Just The Caffeine Talking

A Lovecraftian Chronology

For no very good reason I found myself making up an internal chronology of H.P. Lovecraft's horror stories. My guiding principle was that if a story doesn't have any time clues — and it's interesting to note that most of Lovecraft's stories do include specific dates — it takes place in the year in which the story was written, not published. I have left out some stories, like "In the Vault," or "The Outsider" which appear to be "non-Mythos" tales and have no clear time setting. I've also left out his "Dunsanian" fantasies.

The chronology revealed some fascinating patterns. There are a few "big years" in the Lovecraft universe: 1913, 1920, 1923, 1925, 1927, 1928, and 1932. Gamemasters who want to run a "sandbox" style Call of Cthulhu roleplaying game campaign could do worse than simply pick one of those years and start tossing out clues to ongoing events.

It also reveals some potential hidden connections among the stories. In "The Shadow Out of Time," Professor Peaslee's alien possession ends in 1913 — the same year that Wilbur Whateley is born in "The Dunwich Horror." Did Peaslee's alien controller want to avoid potential contact with the Spawn of Yog-Sothoth?

In "Pickman's Model" it appears that Richard Upton Pickman vanishes some time in 1925 (and later turns up as a ghoul living in the Dreamlands). But of course 1925 is also rocked by the nearly apocalyptic events of "The Call of Cthulhu." Did Pickman get a warning in his dreams and decide to get out of Cthulhu's way? The events of "The Horror at Red Hook" that summer look like a power play by Robert Suydam to take over the scattered and demoralized remnants of the Cthulhu Cult after the sinking of R'lyeh.

The Federal response to the events of "The Shadow Over Innsmouth" in late 1927 and early 1928 explains their curiously lackadaisickal reaction to the theft of the remains of some revered early American (it's got to be Franklin) in The Case of Charles Dexter Ward, which happens at the same time. All the government men with knowledge of the secret war against Elder Horrors are busy up in Innsmouth.

Later in 1928, "The Whisperer in Darkness" and the climax of "The Dunwich Horror" are happening almost simultaneously. Perhaps if Albert Wilmarth hadn't been off in Vermont getting chased by Mi-Go he could have gone with Dr. Armitage to deal with the invisible monster in Dunwich.

LOVECRAFTIAN CHRONOLOGY

1771: April 12 — Raid on Curwen farm and (first) death of Joseph Curwen (The Case of Charles Dexter Ward)

1838: Obed Marsh establishes cult of Dagon in Innsmouth ("The Shadow Over Innsmouth")

1843: Enoch Bowen discovers the tomb of Nephren-Ka ("The Haunter of the Dark")

1844: Bowen establishes the Church of Starry Wisdom in Providence ("The Haunter of the Dark")

1846: "Plague" in Innsmouth ("The Shadow Over Innsmouth")

1877: Church of Starry Wisdom disbands ("The Haunter of the Dark")

1878: Capt. Charles Weatherbee discovers unknown island and recovers strange mummy ("Out of the Aeons")

1882: June — Meteorite lands on Gardner farm ("The Colour Out of Space")

1884: Gardner family die ("The Colour Out of Space")

1889: Walker and Audrey Davis settle in Oklahoma, incur the wrath of Yig ("The Curse of Yig")

1890: Three monstrous snake-children born to Audrey Davis ("The Curse of Yig")

1891: Young man named Heaton explores Binger Mound, goes mad from what he saw ("The Mound")

1894: "The Transition of Juan Romero"

1901: "Beyond the Wall of Sleep"

1904: Herbert West's first experiments ("Herbert West — Reanimator")

1907: November 1 — Inspector John LeGrasse leads police raid of swamp cult south of New Orleans ("The Call of Cthulhu")

1908: May 14 — Nathaniel W. Peaslee possessed by Yithian ("The Shadow Out of Time")

1909: "Peaslee" spends a month in the Himalayas ("The Shadow Out of Time")

1910: Harry Houdini escapes captivity under the Pyramids ("Imprisoned With the Pharaohs")

1911: "Peaslee" spends time in the Empty Quarter of Arabia ("The Shadow Out of Time")

