"the U.S. government rounded up the people of Innsmouth..."
January 11, 2017 8:51 AM Subscribe
Ruthanna Emrys's debut novel Winter Tide is in the world of her novella The Litany of Earth (previously), a story about about secrets, furtive faith, government mistakes, and the silenced Other from a well-known narrative -- specifically, H.P. Lovecraft's Cthulhu mythos. Winter Tide will come out April 4th, but Chapter 1 and Chapter 2 are available to read now.
(Previously on MetaFilter: Emrys's work coming up in questions and discussions of speculative fiction that engages with Lovecraft and particularly of antiracist counternarratives.)
Emrys has also written other short fiction, often published on Tor.com (along with her essays), such as:
(Previously on MetaFilter: Emrys's work coming up in questions and discussions of speculative fiction that engages with Lovecraft and particularly of antiracist counternarratives.)
Emrys has also written other short fiction, often published on Tor.com (along with her essays), such as:
- "Seven Commentaries on an Imperfect Land", a story about religious communities, hospitality, fighting illness and drought, girls, women, and making friendships across boundaries. (People familiar with fables or Judaism will get something extra out of the allusions.)
- "The Deepest Rift", a story about collegiality, research, and adventure.
I really enjoyed The Litany of Earth and am looking forward to reading this new work.
posted by The Ardship of Cambry at 9:19 AM on January 11, 2017 [3 favorites]
posted by The Ardship of Cambry at 9:19 AM on January 11, 2017 [3 favorites]
Litany of Earth was fantastic, and Ada Palmer's linked review in the last posts gets at why. This is one of the 2017 books I'm most excited for.
There's always been heaps of Lovecraftiana novels and anthologies around but with this, Victor LaValle's The Ballad of Black Tom and Matt Ruff's Lovecraft Country all coming out in the last while, there really seems to have been a spurt of thoughtful work inspired by Lovecraft's works but tackling the baked-in racism. Maybe it's just that they're getting more (justifiable) attention.
posted by ocular shenanigans at 9:20 AM on January 11, 2017 [6 favorites]
There's always been heaps of Lovecraftiana novels and anthologies around but with this, Victor LaValle's The Ballad of Black Tom and Matt Ruff's Lovecraft Country all coming out in the last while, there really seems to have been a spurt of thoughtful work inspired by Lovecraft's works but tackling the baked-in racism. Maybe it's just that they're getting more (justifiable) attention.
posted by ocular shenanigans at 9:20 AM on January 11, 2017 [6 favorites]
I read "the people of Smashmouth", so I may have to go make a meta about the current frequency of Smashmouth posts
posted by ominous_paws at 9:25 AM on January 11, 2017 [11 favorites]
posted by ominous_paws at 9:25 AM on January 11, 2017 [11 favorites]
"... with some L shaped tentacles on her forehead"
/coat
posted by lmfsilva at 9:40 AM on January 11, 2017 [6 favorites]
/coat
posted by lmfsilva at 9:40 AM on January 11, 2017 [6 favorites]
So don't delay, eat now, calamari's never running out
Dip now if you're still hungry, tartar sauce, remoulade
No matter what you swallow, there will still be more tomorrow
When things go south, you might as well be eatin' in Innsmouth
posted by It's Raining Florence Henderson at 9:41 AM on January 11, 2017 [10 favorites]
Dip now if you're still hungry, tartar sauce, remoulade
No matter what you swallow, there will still be more tomorrow
When things go south, you might as well be eatin' in Innsmouth
posted by It's Raining Florence Henderson at 9:41 AM on January 11, 2017 [10 favorites]
So much to know
So far to run
So what's wrong with calling the Deep Ones
You never know if you don't wish
You never die if you're a fish
posted by brainwane at 10:37 AM on January 11, 2017 [22 favorites]
So far to run
So what's wrong with calling the Deep Ones
You never know if you don't wish
You never die if you're a fish
posted by brainwane at 10:37 AM on January 11, 2017 [22 favorites]
Living in the Bay Area, being an anti-racist dude, and playing a lot of Call of Cthulhu, Lovecraft's weird racism is something I have to grapple with constantly.
I mean, The Shadow over Innsmouth is actually a fantastic story, rife with action and personal horror, and then you realize that the 'moral' is something like, "...and that's why race mixing is wrong," and you feel like vomiting.
My favorite GM out here is a black man whose games often play with the Cthulhu Mythos in some interesting ways, by assuming that the Mythos isn't racist-as-a-fact-of-the-universe, it's that Lovecraft was a racist describing it.
In a particularly fantastic bit, we were playing Union agents during the Civil War sent into Louisiana to stop a Confederate sorcerer from causing all kinds of bad havoc, and midway through it's revealed that one of our characters, a Union naval officer, is a Deep One hybrid.
When questioned about this, Jack's answer was, "Look, Innsmouth is in Massachusetts, and Massachusetts is in the north. He's a patriot, serving his country. Just because he's a fishman doesn't mean he's a fucking racist."
All of which is by way of saying that I'm looking forward to this book, and will be buying him a copy.
posted by Myca at 10:41 AM on January 11, 2017 [25 favorites]
I mean, The Shadow over Innsmouth is actually a fantastic story, rife with action and personal horror, and then you realize that the 'moral' is something like, "...and that's why race mixing is wrong," and you feel like vomiting.
