Category Archives: Scholarly works

More Moe

28 Sunday Oct 2018

Posted by in New books, Scholarly works

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S. T. Joshi’s latest blog post reveals that the new Lovecraft Annual #12 has reached him, together with latest door-stopper volume of Lovecraft’s annotated letters. Joshi reveals that Letters to Maurice W. Moe and Others has more than letters in it. It…

“contains numerous writings by Moe, Dwyer, and Loveman, and a letter by Starrett to Sam Loveman.”

Beyond the simple problem of wrangling a 628-page print volume thought a tiny modern letterbox by the regular postal service, I do wish that more of these Letters volumes were available as ebooks for the Kindle. Whence they would become keyword searchable, and one could make the font bigger and more readable etc. But only the Morton letters were briefly available that way, and even that volume has recently vanished from the Kindle store at both Amazon UK and USA. Thankfully the Morton ebook, purchased in 2017, is still on my Kindle.

Falling Felines

28 Sunday Oct 2018

Posted by in Historical context, New books, Scholarly works

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Falling Felines Research: the history book, successfully crowd-funding now.

If you can’t wait for the book, the author has a long blog post on the topic of lab research on falling cats.

It turns out that that aerodynamics, molecular physics, mathematics, mechanical control systems, and other branches of science and engineering were all strongly informed by the study of tumbling kitties which (of course) always landed on their feet. Perhaps Lovecraft was right (again), when he said that inherent in the very form of the cat lay cosmic secrets, a potent symbolisation of the universe, and that this was “just as true kinetically as statically”.

A quick search of Google Scholar and JURN shows that such research is still ongoing, and that the same science may yet inform the design of human-interacting robots, autonomous drones, space-elevator nano-ribbons, and many other sqwerky uses as yet undreamed. Robo-tentacles, perhaps.

New book: Je suis Providence

26 Friday Oct 2018

Posted by in New books, Scholarly works

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Announced for publication March 2019 in paperback, Lovecraft : Je suis Providence, being the French translation of S.T. Joshi’s monumental two-volume I Am Providence. The team leader on the translation was the French Lovecraft specialist Christophe Thill, and it looks like it’s in safe hands.

There will be a simultaneous paperback and ebook release. The book is the result of a £23,000 ($32k) crowdfunding campaign which completed in October 2017, and it seems that megafunders have been getting advance peeks at the translation proofs.

Wormwood #31

23 Tuesday Oct 2018

Posted by in Doyle, Kipling, New books, Scholarly works

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Wormwood #31 has been published by Tartarus at £10.

Likely to be of most interest to readers of this blog is “The Dark and Decadent Dreams of Doctor Doyle” by Paul M. Chapman, on Conan Doyle’s non-Holmes tales in which… “His work often echoed Poe’s ‘love for the grotesque and the terrible’”.

Looking back over other issues of the last few years, I also see that #26 had a similar survey essay for Kipling, “The Strange and the Supernatural in the Short Stories of Rudyard Kipling” by Colin Insole.

The Thing from the Vaults

22 Monday Oct 2018

Posted by in Lovecraftian arts, New books, Scholarly works

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The original has been found for John W. Campbell’s famous story “Who Goes There?”, a 1938 Lovecraft-alike tale about a team of scientists in Antarctica and their horrifying encounter with a shape-shifting alien entity. Campbell’s unpublished draft for that, known as “Frozen Hell”, had 45 pages of unused material. The original is now set to be published in 2019 by Wildside.

Science Fantasy Review for Spring 1950 lists “Frozen Hell” as part of a forthcoming Campbell collection, but it seems that book never made it to print. The work was recently discovered by Alec Nevala-Lee, just sitting un-regarded in an archive box, while he was doing research for his new book on the history of the famous Astounding magazine.

