Will Hart (cthulhuwho1) celebrates Lovecraft’s 120th Birthday in style by releasing an ultra-rare tape-to-MP3 conversion of a 1978 World Science Fiction panel discussion…
“163 minutes with Professor Dirk W. Mosig, Professor Donald R. Burleson, J. Vernon Shea, Fritz Leiber, Jr., and S.T. Joshi”
The topic is: “What if Lovecraft had lived into the 1960s?”.
The speakers take it in turns. First up is Fritz Leiber, who talks of his brief correspondence with Lovecraft, Lovecraft’s kind and thoughtful criticism of Leiber’s first Mouser story, Lovecraft’s rationalism – interested in UFO books only as potential sources to mine for fiction ideas, and Leiber guesses that Lovecraft would have welcomed the more literary turn in later SF. Joshi talks about Lovecraft’s political and economic beliefs. I think I would dispute his (then) labelling of Lovecraft’s economic beliefs as left socialist. As far as I’m aware – and perhaps this was not really understood in 1978 when the Second World War was still so close and the academic study of classic fascism was not as developed as it is today – Lovecraft’s economic beliefs don’t seem to have been that far from those of the German national-socialists at the mid 1930s.
I’ve listened to the rest of the talks. Mosig is up as the third speaker. He has a brilliant and coruscating account of the neglect and unjust criticism of Lovecraft, but then gets into Jungian psychological analysis. Toward the end he deplores the use of the mythos to write adventure fiction. Burleson is up next, examining the influence of science on Lovecraft and musing on how the science of the 1950s and 60s would have affected him. Also comments on Lovecraft and maths / abstract structures / infinite dimensional objects. Vernon Shea points out the logistics of Lovecraft’s perilous finances if he had lived longer – he would simply have not been able to survive. S.T.Joshi comments on the sources for Lovecraft’s philosophy. There are some comment on Lovecraft movies, and Shea goes through some of these at length. Some comments on Lovecraft’s use of irony and foreshadowing. Questions from the audience. Lovecraft’s area of Providence was “extremely run down” when Lovecraft was living there and he called it a “slum”. Shea says the “great majority” of Lovecraft’s works are in the public domain.