The Wormwoodiana blog has just posted a new long interview with James Machin, about his new book Weird Fiction in Britain 1880-1939. It’s the same book I had a quick look at yesterday. I must say that Machin makes the book sound much more interesting than the promo blurb and dry chapter-abstracts from the publisher…

The one thing I really lit on is the foundational and persistent influence of literary Decadence … Brian Stableford remarked somewhere that the Decadence of the 1890s never really died, it just moved to the U.S. with Lovecraft, Clark Ashton Smith, etc. This observation really struck me, and in a way the entire book is more or less built on Stableford’s insight here.

… genre snobbery is of course still very much with us: I’m amazed at the contamination anxiety, and the pains some prominent contemporary writers will take to insist that their science fiction or fantasy novels aren’t science fiction or fantasy novels. They endlessly tie themselves up in knots, desperate to avoid the stigma of genre.

Yes, a recent Lovecraft Geek podcast had a question about why Asimov apparently disdained Lovecraft. Robert Price didn’t suggest what I think was the underlying reason — I suspect it was mostly a fear of genre contamination. Asimov had seen horror invading science-fiction in the cheap 1950s drive-in movies, and he and his fellows such as Arthur C. Clarke didn’t want the same thing to happen in the literary ideas-led world of science fiction as well. Thus, Lovecraft had to be kept out of the pantheon.

There’s a call for an edited collection, titled Putting the Imaginative on the Map: Teaching Science Fiction and Fantasy in the EFL Classroom. EFL is teacher-speak for learning ‘English as a Foreign Language’. The deadline for proposals for papers is: 15th September 2018.

“teachers at all levels, from primary school to university, still seem to be reluctant to make use of science fiction and fantasy texts in the EFL classroom [despite the obvious potential]. All contributions should have a clear didactic focus, carving out the pedagogical potential of the genre[s]”.

One might carefully lay out the case that Lovecraft is suitable for young people, contrary to the widespread modern misapprehension that he’s too wordy and convoluted and uses an incomprehensible vocabulary and there’s no real action scenes, etc etc. I mean… a great many lovers of Lovecraft first read him when they were only 11-13 years old. We did fine. Therefore he certainly works for a niche of intelligent young people, though he’s obviously likely to stump the dullards in a mixed-ability class. But they would likely be stumped by most advanced literature.

One might start the paper by looking at the selection made by educationalists, such as Margaret Ronan in her 1971 ‘schools’ paperback of Lovecraft. That was The Shadow over Innsmouth and Other Stories of Horror, published by Scholastic Book Services of New York in December 1971.