Joe's Jottings

Category: Science Fiction

  • The guilty pleasure that is H P Lovecraft

    Over the last couple of days I’ve taken a break from Don DeLillo’s ‘Libra’ and have returned to one of my all time favourite horror / science fiction writers, H P Lovecraft.  In particular, I’m re-reading his novella ‘The Case of Charles Dexter Ward’ – an everyday tale of international grave robbing, ghoulish possession and dealings with dark forces, spread over the centuries.

    HPL is a definitely un-PC writer to admit to enjoying.  Even as a fan there are some phrases used that today slap you in the face as being patronising or racist, but given the attitudes prevalent in much fiction in the first 25 years of the 20th Century, I’m willing to cut some slack.  His ‘purple prose’ is well known – just mention the words eldritch, un-nameable and squamous as adjectives to anyone with a passing knowldge of his books, and you’ll immediately elicit his name.

    I recently bought replacement volums of his stories – my existing ones had fallen apart after 20 years of reading.  The first time I read any Lovecraft at all was in a Corgi edition in my teens – I remember the book as having a purple cover – very apt, I thought – and it was part of a ‘Science Fiction Classics’ series.  The first stories of his I remember are not, oddly enough, from the C’thulhu Mythos – they were ‘The Colour out of Space’ and ‘The Shadow out of Time’ – pretty much straight science fiction in most respect.  His Venus set ‘In the Walls of Eryx’ was pure 1930s science fiction, with the ilmage of Venus as an overgrown jungle world.  Once I got hooked in to the C’thulhu mythos, it was downhill all the way.  I also have a neat collection of ‘Mythos Stories’ from other authors which are great fun, and wrote my own Necronomicon related short story set in Victorian England.  Great fun!

    As for the Mythos, it’s struck me recently that many of the Mythos stories I actually like best are not by Lovecraft himself!  I think one of the amazing things about the Mythos structure is how it’s been used (and occasionally abused) by an incredibly wide range of writers; just as most writers will do a Holmes Homage, most science fiction authors will end up doing a Mythos related tale somewhere along the way.  My favourite Mythos tales probably include those of Stephen King (‘Crouch End’) and Colin Wilson – particularly his ‘Return of the Lloigor.

    I remember some years ago killing time in London one evening (during my film making days) in a Cybercafe on Tottenham Court Road writing a Mythos tale based around a creature that could inhabit electronic networks.  Oddly enough, the email in which I sent the story to myself mysteriously disappeared in transit.  It did make me wonder…

    Back to Charles Dexter Ward – true Gothic Horror.  There is a section of the book where even now I have to sit back and think hard, following the disguises and double identities of the characters in the novel – but it’s a great story.

    If you’ve never read any Lovecraft, and you don’t mind a bit of prose that is slightly purple, I suggest you start with ‘The Call of Cthulhu’ to kick you off on the Mythos stories.  ‘The Music of Erich Zann’ is an interestingly understated short story that always reminds me of H G Wells’ ‘The Platner Story’.  ‘The Mountains of Madness’ is a good read as well – set in the Antarctic and deals with the discovery of ancient alien life on Earth (part of the Mythos).

    In the words of an old newspaper review…go forth to HP Lovecraft and shudder!

  • Arthur C Clarke – RIP

    Bugger.

    Like a lot of things, I guess that in my heart of hearts I knew that eventually all the venerable old writers of science fiction, the folks who I grew up with, would all pass away.  When it starts happening it’s a strange experience.  The world has enough obituaries for ACC – here I just wanted to say something about what he means to me.

    When ‘2001 – A Space Odyssey’ – came out I was a boy of 7 years old and although it played the local fleapit I didn’t see it.  I don’t remember whether I was too young to go, but I remember my mum wanting to see it.  I never found out whether she eventually got to see the movie or not; I only myself caught up with it after watching 2010, which is pretty arse-about-face.   In other words, I came to ACC not via his most famous work, but in my own way.

    A British ‘boys weekly’ of the 1970s was called, I seem to remember, ‘Speed and Power’, and featured all sorts of machines, vehicles, etc. each week…aong with a short story from ACC.  And that’s where I encountered him first.  I still have a box of these magazines somewhere in the dark recesses of my attic, complete with the short stories which occupied many an evening, and encouraged me to go and find his other books.

    The first ACC novel I read was ‘A Fall of Moondust’ – a disaster story about a ‘moon bus’ full of tourists that gets swamped in dust whilst traversing a lunar ‘sea’, and the efforts of rescuers to get them out.  The novel of his that made the biggest impact on me was ‘Rendezvous with Rama’ – I still remember the first time I read it, and even now it holds up.  Lovely, wonderful, story telling that I never get bored with.  I have to say that I’m very excited about the prospects of a film being made of the novel – possibly for release in 2009.  I’m keeping my fingers crossed!

    But the short stories made the biggest impression on me.  As the years passed I just grabbed copeis of his collections of short stories from second hand shops, charity shops, wherever.  And of all of them, the ones that made the biggest and longest lasting impression were his ‘Tales from the White Hart’.   Quite why I have no idea – I guess that I just love ‘tallish tales’ that are just, maybe, plausible.  These stories, and those of Ray Bradbury and Stephen King, have probably been the major influences of my short story writing.  So much so that I’ve written a collection of similar stories – an ‘homage’, I guess – called ‘Tales from the Oakham Arms’.

    I’m not even going to start on the technical innovations that ACC suggested, starting with his now famous Wireless World item on Geostationary Communication Satellites, that have now appeared in our lives.

    Like someone else said recently, I really hope that as ACC passed away he was able to look deep into the cosmos and utter those final words of Dave Bowman’s…”My God, it’s full of stars”.

    Thanks Sir Arthur.  My life would have been significantly poorer without your imagination.

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