New book: Weird Fiction and Science at the Fin de Siecle

23 Thursday Apr 2020

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New from Emily Alder of Edinburgh Napier University, Weird Fiction and Science at the Fin de Siecle. The focus is on British authors and their relations with science as then understood. Alder appears to be challenging the assumption that such works were all in some way ‘supernatural’ or were an elaboration of ‘the gothic’.

In this book, I conceive weird fiction as a literature of borderland science. In its fin-de-siecle forms, the weird tale arises because scientific discourses had murky edges, because the limits of knowledge and the extent of what was or wasn’t possible in the world were unclear, because the boundaries of valid scientific enquiry itself were not stable. Weird fictions flourish in gaps in knowledge or beyond its edges. … Some tales exploit the gaps and possibilities in materialist science opened up by late nineteenth-century biology and evolutionary theories; some extrapolate from theories of physics, from classic thermodynamics and the new physics of unseen, subatomic worlds. All pick up on the strangeness of science, of what is already weird. … Weird fiction and science belong to the same, widespread cultural conversation taking place at this time about new knowledge… [its authors react] to changing ways of understanding generated by scientific exploration, considering how their implications might be experienced by individuals in the present, projected into the future, and reconciled with competing worldviews.

It looks like an interesting approach. Here are the contents…

CONTENTS:

* Weird Tales and Scientific Borderlands at the Fin de Siecle.

* Weird Selves, Weird Worlds: Psychology, Ontology, and States of Mind in Robert Louis Stevenson and Arthur Machen.

* Weird Knowledge: Experiments, Senses, and Epistemology in Stevenson, Machen, and Edith Nesbit.

* Weirdfinders: Reality, Mastery, and the Occult in E. and H. Heron, Algernon Blackwood, and William Hope Hodgson. [On the ‘occult detectives’ sub-genre].

* Borderlands of Time, Place, and Matter.

* Meat and Mould: The Weird Creatures of William Hope Hodgson and H. G. Wells.

* Weird Energies: Physics, Futures, and the Secrets of the Universe in Hodgson and Blackwood.

Added to Open Lovecraft

21 Tuesday Apr 2020

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Added to the Open Lovecraft page on this blog:

* A. Fattori, “Narrazioni aliene: Da Innsmouth a Twin Peaks: tendenze transmediali e tentazioni postumane in Howard Phillips Lovecraft”, Mediascapes journal, No. 14, 2020. (In Italian. “Alien narrations: From Innsmouth to Twin Peaks: Transmedia Trends and Posthumous Temptations in Howard Phillips Lovecraft”. Appears to focus on Lovecraft’s role as the begetter of the first fannish transmedia universe).

* F. Collignon, “The Insectile Informe: H. P. Lovecraft and the deliquescence of form”, Extrapolation, Vol. 60, No. 3, 2019. (Considers the buzzing insectile sounds in “The Whisperer in the Darkness”, and how they later take the form of an “enfleshed [human] voice”. Infers possible philosophical-political meanings from apparent “formlessness” taking on a human form).

* T. Honegger, Re-enchanting a dis-enchanted world: Tolkien (1892-1973) and Lovecraft (1890-1937), Quaderni di Arda: Rivista di studi Tolkienani e mondi fantastici, Vol. 1, No. 1., December 2019. (In dual English and Italian, scroll halfway down the page to find the English version. Both are new.)

Also, forthcoming from Thomas Honegger (in paid paper only) is…

“Language, Historical Depth, and the Fantastic in the Work of H.P. Lovecraft”, in: Fantastic Languages: The Language of the Fantastic. (Fastitocalon: Studies in Fantasticism Ancient to Modern 9), forthcoming in 2020.

New book: Bookery’s Guide to Pulps & Related Magazines

20 Monday Apr 2020

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There’s a second edition of Bookery’s Guide to Pulps & Related Magazines, new in 2020 from Ivy Press. It’s a comprehensive price guide in the Overstreet tradition, but could also be a handy lookup for years and titles for historians. The 400-page 2005 edition is on Archive.org, if you want to see the sort of thing you’ll be getting for your $30 for the new edition.