My favorite GM out here is a black man whose games often play with the Cthulhu Mythos in some interesting ways, by assuming that the Mythos isn't racist-as-a-fact-of-the-universe, it's that Lovecraft was a racist describing it.
In a particularly fantastic bit, we were playing Union agents during the Civil War sent into Louisiana to stop a Confederate sorcerer from causing all kinds of bad havoc, and midway through it's revealed that one of our characters, a Union naval officer, is a Deep One hybrid.
When questioned about this, Jack's answer was, "Look, Innsmouth is in Massachusetts, and Massachusetts is in the north. He's a patriot, serving his country. Just because he's a fishman doesn't mean he's a fucking racist."
All of which is by way of saying that I'm looking forward to this book, and will be buying him a copy.
posted by Myca at 10:41 AM on January 11, 2017 [25 favorites]
Ooh, I'm excited to read this. I liked The Deepest Rift a lot.
I can also recommend a novella along the same lines where a CDC investigator runs into a small population with a very odd series of inherited traits The Innsmouth Syndrome.
posted by lumpenprole at 11:10 AM on January 11, 2017 [2 favorites]
I can also recommend a novella along the same lines where a CDC investigator runs into a small population with a very odd series of inherited traits The Innsmouth Syndrome.
posted by lumpenprole at 11:10 AM on January 11, 2017 [2 favorites]
Ruthanna Emrys is one of two writers tasked with reviewing the whole Lovecraft canon and some bits of Lovecraftiana at TOR.com. Go take a look but beware of spoilers.
posted by sukeban at 11:18 AM on January 11, 2017 [7 favorites]
posted by sukeban at 11:18 AM on January 11, 2017 [7 favorites]
I've mostly stopped just reading whatever to my daughter, but when she first came home from the hospital I'd just grab a story for adults and read to her sometimes as a way of amusing myself, keeping her occupied, and hopefully exposing her to some words and such. It was in that context that I found myself reading "The Dunwich Horror" out loud to an infant, and man, something about doing that really made the uncomfortableness hit home. It's not even a story with as much chance to be racist per se, but even living in rural Western Mass is suspect. On the other hand, I did expose the baby to the word "degenerate" at a younger age than I expected to.
posted by Bulgaroktonos at 11:35 AM on January 11, 2017 [7 favorites]
posted by Bulgaroktonos at 11:35 AM on January 11, 2017 [7 favorites]
It may sound like baby talk, but you'll know something's up if she keeps repeating "ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn"
posted by briank at 11:44 AM on January 11, 2017 [6 favorites]
posted by briank at 11:44 AM on January 11, 2017 [6 favorites]
Don't worry too much; kids grow up fast these days, especially the Whateleys.
posted by GenjiandProust at 11:45 AM on January 11, 2017 [7 favorites]
posted by GenjiandProust at 11:45 AM on January 11, 2017 [7 favorites]
A strange re-imagining, and not in the sense of eeriness. It feels almost as bad as Derleth because it seems to take all that's quintessentially and uniquely Lovecraft out of the mythologies: the prose is not bad, but it's flat, devoid of feeling or sensation beyond what's written; it doesn't get under the skin whatsoever; this could be any middle-brow pulp fiction, which is unfortunately what it seems to reduce Lovecraft to. What distinguished his work from the kind of things published alongside it in publications like Weird Tales is what's missing from this.
posted by clockzero at 11:46 AM on January 11, 2017 [4 favorites]
posted by clockzero at 11:46 AM on January 11, 2017 [4 favorites]
I read a Mythos-based story a little while back that featured a an African-American physician/veteran of WWI in (I believe) New England in the '20s. It also had a sympathetic portrayal of the usually murderous shoggoths, on the basis that they were literally created to be slaves of the Antarctic-dwelling Elder Things of "At the Mountains of Madness".
It didn't sink in right away so I didn't note the author or title, and I read any Mythos anthology that comes along as my own personal guilty pleasure, so I don't even know where to begin in finding it again. But the different perspective has stuck with me in a field where there's a lot of reiteration. Good to see another one approaching HPL from a similar angle.
posted by Quindar Beep at 12:10 PM on January 11, 2017 [3 favorites]
It didn't sink in right away so I didn't note the author or title, and I read any Mythos anthology that comes along as my own personal guilty pleasure, so I don't even know where to begin in finding it again. But the different perspective has stuck with me in a field where there's a lot of reiteration. Good to see another one approaching HPL from a similar angle.
posted by Quindar Beep at 12:10 PM on January 11, 2017 [3 favorites]
I read a Mythos-based story a little while back that featured a an African-American physician/veteran of WWI in (I believe) New England in the '20s.
Sounds like Shoggoths in Bloom.
posted by sukeban at 12:16 PM on January 11, 2017 [11 favorites]
Sounds like Shoggoths in Bloom.
posted by sukeban at 12:16 PM on January 11, 2017 [11 favorites]
Sounds like Shoggoths in Bloom.
