The "Great Race" — often known as the "Great Race of Yith" or "Yithians" (but more on that later) — are the villains (?) in H.P. Lovecraft's last major story, "The Shadow Out of Time." Written in 1934 and published the year before Lovecraft's death, the story is the narrative of one Professor Nathaniel Wingate Peaslee, a tenured professor of Political Economy at Miskatonic University. The course of scholarship at that institution never runs smoothly, and in Dr. Peaslee's case his life and career are rudely interrupted on the morning of May 14, 1908, when an alien personality takes over his body in mid-lecture.
Once it figures out how to use a human form, the alien mind (still using Peaslee's identity, of course) goes on a course of intense occult and archaeological research — destroying Peaslee's marriage and family life in the process. "Peaslee" reads all the usual Lovecraftian books, sometimes making margin notes in unreadable glyphs. He travels the world, going to the Himalayas, the "unknown deserts" of Arabia, the Arctic, and the caves of western Virginia.
After five years of this, "Peaslee" returns home, builds a weird machine in his study, and — after a late-night visit from a "lean, dark, curiously foreign-looking man" — reverts to his old personality and even picks up the lecture right where he left off.
He mends ties with his youngest son, gets his position at Miskatonic back (the power of tenure!), and tries to rebuild his life. But poor Peaslee keeps having weird dreams and disturbing fragments of memory. In 1915 he resigns again and starts trying to figure out what happened to him. Through sheer dogged scholarship across a variety of disciplines, guided by his dreams, Peaslee reconstructs the story. (If you haven't read the story, the next section will ruin a lot of the suspense.)
During those five years, Peaslee was time-napped back to the Permian or Triassic Era while an alien mind belonging to a species called the Great Race was in charge of his body.
Who and what are the Great Race?
Back in the Triassic era, they were giant cone-shaped beings with boneless, pincer-tipped arms and a single three-eyed head. They had an advanced technological civilization and battled even more monstrous creatures living on Earth at the time. But they're not really from around here.
Oh, the bodies are — though how those ten-foot mollusc-like things fit into the history of life on Earth is pretty hard to figure out. (See speculation below.) But the Great Race aren't the cone-things, not really. Their minds came from a "transgalactic" world called Yith, now a "black, aeons-dead orb." The Great Race camped out in the bodies of the cone-things for a few aeons, then fled en masse into the far future to escape the resurgence of a monstrous menace they thought they had sealed up for good. Their next host species will be the "hardy coleopterous race immediately following mankind," and after that . . . who knows?
There's much more to the story, but this is the necessary background for what I really want to think about: The Great Race.
Yith
In Lovecraft fan and gaming lore, the Great Race are often called the "Yithians," because they come from Yith. But . . . how true is that? Certainly they came to Earth from Yith. But was Yith their original home? Or just another way station on their mind-hopping journey through Time?
If we assume suitable hosts for the Great Race are pretty scarce, so they have to search in both time and space for new ones, then the gap between leaving one world and taking over another (see below for how that would work) is on the order of 100 million years.
How long they stay on a given world is likely more variable. They had to flee the Triassic era because of the deadly "Flying Polyps" which came to Earth from space, got imprisoned, and finally escaped. Presumably not every world gets invaded like that — although it's worth noting that in Lovecraft's timeline, Earth has been invaded from Outside at least four times since the Precambrian era, and there's no reason to think there won't be more in the future.
The Great Race's tenure on Earth was something less than 100 million years, if we assume they arrived during the Permian and fled just at the Triassic-Jurassic extinction event. That's a good lower bound. As to upper limits, well, no planet lasts forever, and stars get brighter as they age. Earth has been habitable for about three billion years, and has a billion or two years left before the Sun cooks it. But the Great Race need suitable hosts, and complex organisms didn't really evolve until about half a billion years ago. So let's say two billion years is about the maximum interval (it's probably less than that, since I doubt the Great Race would want to take over a dying world).
So we assume the Great Race has to change planets every billion years or so. The oldest stars are more than 12 billion years old, and Earthlike planets might have started forming about a billion years later (and it's entirely possible the Great Race are not wedded to Earthlike worlds). Tack on another three billion years for intelligence to arise, and the Great Race could have started out eight billion years ago. Yith could have been the seventh in a series of temporary homeworlds.
