13 Tuesday May 2014
Posted in Lovecraftian arts
Richard Swensson’s short film “Concerning Brown Jenkin”…
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=81RJGtPJcmU?rel=0&w=500&h=375]
“Making of…”
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eYjgnf6ctWs?rel=0&w=500&h=375]
Hat-tip to StopmoNick, who appears to be currently making a stop-motion short featuring Lovecraft, Poe, and Cthulhu…
12 Monday May 2014
Posted in Lovecraftian arts
Back in summer 2012 I noted a planned PC game called Clockwork Empires.
“Lovecraft-laden steampunk city-builder” [in which the player is a Civilisation-style] colony-builder amid the grand idealism of Victorian discovery [but] with horrors, madness, wild species, and volatile science.”
Now there’s a demo ahead of the (maybe) summer 2014 release…
“Clockwork Empires uses Victorian-era horror and science fiction as a jumping off point. As in, jumping off a cliff because you joined a cult and went mad after summoning the old gods to your weekly meetings … It’s a crazy and incredibly weird game”
Any videogame that manages to combine Lovecraftian squid monoliths and bottle-kilns can’t be all bad.
10 Saturday May 2014
Posted in New books
James Goho’s new book Journeys into Darkness: Critical Essays on Gothic Horror
* The Sickness unto Death in H. P. Lovecraft’s “The Hound”.
* What Is “The Unnamable”?: H.P. Lovecraft and the problem of evil.
* The Aboriginal in the Works of H. P. Lovecraft.
10 Saturday May 2014
Posted in Historical context, Scholarly works
In one of my recent books I noted the odd lack of any scholarly survey of the influence of Egyptian mythology on SF and fantastic literature. The only study that strays beyond the influence of 19th century Egyptomania is Phillip Barker’s fannish “Egyptian Mythology in Fantastic Literature”, published in the Fanscient fanzine in 1949 and not reprinted.
This gap has now been partly filled by Kevin McLaren, who has a new short survey essay “The Marriage of Science Fiction and Egyptology” in the undergraduate open access journal The Forum: Cal Poly’s Journal of History.
Hello, those wings look familiar…
10 Saturday May 2014
Posted in Fonts, Lovecraftian arts
Lovely new Lovecraftian font, hand made by Stapleton McTavish, free, and with .ttf and source code.
It shows up in Photoshop’s font-list under ‘C’, as “Cthulhuian”.
Personal use only (with credit), but commercial uses can be negotiated with the maker.
[Update: no longer free, now sold]
10 Saturday May 2014
Posted in New books, Scholarly works
S.T. Joshi’s Lovecraft and a World in Transition: Collected Essays on H.P. Lovecraft is set for release, initially as a 500-copy limited edition hardcover, in late June 2014.
10 Saturday May 2014
Posted in Housekeeping, New books
Has it been that long? I took a two month springtime break from Lovecraft (the best time to do so), in order to do intensive work on my JURN open access academic search tool. Until 2014 JURN indexed only open access (free) academic journals in the arts and humanities. It now also indexes all known open ecology-related journals, open business journals, and biomedical/science. Also most of the main UK academic repositories, and key US and world repositories. JURN’s index was given a thorough spring-cleaning and a deep linkrot cure, along with the same for the JURN Directory of arts and humanities journals.
Many thanks to Kenneth W. Faig, Jr. for sending me a paper copy of his EOD mailing zine, containing his kind reviews of my summer 2013 books. I’m also in receipt of review copies of Steven J. Mariconda’s H. P. Lovecraft: Art, Artifact, and Reality, and David Goudsward’s H. P. Lovecraft in the Merrimack Valley. Thanks to David Goudsward and Derek Hussey for those — I’ll be reviewing those books in July or August.
09 Sunday Mar 2014
Posted in Lovecraftian arts, NecronomiCon 2013, New books, Podcasts etc.
A three part audio recording of the panel discussion on the History of Necronomicon Press, made at NecronomiCon 2013.
Above: Rhode Island Historical Society 2013 reprint of Off the Ancient Track: a Lovecraftian Guide to New-England & adjacent New-York, 1987 Necronomicon Press. 18 page pamphlet.
09 Sunday Mar 2014
Posted in New books, Scholarly works
Details on Leslie Klinger’s forthcoming New Annotated Lovecraft book.
900 annotations across 22 Lovecraft works. 90,000 words of additional text, although possibly that word-count also includes the seven appendices and Alan Moore’s introduction. The works chosen for annotation are…
Dagon
The Statement of Randolph Carter
Beyond the Wall of Sleep
Nyarlathotep
The Picture in the House
Herbert West: Reanimator
The Nameless City
The Hound
The Festival
The Unnamable
The Call of Cthulhu
The Silver Key
The Case of Charles Dexter Ward
The Colour Out of Space
The Dunwich Horror
The Whisperer in Darkness
At the Mountains of Madness
The Shadow over Innsmouth
The Dreams in the Witch House
The Thing on the Doorstep
The Shadow Out of Time
The Haunter of the Dark
The book is reportedly dated for publication on 13th October 2014, in time for Halloween.
Update for volume two, the final volume:
NEW ANNOTATED H. P. LOVECRAFT, VOL. II (late summer 2019)
LIST OF STORIES (in order written):
The Tomb
Polaris
Transition of Juan Romero
The Doom that Came to Sarnath
Ex Oblivione
The Terrible Old Man
Facts Concerning the Late Arthur Jermyn
The Cats of Ulthar
Celephais
The Temple
The Outsider
The Other Gods
The Music of Erich Zann
The Quest of Iranon
The Lurking Fear
The Rats in the Walls
The Shunned House
The Horror at Red Hook
He
Cool Air
The Strange High House in the Mist
Pickman’s Model
The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath
08 Saturday Mar 2014
Posted in Lovecraftian arts
The Kickstarter project Prospero’s Price has been halted by a spurious copyright claim. The copyright troll in question rather amazingly claims to own copyright on combinations of Shakespeare’s The Tempest and Lovecraft. Even more amazingly, Kickstarter felt obliged to suspend guffaws of mocking laughter and actually take him at his word. Such ‘DMCA takedown requests’ (as they are known) are being widely abused like this, and WordPress.com is seeking high-level legal rulings in the USA which would allow for legal suits to be brought against those who “knowingly materially misrepresent” a case of alleged copyright infringement.
The bad typography on the above cover, however, is very clearly a criminal act (against good taste)… 🙂
08 Saturday Mar 2014
Posted in Odd scratchings, Scholarly works
Just found out that the 2014 World Science Fiction Convention is being held in August 2014 in London.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FLm9lX0fkEc&w=560&h=315]
Applications are still open for the 2014 Science Fiction Foundation Criticism Masterclass, which is being held just before the convention. The Masterclass is…
“an enriching experience for anyone interested in improving their writing about SFF. To apply please send a sample of writing and a one-page C.V. to: farah.sf@gmail.com
07 Friday Mar 2014
Posted in Odd scratchings
Science-fiction? Cats got there first…
“Ulthar’s many cats … stole off to those cryptical realms which are known only to cats and which villagers say are on the moon’s dark side, whither the cats leap from tall housetops” — from Dream Quest.