Eddie Jones

23 Tuesday Oct 2018

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I’ve extracted the best Eddie Jones interior art from the run of Vision of Tomorrow, a short-lived 1969/70 British attempt at a high-quality science fiction magazine which featured occasional cosmic horror.

That’s how you do spreads when you only have black-and-white to work with. Very nice work.

There’s a fine in-progress biography of Eddie Jones, which is so comprehensive that it even tells me that I have a slight tangential connection — he did the covers of the Novacon convention programme booklet a couple of years before I did. Though the biography lacks the wider economic context. He produced a huge amount of painted covers for the German sci-fi paperbacks, a few for Sphere in the UK, and later some covers for the Star Trek paperbacks. But, like many in the UK, he was hit very hard by the 1978-1983 period of economic chaos, collapse and grinding recovery. He never had a book collection.

There was one fairly brief interview with him, in the short-lived British magazine Vortex (#5, 1977).

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 Campbell’s unpublished draft for that, known as “Frozen Hell”, had 45 pages of unused material.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.

“A Bit Of The Dark World” in audio

22 Monday Oct 2018

Posted by in Lovecraftian arts, Podcasts etc.

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For the 500th episode of Pseudopod, a complete audio reading of Fritz Leiber’s story “A Bit Of The Dark World” (Fantastic, February 1962). He had written some early stories that drew somewhat on Lovecraft, back in the 1930s and 40s, but without pastiching the master. Today I think of him as a sword & sorcery author linked with the post-Howard Conan series, but here the mature Leiber attempts a tale of cosmic horror fit for the know-it-all world of the early 1960s.

Leiber had been musing about the nature of writing in changing times for some years, such as in his rip-roaring sci-fi comedy-satire “The Silver Eggheads” (1959, expanded as a novel in 1962). This features an A.I. science fiction setting in which ‘novel writers’ are machines with names such as the ‘Fiction House Fantasizer’ with Fingertip Credibility Control!). It’s also a little Lovecrafty, as it riffs on the idea of still-living “genetically-enhanced brains taken from the skulls of once-living writers”.

Sadly there’s no audiobook version of what appears to be a sci-fi comedy classic, and the OCR on the 1959 novelette version at Archive.org isn’t good enough for text-to-speech. Though the novel is, at least, newly available for the Kindle.

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.

Lovecraft’s essays – in Spanish

21 Sunday Oct 2018

Posted by in New books

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Lovecraft’s essays are now available in a new Spanish translation by Oscar Mariscal, as the book Confesiones de un incredulo: y otros ensayos escogidos (El Paseo, Oct 2018). The publisher’s blurb states that the works have previously been untranslated in Spanish, and also hints that the Letters were drawn on for their essay-like material. The translator’s selection is followed by a tabulation of the stories that Lovecraft noted or remarked on in his works and letters. Amazon Spain suggests the book has 300 pages, but the publisher suggests 240 pages.

A new Lovecraft poem?

20 Saturday Oct 2018

Posted by in Historical context, Lovecraftian arts, New discoveries, Picture postals

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I think I may have found another new poem by Lovecraft. Not a macabre one this time, but rather a bit of early juvenilia. It’s the “Fore-worde” to his Hope Street High School yearbook for summer 1907, The Blue & White.

This “Fore-worde” is a poem of suspiciously archaic language, and also has a characteristic Lovecraft touch in the coining of the neo-archaism “strange-froughte”. Who else but Lovecraft would write such a poem in the style of an ancient wit, or insert such a phrase?

Neither the title or first line of the poem is in the latest edition of The Ancient Track. Nor is it in the Ancient Track‘s “Chronology”.

If the poem is a very early one by Lovecraft then it’s also interesting for implying that the author was on “ye humbell Boarde of Editours” in early summer 1907, which then leads one to wonder if he influenced the design on the cover. In which the tentacular flame seems to evoke (if you look at it right) a rather Lovecraftian version of a jinn to accompany the surrounding Aladdin’s lamps. If one knows that Lovecraft wore glasses at this time, the central ‘face’ could almost be a self-portrait.

Obtaining a full copy of the Yearbook would show if Lovecraft was on the “Boarde of Editours” for 1907. If he wasn’t, then the poem would be less likely to have been written by him.

He also appears as “H.P.L.” in the text of a humorous playlet in the Yearbook, titled a “Merry Drama of Hope”. At the plangent end of which he might be trying, in vain, to interest a passing fresher in the concept of meteoritic flight-paths…

Act IV, Scene 1.

The Corridor after school (snatches of conversation heard.)

[…]

“H. P. L. (Sophomorite:) “Well, the only definite theory advanced as to the cause of the meteoric path being hyperbolic or elliptic, is —”

Giddy Freshite (giggling hysterically:) “— And then he said —”

    (Corridor gradually becomes vacant)

Lovecraft was a freshman (fresher) at Hope Street High in 1904-05, but left in November 1905 and did not return until September 1906. He formally left on 10th June 1908, without a High School diploma — as he had only taken a few full classes in his final year.

According to a comment by Chris Perridas there may be a photo of Lovecraft in the next yearbook, 1908. But Chris had not been able to see either 1907 or 1908, and they’re still not scanned and online. Possibly it’s a photo that’s already well-known, though there’s nothing from 1908 here.

The small page-scans above are from a long-lost eBay listing, the data for which was snagged and kept online (just about) by a Web traffic-funnelling autobot.

Lovecraft’s pocket spectroscope

20 Saturday Oct 2018

Posted by in Astronomy, Historical context

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A… “pocket spectroscope, which was the delight of my fellow students at H.S.H.S. [Hope Street High School, Providence]. It is unbelievably tiny — will go into a vest pocket without making much of a bulge — yet gives a neat, bright little spectrum, with clear Frauenhofer lines when directed at sunlight. Many are the times I have passed it around at school.” — Lovecraft, letter to Galpin, 29th August 1918.

He had the device for weather and possibly also his astronomy, as such a thing appears to have been specifically used in star-identification. The light of a star would split into a distinctive banding of lines, and thus the identity of an unknown observed star could be confirmed. Although possibly his was not powerful enough to split the light of a distant star. He did have a larger $15 spectroscope in his weather station though.

Note the conjunction here of: unknown | colour | space, in relation to a story like “The Colour out of Space”.

Prop it up!

20 Saturday Oct 2018

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The Museum of Science Fiction invites your replica props, for their “Prop it up!” competition. Entries will be judged to movie-studio standards…

“across a variety of criteria including crafting skill, materials, and accuracy to the presented design. Finalists will be selected based on photographs and illustrated concept art submitted by email.”

Keep in mind that it appears the prop must be an accurate replica of a used movie prop (Conan’s sword, etc), and not some Lovecraftian idol that’s never been seen on the screen before. Deadline is 15th April 2019.

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).

Hideous Creatures: A Bestiary of the Cthulhu Mythos

18 Thursday Oct 2018

Posted by in Lovecraftian arts, New books

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Currently printing and now on pre-order, Hideous Creatures: A Bestiary of the Cthulhu Mythos. Only 31 monsters, from Derleth and others as well as from Lovecraft, so it’s definitely not a cosmos-spanning encyclopaedia. However it’s apparently been in development for years and runs to 352 sumptuous hardback pages. Likely to be heavily illustrated and deeply informative about each monster, as apparently it dovetails with the Gumshoe-based Trail of Cthulhu tabletop RPG system. Since it’s for gamers there will also be a PDF download, albeit an expensive one.

Mentioned here because such in-depth books can be useful for writers, as well as for gamers.