Category Archives: Podcasts etc.

Long and Voluminous

06 Thursday Oct 2022

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A new Voluminous podcast reads a Lovecraft letter to Frank Belknap Long, 25th February 1924. It’s part of the new Long cache deposited at the John Hay Library, and apparently it’s largely new here…

A couple of excerpts from this letter were published in Selected Letters I, but it is not yet available in the Brown Digital Repository, which means that except for a very small handful of people, you are among the first to experience the complete version since Frank Belknap Long opened the envelope 98 years ago!

The reading is followed by a good interview with the John Hay librarian in charge of the Lovecraft materials. It’s revealed that the collection has un-digitised collections from the Lovecraft Circle, and they welcome endowments specifically targeted at Lovecraft and the Circle (which, I guess, might enable scanning). It seems they can’t dip into the general university funds to pay for such things, and Special Collections relies on endowments and donations.

The S.T. Joshi Fellowship at Brown is revealed to have re-opened to scholars. That was mentioned in the podcast as being “1st October”, but it seems this was a slip of the memory. The S.T. Joshi Endowed Research Fellowship Web page states 1st November 2022, so there’s still time to apply. A point to keep in mind for applications is that Brown is said (in the interview) to favour applications to work with un-digitised areas of collections. It was thus interesting to hear that they have un-digitised Circle materials, and also one of the world’s largest collections of Silver Age U.S. comics, in that respect. So potentially one might track the early emergence and evolution of Lovecraftian themes in comics.

Another factor revealed in the interview is that, as of NecronomiCon 2022, scanning of the new Long letters has not yet started. So presumably they won’t be arriving online very soon.

The Hobbit, unabridged and full-cast

03 Monday Oct 2022

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Here’s something which may brighten a dull Monday. I’ve been pleased to discover a new free ten-hour unabridged audio version of Tolkien’s The Hobbit. Full-cast (one man, young, British) + audio FX + music.

The Hobbit (Audiobook) by Bluefax is not quite up to the vocal standards of master-mimic Phil Dragash, who had earlier accomplished the same thing with an unabridged The Lord of the Rings. But the voicework is very good, it’s a great listen and is overall a fine audiowork and precursor to hearing Dragash’s LoTR.

My understand is that to legally download this you need to first own the retail book and the retail audiobook. Also the soundtrack album for the disappointing and overblown The Hobbit movies. Which is where the music comes from, but be warned that the Hobbit movies are otherwise the worst possible introduction to Middle-earth.

With a good unabridged audiobook to hand for repeated listening, I may now expand my The Cracks of Doom book to a third edition. To encompass the ‘untold tales’ to be found in the cracks of The Hobbit as well as The Lord of the Rings.

There’s a certain amount of horror to be found here, and indeed children’s book reviewers warned of it on publication. I don’t refer to that strange anti-Tolkien phobia, which seems to involve a horror of encountering fey singing elves. Yes, there are singing elves a-plenty. But the central chapters on Mirkwood and its spiders may have some reaching for their Lovecraft, for light relief.

The text used by Bluefax is the modern edition, which subtly aligns the 1937 original of the Gollum sequence with the plot of the 1950s The Lord of the Rings, and also makes other small changes. Such as not having Bilbo briefly note some itinerant hobbits when he and Thorin make their way out of the Shire via Breeland (though the existence of roving hobbits who choose to be itinerant is later revealed in LoTR, when Merry inserts his brief history of Breeland… “Some, doubtless, were no better than tramps, ready to dig a hole in any bank and stay only as long as it suited them.”). Also, in the early drafts of LoTR, ‘Trotter’ (later Strider) was to have been one of these roving hobbits.

Podcast: Providence pals interviewed

21 Wednesday Sep 2022

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Thanks to Gregory for letting me know about a new podcast. For Henrik Moller’s 150th podcast last week, he interviewed (in English) living members of the ‘Providence pals’…

The first wave of serious Lovecraft scholars started out in the 1970s. [In the U.S.] They called themselves ‘The Providence pals’. This is the story of how they helped Lovecraft to become recognised as a serious literary author [at a crucial time].

Hamilton and Kipling

08 Thursday Sep 2022

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If you want a taste of what Weird Tales readers found so alluring about ‘star’ author Edmond Hamilton, his “The Metal Giants” (Weird Tales, December 1926) is now a new one-hour reading on Librivox.

Lovecraft called the crowd-pleasing formula writer “indefatigable & repetitious” and he assured a correspondent that, if he were to enter the field of ‘interplanetary fiction’… “you may depend upon it that I shall not choose Edmond Hamilton [as a model]”. That said, in 1926 Lovecraft did admire his “The Monster-God of Mamurth” tale, and I recall that they met at some point and got on well. He was also surprised to find he liked the Hamilton tale “Child of the Winds” in the May 1936 Weird Tales (“Hamilton(!!)” he exclaimed in a letter).

