Category Archives: Odd scratchings

Black Friday round-up

23 Friday Nov 2018

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So Black Friday is upon us. Personally I’d like a few graphics novels in half-price ebook. Especially new biographical graphic novel H.P. Lovecraft: He Who Wrote in Darkness which is still an eye-watering £18 on the Kindle. I already have the latter as a low-res review preview, but a high-res copy would be very nice. Though I don’t expect any of them will be down in price. The new three-volume searchable ebook edition of J. R. R. Tolkien Companion and Guide looks similarly stuck at its standard set price.

Spotted so far…

* Hippocampus Press has a few discounts. Including the three-volume hardcover for H. P. Lovecraft’s Collected Fiction: A Variorum Edition at half-price.

* For gamers, Chaosium has a coupon-code based sale over the weekend.

* PS Publishing has heavy discounts on many anthologies, including a bundle of Joshi’s Black Wings series.

* The H. P. Lovecraft Historical Society Store. I can’t see any discount there yet.

* Necronomicon Press has free shipping for paper items, including the Crypt of Cthulhu paper editions not yet in PDF…

Free shipping for all United States orders of $20 or more (*excluding our Rarities, etc., section) – MAKE CTHULHU GREAT AGAIN!

* A pack of big hi-res Lovecraft graphics is at 50% off this weekend. ‘Commercial use’ for print products made by individuals, charities, and sole traders.

* It’s possible that big gallery sites such as DeviantArt will have discounts on its Core membership. (DeviantArt is free, but being Core is a nice non-essential extra). Incidentally, banish the foot-fetishist (singular, as my theory is it’s all posted by one bloke under different names) from DeviantArt, with the free Web browser add-on DeviantArt Filter 5.0.

* Horror and sci-fi artists using 3D and Poser (down modestly, to $90, this weekend) will be interested in the Renderosity store and its coming discounts on affordable 3D content this weekend.

* Oh, and if you were thinking of picking up a heavily-discounted Amazon Kindle Fire tablet, and you want to read graphic novels from it… then I highly recommend the 2017 10″ HD model instead of the 8″. I got one in the Black Friday sales last November, with the help of a little royalties pay-out, and I find it excellent.

Revelation Space series

22 Thursday Nov 2018

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It was good to hear tonight about another British hard SF space-opera author I had overlooked, during the years when I didn’t pay much attention to the new SF and fantasy books. Revelation Space is said to have a Xeelee-like time-span and similarly ‘big ideas’. One of its central ideas is (apparently) a sort of SF’d Lovecraftian ‘cosmic’ entity.

I have too much to read (and write) now, but Alastair Reynolds looks very promising. His well-regarded Revelation Space series has a manageable six novels and two collections. So, for my own far-future reference, I’ve spent five minutes sorting out the story-world chronological reading-order and matching them with the required books…

2205 | “Great Wall of Mars” | Story (in collection Galactic North) |
2217 | “Glacial” | Story (in collection Galactic North) |
2338 | “Night Passage” | Story (in collection Galactic North) |
2330–2340 | “A Spy in Europa” | Story (in collection Galactic North) |
2358 | “Weather” | Story (in collection Galactic North) |
2427 | Aurora Rising | NOVEL |
2427 | “Open and Shut” | Story (in collection Galactic North) |
2429 | Elysium Fire | NOVEL |
2500–2550 | Diamond Dogs | Novella (in Diamond Dogs, Turquoise Days) |
2511 “Monkey Suit” | Story (in collection Galactic North) |
2513–2540 | “Dilation Sleep” | Story (in collection Galactic North) |
2517–2524 | Chasm City | NOVEL
2530 | “The Last Log of the Lachrimosa” | Story (in collection Galactic North) |
2539-2541 | Turquoise Days | Novella (in Diamond Dogs, Turquoise Days) |
2550 | “Grafenwalder’s Bestiary” | Story (in collection Galactic North) |
2524–2567 | Revelation Space | NOVEL
2600 | “Nightingale” | Story (in collection Galactic North) |
2605–2651 | Redemption Ark | NOVEL
2615–3125 | Absolution Gap | NOVEL
2303 – far-future | “Galactic North” | Story (in collection Galactic North) |

The novels are all are available as unabridged audiobooks, and apparently so are the two collections.

