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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Autumnal" data-source="post: 9609944" data-attributes="member: 6671663">Lovecraft’s prose puts him in a tradition that includes the pulps, gothics, Poe, and like that. But his content is a particular fusion of elements that could barely have come together any sooner than it it. Maaaybe the late 19th century. But many later readers don’t at all grasp the extent to which Lovecraft was genuinely well-informed about cutting-edge science. There’s a bit in At The Mountains of Madness where he folds in an update to the known geology of Antarctica that came out after he started writing the story. He was up on experimental confirmation of relativity in the late 1910s. Likewise with biology and other sciences. Of his predecessors, the closest any come to matching his lore fu is Poe, and Poe was going off in a different direction.Lovecraft took the idea of sinister mysteries in the world around it and generalized it. It’s not just thst lands of faerie and dream are not congenial to the human soul, or that there are singular manifestations of ancients passions and communities of lurking evil here or there. It’s that not a single part of the whole damn universe cares about us at all. No devils hunt for our souls. No Angel appeared at Mons to save our brave boys, nor anywhere else. Nirvana is a state of mind that has no consequence for your body’s interactions with the universe. And it’s also not that great evils prowl the cosmos looking for prey like us. They don’t care, 99.99% of the time. Occasionally some of us achieve imstrumental utility. Thst doesn’t end well for us. But then just being left alone in an uncaring universe ain’t the greatest, either. And Lovecraft turned this sense of the world, as well as he could, into art and inspired others to do the sameI’d there’d never been a Lovecraft, there still would have been Howard, Clark Ashton Smith, Robert Bloch, Fritz Leiber, Catherine Moore, and so many others. But it seems quite likely that in the absence of the particular fusion thst is cosmic horror, their talents would have led them in different directions and the field would be the poorer for it.</blockquote>

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