For those who buy a copy, I’d suggest you might get an interesting blog post by tabulating a few prices, comparing 2005 → 2020 and looking for trends both up and down.

“Deluge” movie fully restored – now streaming

19 Sunday Apr 2020

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Further to my recently look at S. Fowler Wright and his biography and influence on Lovecraft, I’m pleased to see a post today lauding the restored 1933 movie of Fowler Wright’s science-fiction disaster classic Deluge (1927). It’s now available to stream…

Once a lost film and for decades only available in an Italian language print with English subtitles, it was recently restored from a newly-discovered 35mm nitrate negative with the English language soundtrack by Serge Bromberg’s Paris-based Lobster Films. Kino Repertory picked up the film for a limited theatrical re-release in the U.S. and now Kino Lorber Studio Classics presents the stateside disc debut of the Lobster restoration. It looks very good for its age, especially considering the original elements suffered partial decomposition. Digital tools have restored much of the image and the sharpness and the soundtrack is even more impressive, with a clarity not often heard in orphaned films of this vintage and a dynamic range to the musical score. The Blu-ray and DVD Kino Lorber release also features new audio commentary by film historian Richard Harland Smith and a bonus feature: the 1934 B-movie Back Page, a newspaper drama starring Peggy Shannon.

Apparently the movie’s distributor went bankrupt shortly after it was released in 1933, and then the movie was abruptly pulled from cinemas and cannibalised — the spectacular and costly special-effects scenes were extracted and crafted into new “Destruction of New York!” shorts that could generate long-term profits for creditors. This catastrophe scuppered any hope of a Hollywood script-writing career for S. Fowler Wright, and he returned to England.

Did Lovecraft see it? Well, after a long hiatus Lovecraft had returned to movie-going circa the winter of 1932-33, as the quality of movies rapidly improved. He was later wowed by the historical time-travel drama Berkeley Square in 1933 for instance. It’s thus quite possible that the prospect of seeing the ‘pest zone’ of New York entirely destroyed and swept away would have enticed him to a 1933 viewing of Deluge (the movie’s makers had swopped out the English Cotswolds for New York).

Though the Barlow letters suggest that Lovecraft was often tardy in such things, waiting until the very end of a film’s local run before visiting the cinema. Presumably there was less of a noisy distracting crowd in the cinema during the last few days of screening, and that was the way he liked it. Perhaps the tickets were also cheaper at such times. Such tardiness may well have meant he missed Deluge, it being abruptly pulled from release before he could see it. I know of no evidence that he managed to catch the movie before it was pulled.

He somewhat sporadically continued to attend cinema shows, for instance adoring the 18th century British Empire romance-adventure Clive of India (1935) showing the founding of the British Empire in India. This he held up to Barlow, alongside Berkeley Square, as a movie that had given him a ‘real kick’. In such continued cinema-going it’s not impossible he may have, at some point in 1934-36, seen and enjoyed one of the “Destruction of New York!” shorts that Deluge became.

New book: Aliens, Robots & Virtual Reality Idols in the Science Fiction of H.P. Lovecraft, Isaac Asimov and William Gibson

18 Saturday Apr 2020

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A new book, due later in 2020…

My new book: Aliens, Robots & Virtual Reality Idols in the Science Fiction of H.P. Lovecraft, Isaac Asimov and William Gibson is due to be published on October 30th of this year”

The core idea seems to be that some of us enjoy imagining extreme aliens/robots, encountered under extreme conditions. Such ideas then both threaten and reinforce the reader’s ideas about ‘what it is to be human’. One can certainly see how such repeated literary lessons might have been useful for a certain kind of young nerd in the 1930s-80s.

Providence Police Station

17 Friday Apr 2020

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More possibly-useful photo-reference for Lovecraftian graphic novels set in Providence. The Providence Police Station, of which I’ve never seen a postcard before.

