An excellent resource for good science science-fiction, Andrew Fraknoi’s free Science Fiction Stories with Good Astronomy (2019).
Science Fiction Stories with Good Astronomy
07 Thursday Apr 2022
Posted in Astronomy, Scholarly works
07 Thursday Apr 2022
Posted in Astronomy, Scholarly works
An excellent resource for good science science-fiction, Andrew Fraknoi’s free Science Fiction Stories with Good Astronomy (2019).
06 Wednesday Apr 2022
Posted in Scholarly works
The Journal of Dracula Studies returns from the grave… now seemingly taken over by Kutztown University.
03 Sunday Apr 2022
Posted in Scholarly works
Hippocampus Press are now listing Lovecraftian Proceedings #4 (February 2022). A paperback of 300 pages of papers delivered at the ’emerging scholars’ event which flanked the NecronomiCon Providence 2019 convention. Looks like it has four historical/topographical articles of possible interest to me…
* The Influence of The Great Game on the Writings of H. P. Lovecraft: The Opening of Tibet and the Creation of Leng.
* The Necronomicon Yalensis and Lovecraft in Connecticut.
* A Lover of Past Phantoms: Lovecraftian Reflections in R. H. Barlow’s Life and Work.
* Neo-Gothic Decadence as a Pervasive Challenge in the Works of H. P. Lovecraft, Arthur Machen, and Alexander Blok.
The full table of contents is here at Hippocampus. The volume can also be found on Amazon already, in paper. Issues #1 through #3 have appeared as budget £1 ebooks on Amazon UK, and I assume that #4 will also do so in due course.
26 Saturday Mar 2022
Posted in Scholarly works
Leftist Spanish newspaper El Pais has the article “H.P. Lovecraft’s thirst for scientific darkness”. The Spanish-language article muses on the new book in titled El Astronomicon Y Otros Textes En Defense De La Ciencia (‘The Astronomicon and Other Texts in Defence of Science’).

This translates Lovecraft’s various writing on astronomy and the Moon and also his public tussles with a local astrologer. I’m uncertain if it also has relevant extracts from the private letters.
This volume has an introduction by its translator, Oscar Mariscal. He introduces us to a Lovecraft who has been little-known, until now. This is Lovecraft the popularizer and defender of the science of astronomy. In these texts the world first sees this introverted young man’s hunger and thirst for a world of scientific knowledge, and glimpses a tormented inner life that will in time give rise to a cosmos of viscous monsters and star headed terrors … terrors capable of reaching across the cosmos and into the depths of our unconscious souls.
This commercial book was aided by an arts grant from the Ministry of Culture, something almost impossible to imagine happening in the UK.
23 Wednesday Mar 2022
Posted in New books, Scholarly works
Neale Monks has a new long review of the book A Monster For Many: Talking With H.P. Lovecraft by Robert H. Waugh, on SFcrowsnest.
Lovecraft, Waugh argues, might be consciously patterning the structure of ‘The Dream-Quest’ on [James Joyce’s modernist] Ulysses, both being subdivided into parts thematically connected to different parts of the human body. Given that the entire story happens within a single night’s dream, the internalised quality of such a structure is plausible, at least.
Lovecraft flatly told White in May 1935… “I have not read “Ulysses””. But I suppose he may have read of it and its structure in press reviews, or heard about it in letters. It was hard to get hold of, but I seem to vaguely recall that Galpin got hold of various ‘naughty’ books when living in Paris? Galpin also had the interest and intellect to plough through some of such a difficult and rather boring text, if encountered. Thus Galpin could have related or known something of it first-hand, more so than other members of ‘the gang’?
Unfortunately for the notion of a modernist influence on Lovecraft though, I believe that old fashioned occultists patterned their spiritual ‘development’ on parts of the body. Called “chakras” or somesuch, which were deemed to be given spiritual ‘power-ups’ and in a certain order? In which case my initial guess would be that Lovecraft’s “Dream-Quest” and Joyce’s Ulysses were drawing on the same occult sources? Occultists will no doubt know more on the topic than I do.
21 Monday Mar 2022
Posted in New books, REH, Scholarly works
Since I last looked, the Italian Lovecraftian scholars have released several new journals.
Zothique #9 appeared at the end of September 2021.
* “an article on “The Weird and Sword & Sorcery”, which highlights the ‘Celtic substratum’.”
* “a small but succulent special section dedicated to the theme of music in weird literature, introduced by an essay by Davide Arecco, researcher and professor of History of science and technology at the University of Genoa, and with rare or unpublished stories ( by L.A. Lewis, Clark Ashton Smith, Emil Petaja, A.W. Calder, Jessie Adelaide Middleton), poems (by Jo. Dart and Robert Chambers) and also a comic that, signed by the master Gino Carosini (author of the text and drawings) presents a meeting as strange as it is unexpected: the one between the tales of Lovecraft and the music of Chet Baker!”
* “the fourth part of Mariano D’Anza’s long study on Robert E. Howard’s poetry”
Zothique #10 which apparently appeared a few weeks later as an “Autumn 2021” edition. This is the second Robert E. Howard special, of a planned three.
* “another substantial selection of articles and essays dedicated to the Bard of Cross Plains, together with a choice of unpublished works that expand the Italian bibliography of the writer.”
* “Giovanni Valenzano offers a very detailed excursus on werewolves and other shape-shifting beasts in Howard’s fiction”
* “Andrea Gualchierotti with brilliant erudition speaks to us of magic and witchcraft in the cycle of Conan the Barbarian, finding surprising parallels with the real magicians of the classical world.”