Yep, that's the one. I see it won a Hugo, so I'm glad it wasn't just me.
posted by Quindar Beep at 12:40 PM on January 11, 2017
Yep, that's the one. I see it won a Hugo, so I'm glad it wasn't just me.
posted by Quindar Beep at 12:40 PM on January 11, 2017
Shoggoths in Bloom
Ok, that's just an outstanding title, A++
posted by clockzero at 12:47 PM on January 11, 2017 [2 favorites]
Ok, that's just an outstanding title, A++
posted by clockzero at 12:47 PM on January 11, 2017 [2 favorites]
sukeban, I somehow added "County" to the end of your reply so it read "Sounds like Shoggoths in Bloom County." That painted a picture in my head that is probably very, very different from anything in actually appears or occurs in the story.
posted by ElKevbo at 1:41 PM on January 11, 2017 [5 favorites]
posted by ElKevbo at 1:41 PM on January 11, 2017 [5 favorites]
Shoggoths in Bloom County
Her Magnum Opus.
posted by It's Raining Florence Henderson at 1:45 PM on January 11, 2017 [11 favorites]
Her Magnum Opus.
posted by It's Raining Florence Henderson at 1:45 PM on January 11, 2017 [11 favorites]
Every January, I make a point of picking up the Best of Tor.com 200_ collection for free stories which are good for bus or travel reading. My reading habits are so spotty these days that it takes about a year to get through them, and this blurb immediately called Litany of Earth to mind. (It seems a fair number of novels get their starts from Tor.com shorts. I notice that Raymond Electromatic now has two novels, and Jemisin just landed a book deal that may spin off from a story published last year.)
posted by CBrachyrhynchos at 2:22 PM on January 11, 2017 [1 favorite]
posted by CBrachyrhynchos at 2:22 PM on January 11, 2017 [1 favorite]
Ruthanna's Lovecraft reread at Tor introduced me to "Than Curse the Darkness" by David Drake. If you have ever wondered why anyone would choose to be a cultist for an eldritch monstrosity that would eat the planet... the story takes place in Leopold's Congo. Question answered.
posted by BeeDo at 2:29 PM on January 11, 2017 [9 favorites]
posted by BeeDo at 2:29 PM on January 11, 2017 [9 favorites]
Woodcut of the People of Innsmouth being rounded up.
posted by robocop is bleeding at 3:13 PM on January 11, 2017 [1 favorite]
posted by robocop is bleeding at 3:13 PM on January 11, 2017 [1 favorite]
I kind of agree with clockzero above - it's a story with Lovecraftian references but not particularly a Lovecraftian story. Perhaps that's the point?
I noticed this particularly with the magic - you could pull the passages where her and Charles practice/learn magic and put them in pretty much any other fantasy novel and there would be nothing out of place about it. A friend of mine once compared Lovecraft's image of magic, or indeed the acquisition of knowledge as such, as like climbing a glacier - no matter what your intentions or ultimate aims, good or bad, you are always skirting vast black precipices, and each step could be your last. There's no sense of that here. No moral ambiguity or inherent danger.
There's a particular passage from Chapter 3 that struck me as almost anti-Lovecraftian in this sense:
“Mr. Spector, you don’t need me to tell you that magic makes a poor weapon. It’s not a tool for power, but for knowledge. And a limited tool, at that, unless you appreciate knowledge for its own sake. If your Russians are such scholars, you have little to fear from them.”
In Lovecraft's work, power and knowledge are inescapably, dangerously intertwined. It is the pursuit of knowledge for its own sake that usually leads the protagonist down into the depths of the abyss, because knowledge carries its own power with it: it will change you, and you don't get to choose how it will change you, or the world to which you reveal it (or seek to shield from it). Russian scholars happily delving away in pursuit of knowledge for its own sake are, in Lovecraft's terms, as dangerous if not more dangerous than the Whateleys and Curwens of the world - the latter, at least, are likely to only unleash the horrors they intend.
I like the basic idea - looking at and re-interpeting the Innsmouth setting and characters through the lens of government abuse of power and popular prejudice - but the result just kind of falls flat for me. I've read a couple other takes on that angle - Charles Stross presents one in The Jennifer Morgue, in which an Innsmouthian analogue has been enslaved and tortured by the American government under the twin justifications of national security and her own "inhuman" status. Alan Moore's Providence presents the inhabitants of Innsmouth, when the protagonist arrives there, as basically ordinary people, and there are a couple of chilling asides later on in the series hinting at what the government shutdown of the town later entails. But both of those examples achieve the re-appraisal of Innsmouth without brushing away the overarching cosmic power of the setting.
And again, I have to think that this may be intended as a feature, rather than a bug. Maybe Emrys is trying not just to reverse the lens of the Innsmouth event alone, but the entirety of Lovecraft's setting, and in that reversal, the cosmic horror is just one more element of the patriarchal, racist patina that is being removed by telling the other side of the story. But given that the cosmic horror is so much of what makes Lovecraft unique, it kind of cuts the heart out of the setting. You could probably have written the story, in its basic outlines, about any mythological creature in 1950s America, or for that matter any minority (Japanese, African-American, Native American) rediscovering a magical/traditional heritage. It would have retained the force of its characters and setting (the nastiness of prejudice and government sactioned persecution and oppression, the attempt to reconnect to something which has been stolen and cannot be wholly reconstituted because of historical crimes of breathtaking proportion), because none of that force comes from Lovecraft's Mythos.