Are audiobook providers missing a marketing opportunity, by not offering an ‘chrono-list’ version of such sagas? In this case, buy the ‘big bundle’ and it would not only have all the audiofiles neatly bookmarked at the start of each story and chapter, but would also offer a playlist for these which runs in story-world chronological order.

Possibly that’s something already happening. But, not being someone who hangs around on Good Reads or subscribes to Audible, I’m just clueless about it. Yet I pay attention to the innovative publishing news and I haven’t heard of anything like that. Nor seen such a product for sale.

Thrifty prices

16 Friday Nov 2018

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Wormwoodiana has a fine article on charity shops today, and specifically on “Why the net is not a good guide to book prices” for such shops…

Readers who spend any time in charity bookshops will quite often hear the manager or volunteers explain, when a customer queries a price, that they “value” their collectible books “using the Internet.

Wormwoodiana posits one plausible possibility for the ludicrously high prices often seen online. Money laundering…

A book is listed at a ludicrous price: a buyer pays it; shady money is transferred in a seemingly innocuous transaction. Who could possibly suspect second-hand bookselling of involvement with dark money?

Small sub-$150 payments, unlikely to draw notice, and with the excuse that “the robot did it” if the police start sniffing around. Seems plausible to me.

In the U.S. such physical shops are called ‘thrift stores’, or they were the last I heard. Possibly there’s now some trendy new hipster-ised name for them.

In my neck of the woods there are plenty of such charity shops and even a couple of second-hand bookshops (‘used bookstores’) left. But the days of bargains are long gone in either type of shop, as the proprietors think they know the value of everything, and add £3/$5 on top.

The other problem with charity shops is that they are so relentlessly professionalised and commercialised. Big charities now have a small army of professionalised retail managers and regional managers. Pop in to hand over your bag of donated books, and you will be immediately slammed with a robo-request from the poor volunteer staff member to “sign up to a direct debit” etc. They have to ask that of every customer, but it just means that, next time I have a bag of books to donate I’ll be stepping into another charity shop.

The exceptions to rampant commercialisation are the ‘out of town-centre’ shops, often run by a delightfully haphazard cat-lady hoard-minder for a local independent cat-rescue charity. Still the best kind of old-school charity shop. Still the best kind of charity too. If Lovecraft had made his fortune, I suspect he’s have left it all to the local cat charity.

Friend Of Ol’ Marvel

12 Monday Nov 2018

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The U.S. radio stations are reporting the passing of the great Stan Lee, of Marvel Comics fame, whose comics gave such enjoyment and edification to… millions? Probably billions, actually. His comics certainly very strongly and positively shaped the imagination of millions of the more imaginative kids in the generation who grew up between 1960 and 1980. I was one of them. His ‘Marvel Method’ and lack of condescension to readers changed the industry. Not many leave a legacy, in popular storytelling, as huge as the one that he has left us.

Arkham Collector

12 Monday Nov 2018

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Arkham Collector #5, free on Archive.org. It’s nice to get a look at one, and see that it was a very neatly presented little zine. Issued by August Derleth in the summer of 1969, as a hub for interest in Arkham House. Complete with poetry, and some Mythos shorts, and even the occasional b&w photo.

I was disappointed that this was the only issue on Archive.org. Wikipedia informs me that “A hardbound volume in an edition of 676 copies (issued without dustjacket), collecting the entire run of ten issues, was published by Arkham House in 1971.” Judging by pictures of that, the hardback binding may have been rather tight into the gutter, though. As such, if I were a collector I think I’d prefer to have a set of the loose pamphlet editions in a slipcase…

Man-Gods from Beyond the Stars (1975)

12 Monday Nov 2018

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In the 1970s Lovecraft’s burgeoning reputation must surely have both benefited from and fed into the ‘ancient astronauts’ fad. Jason Covalito had a book-length survey of that nexus of influence, which arose mostly from the Morning of the Magicians (1960) and then fed forward, in his The Cult of Alien Gods: H.P. Lovecraft And Extraterrestial Pop Culture (2006, and I see that this is now available as an ebook).

An exemplar of this 1970s sub-genre, which reached even those not likely to read text-heavy and expensive UFO-ology paperbacks, was the fine $1 comic-magazine Marvel Preview #1, “Man-Gods from Beyond the Stars” (1975). I remember having a copy of this as a youth, a copy now long gone.

