New at Dark Worlds Quarterly, a fun and extensively illustrated survey of the Giant Ants of the Pulps.

Which made me curious about Lovecraft and ants. While alien insects are an occasional thing, the terrestrial ant is hardly made use of by Lovecraft’s imagination. Except in two letters. Here is Lovecraft in a letter of 1916, imagining a “Lovecrafty” ant and the Earth as a giant ant colony in which he resists the rigid conformity of the species…

my point of issue involves the existence of ants which are “Lovecrafty” or crafty in other ways … “Lovecrafty ants” [analogous to himself] do exist on this terrestrial anthill [of the Earth], and suffer keenly from the crude enforcement of orthodoxy.

And later a similar comparison appears when in 1929 he forecasts that man will soon have the instruments to discover “the relation of man and the earth to the solar system and the nearer stars”…

If we can study the relation of a race of ants to a coral atoll or a volcanic islet which has risen and will sink again – and nobody dares deny that we can – then it will be equally possible for us, if we have suitable instruments and methods, to study the relation of man and the earth to the solar system and the nearer stars. The result will, when obtained, be
just as conclusive as that of a study in terrestrial zoology or geology.

One might think that he is suggesting that the ‘new’ cosmic rays and the like will be found to have influenced Earth and thus man’s evolution on Earth. But the context is a long letter to Long seeking to counteract the “popular theological misuse of relativity”. Einstein’s theory of relativity was then a new thing, and was being horribly mangled and twisted in its popular reception. He is here arguing that the physical laws of earth must hold also in space, and thus man’s fleeting and insignificant “relation” to the cosmos will soon be confirmed by scientific measurement. No quasi-spiritualist “trick metaphysics” purveyed by “the Einstein-twisters” will allow us to escape from that conclusion. Thus his imagining of humanity as being akin, in its imperilled existence, to “a race of ants to a coral atoll or a volcanic islet” is an apt one.

More on volcanoes and Lovecraft, on Friday.