I dunno. It's still a very well-written story, by someone deeply familiar with and who obviously enjoys the Mythos (thanks, sukeban, for the link to her Tor reviews!). But it does do away with what I feel is kind of the most interesting element of Lovecraft's oeuvre, possibly because it's really hard to talk about the things the writer here seems to really want to talk about - oppression, and especially oppression that takes the form of the loss of family, community, tradition, as well as personal security and freedom - in the context of a setting riven through with alienation ( in soooo many senses). Reading this reminded me of how the overwhelming majority of Lovecraft's protagonists aren't just male and white but also unattached or isolated white males, who for all their interest in antiquities or traditional mythology are cut off from the very beginning from the elements of life that Emrys' protagonists have lost and whose loss they are mourning. I think that its hard to tell a story about the latter kind of protagonist in a setting designed for and around (and, of course, by) the former kind.
posted by AdamCSnider at 4:51 PM on January 11, 2017 [5 favorites]
I noticed this particularly with the magic - you could pull the passages where her and Charles practice/learn magic and put them in pretty much any other fantasy novel and there would be nothing out of place about it. A friend of mine once compared Lovecraft's image of magic, or indeed the acquisition of knowledge as such, as like climbing a glacier - no matter what your intentions or ultimate aims, good or bad, you are always skirting vast black precipices, and each step could be your last. There's no sense of that here. No moral ambiguity or inherent danger.
There's a particular passage from Chapter 3 that struck me as almost anti-Lovecraftian in this sense:
“Mr. Spector, you don’t need me to tell you that magic makes a poor weapon. It’s not a tool for power, but for knowledge. And a limited tool, at that, unless you appreciate knowledge for its own sake. If your Russians are such scholars, you have little to fear from them.”
In Lovecraft's work, power and knowledge are inescapably, dangerously intertwined. It is the pursuit of knowledge for its own sake that usually leads the protagonist down into the depths of the abyss, because knowledge carries its own power with it: it will change you, and you don't get to choose how it will change you, or the world to which you reveal it (or seek to shield from it). Russian scholars happily delving away in pursuit of knowledge for its own sake are, in Lovecraft's terms, as dangerous if not more dangerous than the Whateleys and Curwens of the world - the latter, at least, are likely to only unleash the horrors they intend.
I like the basic idea - looking at and re-interpeting the Innsmouth setting and characters through the lens of government abuse of power and popular prejudice - but the result just kind of falls flat for me. I've read a couple other takes on that angle - Charles Stross presents one in The Jennifer Morgue, in which an Innsmouthian analogue has been enslaved and tortured by the American government under the twin justifications of national security and her own "inhuman" status. Alan Moore's Providence presents the inhabitants of Innsmouth, when the protagonist arrives there, as basically ordinary people, and there are a couple of chilling asides later on in the series hinting at what the government shutdown of the town later entails. But both of those examples achieve the re-appraisal of Innsmouth without brushing away the overarching cosmic power of the setting.
And again, I have to think that this may be intended as a feature, rather than a bug. Maybe Emrys is trying not just to reverse the lens of the Innsmouth event alone, but the entirety of Lovecraft's setting, and in that reversal, the cosmic horror is just one more element of the patriarchal, racist patina that is being removed by telling the other side of the story. But given that the cosmic horror is so much of what makes Lovecraft unique, it kind of cuts the heart out of the setting. You could probably have written the story, in its basic outlines, about any mythological creature in 1950s America, or for that matter any minority (Japanese, African-American, Native American) rediscovering a magical/traditional heritage. It would have retained the force of its characters and setting (the nastiness of prejudice and government sactioned persecution and oppression, the attempt to reconnect to something which has been stolen and cannot be wholly reconstituted because of historical crimes of breathtaking proportion), because none of that force comes from Lovecraft's Mythos.
I dunno. It's still a very well-written story, by someone deeply familiar with and who obviously enjoys the Mythos (thanks, sukeban, for the link to her Tor reviews!). But it does do away with what I feel is kind of the most interesting element of Lovecraft's oeuvre, possibly because it's really hard to talk about the things the writer here seems to really want to talk about - oppression, and especially oppression that takes the form of the loss of family, community, tradition, as well as personal security and freedom - in the context of a setting riven through with alienation ( in soooo many senses). Reading this reminded me of how the overwhelming majority of Lovecraft's protagonists aren't just male and white but also unattached or isolated white males, who for all their interest in antiquities or traditional mythology are cut off from the very beginning from the elements of life that Emrys' protagonists have lost and whose loss they are mourning. I think that its hard to tell a story about the latter kind of protagonist in a setting designed for and around (and, of course, by) the former kind.
posted by AdamCSnider at 4:51 PM on January 11, 2017 [5 favorites]
I read "the people of Smashmouth", so I may have to go make a meta about the current frequency of Smashmouth posts
At the Mountains Of Madness, except each time someone goes insane "All Star" plays.
posted by Gorgik at 5:26 PM on January 11, 2017 [5 favorites]
At the Mountains Of Madness, except each time someone goes insane "All Star" plays.
posted by Gorgik at 5:26 PM on January 11, 2017 [5 favorites]
At the Mountains Of Madness, except each time someone goes insane "All Star" plays.
