{"id":4665,"date":"2012-05-03T10:27:24","date_gmt":"2012-05-03T07:27:24","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/tentaclii.wordpress.com\/?p=4665"},"modified":"2012-05-03T10:27:24","modified_gmt":"2012-05-03T07:27:24","slug":"algol-and-lovecraft","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/jurn.link\/tentaclii\/index.php\/2012\/05\/03\/algol-and-lovecraft\/","title":{"rendered":"Algol and Lovecraft"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><em>Discovery News<\/em> has a <a href=\"http:\/\/news.discovery.com\/space\/ancient-egyptians-tracked-eclipsing-binary-star-called-algol-120502.html\">new web article<\/a> on the history of the relationship between humans and the star Algol.  Algol appears as the location of the climax in Lovecraft&#8217;s fiction in &#8220;Beyond the Wall of Sleep&#8221; (1919)&#8230;<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>&#8220;You on earth have unwittingly felt its distant presence &mdash; you who without knowing idly gave the blinking beacon the name of Algol, the Demon-Star.&#8221;<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>Lovecraft gives Algol as the location for a nova star, Nova Persei, which had indeed happened in fact&#8230;<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>&#8220;On 22 February 1901, the discovery of a naked-eye nova, Nova Persei, was announced.&#8221; &mdash; from: <em>Agnes Mary Clerke and the Rise of Astrophysics<\/em>, p.145.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>S.T. Joshi says in <em>An H.P. Lovecraft Encyclopedia<\/em> that the&#8230;<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>&#8220;account of the nova [was] taken verbatim from his [Lovecraft&#8217;s] copy of Garrett P. Serviss&#8217;s <em>Astronomy with the Naked Eye<\/em> (1908).&#8221;<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>My recent book, <em>Walking with Cthulhu<\/em>, also examines possible borrowings from Serviss.  <\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;ve also just now found that <em>Popular Science<\/em> ran a long article on &#8220;New Stars&#8221; in January 1919, and the story &#8220;Beyond The Wall of Sleep&#8221; was written in the Spring on 1919.  The article was triggered by the then-recent naked-eye Nova Aquilae, and recalls the Nova Persei of 1901&#8230;<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/www.jurn.link\/tentaclii\/oldimages\/newstars.jpg\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/www.jurn.link\/tentaclii\/oldimages\/newstars.jpg?w=233\" alt=\"\" title=\"newstars\" width=\"233\" height=\"300\" class=\"aligncenter size-medium wp-image-4666\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Discovery News has a new web article on the history of the relationship between humans and the star Algol. Algol &hellip;<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/jurn.link\/tentaclii\/index.php\/2012\/05\/03\/algol-and-lovecraft\/\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4665","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-historical-context"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jurn.link\/tentaclii\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4665","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/jurn.link\/tentaclii\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/jurn.link\/tentaclii\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jurn.link\/tentaclii\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jurn.link\/tentaclii\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4665"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/jurn.link\/tentaclii\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4665\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jurn.link\/tentaclii\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4665"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jurn.link\/tentaclii\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4665"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jurn.link\/tentaclii\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4665"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}