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18 Friday Mar 2011
Posted in Historical context, Lovecraftian arts
Category Archives: Historical context
Hand-made map of the history of Science Fiction, imagined as a Lovecraftian monster
11 Friday Mar 2011
Posted in Historical context, Lovecraftian arts, Maps, Odd scratchings, Scholarly works
Kindle edition of Ice Cores
24 Thursday Feb 2011
Posted in Historical context, New books, Scholarly works
The new Kindle edition of my Ice Cores: essays on Lovecraft’s At the Mountains of Madness is available now in the UK and in the USA. Slightly revised, and with another four passes of proofreading to correct a few minor niggles from the print edition. Hand coded for the Kindle, with illustrations.
Talking of Kindle / ebook sales, Barnes & Noble’s chief executive William Lynch says…
“we now sell twice as many ebooks as we do physical books at BN.com”
Major New Yorker del Toro article
11 Friday Feb 2011
Posted in Historical context, Lovecraftian arts, New books
Substantial new New Yorker interview / profile article on Guillermo del Toro’s quest to film At The Mountains of Madness…
Incidentally, my 2010 book of essays on Lovecraft’s Mountains, Ice Cores, should be available on the Amazon Kindle Store within the next 48 hours. Hand-coded, four passes of fresh proofreading for this new edition, and with a linked table-of-contents…
New journal on science fiction
08 Tuesday Feb 2011
Posted in Historical context, Scholarly works
A new Spanish-language journal of science-fiction, Sci-Fdi : Revista de ciencia ficcion. Three issues so far, and the articles include one on Ray Bradbury’s stint with EC’s horror comics, 1951-1954, during which time 27 of Bradbury’s stories were closely adapted by Al (Albert B.) Feldstein. Initially pirated, but Bradbury was a comics fan and so he eventually found out and asked for a fee. He got it, to EC’s credit.
Colby Quarterly
30 Sunday Jan 2011
Posted in Historical context, Scholarly works
The Colby Quarterly may be of interest to those seeking to place Lovecraft in the wider context of New England writers. The full-text of the journal is now online for free, 1943-2003. The journal…
“solicited [articles] on Maine authors and Maine history, including books and authors that had influenced Maine life and letters [and as the journal expanded to cover a wider range of English literature] The special interest in Maine and regional history and literature was maintained, now including the neighboring provinces of Canada”
The mystery of “J.N.”
02 Thursday Dec 2010
Posted in Historical context
Ichabod Wiswall. Apparently the first man known to have given a funeral service in North America, at Massachusetts in 1697 (that was five years after the Witch Trials of 1692). Why did a Christian minister have his gravestone flanked by two Cthulhu-like sea creatures?
The gravestone is one of three known made by a carver who signed himself “J.N.” (and of whom nothing more is known — see the 1966 book: Graven images: New England stonecarving and its symbols, 1650-1815, by Allan I. Ludwig, p. 296). Nine other gravestones done in the same manner and style are known locally. J.N.’s workmanship was far in advance of the local carvers. Ludwig writes of…
“the enigmatic Dagons or Tritons which ornament his most representative stones. The use of Dagons on Puritan gravestones is puzzling in the light of the fact that they were associated with paganism and the evil doings of Thomas Morton and his merrymen. … Yet pagan Dagons remained to grace the stones of many a proper Boston family in the late 17th century. … It is not clear what pagan water deities were doing on Puritan gravestones.” — Graven images, Ludwig.
The roots of Dagon in New England have, of course, been investigated already by Lovecraftian scholars. See Will Murray’s “Dagon in Puritan Massachusetts,” Lovecraft Studies, No. 11 (Fall 1985), pages 66-70.
Harriette Merrifield Forbes’ The Gravestones of early New England and the men who made them: 1653-1800 (1927) tells us that Wiswall was also an astrologer…
“In Duxbury we discover another stone [i.e.: the one seen above], quite different from the other two and signed ‘JN’ in script below the left-hand border. It is that of the Reverend Ichabod Wiswall, a man ‘famous as an astrologer.'”
“famous as an astrologer” — interesting. No-one else with net-accessible information on him mentions that fact. Forbes’ source appears to be the 1854 book A history of the early settlement of Newton, county of Middlesex by Francis Jackson, which adds that he predicted the death of his child…
Hi-res images of the gravestone on Flickr and another here.
[ Hat-tip: io9 ]
Weird Fiction Review #1
25 Thursday Nov 2010
Posted in Historical context, Lovecraftian arts, Scholarly works
Weird Fiction Review. The first issue is out now…
“The Weird Fiction Review is an annual periodical devoted to the study of weird and supernatural fiction. It is edited by S.T. Joshi. This first issue contains fiction, poetry, and reviews from leading writers and promising newcomers. … Among the articles, there are discussions of a forgotten story by Victorian weird writer R. Murray Gilchrist; Poe’s “The Imp of the Perverse”; Algernon Blackwood’s novella “A Descent into Egypt”; Neil Gaiman’s treatment of the Beowulf story; a 16-page full-color gallery of art by David Ho; and much more.”
Providence Evening Tribune online for free
15 Monday Nov 2010
Posted in Historical context
Chris Perridas notes that old copies of the Providence Evening Tribune newspaper are now available on the Google News historical archives. There are some gaps, such as the whole of Dec 1907 – Jan 1908, presumably where issues never survived for modern scanning.
The City in the Sea
26 Tuesday Oct 2010
Posted in Historical context
One of the illustrations for The poems of Edgar Allan Poe (1900), by Heath Robinson…
New H.G. Wells bibliography on The Time Machine
24 Sunday Oct 2010
Posted in Historical context, Scholarly works
Those interested in the possible influence of H.G. Wells on H.P. Lovecraft (Victorian pessimism about the ultimate fate of man in the light of advanced science and the unsustainability of religious belief, degeneration of the race, seamless blendings of horror and science fiction, the uncertainty of perception and world-understanding on the part of the scientific/rational narrator, tentacles, etc) might be interested that I’ve just published a Selected Bibliography of Scholarship on H.G. Wells’s The Time Machine (PDF link, 220Kb). I undertook it as part of creating a new 18,000 word novelette The Time Machine: a sequel for the Amazon Kindle Store.
Fish-frogs
20 Wednesday Oct 2010
Posted in Historical context, Lovecraftian arts
Frog-people of Innsmouth? An old illustration of degenerative inbreeding…
“There certainly is a strange kind of streak in the Innsmouth folks today – I don’t know how to explain it but it sort of makes you crawl. You’ll notice a little in Sargent if you take his bus. Some of ’em have queer narrow heads with flat noses and bulgy, starry eyes that never seem to shut, and their skin ain’t quite right. Rough and scabby, and the sides of the necks are all shriveled or creased up. Get bald, too, very young. The older fellows look the worst – fact is, I don’t believe I’ve ever seen a very old chap of that kind. Guess they must die of looking in the glass! Animals hate ’em – they used to have lots of horse trouble before the autos came in.” — Shadow over Innsmouth.