The other way around, surely.
posted by tobascodagama at 5:40 PM on January 11, 2017 [3 favorites]
The other way around, surely.
posted by tobascodagama at 5:40 PM on January 11, 2017 [3 favorites]
MetaFilter: Lovecraft + Smashmouth (with bonus Bloom County)
posted by oneswellfoop at 5:45 PM on January 11, 2017 [4 favorites]
posted by oneswellfoop at 5:45 PM on January 11, 2017 [4 favorites]
the cosmic horror is just one more element of the patriarchal, racist patina
i really actually think part of the idea is that the wellspring lovecraft drew on for that stuff was his deep and infinite horror of non-english people
posted by reprise the theme song and roll the credits at 6:21 PM on January 11, 2017 [3 favorites]
i really actually think part of the idea is that the wellspring lovecraft drew on for that stuff was his deep and infinite horror of non-english people
posted by reprise the theme song and roll the credits at 6:21 PM on January 11, 2017 [3 favorites]
I disliked Litany of Earth, but it's been long enough since I read it that I couldn't explain exactly why. At the time, it felt point-missing, preachy and flat, I suppose. The Allen Williams art accompanying the story is excellent, though.
Why isn't there more weird fiction and cosmicist writing about social issues, oppression and historical atrocities? And why isn't what there is of that very good? It's an outlook that's very well suited to exploring these kinds of topics in the bleakest ways, but aside from Matt Ruff's Lovecraft Country and perhaps some of Caitlyn Kiernan's work, I'm drawing a blank on examples that do that kind of thing at all well. Most weird fiction reaches high for some truly alien perspectives and imagery, but almost nothing bothers to blend that with more human concerns, which is a potentially fantastic, fascinating combination. A lot of it's just too abstract.
For specifically Derlethian things, I think part of it is that Lovecraft's racism has never really be fully reconciled with the cosmicism and wild imagination. There are only two acceptable opinions on Lovecraft ("genius, therefore can afford todrool be a bigot" vs. "nothing of value, just bigotry"), both of which are patently just...wrong. We seem stuck on this, and I don't know why popular editions of Lovecraft don't just edit things and include introductory passages by writers of color capable of putting the racism in a historical and contemporary context. I don't know why everyone is still always so afraid to even engage with it at all. There is this persistent sense either that Lovecraft's imaginative genius means we should ignore the racism entirely, or that Lovecraft was literally the most racist, horrible human being who ever lived, which is laughably absurd--Lovecraft certainly was not somehow "more" racist than the majority of white American culture in the 1920s and 30s. All that's unique about Lovecraft's racism is that it's very well-documented.
I suppose it doesn't help that almost no one reads Lovecraft, and S.T. Joshi is about it when it comes to serious Lovecraft scholarship. There's still too much of a stigma of the pulps about Lovecraft, but Lovecraft wasn't really as pulpy a writer as we like to imagine, so "literary" readers refuse to drop the snobbery and everyone else just gets bored. Rinse, repeat. Lovecraft's racism is only ever discussed to dismiss the entirety of the work or to insist we stop discussing it. The few things that try to flip this inside out either lose the cosmicism or just end up...more problematic than the originals; Moore's Providence presents the Innsmouth folk as an oppressed minority, but then the more we see of their culture, the more apparent it becomes that it's super, super, super rapey and awful. I liked Providence enough to read Neonomicon and just, yeah, no. Did not need "Derlethian mythos but as a porny rape fantasy" in my life at all.
posted by byanyothername at 6:45 PM on January 11, 2017 [1 favorite]
Why isn't there more weird fiction and cosmicist writing about social issues, oppression and historical atrocities? And why isn't what there is of that very good? It's an outlook that's very well suited to exploring these kinds of topics in the bleakest ways, but aside from Matt Ruff's Lovecraft Country and perhaps some of Caitlyn Kiernan's work, I'm drawing a blank on examples that do that kind of thing at all well. Most weird fiction reaches high for some truly alien perspectives and imagery, but almost nothing bothers to blend that with more human concerns, which is a potentially fantastic, fascinating combination. A lot of it's just too abstract.
For specifically Derlethian things, I think part of it is that Lovecraft's racism has never really be fully reconciled with the cosmicism and wild imagination. There are only two acceptable opinions on Lovecraft ("genius, therefore can afford to
I suppose it doesn't help that almost no one reads Lovecraft, and S.T. Joshi is about it when it comes to serious Lovecraft scholarship. There's still too much of a stigma of the pulps about Lovecraft, but Lovecraft wasn't really as pulpy a writer as we like to imagine, so "literary" readers refuse to drop the snobbery and everyone else just gets bored. Rinse, repeat. Lovecraft's racism is only ever discussed to dismiss the entirety of the work or to insist we stop discussing it. The few things that try to flip this inside out either lose the cosmicism or just end up...more problematic than the originals; Moore's Providence presents the Innsmouth folk as an oppressed minority, but then the more we see of their culture, the more apparent it becomes that it's super, super, super rapey and awful. I liked Providence enough to read Neonomicon and just, yeah, no. Did not need "Derlethian mythos but as a porny rape fantasy" in my life at all.
posted by byanyothername at 6:45 PM on January 11, 2017 [1 favorite]
Oh, also, I may as well add my thoughts on "Shadow Over Innsmouth" and why I think it's generally superior to things like Providence or Litany of Earth. It's a very open-ended story, and while the takeaway from many modern readers is that it's about miscegenation, it is just as easy to bend the story just a bit so that it is about the horror of rape. While Lovecraft may have intended for Olmans' eventual embracing of his heritage to be horrifying, it's always read as empowering to me, and I do think that was also clearly intended as well. It's ambiguous enough to be both or either, and the story itself allows us to view the Deep Ones and hybrids ambivalently; not as monsters or evil creatures, but just a different species of aquatic kinda-humans with their own cultures, inner lives, etc.
