Tales of Wonder No. 8, and a wonder-tale of cats

14 Tuesday May 2024

Posted by in Kittee Tuesday, Odd scratchings

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New on Archive.org for the first time, a good scan of Tales of Wonder No. 8, for Autumn 1939.

The SF Encyclopedia states the magazine gave Arthur C. Clarke his first professional published articles, and as we see above it also gave British readers the strong taste of the other Clark, Clark Ashton Smith. Tales of Wonder also had…

“The Smile of the Sphinx” (Autumn 1938, No. 4) – where cats are discovered to be aliens observing humans – was one of the most popular stories the magazine published.

A pity Lovecraft could not have lived to chuckle at that one. The title may even have been a nod to Lovecraft… “the smile of the Sphinx vaguely displeased us, and made us wonder about the legends of subterranean passages beneath” (“Under the Pyramids”).

The 12,000-word cat tale was such a success that the fanzine Tomorrow No. 7 (August 1938) published a “making of…” article by the author.

The story itself can be found reprinted in Worlds Beyond 1 (December 1950), available as an open PDF download at Archive.org. A poor scan, but readable. An amusing story, with a British setting that reminds me of Wells’s War of the Worlds, plus we get a thinly disguised Arthur C. Clarke as a story character.

Sadly, it can’t be made into an audiobook and AI will botch it due to the poor OCR underlying the poor Archive.org scan. The author only died relatively recently, in 1989, and thus it is still in copyright. Presumably the rights are what has prevented it from being included in various ‘SF with cats’ anthologies over the years, since I can find no trace of it in such.

HorrorBabble’s “Innsmouth” (2024)

12 Sunday May 2024

Posted by in Podcasts etc.

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HorrorBabble tackles “The Shadow Over Innsmouth” in a new three-hour marathon audiobook. It was recorded before, back in 2016, but this is a new reading for 2024. Ian Gordon writes…

HorrorBabble was in its infancy when we first tackled Innsmouth — I hope this new recording demonstrates some maturity. Of course, the 2016 recording will remain live on the channel. PS — If you listen closely to the new version, you might just catch the characteristic chuckle of 2016 Zadok…!

Free on YouTube.

Providence Harbour

10 Friday May 2024

Posted by in Maps, Picture postals, Scholarly works

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This week on ‘Picture Postals’, my hand-tinted version of a nautical map of Providence Harbour and the lower Seekonk in 1896. In the Seekonk (here the ‘Pawtucket River’) we see the ‘Twin Islands’ on which the youthful Lovecraft used to land in his rowing-boat. High-res at 4600px and 300dpi.

Brown University at the top, Starvegoat Island at the bottom. This map seems to have some RPG potential, as at that time a lot of infilling had not yet occurred. Lots of coves and marshes and eel-grass meadows in which Things Might Lurk.

And here’s a more poetic surface view, though also work-a-day since there were still tall-masted ships working the harbour in Lovecraft’s early youth…

Another load of LORAs

09 Thursday May 2024

Posted by in AI, REH

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More picks of recent Lovecraft related and (now also) R.E. Howard related LORAs, these being free plugin for models based off the free Stable Diffusion 1.5 AI image generator.

* Stygia, explicitly modelled on Conan’s world and darker than usual ‘mediaeval desert, with pyramids and crypts’ settings.

* Conan trained on old comics plus oil paintings and film-stills. Doesn’t look great, the faces being too anime. But might be worth a try with a different model more oriented to western comics? Beware of commercial use, for a lookalike barbarian named ‘Conan’. Since there are still active Conan trademark-trolls in the USA. Apparently they are underlings of the megacorp Tencent, and can claim a trademark in the name until 2028. So you might call him some adjacent name instead, like Xolan or Kohlan.

* Style of Andreas Achenbach, possibly of interest for sword & sorcery, fantasy-historical.

* UFO Alchemy, which looks like it could be de-UFO’d and made into more of a Lovecraftian ‘cosmic map’.

* Style of Norman Ackroyd, moody British 1970s aquatint, possibly useful for Innsmouth-type scenes to which you’d add text to make a ‘widescreen’ storybook. Apparently Norman Ackroyd was one of the core artists in the SD 1.5 initial training. His ‘look’ was…

* 1900 style photographs, likely to be useful for RPG pictures and the like.

* There was also a new LORA that attempted to emulate Weird Tales covers, but the samples looked so bad that I’m not linking it.