They had started Earth life as an accident, or a jest. Stars" not long "after the earth had flung off the moon" In "At the Mountains of Madness,"Īntarctic explorers stumble onto a vast fossil city constructed eons agoīy starfish-headed, plantlike creatures that "seeped down from the In the ocean depths for geologic ages, waiting for "when the stars
Learns of a monstrous tentacled thing from the stars, dead and dreaming In "The Call of Cthulhu," for example, the protagonist In part from this detached, awestruck worldview. "designed to build vast, beautiful, mineral things for the moon toĭelight in after he is dead." His stories draw their peculiar power
New-York I told him that man is like the coral insect," he wrote, Humans as insignificant dust on the infinite cosmic stage, ludicrous in Secrets from its 26,000-year precessional cycle, "winking hideouslyįrom his childhood studies in astronomy, Lovecraft came to regard Worm-bedeviled Massachusetts seaport Polaris, steeped in prehistoric Waning crescent moon casting its feeble light on moldering gravestones įrosty Aldebaran seeming to balance on a steeple over an ancient, His tales are filled with haunting astronomical images-a Providence, and a philosophical dread regarding the starry voids His intimate love of the 18th-century antiquities around him in Own actual nightmares, which he claimed to remember in perfect detail, Lovecraft's nightmarish tales arose from several sources: his Revealed by astronomy, finally merging into science fiction. He was a key transitionalįigure, carrying the genre from its traditional ghost stories (which heĬonsidered petty and unimaginative) into the wild cosmic immensities The amateur astronomer was Howard Phillips Lovecraft (1890-1937).Īlmost unknown during his lifetime, he is now regarded as the seminal In his classic "The Whisperer inĭarkness," the eerie Vermont woods and their stream-trickling glensĪre settled by malign, crablike creatures from Yuggoth -"a strangeĭark orb at the very rim of our solar system." Times"-so much so that he featured the dwarf planet in a story Horror tales, "more than any other happening of recent Pluto 24 years later excited this amateur, now a published author of Observatories to "band together and minutely photograph theĮcliptic" in a quest for planets beyond Neptune. Island, penned a letter to Scientific American urging the world's In 1906 a fifteen-year-old amateur astronomer in Providence, Rhode APA style: Cosmic dread: the astronomy of H.P.This copyrighted material is duplicated by arrangement with Gale and may not be redistributed in any form without written permission from Sky & Telescope Media, LLC.
0 kommentar(er)