The unchanging nugget of horror in the story is in the "third oath of Dagon," which is never explicitly stated to be such but is fairly obviously rape - of humans of either/any gender, by Deep Ones. It's sanitized as the "third oath" and some kind of special "marriage," but it's fairly obvious what is actually happening there. It's an equally fair reading to see the horror of it being the lack of consent, rather than the fantastic "race mixing." As a younger reader, this was my main takeaway and there is enough in the text to indicate it is an intended facet. As an adult, I can see the "miscegenation" aspect, but it just doesn't completely jive with the mood whiplash of the ending.
Many of Lovecraft's actual stories are actually very flexible this way. There's a little snippet in "The Thing On the Doorstep" that, when I was a teenager reading these stories for the first time, I interpreted as a backhanded little slap of misogyny. As an adult, I think that's still a valid reading; but rereading the story as an adult much more familiar with Lovecraft generally, I can see that it's primarily an in-joke and reference to another story. Lovecraft may have intended to imply that "female brains" are inhuman; but it's as or more likely that the snippet is referring to that particular woman's brain being literally inhuman in context.
Of course there are exceptions (ugh, "Rats in the Walls," "Horror at Red Hook") and a fair few of Lovecraft's stories feature less than wonderful attitudes toward people of color, but this gets blended in with these ambiguous or alternate explanations and a kind of satirical tone toward academic hubris. The bulk of Lovecraft's racism is in the letters, and this is sort of what I mean when I sincerely wonder why no one's just...edited popular editions, provided context, included essays with alternate interpretations of popular stories and so forth. Because Lovecraft's racism is bizarre. It doesn't explain the cosmic horror at all; it stands in stark contrast to Lovecraft's socialist politics, rampant xenophilia and cosmicist philosophy that humanity had no significance to reality and that our concerns are all petty, biased things. Oddly, Lovecraft was racist in spite of being Lovecraft, not because of.
posted by byanyothername at 7:05 PM on January 11, 2017 [2 favorites]
The unchanging nugget of horror in the story is in the "third oath of Dagon," which is never explicitly stated to be such but is fairly obviously rape - of humans of either/any gender, by Deep Ones. It's sanitized as the "third oath" and some kind of special "marriage," but it's fairly obvious what is actually happening there. It's an equally fair reading to see the horror of it being the lack of consent, rather than the fantastic "race mixing." As a younger reader, this was my main takeaway and there is enough in the text to indicate it is an intended facet. As an adult, I can see the "miscegenation" aspect, but it just doesn't completely jive with the mood whiplash of the ending.
Many of Lovecraft's actual stories are actually very flexible this way. There's a little snippet in "The Thing On the Doorstep" that, when I was a teenager reading these stories for the first time, I interpreted as a backhanded little slap of misogyny. As an adult, I think that's still a valid reading; but rereading the story as an adult much more familiar with Lovecraft generally, I can see that it's primarily an in-joke and reference to another story. Lovecraft may have intended to imply that "female brains" are inhuman; but it's as or more likely that the snippet is referring to that particular woman's brain being literally inhuman in context.
Of course there are exceptions (ugh, "Rats in the Walls," "Horror at Red Hook") and a fair few of Lovecraft's stories feature less than wonderful attitudes toward people of color, but this gets blended in with these ambiguous or alternate explanations and a kind of satirical tone toward academic hubris. The bulk of Lovecraft's racism is in the letters, and this is sort of what I mean when I sincerely wonder why no one's just...edited popular editions, provided context, included essays with alternate interpretations of popular stories and so forth. Because Lovecraft's racism is bizarre. It doesn't explain the cosmic horror at all; it stands in stark contrast to Lovecraft's socialist politics, rampant xenophilia and cosmicist philosophy that humanity had no significance to reality and that our concerns are all petty, biased things. Oddly, Lovecraft was racist in spite of being Lovecraft, not because of.
posted by byanyothername at 7:05 PM on January 11, 2017 [2 favorites]
Oh, oh, and as long as I'm sharing my personal interpretations, At the Mountains of Madness is so very obviously a political fable about the atrocity of slavery. And something about penguins.
posted by byanyothername at 7:09 PM on January 11, 2017
posted by byanyothername at 7:09 PM on January 11, 2017
I kind of agree with clockzero above - it's a story with Lovecraftian references but not particularly a Lovecraftian story. Perhaps that's the point?
That's probably a better take than my initial one.
I guess I expect that if someone is using such a framing, such a mythology, they should do so for some reason that one can make sense of, as a reader. I can see the author's story on top of the mythos, and it's a fine story, but it's just sort of very basic; an orphan of a semi-conquered, magical people starts to discover her power/make her way in the world against countervailing forces. In another way, it reminds me of how a lot of YA writing sounds, which is definitely not an insult in any way. You could substitute that story in any number of narrative traditions and it could work, so it's hard to see why this one was chosen, and it's a bit distracting.