Marvel Preview was an oversize magazine-style b&w comics title, intended to test ideas for titles that would reach more mature audiences outside the censorship of the loosening Comics Code. Notable later in the run were two Sherlock Holmes (#5-6, 1976) and a fine John Buscema take on Merlin the wizard (#22, 1980).

Preview is now mostly known for launching the Star-Lord character (#4), but this first standalone “Man-Gods” issue riffed on the ancient astronauts theme with a long Doug Moench tale from a basic Roy Thomas concept/plot, beautifully illustrated by Alex Nino. The excellent letterer doesn’t appear to be credited, and so may have been Nino himself.

Page 2 had a full-page Lovecraft poster-quote from “The Call of Cthulhu”, against Easter Island statues. As well as the lead comic there was also a profile and timeline for the best-selling ‘ancient astronauts’ author von Daniken, and capsule reviews of all the key books for and against the ‘ancient astronauts’ theory (which in the 1960s and early 70s could still be deemed ‘undecided’ by many, including Carl Sagan, rather than ‘crackpot’). At the back there was a nicely-done modern monster-heavy tribute to the old EC-style ‘planet explorer’ tales.

Apparently the same issue was re-printed for Australia in 1981. There are evidently a lot of copies about on eBay in paper, but they appear to be priced at silly ‘ooh gosh, Neal Adams cover art’ prices. Anyway, if you squint the following set of page scans are just about readable, and have the whole of the issue’s central story…

Part 1.

Part 2.

Part 3. Conclusion.

Not much Lovecrafting here, other than the general theme and some archaeological interludes, and it’s more of an exemplary short science-fiction mash-up of space-gods and ‘sabre-tooth-tiger’ prehistory. Jack Kirby, also at Marvel, would explore similar ideas in his The Eternals (first issue July 1976).

One of the Amazon reviews for The Cult of Alien Gods: H.P. Lovecraft And Extraterrestial Pop Culture (2006) is a cursory one but points out that Garrett P. Serviss’s Edison’s Conquest of Mars (1898) proto-pulp Edisonade got there first with such ideas…

“Edison’s “Conquest of Mars” has the Martians coming to Earth in the distant past, abducting humans, and then hanging around to build the pyramids of Egypt”.

That Lovecraft read Serviss’s book as a boy is highly likely (see my chapter on Lovecraft and Serviss, a favourite author in his youth and ‘the Carl Sagan of his day’, in my book Lovecraft in Historical Context #4). And there was a book reprint of Edison’s Conquest of Mars in a 1,500-copy limited edition in 1947, which was advertised for several years in the likes of Weird Tales. Its reprint edition would have been about the right time to hit France in the mid 1950s, if only as book reviews (Morning of the Magicians was written c. 1955-59 and published 1960 in French). But Covalito’s book convincingly shows that the Morning of the Magicians authors were strongly influenced by Lovecraft.

In theory then the route(s) of influence to von Daniken could be many:

Serviss [1947] -> Morning of the Magicians [mid 1950s] -> von Daniken’s ‘ancient astronauts’ [1960s].

Serviss [1898] -> Lovecraft [1920s] -> Morning of the Magicians [mid 1950s] -> von Daniken’s ‘ancient astronauts’ [1960s].

The most likely is, cumulatively:

Serviss [1898] -> Theosophy [1920s] -> Lovecraft [1920s] -> + more Theosophy and other 1930s historico-mystic currents [1930s and 40s] -> Morning of the Magicians in English [1963] -> other French copycats of Magicians [mid 1960s] -> von Daniken’s ‘ancient astronauts’ [later 1960s].

But quite whether the bulk of the 1970s UFO-logists bothered to look any further back than von Daniken after his 1971 American paperback and cinema movie, who knows? There was also an American documentary of the increasingly popular book, the TV programme In Search of Ancient Astronauts (NBC, 1973).

Though we do know that Terrence McKenna was influenced early by Lovecraft (see the memoir The Brotherhood of the Screaming Abyss), and many of the more literate hippies must have at least tried to read Lovecraft once he was in affordable paperback form. Some key Lovecraft ideas had also filtered through into Arthur C. Clarke’s trans-cosmicism — which had its own ‘ancient contact’ symbolism such as 2001‘s monolith among the primitive man-apes — so there may be more wormholes of influence to be considered there. Carl Sagan’s famously lyrical Cosmos TV series probably also had an influence (see Cosmos: Podcast Edition – Carl Sagan for a good audio-only version), with Sagan highly sceptical of post-1940s UFO contacts but not of alien civilisations per se.