They had to jump forward from the Triassic sooner than they expected, but the "hardy coleopterous species" after humanity could well survive until Earth itself starts to get too hot for life. And after that . . . who knows? There's nothing to stop the Great Race from jumping from world to world, species to species, until the Universe gets too cold and dark for intelligent life.
Even that might not be the end. The Great Race, after all, have conquered Time. Maybe after they've gone through the whole duration of the Universe, they can jump back in time to some species near the beginning, and go through it all over again.
The Triassic Cone Thingies
And what about those rugose cone beings the Great Race took over back in the Permian era? What the hell were they? Intelligent molluscs? Some experiment of the antarctic Old Ones that got out of hand?
Obviously they were intelligent beings, though we have no way of knowing how much of their technological civilization was their own, and how much was the work of the Great Race. They might have been philosophical hunter-gatherers, or tentacled Bronze Age-style philosophers.
There is another possibility which explains a lot of things: maybe the cone-shaped beings were themselves alien invaders. Consider: they really don't resemble any lineage of living things on Earth. They're really big creatures, which means it would be hard to miss fossilized specimens in Permian rock. And how the ruthless super-intellects of the Old Ones would put up with some conical upstarts is hard to imagine. But if the cone-beings dropped out of the sky, with their own super-science and sorcery, then that would explain a lot. They just had the bad luck to get taken over by time-jumping minds from Yith not long after they arrived.
In fact, it occurs to me that the dreadful flying polyp monsters may have had a grudge against the cone-beings, and pursued them to Earth. The Great Race never knew it, but those monsters weren't interested in them, they were trying to destroy the poor saps whose minds were cast back a hundred million years to die on Yith.
The Great Race Invasion
So what would it be like when the Great Race invasion happens? Do they all make the jump at once, so millions (billions?) of people just fall down and struggle around trying to learn how their bodies work?
That seems like a dangerous way to do it. From what we see when Peaslee is taken over, the victims need care and support while they adjust. This suggests that the Great Race would trickle in a few at a time, using their incredible intellects, advanced science, knowledge of secrets (gleaned from reconnaissance trips to times before and after the target date), and what Lovecraft describes as a "power to influence the thoughts and acts of others" which not-Peaslee displayed.
Instead of just research and exploration like Peaslee, these invaders would work themselves into positions of influence, setting up support networks for new arrivals. Ordinary victims of the target species might not even notice at first — a few cases of amnesia, but that new charitable foundation is ready to help the afflicted ones, so it's fine.
Then, as the Great Race becomes more numerous and influential, they would begin to transform society to fit their own preferences. Government would become "a kind of fascistic socialism" like what they had back in the Triassic, while technology would suddenly start to advance very rapidly. At a certain point, when all the Great Race have made the transition, the new arrivals would make war on the remaining members of their victim species. Enslaved or exterminated, those unfortunates would watch their world become alien and unfamiliar, perhaps never understanding why.
Reproduction
So . . . how do the Great Race reproduce?
After all, their bodies are stolen. If one of the Great Race, inhabiting a cone-thing body, reproduces using the process of asexual spawning via spores described by Peaslee, that juvenile won't be one of the Great Race, it will be a cone-thing, mentally. Sure, it will grow up in a civilization of the Great Race, but will it have their superhuman intelligence? Their mysterious powers?
There are two possibilities. The nicer one is that the Great Race is based on culture and knowledge rather than lineage, so that a cone-thing raised by the Great Race becomes one of them, and can go off to possess the hardy coleopterans with all its friends when the time comes.
To me, that seems a little too humane. I would expect something grimmer: physical reproduction among the Great Race is only practiced to replace the aging bodies of older individuals. Rather than raise their offspring, they simply replace them, taking younger bodies. The dying body inhabited by the mind of a frightened infant is presumably destroyed. It just seems appropriate to me that the Great Race would do the same thing on an individual level that they do as a species.
This in turn inspires an interesting thought: if you've also read Lovecraft's short story "The Thing on the Doorstep" you know that the sinister Waite family apparently do something similar, and have been doing it for a very long time. Is "Asenath" really a rogue member of the Great Race? Or did one of her distant ancestors learn the trick of mind-swapping from a Triassic time voyager? Are they allied with the mysterious cult which serves the Great Race on contemporary Earth? Or are they enemies?
Those are my own random thoughts about one of Lovecraft's most fascinating creations. If you want to know more about the Great Race, the obvious place to start is with Lovecraft's story, which can be read online. There's also a good two-part podcast about the story and the Great Race by The Good Friends of Jackson Elias.
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