The Book of Cthulhu, ed. Ross E. Lockhart. (Night Shade Books, 978-1-59780-232-1, $15.99, 529 pages.) Cover art by Obrotowy.
New Cthulhu: The Recent Weird, ed. Paula Guran. (Prime Books, 978-1607012894, $15.95, 528 pages.)
Sense of Wonder: A Century of Science Fiction, ed. Leigh Ronald Grossman. (Wildside Press, 978-1434430793, $49.99, 992 pages.)
Clarkesworld 62, November.
Tor.com, December 13.
Tor.com, December 14.
The stories of H.P. Lovecraft, especially the stories in the Cthulhu Mythos cycle, have been influencing other writers for almost a hundred years now, starting with writers such as Fritz Leiber and Robert Bloch, and continuing on through writers such as Stephen King, Ramsey Campbell, Neil Gaiman, William Browning Spencer, China Mieville, and dozens of others; by now, here in the 21st Century, there are third and even fourth generations of writers influenced either directly by Lovecraft or by authors who were influenced by him, and Lovecraft’s work can be demonstrated to have had a major impact on the development of horror, fantasy, and even science fiction.
The question is, why?
By modern standards, Lovecraft is a mediocre to terrible writer line-by-line, his fustian prose overloaded with adjectives, sometimes to the point of near-impenetrability, his dialog stilted, his characters one-dimensional (and often difficult to distinguish one from the other), his plots repetitive, and his racism undeniable.
The only reason I can think of for his continuing influence is his vision. Lovecraft was one of the earliest writers to shake off a 19th Century world which was dominated by the idea of sin and redemption, heaven and hell, devils and angels, and instead to show us a cosmos ruled by vast, impersonal, implacable forces that humans not only didn’t understand but probably couldn’t understand. As the narrator says in Lovecraft’s story “The Call of Cthulhu,” “We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little, but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new Dark Age.”
In Lovecraft’s cosmos, Good and Evil don’t enter into the equation. If one of those implacable, unknowable cosmic forces decides to destroy the Earth, perhaps without even noticing or caring that it was doing so, the good people praying to Jesus in a church would be as helpless and doomed as the blackest sinners in a tavern or brothel. God couldn’t save you—as radical a notion as the 20th Century would produce, and one antithetical to almost everything written in the 19th. As Lovecraft himself said, “I don’t make the mistake of thinking that the…cosmos…gives a damn one way or the other about the especial wants and ultimate welfare of mosquitoes, rats, lice, dogs, men, horses, pterodactyls, trees, fungi, dodos, or other forms of biological energy.”
As the 20th Century has progressed into the 21st Century, and as our picture of the universe has gotten deeper, more complex, and far, far stranger than anyone could have imagined in the 1930s, it’s become clear that we’re living in a Lovecraftian cosmos, one where the Earth could be destroyed—or at least human life wiped from it—without warning at any moment by an asteroid strike, a nearby supernova, a burst of hard gamma radiation from the galactic core, a supervolcano explosion, or any of a dozen other menaces, and that God couldn’t (or wouldn’t) save us either. No wonder Lovecraft’s work continues to resonate with young writers today, in spite of his literary shortcomings.
Lovecraft’s own work has been canonized in H.P. Lovecraft: Tales, part of the prestigious series from New American Library, which firmly establishes his place in literature as a Significant American Writer (something that no doubt would have astounded Lovecraft himself as much as it would have dismayed my old mentor Damon Knight, who despised his work), but 2011 also brought us two reprint anthologies that give us an interesting overview of the recent work of younger writers who have been influenced by Lovecraft enough to want to play in his Cthulhu Mythos universe, The Book of Cthulhu, edited by Ross E. Lockhart, and New Cthulhu: The Recent Weird, edited by Paula Guran.
