieces; the conceit at the core of my current fiction project is that Lovecraft, Smith et al. based all their stories on authentic lore, and so I've been scattering all kinds of details borrowed from the classic Weird Tales authors here and there.

Smith's science fiction is underrated -- his Mars, for example, with its Aihai natives and human drifters, could have been the setting for many another tale. As you point out, too, Lovecraft was a cracking good SF author; if he'd lived longer, I like to think, he might have written more OSS stories. Tentacled horrors lurking in the eternal snows of the mountains of Uranus, mummified Martian hierophants come to life intoning spells from books far more ancient and evil than the Necronomicon... A being can dream!

{comment from Zendexor: You're playing what one might call the Great Game, of tie-ins or the steering of influences or the induction of fragments into a greater whole, an enterprise with a mighty tradition behind it - the medieval romancers did it with the Troy cycle and the Arthurian cycle; now we can try with the OSS Cycle and its various manifestations, for example in the Weird Tales authors Lovecraft and CAS, both of whom, we can agree, are greatly under-rated as sf authors.}

Aug 24, 2016
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Fantasy and Scifi
by: Dylan

Sometimes, even the most pragmatic of Scifi authors will dip into what might be called fantasy on occasion.

Asimov, for example, has his concept of "mentalics", emotional telepathy that be posits is a natural evolution of the human mind. It feels different from other imaginary scientific phenomena, such as psycho-history, pantropy, or xenobiology, in that its roots seem to stem from magic rather than established sciences. That, I think, allows one to call mentalics "fantasy".

{comment from Zendexor: we really are on the frontier here. The mind - is it qualitative and hence transcendent, or is it merely emergent and hence epiphenomenal? Here spans the gulf between the religious and the non-religious mentality.}

Aug 24, 2016
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Welcome to the System!
by: Dylan

kaor, Mr. Greer!

Might you be the same John Michael Greer who writes books on Druidry? If so, welcome! If not, welcome just the same!

I would certainly be interested in reading your science fiction, what are the titles?

In regards to science fantasy vs science fiction, I've had the same thought myself. However, one can argue that OSS fiction remains science fiction nonetheless, if one adheres to the many-worlds theory of quantum physics.

Very pleased to have another member in the community!hi

{Comment from Zendexor: Dylan beat me to it. I was going to ask the same questions, as soon as I had picked myself up off the floor after the shock of getting another contributor.

Regarding the Clark Ashton Smith OSS, fantasy vs SF becomes a relevant issue when one is deciding whether or not to include "The Door to Saturn" with the others... I love that story, and would be in favour of classing it in the same continuum as the out-and-out SF tales, by means of a bit of agile sleight-of-mind}

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