Lovecraft: Hack or Genius?

[Mystery Man]

If you want to get your wife to look at you funny ask for Moorcock for your birthday.

 

[Desdichado]

I've never been a fan of Moorcock either, for that matter. Then again, I didn't read anything of his until after I was 30, so maybe I'd just lost the magic or something like that. I read the first two (or maybe three) Elric books and thought they were both pretty bad, and haven't looked for another Moorcock book since.

 

[Rackhir]

Well for what it's worth think of how few people have managed to write a sucessful Cthulhu mythos story. August Derleth's stuff is just awful, a handful of Bloch's are good and out of all the "modern Chtulhu" stuff the only one that I've read which actually caught the feeling and imagination of a good HPL story was one written by Warren Murphy one of the co-authors of the "Destroyer" aka Remo Williams pulp novels.

I think one of the reasons why he mentions "Non-Euclidian Geometry" so often is that while you can do math with triangles that have more than 180 degrees total in all the angles. We can't construct any in the real world. So it is an effective tool for conveying the fact that something is radically different from what we are used to in our 3 dimentions.

 

[Kanegrundar]

My assessment of Lovecraft (who I mostly enjoy), is that his writing is very streaky. Some stories are great (Shadow Over Innsmouth), but others are bland or outright boring. There have been many stories that have built up this sense of horror and dread, only to let me down entirely at the end. That's also a big problem with most Mythos writers. Most are so vague and ambiguous in their descriptions of what is actually going on that they simply lose the reader and the focus of the story.

Kane

 

[barsoomcore]

I also think "non-Euclidean" was kind of a thing in the 20s and 30s. Einstein had published the theory of general relativity in 1920, and I think it freaked a lot of people out. I wouldn't be at all surprised to hear that Lovecraft was reasonably well-informed on such scientific matters and even familiar with Einstein's work.

I certainly detect a general "Holy crap, this universe is messed up," in the Mythos and I suspect that derives in some part from the spectacular undermining of commonly-held assumptions about how things worked that took place in the early 1900's.

Oh, and JD: If you can find it, read The War Hound and the World's Pain -- one of the best Grail stories ever told. By Moorcock. And I really like the first four Jerry Cornelius novels, but they're a long way from being for everyone.

 

[TheAuldGrump]

And since HPL has now been dead long enough for his works to enter the public domain many are available online. One of several sites: http://terror.org.pl/~darkeye/bookz/hor_lovecraft.html

The Auld Grump

 

[trancejeremy]

On a slight tangent, Moorcock is a really odd writer in that he deliberately changes his style from book to book depending on what he is writing. And he has done a lot of pastiches, in the style of certain authors. Some stuff is also very experimental.

His Elric stuff was done when he was fairly young and was imitating Howard. The first 6 books or so, anyway. The later Elric novels are much easier to read.

 

[Desdichado]

His Elric stuff was done when he was fairly young and was imitating Howard. The first 6 books or so, anyway. The later Elric novels are much easier to read.

Continuing the slight tangent; that seems to be the opposite of what I've heard from most -- that he should have quit while he was ahead after the first three or so Elric books, and that they've generally all gone downhill from there as being little more then poorly-done rehashes.

 

[MonsterMash]

If you want to get your wife to look at you funny ask for Moorcock for your birthday.

Surely you get plenty of emails advertising it everyday.

 

[Desdichado]

I also think "non-Euclidean" was kind of a thing in the 20s and 30s. Einstein had published the theory of general relativity in 1920, and I think it freaked a lot of people out. I wouldn't be at all surprised to hear that Lovecraft was reasonably well-informed on such scientific matters and even familiar with Einstein's work.

I'm sure he was; he mentioned it a few times.

I certainly detect a general "Holy crap, this universe is messed up," in the Mythos and I suspect that derives in some part from the spectacular undermining of commonly-held assumptions about how things worked that took place in the early 1900's.

One that I can identify with, and I think that's actually one of Lovecraft's stronger points. I'm not nearly as pessimistic about life in general as ole H.P., but I share his distrust of putting too much faith in science. I read a quote once, by a physicist who's name I forget, that encapsulates my own opinion quite well (and I'm paraphrasing here); "The greatest discovery of the last century is the enormous scope of our ignorance."

That's where Lovecraft was the strongest, IMO. IMO, also, that message has been the most diluted over time since he wrote. If anything, we have more faith in our own knowledge and scientific advances than every before. Science is almost dogmatic.

But, I've never said Lovecraft didn't have good concepts, just good execution.

Oh, and JD: If you can find it, read The War Hound and the World's Pain -- one of the best Grail stories ever told. By Moorcock. And I really like the first four Jerry Cornelius novels, but they're a long way from being for everyone.

Will do. My local library is already tapped out; it's got a fair amount of Moorcock, but it looks like it's mostly Eternal Champion stuff. I've got a few ILL requests already out, but I'll see what I can do about bringing that book next.