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naraburns  nihil supernum  2yr ago (text post)   3070 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for October 28, 2022

Be advised; this thread is not for serious in depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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Part of this is that "Genre Founders" is one of the strongest possible selection effects. Weird and pulp fiction entered the modern canon through intermediaries in the 60s and 70s, so there's an additional filter when compared to something like detective fiction.

A month or two ago I was reading Michael Moorcock's collection of early Elric stories, specifically this volume. It's unapologetically schlocky, sword and sorcery married with "all the angst that's fit to print," and its influence seeped into the entire genre. Moorcock includes a variety of author's commentary between stories. Lovecraft is specifically cited as a non-influence! But it was immersion in this pulp culture that influenced his generation so heavily. The man was running an Edgar Rice Burroughs fanzine as a teenager in 1954; before ever getting published, he was reading Howard and Lieber along with French existentialists and Beats.

We went to Paris every chance we had. At George Whitman's Paris bookstore I would busk with my guitar, seated on a chair outside the shop (George didn't mind since he knew all the money went back to him), and then as soon as I had enough, buy a couple of paperbacks for the rest of the day. It was there, in the shadow of Notre Dame, that I read my first true SF story, Alfred Bester's The Stars My Destination, and wondered what I'd been missing.

...

My friends--Ballard, Bayley and Aldiss especially--believed much as I did. Quite a bit of our late-1950s and early 1960s conversation envisioned a magazine which would combine the values of the best SF and the best contemporary literature as well as features about what was happening in the arts and sciences.

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The last kind of fiction I imagined myself writing was what Leiber had christened both heroic fantasy and sword-and-sorcery but which I had, it appeared, already termed epic fantasy. By some strange twist of fate I was telling tales that had more in common with the nineteeth century than the twentieth in order to help support an avant-garde movement which looked forward to the twenty-first.

Though Tolkien had been published, he was still relatively obscure, and his kind of fantasy fiction was never published in the mainstream (Tolkien's primarily academic publisher, George Allen and Unwin, was better known as Jung's). Hard as it is to believe now, The Lord of the Rings was considered as some kind of post-nuclear allegory, too risky to chance in a paperback editioon (which Tolkien, anyway, regarded as a bit vulgar). Both Burroughs and Howards were throughoughly out of fashion in the United States (though not so much in Britain), and there was no longer any kind of market for supernatural adventure fiction. The eagerness with which the public embraced the fantasts when they were finally released, an uncaged flock, upon the world, is a good lesson for publishers and for politicians.

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We've come a long way since 1957, when it was still possible to order the set of The Lord of the Rings and wait a week before receiving the first editions at, as I recall, a guinea apiece. Tolkien's phenomenal story was still considered as much an expensive rarity as Arkham House Lovecrafts, luxuriously illustrated limited editions of Dunsany or the Gnome Press editions of the Conan books. Ironically, none was as widely published as [Poul] Andersons's second novel, The Broken Sword...

The fantasy canon was an expensive prospect, even if you could find the book in print. Weird Tales of the magazine's golden age were, however, still relatively cheap in the second-hand bookstores, especially those which specialized in giving you half price on any title you brought back in good condition... Weird Tales, which had published almost every major fantasist including Lovecraft, Howard and Bradbury, inspired [prominent fantasy magazine editor E. J.] Carnell.

There's a lot more in this essay about Moorcock's attempts to conflate SF and literary fiction, but I think the point about Lovecraft et al. is clear. What we label, today, as "Lovecraftian" is a distillation of his work--the elements which most captured the minds of this particular generation of New Wave freelancers.

The other factor is that atmosphere is its own axis, nearly orthogonal to both technical skill and to underlying ideas. But the first part of this has ballooned enough; I suppose I'll argue about the differences between Harry Potter and Earthsea another time.

I read that one nearly a year ago and yeah, Elric as a character is...a bit much. Adolescent is the word I would use. Not that I didn't enjoy the stories.

I'd agree that there's something about Lovecraft. His prose can get pretty purple, his plots aren't particularly inventive, and his ideas, when stated bluntly, don't seem terribly sophisticated or compelling (There is no higher power and the universe is pointlessly cruel and chaotic? Shocking twist). And yet, he makes an impression. He casts a longer shadow than many other "better" writers. Maybe it's just sheer conviction. He really feels dread when contemplating a universe stripped of divine purpose and he's able to communicate that dread to the reader? I dunno.

There is a certain authenticity to Lovecraft. Everything I've read about the man paints him as an odd character himself, with poor relationships, unsuccessful in most endeavors, and with a somewhat fragile temperament. Extremely passive and neurotic, which his contemporaries put on how much he was raised exclusively by women. These attributes come through in his writing, in a way his imitators cannot match.

You can mimic his style, even improve on it. You cannot mimic his pathos.

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