HPLinks #26.
* Now available digitally, for academics with access behind the JSTOR paywall, the full-text of the journal Lovecraft Annual for 2024. With a long article by yours truly, but don’t let that put you off.
* S.T. Joshi’s blog has updated, and he draws attention to the first volume of the series Relatos Macabros (Aurora Dorada). This being new translations of Lovecraft tales into Spanish, presented as a… “distinctive bilingual edition (using my corrected texts)”.
* Joshi also notes that one can currently buy the now-gentrified Shunned House at 135 Benefit Street, Providence. Yours for a mere $1.8m. Which should not be beyond a large crowdfunding campaign, should some local worthies wish to make it into the city’s first Lovecraft Museum.
* A new post in French (but easily auto-translated) from L’Antique Sentier, an illustrated post on Sarah Symonds, the antiquarian-artist who Lovecraft met in Salem. I wrote about Lovecraft’s visit to see this bas-relief maker on Tentaclii back in 2019. Regrettably, an image of her plaque of the Marblehead town ‘roofscape’ (purchased by Lovecraft) has yet to surface online.
* The new issue of the mostly-French journal Fantasy Art and Studies #17 (winter 2024) takes the theme of ‘Fantasy Flora’. Free to read online, as a Web flip-book — which regrettably means that articles can’t be easily auto-translated.
* The open-access Atlantis: Journal of the Spanish Association for Anglo-American Studies had a 2023 special issue (Vol. 45, No. 1) on the fantastic and science-fiction.
* Set for release in April 2025, a short 200-page book from a DePaul University neuroscientist on Horror on the Brain: The Neuroscience Behind Science Fiction.
* Grab your purchased Amazon ebooks while you can… as transferable file downloads. Amazon will turn off of this feature by 26th February 2025.
* In London, the major historical show ‘Tarot — Origins & Afterlives’ on tarot cards. This is the inaugural exhibition for the new £14.5m Kythera Gallery, at the Warburg Institute (London’s museum of cultural history). Runs until 30th April 2025. Free, but booking is required for time-limited entry tickets. Likely to be a popular draw, as the weather warms, so book ahead.
* For the first time in English, publisher Humanoids is to publish a 500-page sci-fi comic-book epic created by Caza, whose fine graphic work some may recall for the glory days of Heavy Metal magazine. The new single-volume ‘restored + English language’ edition of Arkadi and the Lost Titan is due March 2025. The publisher notes that the idea of producing a quality reprint of this was…
stuck in purgatory for decades [but now] the original negative films have been salvaged and are currently undergoing a scanning and digitization process, allowing the release of this magnum opus in its entirety.
Originally published as Le monde d’Arkadi, in French BD volumes from 1989-2004. The artwork style sometimes reminds me of Moebius, and sometimes Druillet. The sensibility is that of the then ‘newly-liberated from censorship’ 1980s Euro-comics.
* Also possibly of interest to readers, a new book from the UK on Female Detectives in Early Crime Fiction, 1841-1920 (September 2024). Said to be an “extensive survey” of instances, in a chunky 410 pages. Also note the forthcoming “Speculative Detectives’ special issue of the open-access Studies in the Fantastic (for which the call deadline has passed), which I would imagine will highlight some of the more recent female detectives who encounter the fantastical.
* New on Archive.org, The Spectatorial Vol. III (2015), which includes an article on Lovecraft and Innsmouth, “Becoming the Monster”. The upload made me aware of the Journal Archive of this University of Toronto journal offering… “works of speculative fiction, poetry, academic essays, graphic fiction, and artwork by the University of Toronto community and other speculative fiction enthusiasts.”
* A brief new blog post suggests the classic novel Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde as a source for Lovecraft’s ideas on evolution/degeneration…
Lovecraft’s theory of evolution […] reveals a fear on his part that degeneration is a stronger force than development; that human beings can more easily devolve than they can evolve. Lovecraft’s theory derives, in part, from Robert Louis Stevenson’s famous novel: Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886), a book that Lovecraft was very familiar with. Mr. Hyde is described by numerous characters in the novel as “deformed” or “degenerate.” When Jekyll transforms into Hyde, this can be interpreted as a devolution from a higher form of life into a lower one.
Well, perhaps… though degeneration ideas were common in the British and French research and thought of the late Victorian / Edwardian era, and in a different and more familial way via the North American anti-liquor and eugenic health movement. Lovecraft was familiar with both strands of thought. Add to this his sustained teenage dalliance with the French literary decadents, with their focus on the devolving of minds and bodies in sex, disease, drink, drugs and death. One might also note that ‘decaying degeneration’ over several generations and ‘devolving de-evolution’ (of a creature’s lineage to an earlier state in its evolution) are different things, not to be confused. The former can happen (e.g. the sorry results of repeated cousin marriage and incest over several generations), while the latter is biologically impossible (though it makes for a good comic-book plot).
As for Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Lovecraft had it in his library as a cheap Everyman edition, but we don’t know the date of this edition nor when he read it. One would have expected his grandfather to have had such a classic in his library, and for Lovecraft to have read it as a lad… and thereafter cherished his grandfather’s book. But it seems not. Of course, various ideas on ‘generational degeneration’ and even ‘backwards evolution’ could equally have come partly from his uncle’s late-Victorian medical library.
* And finally, what appears to be a new(?) 2025 Italian translation by metal guitarist Fabrizio Pinna, of Lovecraft’s notes on writing interplanetary science-fiction. Freely available online.
— End-quotes —
“… this isn’t to say that poets and artists are less important than men of science, for in hard fact we must admit that truth is nothing of any intrinsic importance. It doesn’t matter a hang whether we know anything about anything or not, so long as we can be contented. If we can happily do it, we might just as well believe in Santa Claus, God, a green-cheese moon, fairies, witches, good and evil, unicorns, ghosts, immortality, the Arabian Nights, a flat earth, etc., etc., as learn the real facts about the universe and its streams and patterns of eternal and alternatingly evolving and devolving energy.” — Lovecraft to Toldridge, September 1929.
“No planet lasts for ever. Its sun expires sooner or later, & eventually the very material substance of its system — & galaxy — & universe — disintegrates into its constituent electrons & leaves only an ’empty’ field of force (out of which another universe is later born).” — Lovecraft to Emil Petaja, April 1935.
“Disintegration of all matter to electrons and finally empty space [is, so far as we know] assured [by scientific laws]. Case of acceleration — man passes into space” — Lovecraft, No.36 in the Commonplace Book, possibly circa 1919?
[Science will never] “be able to kill the feeling of wonder in the human spirit. The mystery of the black outer gulfs, and of the deepest cognitive processes within us, must always remain unplumbed — and against these imagination must always frantically pound.” — Lovecraft to Fritz Leiber, December 1936.
“That’s why I light out for the fifth dimension and the galaxies beyond the rim of Einsteinian space-time — to escape the concentrated ennui to which all phases of objective life ultimately boil down.” — Lovecraft to Moe, January 1931.