1912: "Peaslee" charters a ship to explore the Arctic north of Spitzbergen ("The Shadow Out of Time")

1912: "Peaslee" explores a cave in West Virginia for several weeks ("The Shadow Out of Time")

1913: February 2 — Wilbur Whateley born ("The Dunwich Horror")

1913: August — Death of Arthur Jermyn ("Arthur Jermyn")

1913: August — meteorite lands off Maine coast containing Greek manuscript ("The Green Meadow")

1913: September 27 — Peaslee's possession ends ("The Shadow Out of Time")

1915: Two "eastern visitors" from a small college vanish at the Binger Mound

1915: Herbert West continues experiments in field hospital in Belgium

1916: "Dagon"

1917: "The Temple"

1919: "The Statement of Randolph Carter"

1919: "The Terrible Old Man"

1919: "The Shunned House"

1920: Herbert West carried off by his experimental subjects

1920: "The Music of Erich Zann"

1920: "The Nameless City"

1920: "The Picture in the House"

1920: "From Beyond"

1921: August — destruction of a hamlet in the Catskills near Tempest Mountain ("The Lurking Fear")

1921: November — destruction of the Martense house ("The Lurking Fear")

1921: "The Hound"

1922: "The Festival"

1923: Charles Dexter Ward travels in Europe

1923: "Cool Air"

1923: July-August — "The Rats in the Walls"

1925: Ethnographer visits Guthrie, Oklahoma and hears the Yig legend ("The Curse of Yig")

1925: "Pickman's Model"

1925: March — unrest among cults worldwide, artists have strange dreams ("The Call of Cthulhu")

1925: March 22 — Island of R'lyeh rises ("The Call of Cthulhu")

1925: March 23 —Johansen encounters Cthulhu and disrupts it; R'lyeh sinks again

1925: "The Horror at Red Hook"

1926: May — Charles Dexter Ward returns to Providence

1926-27: Winter — Death of Prof. Angell ("The Call of Cthulhu")

1927: April 15 — Ward reanimates Curwen (The Case of Charles Dexter Ward)

1927: June — Outbreak of vampiric attacks in Rhode Island (The Case of Charles Dexter Ward)

1927: July — Robert Olmstead escapes Innsmouth ("The Shadow Over Innsmouth")

1927: November — Vermont floods, reports of strange creatures ("The Whisperer in Darkness")

1928: January — attempted theft of Franklin's remains (The Case of Charles Dexter Ward)

1928: February — Federal raids on Innsmouth, Curwen kills and replaces Ward

1928: March — Ward/Curwen in asylum

1928: April — Willett explores catacomb, destroys Curwen (The Case of Charles Dexter Ward)

1928: May — Akeley-Wilmarth correspondence begins ("The Whisperer in Darkness")

1928: August 3 — Wilbur Whateley killed ("The Dunwich Horror")

1928: September 9 — The Dunwich Horror strikes

1928: September 12 — Wilmarth visits Vermont and barely escapes ("The Whisperer in Darkness")

1928: September 15 — Dunwich Horror destroyed

1928: October 7 — Randolph Carter disappears ("The Silver Key")

1928: Autumn — Destruction of two wizards in Prague and Transylvania (The Case of Charles Dexter Ward)

1928: Ethnographer visits Binger, Oklahoma, explores the Mound and recovers the Zamacona scroll ("The Mound")

1929: Edward Derby marries Asenath Waite ("The Thing on the Doorstep")

1930: Randolph Carter in alien body returns to Earth, lives in disguise in Boston as "Swami Chandraputra" ("Through the Gates of the Silver Key")

1930: April 30 — Climax of "The Dreams in the Witch House"

1930: September — Miskatonic Antarctic Expedition departs Boston (At the Mountains of Madness)

1931: February 2 — Miskatonic Expedition departs Antarctica after disaster (At the Mountains of Madness)

1931: Robert Olmstead and his cousin head for Innsmouth ("The Shadow Over Innsmouth")

1932: "Swami Chandraputra" vanishes in New Orleans ("Through the Gates of the Silver Key")