* “Mariano D’Anza’s work on the sources of Howardian poetry continues, this being his fifth section.”
Studi Lovecraftiani #20 with the announcement post being dated 12th January 2022.
* “a thorough examination of HPL’s cultural heritage in modern literature and media”
* “an in-depth study of cursed grimoires and impossible books that sprang from its pen and that of other authors”
* “a piece on Lovecraft’s monsters seen as a psychological metaphor, the first part of a learned study on the abstraction of corporeality in HPL’s fiction”
* “an original article that discloses a source never before identified for the short story “The Nameless City”.”
* “three unpublished [in Italian] writings by HPL himself, starting with a memory of his school days, where the writer also tells a funny episode that occurred during the graduation ceremony; then one of his essays where he criticizes the famous poem “The Waste Land” by Thomas Eliot, and, translated here for the first time, there are also his extraordinary notes that he needed to write the famous short story “The Shadow over Innsmouth”.”
The Italian Horror Magazine also notes that #20 has…
* “”Lovecraft’s Call: A Few Considerations on the Cultural Heritage of the Providence Dreamer.” The last part of which talks… “about Lovecraft the philosopher and conservative, a man flanked by authors apparently very distant from him such as Cesare Pavese, William Butler Yeats, Yukio Mishima and Pierre Drieu La Rochelle, Ezra Pound and even the late-stage Pasolini.”
* “Lovecraft and the Bible, examining the influence of the King James Bible on Lovecraft’s tales.”
* “an interview with Richard Stanley, director of The Colour Out Of Space movie.”
21 Monday Mar 2022
Posted in Scholarly works
S.T. Joshi’s Blog has updated. Joshi is tallying current submissions for the summer 2022 editions of his Penumbra mega-journal and the Lovecraft Annual. He’s now moving into the ‘call for submissions’ phase and there are opportunities in both publications…
I am somewhat short of material (especially articles) for Penumbra at this moment, so I encourage anyone out there who wishes to write about weird fiction (either a specific author or work in the field or some general topic) to send me an article. There is plenty of space! Lovecraft Annual also needs some filling up, but I imagine I will have a full issue in due course of time.
Great. I’ve sent a 6,000 word article in for Penumbra. Not on Lovecraft.
He also writes that he’s at work on the Long letters, which give tantalising glimpses of what the lost Lovecraft-to-Long letters contained (the period lost is Spring 1931 to 1937).
In a letter dating to May 1932, Long includes an extensive and explicit discussion of (hold on to your hats, people) sex. This is clearly a response to a letter Lovecraft wrote on the subject.
15 Tuesday Mar 2022
Posted in New books, Scholarly works
Neale Monks reviews the new Fungi From Yuggoth — An Annotated Edition, for SFcrowsnest. The new paperback…
represents astonishing value. There’s tons here to appeal to even the most casual Lovecraft fan, let alone the more serious student of weird fiction or 20th century poetry. ‘Fungi From Yuggoth’ is an astonishingly beautiful sonnet cycle and Schultz has done a stellar job here providing its complete context. … Highly recommended.
I was going to promote it for the latest ‘Plants’ issue of Digital Art Live, but sadly it got crowded out by a game I found at the last minute (Strange Horticulture).
10 Thursday Mar 2022
Posted in New books, REH, Scholarly works
Some books bits that don’t seem to justify a post on their own.
The European Conservative journal has a free review-article on the “Afterlife of an American Pulpster”…
Two recent American novels feature not the vivid characters who were products of R.E. Howard’s imaginative pen, but fictionalized versions of the man himself. Teel James Glenn’s A Cowboy in Carpathia was published in 2020 by Pro Se Press. David Pinault’s Providence Blue appeared in 2021 from Ignatius Press.
hplovecraft.com now has the table-of-contents for the third book in The Robert H. Waugh Library of Lovecraftian Criticism. Looks tasty. The entire three-volume set will weigh in at 900 pages.
Taskerland reviews, as a Lovecraft newbie daunted by I Am Providence, the shorter H.P Lovecraft: A Short Biography. This being S.T. Joshi’s 100-page whistle-stop abridgement.
S.T. Joshi’s Miscellaneous Writings and his 1980s Journals have been published.
08 Tuesday Mar 2022
Posted in Scholarly works
H. P. Lovecraft – The Final Decade, which appears to be the final talk in a series being given at the Topping & Company bookshop in Ely, England. 15th March 2022. ‘In person’ rather than online, though perhaps someone will put a recording on YouTube.
07 Monday Mar 2022
Posted in Podcasts etc., Scholarly works
A new podcast interview with John L. Steadman, author of the books Aliens, Robots & Virtual Reality Idols in the Science Fiction of H.P. Lovecraft, Isaac Asimov and William Gibson, and the historical survey H.P. Lovecraft & the Black Magickal Tradition: the master of horror’s influence on modern occultism.
26 Saturday Feb 2022
Posted in Podcasts etc., Scholarly works
Symposium from the Untold Depths: Lovecraft and the Popular, 25th March 2022, online. Seems to be a joint postgrad symposium linking students at Birmingham University and Manchester Met (MMU), England.
It has three interesting sounding talks…
* Post-Millenial Lovecraftian Humour.
* From Thalassophobia to a Thalassic Feeling in H.P. Lovecraft’s Oceanic Weird Fiction.
* ‘A Greek Influenced by Grimm’: H.P. Lovecraft’s Classical Reception