Lovecraft's Moon

by John Michael Greer
(Cumberland MD USA)

Kaor, Zendexor! Apologies for the long silence; Jasoomian responsibilities kept me off the spacelanes for way too long. (On the upside, I scored five battered paperback volumes of Leigh Brackett's, three of them OSS.)

You asked about the moonbeasts and the Moon in Lovecraft's "The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath" on the 19th of last month. There is indeed a scene set on the Moon; Randolph Carter is drugged and kidnapped by moonbeasts in the sinister basalt city of Dylath-Leen, and conveyed on one of their galleys to the far side of the Moon. The near side, which they passed, was notable for ruined temples of unwholesome gods; the far side had forests, fields of white fungus, an oily sea, and a city of windowless gray towers and red-litten streets beneath a black and starry sky. The moonbeasts themselves are fine aliens, giant grayish-white toadlike things with no eyes but a cluster of pinkish sensory tentacles on their snouts. Carter gets away, due to the timely arrival of allies, but it's a close shave.

Whether or not "The Dream-Quest" counts as an OSS story, though, is a tricky question. In the story's cosmology, each world has its own attached dreamworld, to which the inhabitants can resort in dreams. Human dreamers can sometimes travel to the dreamworlds of the other planets in the solar system, though with grave risks, and three went beyond to the dreamworlds of extrasolar planets, though two of them came back stark staring mad. The dreamworlds, though, are, well, worlds of dream; in the dreamlands, cats can leap to the Moon at certain seasons, and ships can sail up into the sky, to the city of Serranian in the clouds or to the Moon. The dream-Moon is not the kind of place that behaves in accordance with orbital laws!

I heartily agree that Lovecraft could have written some thumping good OSS stories. Me, I wish he'd set some stories on Mars. "The Nameless City" shows that he could handle desert scenes beautifully, "At the Mountains of Madness" demonstrates that he could portray a scientific expedition believably -- and I like to try to imagine the eldritch horrors with which he could have peopled the Martian deserts and canals, and the aura of encroaching, incomprehensible nightmare the members of a doomed expedition would have faced as they struggled helplessly against the inevitable. OSS Mars just seems so perfect for him, with its dead civilizations and aeons-old ruins haunted by nameless shadowy things...

(On an unrelated note, I agree about Brackett's Eric John Stark stories. The Skaith trilogy could have been set on Titan or Ganymede, say, without any difficulty at all, and that would fit much better with the rest of Stark's history than suddenly dragging in a Galactic Union.)

{Note from Zendexor: many thanks John for clearing up the matter of the lunar scenes in The Dream Quest... We could maybe class it as "under the OSS influence" - as it's yet another facet of the Moon's fictional character-gestalt. I've never yet managed to read the book properly, not yet having achieved the right frame of mind, but I acknowledge the power in it and hope one day to manage it.}

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Mar 04, 2017
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Eldritch Mars
by: Anonymous

Dylan, oh, no question, Smith and Lovecraft -- or, if you will, the sinister Atlantean hierophant Klarkash-Ton and the equally sinister Luveh-Kerapht, High Priest of Bast! -- were companions in eldritch iniquity, if not quite peas from the same pod. Smith's Mars, with its Aihai natives and its ruins full of things that will gladly eat your brains, eyeballs, etc., is classic OSS stuff, and I think you're right that Lovecraft's Mars (if he'd written Mars stories) would have been similar. Still, it would be something to see what he would have done with it. To my mind, the dark and deadpan humor that he weaves into some of his stories -- I'm thinking here especially of the opening passages of "The Shunned House" and "Arthur Jermyn," with their wry commentary on human ignorance and futility -- would have really worked well with an OSS Mars, with its age-old ruins mocking all our species' aspirations.

(That may be more than usually on my mind because I've been reading some of Leigh Brackett's Mars stories, which reach in the same direction from time to time.)

Many thanks for the welcome back, btw! It was no lack of enthusiasm -- three older books of mine are all being reprinted pretty much at once, and two more are on their way to press; that on top of other responsibilities left me with next to no spare time for online enjoyments.

Mar 04, 2017
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Darn Little Buttons
by: Dylan

I have to get back into the habit of proof-reading my comments. It's been so long since I commented like this, lately I've been sticking to the Travelogue.

Sorry about the typos!

{Z: Don't worry - I spotted them all and edited them out - I think... though the trouble with your typos is that they can seem like sophisticated neologisms; for example I devoted some speculative moments to "striles" before I realized, almost with disappointment, that it was merely a typo for "strikes".}

Mar 04, 2017
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Eldritch Mars
by: Dylan

Mr. Greer! It's good to hear from you again, you were missed in your absence!

I admit I've barely scratched the surface of the weird and dark. I've begun perusing Eldritch Dark, mostly for the OSS stuff, and I have a tome of Lovecraft stories which I crack open every Halloween to get a little further in. Unfortunately, this means I have not yet encountered moon beasts - I may have to pick up the pace on my reading.

It strikes me, though, that CAS's Martian adventures might be very much like what HPL could have done on Mars, had the mood taken him. It seems to me that the same feeling of lurking evil which pervades Lovecraft's sleepy east coast villages is found also in Ashton's ageless Martian cities.

What's more, the two were contemporaries, writing in similar verbose styles for the same publications. I wouldn't postulate that the two worlds are interchangeable, but they do seem to be eldritch brothers, after a fashion.

{Zendexor: Now why didn't I think of that? Now that you mention it, the resonance is very strong, for example, between CAS' "In the Vaults of Yoh-Vombis" and the Lovecraft approach. So we do more or less have an HPL Mars after all.}

Mar 03, 2017
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Lovecraft's Dream Stories
by: John Michael Greer

No question, Lovecraft's dream cycle is an acquired taste for a lot of readers these days -- heavily influenced by Lord Dunsany, and various other styles of older fantasy long since swept away by the tsunami named JRR Tolkien. Science fiction it's unquestionably not -- an interesting contrast with stories such as "Beyond the Wall of Sleep" and "The Dreams in the Witch-House," which are classics of Lovecraft SF.

One of these days I need to go digging in pre-Tolkien fantasy and see if I can figure out a lineage for the dream cycle. There are certainly other works along the same lines; Clark Ashton Smith's "The Abominations of Yondo" is one, though not very successful.

{Z: SF or not, the lunar imaginings of HPL in the Dream Quest are relevant to OSS gestalt-formation. The characters of worlds accrete from various imaginings, just as the real physical worlds accreted from planetesimals. So any more comments you can make on the dream cycle theme are likely to be relevant. (By the way, John, if you should like to be accorded column-space like Dylan's with his "Intrepid Travelogue", you only have to say the word.) Regarding "The Abominations of Yondo", I myself would rate that tale very high. It's an interesting "singleton" among the CAS imagined worlds - without any follow-up. I wonder if Yondo is a world in the normal planetary sense; it seems to have a "rim", as though it were a Diskworld! A pity we don't know more. We could ask CAS himself if we were willing to raise him up using special salts, as in HPL's "The Case of Charles Dexter Ward", but I regard necromancy as immoral and contrary to site policy. One more comment: there are good biographies of R E Howard and H P Lovecraft; am I right in thinking that there is as yet no proper biography of Clark Ashton Smith?}

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