Both anthologies are solid values, particularly if you have a taste for Lovecraftian horror (if you don’t, as many people do not, stay away from both). The best stories in The Book of Cthulhu include “Fat Face,” by Michael Shea, “Lord of the Land,” by Gene Wolfe, “Black Man With a Horn,” by T.E.D. Klein, “The Unthinkable,” by Bruce Sterling, and “The Man from Porlock,” by Laird Barron. The best stories in New Cthulhu: The Recent Weird include “A Study in Emerald,” by Neil Gaiman, “Mongoose,” by Elizabeth Bear and Sarah Monette, “Pickman’s Other Model (1929),” by Caitlin R. Kiernan, “Old Virginia,” by Laird Barron, and “Take Me To the River,” by Paul McAuley.
Stories that appear in both volumes, and which are among the very best in either, are “A Colder War,” by Charles Stross, “Shoggoths in Bloom,” by Elizabeth Bear, and “Bad Sushi,” by Cherie Priest. “Shoggoths in Bloom,” of course, won a Hugo, but the story that strikes me as the most significant here is “A Colder War,” originally published in 2000, which established a relationship between Lovecraftian horror and Cold War politics that I’ve seen echoed subsequently in many other stories, including this year’s “The Vorkuta Event,” by Ken Macleod.
A discussion of reprint anthologies published in 2011 wouldn’t be complete without mention of Sense of Wonder: A Century of Science Fiction, edited by Leigh Ronald Grossman, which earns the odd distinction of being perhaps the largest SF anthology ever published: almost a thousand pages, roughly the size of an old-fashioned telephone directory, weighing five pounds, containing 148 stories and 62 specialized essays about various authors and categories of science fiction. At almost fifty bucks, this will probably be too expensive for most casual readers (there is an ebook version available for forty bucks), but it’s a great choice for libraries and serious collectors, practically being a one-volume library in itself. The literary quality of the stories is on the whole quite high as well. There are too many good stories contained here to do anything like a complete list, but among the best are “The Country of the Kind,” by Damon Knight, “The Game of Rat and Dragon,” by Cordwainer Smith, “Fondly Fahrenheit,” by Alfred Bester, “The Green Hills of Earth,” by Robert A. Heinlein, “Souls,” by Joanna Russ, “Driftglass,” by Samuel R. Delany, “Bloodchild,” by Octavia Butler, “The Golden Horn,” by Edgar Pangborn, “Bears Discover Fire,” by Terry Bisson, “Rachel in Love,” by Pat Murphy, “Think Like a Dinosaur,” by James Patrick Kelly, “Seven American Nights,” by Gene Wolfe, “The Ugly Chickens,” by Howard Waldrop, “The Lincoln Train,” by Maureen McHugh, and “Blood Music,” by Greg Bear, as well as stories by Michael Swanwick, Bruce Sterling, Jack Vance, L. Sprague de Camp, Nancy Kress, Nalo Hopkinson, Ted Chiang, Pat Cadigan, Cory Doctorow, Connie Willis, Karen Joy Fowler, Kim Stanley Robinson, and many others.
One cavet: the type here is very small, so you may have trouble reading this if your eyes are weak, or if you don’t own a magnifying glass. You won’t find this in most bookstores, so if you want it, either order it direct from Wildside Press or order it from Amazon.
The November Clarkesworld, Clarkesworld 62, is perhaps their strongest issue this year, with two very good stories: “The Smell of Orange Groves,” by Lavie Tidhar, a study of the machine-augmented persistence of memory across generations, set against a bizarre, vividly portrayed future Tel Aviv, and “A Militant Peace,” by David Klecha and Tobias S. Buckell, a compelling look at an unusual high-tech, non-violent invasion of North Korea.
Tor.com closes out 2011 with two relatively minor but entertaining stories: the Damon Runyon pastiche “A Clean Sweep with All the Trimmings,” by James Alan Gardner, and the vaguely Holiday-themed “If Dragon’s Mass Eve Be Cold and Clear,” by Ken Scholes.