Amazon’s warehouse bots rush to complete your Xmas books order…

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tMpsMt7ETi8?rel=0&w=560&h=315]

I’ve only just stumbled on the news that last month George R.R. Martin (Game of Thrones) made a visit to the grave of H.P. Lovecraft…

H.P. Lovecraft in The Pinfeather, November 1914…

The UK has opened its Orphan Works licencing scheme. How to apply, if you want to reprint a long out-of-print and forgotten bit of weird fiction in the UK. As far as I know it’s not a ‘first one to apply, blocks all others’, or else the big publishers would simply gobble up all the low hanging fruit.

Why, gosh — one could almost imagine that the folks at Brown University were channelling H.P. Lovecraft. In the news this month…

“Researchers at Brown University have shattered an electron wave function, that near-mythical representation of indeterminate reality, in which an unmeasured particle is able to occupy many states simultaneously”.

“A team at Brown University called BrainGate is at the forefront of the real-world movement to link human brains directly to computers”.

“Brown University is part of a team looking at the environment’s influence on human adaptation and how it changes biology… Genes can shape culture and political institutions, which in turn can shape biology and physiology, passing on certain traits to future generations.”

And becoming world experts on creatures that look like this…

“Century old Antarctic Expedition notebook found underneath ice”…

The University of Iowa Libraries has announced that they will scan the James L. ‘Rusty’ Hevelin Collection… “in its entirety … 10,000 science fiction fanzines will be digitized”…

Nothing on this scale has been attempted with fanzines before, and we are thrilled to be able to finally address the concern we have been hearing for years from fans and scholars, to find a way to enable them to discover exactly what these pieces contain,” says Greg Prickman, head of special collections. Once digitized, the fanzines will be incorporated into the UI Libraries’ DIY History interface, where a select number of interested fans (up to 30) will be provided with secure access to transcribe, annotate, and index the contents of the fanzines. The transcription will enable the UI Libraries to construct a full-text searchable fanzine resource, with links to authors, editors, and topics, while protecting privacy and copyright by limiting access to the full set of page images.

Opening the boxes, they also seem to be discovering some boxes full of Munsey-era proto-pulps.

The incipient “H.P. Lovecraft was Here! Come unto us, ye tourist hordes!” trend gathers a little more pace, as Marblehead gets in on the action with a forthcoming public lecture…

The lecture will take up Lovecraft’s obsession with Marblehead and St. Michael’s, their importance to his macabre and influential writings, and controversies about fact and fantasy in Lovecraft’s literary landscapes.

PulpdomOnline is a PDF version of a long-running old-school fanzine, with the added bonus of tablet-tastic colours. Four issues so far, all free.

Lovecraft is deftly name-checked in the opening of the nicely-designed main booklet that welcomes new graduate students to Providence…

A long time ago, the writers Edgar Allen Poe and H.P. Lovecraft wrote of strange surreal realms hidden from common eyes. It was in the nooks and crannies of Providence that they experienced other universes, stranger and more fantastic than our own. While I am not a superstitious man, I find that this place is its own pocket universe, its population of geniuses focusing great energy into strange and fantastic projects. Being here is a unique experience, and I hope you explore all it has to offer.

Tellers of Weird Tales is a super blog that surveys the lesser-known writers and monsters from the Lovecraft era.

A big Lovecraft convention, set for 2015 in Germany…