1932: Asenath Derby disappears ("The Thing on the Doorstep")

1932: "Out of the Aeons"

1932: "The Horror in the Museum"

1933: Daniel Upton kills Edward Derby (maybe) ("The Thing on the Doorstep")

1935: March 28 — Team of Miskatonic scholars set out on expedition to Western Australia ("The Shadow out of Time")

1935: July 17-18 — Peaslee discovers lost city in western Australia ("The Shadow Out of Time")

1935: August 8 — "The Haunter of the Dark"

Lovecraft and Claptrap

This past weekend I attended (as a humble paying member) NecronomiCon 2019 in Providence, Rhode Island. If you know anything about horror fiction or games you can probably guess that NecronomiCon is a convention focused on the works of H.P. Lovecraft, the father of modern horror. I had a great time and plan to go back for the next iteration in 2021.

In connection with the con I decided to re-read Lovecraft's famous essay "Supernatural Horror in Literature." It's a good comprehensive survey of horror fiction up to HPL's time, with a fascinating introduction laying out his theory of what horror (or as he calls it, "weird fiction") should be.

As I was reading it, something struck me. Lovecraft knew a hell of a lot about horror fiction, and his analysis of it was quite thorough and profound. But when he touched on other subjects, I started to realize that he wasn't as erudite as his scholarly fictional characters — and probably not as erudite as he thought he was.

H.P. Lovecraft was mostly self-educated. He read widely and exhaustively. He really did know a lot.

BUT . . .

He had the problem common to many autodidacts: without any formal teaching, it's very hard to tell serious scholarship from bogus. So Howard evidently read, and uncritically swallowed, Madison Grant's The Passing of the Great Race. If you're hoping it's a "Shadow Out of Time" novelization, I'm sorry to disappoint you: it was a work of racist pseudoscience popular in the 1920s. It even gets a shout-out in The Great Gatsby, of all places. (F. Scott Fitzgerald is using it ironically, though: his vapid, decadent character Tom Buchanan is worried about the decline of the Nordic peoples.)

In "Supernatural Horror in Literature" Lovecraft refers to the grimoire "The Key of Solomon" as some immemorially ancient text, but by the 1920s serious medievalists knew it was no older than the 14th Century. He also makes reference to Margaret Murray's Witch-Cult theory as fact, though it was always controversial. He believed Charles Fort's accounts of paranormal events, even though (somewhat sadly) Fort's credibility suffers as soon as you start looking at the sources he cites. His views of the Middle Ages are the standard erroneous 19th-Century mix of Enlightenment anti-Catholicism and Victorian self-congratulation. And anyone who took high-school geometry can recognize that one of his favorite shuddersome adjectives, "Non-Euclidean," isn't quite as sanity-blastingly unnatural as he seems to think.

This is all quite ironic because of course HPL considered himself a great skeptic and materialist, and planned (unsuccessfully, alas) to write a series of "debunking" works with none other than Houdini himself!

Now, I'm not just making fun of a dead man's mistakes. As I mentioned, I think Lovecraft's self-education suffered from a lack of guidance. The only reason I can spot his errors is that I did have the benefit of many very good teachers, both in high school and in college. Without that advantage, he wound up siezing on authoritative-sounding works which were nevertheless wrong.

This is not a problem confined to people named Lovecraft in the early 20th Century. It is a HUGE problem today. We all probably know at least one person who has just read the One Book That Explains Everything. In past decades that book was usually either something by Noam Chomsky or something by Ayn Rand. More recent examples are left as an exercise for the reader.

There is a difference between ordinary "punditry" and the One Book That Explains Everything. It's hard to pin down precisely, but I think a key feature is that pundits — be they Rush Limbaugh or Rachel Maddow — make no secret that they are expressing their own opinions. They are making a case, attempting to persuade. Whereas the authors of the OBTEE genre simply assertthings as true, in a very authoritative way, with just enough evidence that only a real expert can spot the flaws.

This is where it gets good. I propose that not only did Lovecraft absorb some intellectual claptrap from writers like Grant and Murray, I think he also (perhaps unconsciously) learned from them how to convincingly put across his own made-up lore in the same way.