I have several times been in a police station — usually to inquire about stolen property, & once to see the Chief of Police about the banning of a client’s magazine from the stands — but never in the part devoted to cells.” — Lovecraft to J. Vernon Shea, 29th May 1933.

In both these instances this was in New York. He had had all his suits and Loveman’s radio stolen by youths, while living at a squalid rooming house in Red Hook. The magazine was the ‘banned in Indiana’ issue of Weird Tales.

If he ever had cause to step inside Providence Police Station appears to be unknown. The stern frontage and lingering litter/trash does not make it look like the sort of place that would encourage a 14 year old Lovecraft to venture in during Winter 1904/5, to enquire about his lost cat Trigger-ban — though a graphic novel of his life might plausibly include such a scene — the staunch young Lovecraft weaving through the drunks and leering ner-do-wells to enquire about his beloved feline. Nevertheless, the Police Station was no doubt part of his mental geography of his city, both topographically and via the drip-feed of police news headlines he glanced at daily in the local newspaper. He did not actually read the ‘Police News’ pages, as he told his friend Moe in a letter of 1923, but one imagines some of the more front-page headlines of crime were unavoidable.

Lone Star Fictioneer #1 and 4

16 Thursday Apr 2020

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Here’s a good look at a fine Solomon Kane cover by Steve Fabian, for the launch of Lone Star Fictioneer #1. This is the apparently-rare 1975 first-issue of the R.E. Howard fanzine produced by Byron L. Roak. Contents list.

Search suggests that the ‘zine is not on Archive.org or the usual fanzine archives, but issue #4 is online at Georgia Tech as a student digitisation and Omeka familiarisation project.

R.E. Howard and Amir Timur

15 Wednesday Apr 2020

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New on Cyberlenika, the main Russian open scholarly repository, a short paper which examines…

the image of [Amir] Timur the Great [aka Tamerlane] and description of his epoch in the story Lord of Samarcand by well-known American writer Robert E. Howard.

The paper is in reasonable English and is under Creative Commons Attribution, and thus an English-language journal might be interested in publishing a re-formatted and expanded version. One imagines that public-domain maps and illustrations could be found to illustrate it, along with relevant sections from the letters and the Weird Tales sister title Magic Carpet.

The Early Wells – in Kindle

15 Wednesday Apr 2020

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Back in 2012 I created a handy bundle of ebooks for the classic early science fiction and fantastic fiction of H.G. Wells.

This was hosted as a .ZIP on one of my now-lapsed domains, and as such hasn’t been available for a few years now. So I’ve dug it out and uploaded it to archive.org in perpetuity. This .ZIP file contains the following ebooks…

The early science fiction novels:

The Time Machine (1895)
The Island of Doctor Moreau (1896)
The Invisible Man (1897)
The War of the Worlds (1898)
When the Sleeper Wakes (1899)
The First Men in the Moon (1901)
The Food of the Gods and How It Came to Earth (1904)
In the Days of the Comet (1906)
The War in the Air (1908)
The Sleeper Awakes (Wells’s 1910 revision of When the Sleeper Wakes, the first being said to be the best)

Short story collection:

The Country of the Blind and Other Stories. (You only really need this one collection. Wells wrote that this particular story collection covers: “all the short stories by me that I care for any one to read again”. The stories the collection contains were all written between 1894 and 1910.)

Download.

These Kindle versions were checked and viewed and found to be good texts and free of errors. Just unzip and copy the .MOBI files to your Kindle. These works are in the public domain, and were gleaned, downloaded and repackaged for your convenience from open sources.

They won’t be a swishy as the Penguin Classics or other editions, but they’re free and they may save you an hour of hunting and confusion on the Web. It can be especially difficult to find such things by search, as there’s a lot of crapware when it comes to public domain books. That goes for Amazon too, where you’re highly likely to be mis-directed multiple times in such a search.

Also, one might usefully pair these with the early journalistic ‘science writing’ the young Wells was publishing in newspapers and small journals at this time. For which see the book H. G. Wells: Early Writings in Science and Science Fiction (University of California Press), also freely available at Archive.org in Kindle .MOBI format.