Nor should we underestimate the power of oral transmission, in terms of the influences swirling through the tight but far-travelling counter-culture of the UFO-logists. I guess there must be good histories of ‘serious’ UFO-ology by now, which might tell us more about that swirl. But I expect that research on the now-unfashionable ‘ancient astronauts’ wing and the influence of Lovecraft is likely greatly hampered by big gaps in memory, caused by: i) the inevitable natural memory loss and distortion caused by age; ii) the natural ephemerality of the counter-culture’s diaries and suchlike; iii) the psychedelic drugs of the time (summed up in the saying “if you can remember the 1960s, you weren’t there”); and iv) the later 1970s heroin epidemic which burned through so many urban hippies.

Apparently this half-baked stuff is still popular, mainly through a rather shallow American TV ‘documentary’ series called Ancient Aliens. I’ve never seen that series, and didn’t even know it existed until today. It’s said that even ‘serious’ UFO-ologists shun the ‘ancient astronauts’ believers as a ‘fringe of a fringe’, but I guess it has some passing entertainment value as “what if?” TV pseudo-archaeology for the masses. Although, as Lovecraft suggested several times in his letters, such wild real-world historical-conspiracy theory is really best confined to speculative fiction which is its proper home.

It’s possible that such ideas won’t just be confined to junk TV and swivel-eyed YouTube channels in the near future. On the 50th anniversary of von Daniken’s book, Hollywood is obviously currently sniffing around the sub-genre, with Prometheus already leading the way and a proposed movie-trilogy based on Kirby’s Eternals comics being mooted.

Frank E. Schoonover: American Visions

09 Friday Nov 2018

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“Frank E. Schoonover: American Visions” is a survey exhibition of over 80 original works, from a life’s work of over 2,000 pictures. The show runs 10th November 2018 until 27th May 2019 at the Norman Rockwell Museum (about 75 miles north of New York City). Mostly westerns, medieval, pirates, in the Howard Pyle manner, but he also did some science fiction. The Schenectady Daily Gazette has a well-written profile of the artist — which I’m pleased to see is also available to those in the UK and Europe, at a time when many small U.S. newspaper websites are blocking overseas visitors.

A John Carter of Mars illustration, with a faintly Lovecraft-like character visiting the hero.

10th Algeciras Fantastika – a Lovecraft special

08 Thursday Nov 2018

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Two reports of a Spanish Lovecraft event, translated and condensed…

The Guillermo Perez Villalta Building, host of the 10th International Fantastic Arts and Terror event Algeciras Fantastika, yesterday [Nov 2018] hosted the literary tribute to the American writer Howard Phillips Lovecraft. The director of the festival, Angel Gomez, together with other collaborating writers such as Juan Emilio Rios, Carmen Sanchez, Jorge Sanchez, Miguel Angel Planas and Juan Luis Helguera, honored the classic author through the reading of poems, sketches and short stories. Gomez recalled that this literary tribute of Algeciras Fantastika is one of its most traditional moments, and has previously celebrated and honoured famous artists such as Edgar Allan Poe, Gustavo Adolfo Becquer, Ray Bradbury and H.G. Wells.

The Algeciras Fantastika 2018 festival is a multidisciplinary cultural event specializing in fantasy, suspense, terror and science fiction, organized by the City Council of Algeciras and the University of Cadiz (UCA). Angel Gomez Rivero, director of the event, highlighted the extensive program of Algeciras Fantastic, “in which we can enjoy screenings of short films and feature films, the Little Mystics children’s literary contest, exhibitions of illustrations by Jesus Merino, the literary tributes of H.P. Lovecraft, and the tributes to the film director Miguel Angel Vivas and the actor Manuel Galiana.”

[Algeciras Fantastic also offers a] retrospective session on The Cinema of H.P. Lovecraft, in which a palace containing the spirits and the monster of terror will be screened. [Then on] The last day of Algeciras Fantastika 2018 a retrospective Lovecraft double-bill screening, with projections of The Resurrected and The Whisperer in Darkness, both in original version with Spanish subtitles.