And, to be honest, I'm not a huge fan of work that uses the color of real peoples' actual trauma (e.g., the persecution and internment of Japanese Americans during the WW2 era) to create a frame for imaginary mistreatment, especially not of lovecraftian fish monsters. The story invites us to imagine that they're terribly misunderstood, or at least, that they are true persons, that their personhood is comparable to our own in some important and essential way. This is profoundly anti-Lovecraftian in several distinct ways, but there doesn't seem to be any critique or counter-ethos, so it feels oddly arbitrary to me.
posted by clockzero at 7:11 PM on January 11, 2017 [3 favorites]
That's probably a better take than my initial one.
I guess I expect that if someone is using such a framing, such a mythology, they should do so for some reason that one can make sense of, as a reader. I can see the author's story on top of the mythos, and it's a fine story, but it's just sort of very basic; an orphan of a semi-conquered, magical people starts to discover her power/make her way in the world against countervailing forces. In another way, it reminds me of how a lot of YA writing sounds, which is definitely not an insult in any way. You could substitute that story in any number of narrative traditions and it could work, so it's hard to see why this one was chosen, and it's a bit distracting.
And, to be honest, I'm not a huge fan of work that uses the color of real peoples' actual trauma (e.g., the persecution and internment of Japanese Americans during the WW2 era) to create a frame for imaginary mistreatment, especially not of lovecraftian fish monsters. The story invites us to imagine that they're terribly misunderstood, or at least, that they are true persons, that their personhood is comparable to our own in some important and essential way. This is profoundly anti-Lovecraftian in several distinct ways, but there doesn't seem to be any critique or counter-ethos, so it feels oddly arbitrary to me.
posted by clockzero at 7:11 PM on January 11, 2017 [3 favorites]
okay yeah. admittedly i am way out of my depth discussing the specifics of lovecraft's works. haven't read 'em. tried once, don't specifically plan to try again. however:
rape - of humans of either/any gender, by Deep Ones.
that their personhood is comparable to our own in some important and essential way. This is profoundly anti-Lovecraftian
these both remind me a lot of things i have heard racist people say about the people they hate and fear. going against those points in the original work - asserting that yes, they are people, and no, they are not coming here to rape us - in my opinion fits well well within the theme of addressing it as a racist work.
posted by reprise the theme song and roll the credits at 7:40 PM on January 11, 2017 [4 favorites]
rape - of humans of either/any gender, by Deep Ones.
that their personhood is comparable to our own in some important and essential way. This is profoundly anti-Lovecraftian
these both remind me a lot of things i have heard racist people say about the people they hate and fear. going against those points in the original work - asserting that yes, they are people, and no, they are not coming here to rape us - in my opinion fits well well within the theme of addressing it as a racist work.
posted by reprise the theme song and roll the credits at 7:40 PM on January 11, 2017 [4 favorites]
these both remind me a lot of things i have heard racist people say about the people they hate and fear. going against those points in the original work - asserting that yes, they are people, and no, they are not coming here to rape us - in my opinion fits well well within the theme of addressing it as a racist work.
The story resulting from this author's engagement with Lovecraft is more or less pulp fiction in that case, I feel, with a pretty conventional plot (so far, at least). It's not bad, but its addressing of the racist undertones doesn't feel like a startling insight -- or an insight at all, really.
posted by clockzero at 7:54 PM on January 11, 2017
The story resulting from this author's engagement with Lovecraft is more or less pulp fiction in that case, I feel, with a pretty conventional plot (so far, at least). It's not bad, but its addressing of the racist undertones doesn't feel like a startling insight -- or an insight at all, really.
posted by clockzero at 7:54 PM on January 11, 2017
Also wanted to say I looked up The Ballad of Black Tom (which is now on my reading list) thanks to this thread, and The Dream Quest of Vellitt Boe looks promising as well. I prefer weird fiction to leave the Lovecruft behind and be its own odd, personal, idiosyncratic thing (especially if the intention is to show Lovecraftian entities defeated by human values or something, which gets enormously point-missing), but I would like to see more weird fiction engaging with social issues. There is also the whole Romantic-idealist underbelly of the genre in which "weird" is not at all "bad" and can instead be rather beautiful and liberating (which comprises even a large amount of Lovecraft's work) that too often goes...completely ignored.
posted by byanyothername at 9:05 PM on January 11, 2017 [5 favorites]
posted by byanyothername at 9:05 PM on January 11, 2017 [5 favorites]
The Dream Quest of Vellitt Boe Is extremely good, ultra-recommend.
You may have to be a total fucking need to get the best out of it though, or at least be broadly familiar with HPL's Dreamland stuff.
posted by Artw at 9:08 PM on January 11, 2017 [1 favorite]
You may have to be a total fucking need to get the best out of it though, or at least be broadly familiar with HPL's Dreamland stuff.
posted by Artw at 9:08 PM on January 11, 2017 [1 favorite]
It's a very open-ended story, and while the takeaway from many modern readers is that it's about miscegenation, it is just as easy to bend the story just a bit so that it is about the horror of rape.
It's not an either- or situation, it's both. Consider how racists generally believed miscegnation would occur, ala "Birth of a Nation." I mean, it's a nice stab at pretending one can reinterpret Lovecraft to ignore the racism, but the bigotry really is so pervasive it can't be removed.
I actually thought that Litany of Earth was very powerful and moving, but I will concede that coming from a nonwhite, nonmale perspective, it had to avoid the major cosmological element of Lovecraft: the horror of white males at finding out they aren't the center of the universe.
