An inevitable doom creeps toward the unsuspecting world of the smartphonifiers and appytwitterers… The Cthulhu app awakes.

Scientists have reconstructed Lovecraft’s giant “Mountains of Madness” prehistoric penguin.

The veteran publishers of the New Scientist magazine have started a speculative science fiction / near-future magazine, possibly aiming to get a first-mover advantage ahead of the economic upturn (apparently touted in big publisher circles as likely to drive a new generation of young people away from fantasy, and toward “hard” SF). The new title is Arc…

“A new digital magazine about the future […] forthcoming new fact and fiction”

MIT Technology Review magazine has also announced a hard SF venture, TRSF…

“the first installment of a to-be-annual hard SF collection.”

Echoing the idea of Lovecraft’s At The Mountains of Madness, an ancient flowering plant has this month been brought back to life from seeds buried by a squirrel more than 30,000 years ago. The seeds were dug out of the fossilised and frozen burrows of ancient Arctic ground-squirrels in Siberia.

“The breakthrough means some early lifeforms, which ‘have long since vanished from the earth’s surface’, could still be held in the frozen wastes. It also suggests that dormant life found on Mars or other icy planets could be revived.”

An original copy of the 1924 issue of Weird Tales edition that published Lovecraft/Houdini’s long story “Imprisoned With The Pharaohs”, has been flogged on eBay for $680.

I was recently asked by a student the meaning of H.P. Lovecraft’s famous couplet, which he attributes to Alhazred…

“That is not dead which can eternal lie.
And with strange aeons even death may die.”

I answered that Lovecraft was presenting these lines as having been written in The Necronomicon by a mad 6th century Arab poet called Abdul Alhazred. Lovecraft states that The Necronomicon was originally written in Arabic, then translated into Greek, then Low Latin — and finally this fragment is rendered into English by the narrator of the short story “The Nameless City” (1921) in which the lines appear. That’s what Lovecraft would have the reader believe, and the fact that it is meant to be ‘a translation of a translation of a translation of a translation’ might explain why Lovecraft has his narrator call the couplet “unexplainable”. Yet, in typical Lovecraftian fashion, it is then partly explained: the narrator says the lines are related to a dream of Alhazred’s of “the nameless city” depicted in the story. How he knows this fact is not explained.

This aspect of the couplet’s apparent meaning was later picked up in Lovecraft’s “The Call of Cthulhu”. In this masterpiece the same couplet gets a repeat outing, with the same wording. In that later and more famous story the reader is clearly meant to understand couplet as being a prophesy — of the awakening of Cthulhu from the sunken city of R’lyeh. So once again it is meant to refer, obliquely, to a mysterious forgotten city. Those few fans who remembered the earlier “The Nameless City” story (published in the obscure The Wolverine) while reading “Cthulhu” were thus presumably meant to think that the narrator of that earlier tale was somewhat astray in his understanding of the couplet. For more precise understanding of how the couplet might relate to the idea of immortal beings, sunken cities lying in the deeps of the sea, and the nature of the sleeping Cthulhu, read the famous story itself.

Lovecraft’s Remington typewriter meets the 21st century, picture from dVice…

It’s a fully-functioning Mac PC, apparently…

Here’s one that might interest connoisseurs of Lovecraft’s poetry. A 1977 first-edition Lovecraft poetry collection, with what’s said to be an extensive introduction. On eBay now.

While Google chases an anti-trust suit with Google+, search doesn’t seem to be getting better. Even with personalisation turned on, and my heavy record of years of searching for Lovecraft items, my top ten results for “Lovecraft” include links to: a craft shop in the UK; and sex shop in Totonto.