Scientific American fisks the geology of At The Mountains of Madness.
Above: tunicates that live in the coastal water of Antarctica.
Scientific American fisks “Mountains”
19 Monday Dec 2011
Posted in Scholarly works
The Unsettled Dust: The Strange Stories of Robert Aickman
17 Saturday Dec 2011
Posted in Podcasts etc.
A new 30-minute BBC radio documentary about a British weird writer, The Unsettled Dust: The Strange Stories of Robert Aickman. Available to those in the UK via the BBC’s “Listen Again” online, for the next few days.
You know you’re having a Lovecraftian Christmas when…
17 Saturday Dec 2011
Posted in Unnamable
You know you’re having a Lovecraftian Christmas when…
* You read At The Mountains of Madness to get “that snowy Christmas feeling”.
* You fasten your Christmas present parcels with tape printed to look like a tentacle.
* Roasting chestnuts by the fire reminds you of the cultists’ scene in “The Call of Cthulhu”.
* At parties you begin to gibber wildly that Santa is an anagram of Satan.
* Christmas carollers are met at your door by a wreath of mistletoe, ivy and holly twisted into a hideous pre-Christian mask.
* Scrooge seems like a rationalist atheist hero to you…
* Your oddly-shaped Christmas tree is delivered by an in-bred backwoods man, who warns you not to listen to the voices that may come from it.
* You think the Three Wise Men were named Alhazred, Atal, and Kuranes.
* “The Festival” seems like a description of an ideal Christmas with the family.
* You get the North Pole mixed up with the Plateau of Leng.
Alt.Fiction 2012 (UK) – tickets on sale
16 Friday Dec 2011
Posted in Odd scratchings
Alt.Fiction has 2012 dates for the sixth year of the UK’s convention for readers and writers of science fiction, fantasy and horror, with the emphasis on the literature (rather than movies, action-figures, cosplay, etc). Organised by Writing East Midlands. 14th & 15th of April 2012. Phoenix Digital Arts Centre, Leicester. Currently just 56 tickets left.
H.P. Lovecraft’s Dreamlands, back in print
15 Thursday Dec 2011
Posted in Lovecraftian arts, New books
Chaosium have put their H.P. Lovecraft’s Dreamlands book back into print. It seems to be one of those collectable tabletop RPG guides that also serve as a handy encyclopaedia for writers using the setting…
“Includes […] a huge gazetteer [examining the distinct regions of: The East, The North, Oriab, The Seas, The South, The West, The Moon, The Underworld, and Worlds Beyond.], [descriptions of thirty] People of the Dreamlands, lists a number of important non-player characters within the Dreamlands […] over 60 monsters dwelling within the Dreamlands, descriptions of the Dreamlands gods and their cults […] and a fold-out map of the Dreamlands by Andy Hopp.”
256 pages in paper, and now with a PDF version available.
Sidney Sime entering the public domain?
14 Wednesday Dec 2011
Posted in Odd scratchings
Illustrator Sidney Sime died in 1941, so according to the ridiculously elongated “70 year rule” on copyrights, his classic horror and Dunsany fantasy illustrations should be in the public domain on 1st January 2012?
Hugh Walpole’s gothic horror novels are also entering the public domain in 2012.
Transmedia Lovecraft – call for creatives
14 Wednesday Dec 2011
Posted in Lovecraftian arts
A Lovecraftian transmedia storytelling project is calling for Writers / Storytellers…
“Not a paid gig, but minimal commitment; compensation will include early access to cool new story-related technology.”
The call’s coming by a web developer and multimedia producer based in Boston, USA.
Some key lessons I learned from a transmedia ARG masterclass during the summer: transmedia works need multiple time-sensitive entry-points to the narrative, not just one entry-point at the start; lead the audience into two x half-hour blocks over four weeks (eight weeks is too long).
Several folks have had similar ideas. A Twitter-based game called Cthalloween is discussed here (as if Twitter isn’t horrific enough…). And Alchemic Dream apparently have a game wireframed, called Kadath Quest. Others have apparently mumbled on Twitter that the format might be a way to get away from having to actually read Lovecraft’s fiction. Personally I would have thought that a well-acted audio narrative, incorporating chunks of Lovecraft’s own words, would be an excellent scene-setter for such a creative game.
More podcasts on Lovecraft in the comics
13 Tuesday Dec 2011
Posted in Lovecraftian arts, Podcasts etc.
More new Panel Borders podcasts, examining Lovecraft in the comics…
#2. Alan Moore: The Horrors at Red Hook: Alex Fitch talks to Alan Moore about his final graphic novel.
#3. Panel Discussion: “Alex Fitch chairs a panel discussion on Edgar Allan Poe and H.P. Lovecraft, with contributors including novelists China Mieville and Denise Mina, and illustrators Mark Stafford and Alice Duke.” Recorded earlier this year at the British Film Institute.
At the Mountains of Microbes
13 Tuesday Dec 2011
Posted in Unnamable
“I think this entire ice sheet is alive. That has yet to be proven,” said John Priscu, a professor at Montana State University, who has been doing field work in Antarctica for 27 years. What is proven, Priscu said, is that bacteria are in the ice. […] in tiny veins of liquid water that crisscross the solid ice […] In the lab, ancient bacteria from ice samples 420,000 years old, retrieved from more than 2 miles inside the ice sheet, have quickly shown signs of life. “We melt the water, and they grow,” Priscu told Our Amazing Planet.
Above: common East Antarctica underground nematode.
Above: Halicephalobus Mephisto: new species found nearly a mile deep in the earth’s crust in summer 2011.
Remix politics
12 Monday Dec 2011
Posted in Odd scratchings
Interesting short opinion article on the likely political impact of ‘generation remix’…
“Everyone over age 12 when YouTube launched in 2005 is now able to vote. What happens when — and this is inevitable — a generation completely comfortable with remix culture becomes a majority of the electorate, instead of the fringe youth? What happens when they start getting elected to office?”
I love the fact that Lovecraft was a pioneer of shared fictional world-making, and later became the ground-zero of remix culture because his works were allowed to fall into the public domain.
S.T. Joshi’s blog updates
12 Monday Dec 2011
Posted in New books, Scholarly works
S.T. Joshi’s blog has updated. It includes, among other items, news of the new illustrated version of the biography which should be published in Autumn 2012…
“…heavily illustrated biography of Lovecraft (the tentative title — which I don’t care for — is H.P. Lovecraft: Nightmare Countries), to be distributed exclusively in Barnes & Noble bookstores. […] I hope to suggest or supply numerous illustrative matter, including photographs of Lovecraft (probably drawing on the extensive collection assembled by Donovan Loucks), copies of letters or manuscripts, and so forth.”
Lovecraft scholarship in 2012
12 Monday Dec 2011
Posted in New books, Scholarly works
A couple of non-Joshi scholarly items, noted as due for publication in 2012…
Green, Matthew (2012). “A Darker Magic: Heterocosms and bricolage in Moore’s recent reworkings of Lovecraft”. In: Alan Moore and the Gothic Tradition. Manchester University Press. (Forthcoming, 2012).
Weird Realism: Lovecraft and Philosophy. Zero Books, (Forthcoming, 2012). Seems to have been due since 2010, and “will deal with a small number of H.P. Lovecraft’s greatest stories” when it finally appears.