This incidentally, is the real reason why cosmological knowledge is dangerous- it prevents our white male heroes from pretending that they are the pinnacle of creation, and that the universe was made for them.
posted by happyroach at 12:17 AM on January 12, 2017 [3 favorites]
It's not an either- or situation, it's both. Consider how racists generally believed miscegnation would occur, ala "Birth of a Nation." I mean, it's a nice stab at pretending one can reinterpret Lovecraft to ignore the racism, but the bigotry really is so pervasive it can't be removed.
I actually thought that Litany of Earth was very powerful and moving, but I will concede that coming from a nonwhite, nonmale perspective, it had to avoid the major cosmological element of Lovecraft: the horror of white males at finding out they aren't the center of the universe.
This incidentally, is the real reason why cosmological knowledge is dangerous- it prevents our white male heroes from pretending that they are the pinnacle of creation, and that the universe was made for them.
posted by happyroach at 12:17 AM on January 12, 2017 [3 favorites]
Oh, oh, and as long as I'm sharing my personal interpretations, At the Mountains of Madness is so very obviously a political fable about the atrocity of slavery. And something about penguins.
With you on the penguins, but the slavery angle was entirely missed by this cis-male white reader until Bear ran with it in her story. Obvious in retrospect, sure.
posted by Quindar Beep at 6:26 AM on January 12, 2017
With you on the penguins, but the slavery angle was entirely missed by this cis-male white reader until Bear ran with it in her story. Obvious in retrospect, sure.
posted by Quindar Beep at 6:26 AM on January 12, 2017
Traditionally this is the part of the discussion where I'd bring up the claim in L Sprague De Camp's biography that Lovecraft changed his views later in life and spoke out against people who were half as racist as he had been previously.
...the thing is I've never seen any other evidence for that, and I wonder if that wasn't something his friends and family told him in retrospect.
posted by lumpenprole at 9:18 AM on January 12, 2017 [1 favorite]
...the thing is I've never seen any other evidence for that, and I wonder if that wasn't something his friends and family told him in retrospect.
posted by lumpenprole at 9:18 AM on January 12, 2017 [1 favorite]
Well, the super racist stuff* does seem to be clustered up the one end of his career, for the most part. I'm not sure there's much else.
* Including that one poem when he was like 12 or something that is just awful.
posted by Artw at 9:47 AM on January 12, 2017
* Including that one poem when he was like 12 or something that is just awful.
posted by Artw at 9:47 AM on January 12, 2017
Why isn't there more weird fiction and cosmicist writing about social issues, oppression and historical atrocities?
I think it's the sort of thing that's hard to do well and will likely trigger some readers. Cstross has used references to the Holocaust at least twice that I know of, and it was only his relatively light touch that stopped it from seeming weird. If your story relies on (e.g.) "the house was built on an old Indian burial ground!" then you're co-opting Native American oppression while erasing their actual story- where are those people's descendants, why don't they live around here, how do they feel about all this. On the other hand, it would potentially be even more offensive (IMO) to fictionalise victims' experiences and say that, e.g., the Nazis were rounding up and killing Romani because they were collecting their occult powers: that blurs the line between truth and fiction at a time when there's already a lot of Holocaust denial, and implicitly denies the continuing nature of anti-Romani prejudice. So it's probably a good idea to steer clear of this sort of thing, because it's quite hard to respect victims while using their experiences in your story.
posted by Joe in Australia at 3:34 PM on January 12, 2017 [2 favorites]
I think it's the sort of thing that's hard to do well and will likely trigger some readers. Cstross has used references to the Holocaust at least twice that I know of, and it was only his relatively light touch that stopped it from seeming weird. If your story relies on (e.g.) "the house was built on an old Indian burial ground!" then you're co-opting Native American oppression while erasing their actual story- where are those people's descendants, why don't they live around here, how do they feel about all this. On the other hand, it would potentially be even more offensive (IMO) to fictionalise victims' experiences and say that, e.g., the Nazis were rounding up and killing Romani because they were collecting their occult powers: that blurs the line between truth and fiction at a time when there's already a lot of Holocaust denial, and implicitly denies the continuing nature of anti-Romani prejudice. So it's probably a good idea to steer clear of this sort of thing, because it's quite hard to respect victims while using their experiences in your story.
posted by Joe in Australia at 3:34 PM on January 12, 2017 [2 favorites]
I'm reminded at this points of one of the core issues with the X-Men as a civil rights allegory: if you can shoot fucking lasers out of your eyes, it actually kind of makes sense for the government to want to put you in a camp. In theory, that makes the anti-internment stance stronger, because you're saying internment would still be wrong even if the lies were true. But, in practice, I think it muddies the waters unnecessarily, because fictional portrayals, even allegorical ones, inevitably affect how we view historical events. And I think it's really important to remember that interment is both wrong in abstract moral terms and a historical event that was founded on lies.
posted by tobascodagama at 5:59 PM on January 12, 2017 [2 favorites]
posted by tobascodagama at 5:59 PM on January 12, 2017 [2 favorites]
Chapter 4 and Chapter 5 are up. I predict that is the end of the free preview.
posted by brainwane at 8:52 AM on January 19, 2017 [1 favorite]
posted by brainwane at 8:52 AM on January 19, 2017 [1 favorite]
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posted by cstross at 8:58 AM on January 11, 2017 [54 favorites]