Lovecraft Country

21 Sunday Oct 2018

Posted by in Lovecraftian arts, Maps, Odd scratchings, Scholarly works

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Here’s an elegant map, which might make a useful folded bookmark or paste-in for Lovecraft scholars. Especially those reading through the ever-increasing number of shelf-strainers that contain Lovecraft’s Letters and Essays, and who are trying to follow the old gent as he zig-zags through the coastal summerlands and backwaters of New England to alight on the doorsteps of fellow amateurs, correspondents and antiquarian museums. The map is from the 1922 edition of The geography of New England.

300dpi, in a 3Mb .jpg file. It’s not a fold-out, so there’s not much I could do about the gutter when aligning the two pages in Photoshop.

Also useful, for following Lovecraft’s more local walks into the city-centre, is a 1907 street-map of central Providence. Hand-drawn by a local, it was intended for use as part of a city-wide ‘open day’. As such it shows the hopping off points for the tram lines that Lovecraft would have used to get out and about, and it usefully highlights and has a fine-grained local awareness of which stores and buildings are worthy of notice. Again, there was not much I could do about the map’s gutter, as it wasn’t a fold-out map.

Spicy Armadillo Stories

19 Friday Oct 2018

Posted by in Historical context, Scholarly works

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Inspired by the excellence of Sam Moskowitz’s boots-on-the-ground 1964 biographical article on Virgil Finlay, mentioned here in an earlier post, I went looking to see if he had collected more such articles on artists into a book. It seems not, but Archive.org has the 1974 reprint of his earlier Immortal Storm: A History of Science Fiction Fandom (1954).

Also noted, the last issue of Spicy Armadillo Stories #7 (August 1992), themed “How the Pulps Worked”. Includes “Teaching Pulp Magazine Writing” by Sam Moskowitz. Seems to be totally unavailable today, but a $3 Kindle edition might get some interest re: the growing interest in the pulps among business historians.

There’s a more recent collection on how the pulps worked, albeit only from the point of view of the writers and probably mostly talking about story mechanics. The Penny-a-Word Brigade (2017) is from the makers of The Blood ‘n’ Thunder Guide to Pulp Fiction (2018, revised edition).

A new Tom Shippey interview

16 Tuesday Oct 2018

Posted by in Podcasts etc., Scholarly works

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No mention of Lovecraft, but readers of this blog will likely be interested in a new and excellent 90 minute interview with Tom Shippey, leading Tolkien scholar. Shippey is on top form. As well as various acutely perceptive Tolkien observations, other topics include the establishment attitudes to the study of genre literature, then the real historical Vikings and their recent TV adaptations, and heroism. It’s a dual presenter podcast, but the jokey ‘lots-a-laffs’ approach that such shows commonly exhibit is suppressed for such a heavyweight guest and only creeps back in toward the very end of the show.

Added to Open Lovecraft

15 Monday Oct 2018

Posted by in New books, Scholarly works

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* A. Sheedy, “Perverted by language: weird fiction and the semiotic anomalies of a genre”, 2016 PhD thesis for the University of Tasmania, Australia. (Focusses on short stories that deploy “nameless things and thingless names”, inc. by Lovecraft. Chapters three and four usefully discuss this in relation to the library as a characteristic place of weird fiction).

Comics panel from Obscure Cities: The Walls of Samaris I.

“I Am Providence” in German – volume 2

14 Sunday Oct 2018

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H. P. Lovecraft – Leben und Werk 2 is now listed on Amazon UK for publication 1st November 2018. It’s the second volume in the German translation of S.T. Joshi’s full and excellent Lovecraft biography I Am Providence. Volume One in German translation was H. P. Lovecraft – Leben und Werk, Band 1: 1890–1924 and appeared in October 2017, having been first announced in late 2012.

The German Amazon store also has volume 2 listed as pre-ordering, but has a later shipping date of 30th November 2018.

Is the interior of the mirror meant to be solid black? Or is that due to the poor screen I’m currently having to use (my hi-colour monitor died, after a decade of use).