While searching for the name, I found more evidence for the influence of Kipling’s seminal “With The Night Mail” on science-fiction…

“… an article in the February 1922 Science and Invention, ‘10,000 Years Hence’. Howard Brown provided a stunning illustration of floating health cities (like huge health farms) kept aloft in the upper atmosphere by power rays drawing their energy from the sun. Gernsback described how these cities could be directed to move around the Earth [keeping pace with the sun], a concept one might believe inspired two later noted works of science fiction, Edmond Hamilton’s “Cities in the Air” (1929) and James Blish’s Earthman, Come Home (1955), were it not that neither author knew of the article.”

The above is from the pulp/early SF survey book The Time Machines, Liverpool University Press, which does not mention Kipling even once.

Ah, but these authors would have known of Kipling, the obvious source for such ideas. The direct inspiration being drawn from “With The Night Mail” will be obvious to anyone who has read it. Kipling’s cloud-breakers + permanently aloft sun-powered airships = “Cities in the Air”. Kipling’s giant and ascending ‘consumptive’ hospital airships = hospital cities in the upper atmosphere.

Since the article and Hamilton’s “Cities in the Air” (much enjoyed by pulp readers of the time, it seems) are now public domain, they might even be overhauled and retro-fitted to fit with Kipling’s “With the Night Mail” / Aerial Board of Control universe. In fact, much else that was published in the 11 issues of Gernsback’s short-lived Air-Wonder Stories seems on the face of it to be fair game for such a thing.

Audiobook: The Last Galley

24 Wednesday Aug 2022

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New on Librivox, Conan Doyle’s book The Last Galley, Impressions and Tales (1911). This is from before Doyle’s marked turn to spiritualism.

Doyle writes in his introduction…

The first half is made up of a series of pictures of the past … there is a region between actual story and actual history which has never been adequately exploited. I could imagine, for example, a work dealing with some great historical epoch, and finding its interest not in the happenings to particular individuals, their adventures and their loves, but in the fascination of the actual facts of history themselves. These facts might be coloured with the glamour which the writer of fiction can give…

The Academy remarked, in a review of the book on publication in 1911, that the evocations of the first section would make an excellent accompaniment to a tiresome journey…

The classical section, consisting of some 124 pages, is extremely well done and transports us into the atmosphere of the period in which the tales are told.

In the Librivox reading this historical section runs for three and a half hours.

In the eight stories that then make up the second half of the book, we end with “The Terror of Blue John Gap”. This is a upland monster-horror set in and beneath the Peak District of England, where the Midlands rises to meet the rocky North. The specific location it was based on would likely be Treak Cliff Cavern near Castleton, a Peak mine since Ancient Roman times and a source for ‘Blue John’ rock which the story title alludes to. The cave played a key role in the discovery of the principle of evolution by Erasmus Darwin.

Early 132nd Birthday news

20 Saturday Aug 2022

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It’s only noon over in the USA, and I guess many are only just emerging in search of breakfast. But a quick tickle of the search tools at 6pm in the UK brings some early 132nd Birthday news…

* Dark Adventure Radio Theatre, “Bad Medicine” compilation. Containing their olde time radio version of “Cool Air” and others. Free to download for HPL’s birthday. Also “Dark Adventure Radio Theatre episode downloads on a buy-one-get-one-free” basis.

* Some podcast activity already detectable via search. A lecture on “Lovecraft & the Occult – historical & literary influences on the Cthulhu mythos”. No idea what it’s like, but I like the look of the presenter and studio. He makes an effort. Nerds RPG Variety Cast did a podcast to celebrate H.P. Lovecraft’s birthday by discussing Lovecraftian films. Some story readings on YouTube, several in Spanish, some still to be broadcast later today.

* A curious coffin-shaped magazine posted on eBay. Not sure if it’s a birthday thing. Apparently only 10 have been made.

A new essay by Lovecraft?

13 Saturday Aug 2022

Posted by in Historical context, Podcasts etc., Scholarly works

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A new episode of Voluminous, reading and discussing one of Lovecraft’s letters. Oddly enough I’ve just started properly reading (rather than occasionally dipping into at random) the Donald Wandrei letters, and this is one of those letters.

The Voluminous presenters appear have have discovered an unpublished essay lurking at Brown…

The Brown Digital Repository has another typescript which is [incorrectly, by Barlow] labeled as “The Materialist Today”, but it is a different essay also called “Remarks on Materialism”. This longer essay does not appear to have been published, but if you’re interested in more of HPL’s thoughts on cosmic matters it’s worth taking a look at.

It seems to have been pieced together by Brown archivists or others, having appeared in very scattered form on the backs of letters sent to various correspondents “between 1927 and 1932”. The general practice of the Lovecraft circle’s letters seem to be that one re-used paper by writing letters on the reverse of failed manuscripts, or texts superseded by a good printed version, or on old carbons.

Update: It actually appears to be a late typing of “In Defence of Dagon”, an essay already known. My thanks for the commenters (see below) for pointing this out.

Also in audio. New on Archive.org, R.E. Howard’s “Wolfshead” in a new 58 minute public domain reading. Also “He” and “The Shunned House” by Lovecraft.