The Wormwoodiana blog has just posted a new long interview with James Machin, about his new book Weird Fiction in Britain 1880-1939. It’s the same book I had a quick look at yesterday. I must say that Machin makes the book sound much more interesting than the promo blurb and dry chapter-abstracts from the publisher…

The one thing I really lit on is the foundational and persistent influence of literary Decadence … Brian Stableford remarked somewhere that the Decadence of the 1890s never really died, it just moved to the U.S. with Lovecraft, Clark Ashton Smith, etc. This observation really struck me, and in a way the entire book is more or less built on Stableford’s insight here.

… genre snobbery is of course still very much with us: I’m amazed at the contamination anxiety, and the pains some prominent contemporary writers will take to insist that their science fiction or fantasy novels aren’t science fiction or fantasy novels. They endlessly tie themselves up in knots, desperate to avoid the stigma of genre.

Yes, a recent Lovecraft Geek podcast had a question about why Asimov apparently disdained Lovecraft. Robert Price didn’t suggest what I think was the underlying reason — I suspect it was mostly a fear of genre contamination. Asimov had seen horror invading science-fiction in the cheap 1950s drive-in movies, and he and his fellows such as Arthur C. Clarke didn’t want the same thing to happen in the literary ideas-led world of science fiction as well. Thus, Lovecraft had to be kept out of the pantheon.