Science and Literature, 1800 to Present

26 Sunday Feb 2012

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Keele University (North Staffordshire, England) is to host a conference of historians and literary specialists that may appeal to Lovecraftian scholars in the UK. “Science and Literature, 1800 to Present: Two Cultures or Co-evolution?” is a postgraduate conference set for 12th May 2012. The event will examine the long history of interplays between the sciences and the arts, seen most especially in science fiction.

Preternature issue on monsters

25 Saturday Feb 2012

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A paywalled Penn State University Press academic journal, Preternature, is seeing papers for a special issue on: “Monstrophy: The Academic Study of Monsters”…

“Preternature is an interdisciplinary forum for the study of the preternatural as seen in magics, witchcraft, spiritualism, occultism, prophecy, monstrophy, demonology, and folklore. The journal embraces a broad and dynamic definition of the preternatural. […] Contributions are welcome from any discipline, time period, or geographic provenance, so long as the discussion highlights the cultural, literary, religious, or historical significance of the topic. Final Papers are due 15th April 2012.”

Astounding Cthulhu Competition

25 Saturday Feb 2012

Posted by in Lovecraftian arts, Odd scratchings

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Enter the Call of Cthulhu Competition, and win a copy of Astounding Stories from March 1936 featuring H.P. Lovecraft (contains part 2 of At the Mountains of Madness).

To enter, “rewrite the text of an existing review of [the game] Call of Cthulhu: The Wasted Land in the style of H.P. Lovecraft”.

Interesting to see quite how small Astounding was. I had gained the impression that most pulps were big tabloid-newspaper -sized things.

The influence of Lyonesse on Lovecaft

22 Wednesday Feb 2012

Posted by in Historical context

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New article by Karl Beech, Lyonesse and ‘The Foundered Town’ in Romance and Fantasy of the Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries. Lovecraft was aware of the myth, since it is Cornish and his ancestors were more or less from that part of the British Isles (he believed that, as he wrote in one letter, “Cornwall & Devon are pretty much a unit”).

Sam Llewellyn also has a short survey of the monsters and dangerous animals that were said to dwell in that land sunken below the sea…

“When historians write about Lyonesse, they are inclined to concentrate on the exotic monstrosities that rise from the land’s bottomless wells. The original animals were curious in their own way…”

Lovecraft Was Right, part 745

21 Tuesday Feb 2012

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Echoing the idea of Lovecraft’s At The Mountains of Madness, an ancient flowering plant has this month been brought back to life from seeds buried by a squirrel more than 30,000 years ago. The seeds were dug out of the fossilised and frozen burrows of ancient Arctic ground-squirrels in Siberia.

“The breakthrough means some early lifeforms, which ‘have long since vanished from the earth’s surface’, could still be held in the frozen wastes. It also suggests that dormant life found on Mars or other icy planets could be revived.”