Call for articles on ‘Fantasy flora / Flore imaginaire’, for a special issue of the journal Fantasy Art and Studies. Deadline: 10th June 2024.

Voegelin has a new review of the relatively new book Theology and Lovecraft (2022)…

to say that Lovecraft was a man of his times is an understatement and deflection. He was more a man out of time, living firmly in a romanticized past and fantasizing about a dangerous future. This was a religious endeavor – which is to say, a mission of devotion and worship – even for a staunch atheist like Lovecraft.

See also the 2020 open-access article Altar Call of Cthulhu: Religion and Millennialism in H.P. Lovecraft’s Cthulhu Mythos. Which, incidentally, is under full Creative Commons Attribution.

This article offers a close analysis of millennialism within Lovecraft’s thought” as seen in three tales.

And in the latest Aeon magazine, H.P. Lovecraft, philosopher.

New in Dissections: Journal of Contemporary Horror, a long review of What Is Anything: Memoirs of a Life in Lovecraft and also of Joshi’s Journals: 1974–1987.

NecronomiCon Providence has issued the call for the Dr. Henry Armitage Memorial Scholarship Symposium, to be held at the impressive Omni Hotel, Providence – 15th-18th August 2024. Among the most interesting suggestions for possible topics are…

* Lovecraft’s correspondence as pre-blogging/travelog

* [Publisher] “Arkham House” and its heritage: further discoveries in its archival history

“Pre-blogging” is a new one to me. Never heard of it before. Seems that it may mean ‘a blog post you write before you actually do something, which you then also blog about afterwards’. Or they may just mean historically, that Lovecraft was ‘using letters as a form of blogging, before blogging was invented’? If the latter, it raises the question of his often phenomenal memory. Did he, like a modern blogger today, have substantial ‘search access’ in his mind to much of importance that he had written in his correspondence? “Lovecraft’s memory” might make an interesting topic for a short talk, showing just how good it was, how it worked, pointing to where and why it might have failed over time, and all the while drawing examples from the correspondence.

Anyway, submission deadline for the 2024 Symposium is 24th May 2024 and “early submissions are encouraged”.

2024 Call Flyer and contact details.

Omni Hotel

Another quick scamper around the tunnels of academia…

* “Science and Madness: Echoes of Freudian Psychoanalysis in the Works of H.P. Lovecraft”, an M.A. dissertation. “Available for download on Thursday, April 25, 2024”.

* H.P. Lovecraft’s monsters of modernity read through J. J. Cohen’s ‘Seven Monster Theses’. Another Masters dissertation, from 2022 and also embargoed, but with a substantial abstract. As well as the oft-cited racial fears…

“The study finds that Lovecraft’s monsters are in part influenced by religious uncertainty following the First World War, the scientific advancements of Einstein’s theories of relativity, and the economic uncertainty of the American Great Depression” and at a deeper level “laissez-faire capitalism and Judeo-Christian thought”.

* In Indiana, the 2023-2024 IDAH HASTAC Scholars include a reseacher looking at… “the role of magic in weird fiction, particularly that influenced by H.P. Lovecraft. As part of this work, Sam utilizes computational text analysis methods such as topic modelling and document classification.”

The venerable British SF author Brian Stableford has passed away. I can’t speak to his fiction, though I recall reading his SF books in the early 1980s and I know his range later included Lovecraftian Mythos tales (The Innsmouth Heritage and Other Sequels, etc al), fantasy tales (collected in Fables & Fantasies from Necronomicon Press) and acclaimed genre pastiche and mash-ups (Sherlock Holmes and others). Here I try to piece together a very basic overview of his scholarly works. Others will doubtless do a far better job in time, for one of the most prolific British writers. One hopes they’ll also say a word or two about the fine cover-artists he must have enjoyed having from time to time…

In 1979 he made his name as a critic with a study of the works of fellow SF author James Blish, A Clash of Symbols: The Triumph of James Blish. So far as I can tell, he never wrote on Lovecraft but a taste of his wide range of interest can be found in the contents list for his Slaves of the Death Spiders and Other Essays on Fantastic Literature (2017). With essays on H.G Wells and Dracula, SF of the 1980s, and also the infamous British 1990s censorship case of Lord Horror, plus his musings on the modern profession of science-fiction writing as a profession. He wrote at length on the latter topic in Writing Fantasy and Science Fiction. Several other essay collections on the craft, and DIY guides to writing SF, can also be found.

He was most interested in the deep roots of science-fiction, and became the authority of seminal but forgotten figures in the early ‘scientific romance’ such as Birmingham’s Sydney Fowler Wright (Deluge, The World Below and others), writing introductions to new editions, collecting and publishing S. Fowler Wright’s Short Stories, and editing books with a wider scope such as Scientific Romance: An International Anthology of Pioneering Science Fiction, the multi-volume scholarly book-series Scientific Romance in Britain 1890-1950; plus the later New Atlantis: a narrative history of the scientific romance.

He was also interested in the intersections with decadence, with historical collections such as Decadence and Symbolism: A Showcase Anthology, and at least two volumes of the Dedalus Book of Decadence. Exemplary early drug literature he collected in Snuggly Tales of Hashish and Opium. Recently he produced the representative collection Weird Fiction in France, and The Dedalus Book of British Fantasy (19th century).

He collected sea tales of alluring sirens in The Snuggly Sirenicon and Fays of the Sea, made an anthology of early femme-fatalle stories, and in Tales of Enchantment and Disenchantment wrote a history of faerie as a lead-in to “exemplary anthology” of such early tales and with a focus on the female ‘fay’.

In his later years he produced anthologies of proto-science fiction such as News from the Moon, and volumes of translations of early French science fiction such as Nemoville. His translations of early French imaginative authors would fill a small library, and his The Plurality of Imaginary Worlds: The Evolution of French Roman Scientifique provides the guide-book. Side-interests included early proto-robots, evidenced by the book Automata which collected stories from the 19th century featuring such ‘automata’ devices.

I see he had bibliographic articles published in the Book & Magazine Collector, introducing collectors to the likes of R.E. Howard and M.P. Shiel.

One can also find his name as editor (and probably also writer) on volumes such as The A to Z of Fantasy Literature; Science Fact and Science Fiction: An Encyclopedia; the Historical Dictionary of Science Fiction Literature; Dictionary of Science Fiction Places, and others.

Being British he was also interested in our own SF history, as seen in pieces such as “A Brief Economic History of British SF magazines” (in Space, Time, and Infinity: Essays on Fantastic Literature, 2007). Possibly there are more such out there.

That’s it for a brief survey. Doubtless I’ve missed a lot, but hopefully I’ve also given others some clusters to build on. Or just titles to read. He wrote a lot, but was not publicised a lot — and so you may well find titles above that you had no idea existed.

Bookstore Chronicles. Being an oral history of bookselling in America, as told by the nation’s own booksellers. The call for participants is still active and they appear to want audio only. One option there is to… “record a self-interview and upload your audio file”. Or if you know an old bookseller you think should be interviewed, pop over with an audio recorder for an afternoon’s chat.

MarzAat reviews The Annotated Tales of Edgar Allan Poe (1981). I never knew it existed. Currently available ‘to borrow’ from Archive.org, or I see there are a few hardback copies from used booksellers at reasonable prices. The detailed review by MarzAat usefully notes the many Lovecraft connections.