He's got all the tropes of bogus nonfiction in his fiction: the casual allusions to things as true (like the existence of "pre-human civilizations" or lost continents), the appeal to bogus authority (e.g. the Mad Arab Abdul Alhazred himself), selective use of quotations (Lovecraft mixes real occult bits with made-up lore of his own and makes extensive use of fictional newspaper clippings), and specific-sounding but vague details (we get directions to both Dunwich and Innsmouth, but you can't quite find them).

These are hugely effective ways to sell the reader on your story's background details in fiction (or in games). One reason we're still reading Lovecraft in a new century is the extremely convincing way he plants his fantastic horrors in a base of reality. Do likewise, and people may be organizing conventions in your honor in 2119.

A Matter of Principle

Waldo's momentum is 34,974 kilogram-meters per second.

Now you'll never find him.

Unleash The Wild Hunt!

No, not the one with mythical hounds and/or Celtic deities crossing the sky on dark nights. The one with University of Chicago students taking a break from being obsessive overachievers in order to overachieve obsessively. Here's this year's list. Can you get all these things before noon Sunday?

 

And if you haven't got the time or energy for that, you could always read my book.

Be Careful What You Wish For

It's an old lesson, but one we must re-learn every now and then.

Recently I began to suffer from "gamemaster withdrawal" after half a year or so without running any roleplaying campaigns. I was bursting with ideas for games, so finally I sent out a call for interested players, and drew up a "prospectus" of games I'd like to run. The idea was that the players could vote on which campaign appealed to them.

I kept it simple. The prospectus had six campaigns on it:

• "Unknown Stars" — a classic Traveller game of mercantile exploration in a newly-reopened subsector,
• "Beyond Tomorrow" — a D20-based "Gamma World"-style campaign of space voyagers returning to a devastated far-future Earth,
• "Against All Flags" — a more-or-less straight historical pirate game set in 1714,
• "SHIELD Stories" — a game of doughty SHIELD agents in a world of superheroes (essentially my version of the Agents of SHIELD TV show),
• "Lost Decade" — a Call of Cthulhu campaign about characters who have all just recovered from amnesia and must find out what they were doing over the past ten years, and
• "A Billion Worlds" — I kind of just threw this one in on a whim, a campaign using a fictional far-future hard SF setting I've been developing for a fiction project.

Most of them were pretty low-effort. The simplest would be the pirate game, since my own knowledge of the world in 1714 is good enough to let them just sail around and bump into people.

The SHIELD campaign was almost as easy, especially since I intended to let my players occasionally take the roles of the mysterious "Steering Committee" setting objectives and priorities for the agency's operations. Their decisions would determine what kind of missions Col. Fury would hand out to their agent characters. All I needed was access to a couple of Marvel Comics fan wiki sites, and forty years of reading comic books.

The Traveller campaign and "Beyond Tomorrow" needed a little more preparation, but they were confined to fairly limited areas so I could generate some worlds or places for the party to explore, and expand only as needed.

The Call of Cthulhu game needed a bit more preparation, but I had not only a lot of existing support material for the game, but also H.P. Lovecraft's entire corpus to steal from.

So, no matter what game my players picked, I could run it without a lot of effort. Easy-peasy.

Guess which one came out first in the vote? That's right — my unlikely dark horse candidate, "A Billion Worlds." For that one I have to come up with dozens of intelligent species and subspecies inhabiting a billion artificial habitats, asteroids, terraformed moons, and planets, with eight thousand years of history to invent.

Now, fortunately, I have to do most of that anyway for the new novel I'm working on. So the roleplaying game and the science fiction project can borrow from each other.

Maybe this is for the best, really. Low-effort campaigns don't test my powers at all. The Billion Worlds won't be easy, but I doubt I'll get bored with it.

Boskone 2019

This Friday and Saturday I'll be appearing at the venerable Boskone science fiction convention, at the swanky Westin Waterfront hotel in Boston. Here's my schedule if you want to join in.

Friday, February 15, 4:00 p.m.: The Most Alien Aliens

A panel discussion about creating aliens and what our depictions of them say about ourselves. With me, Stephen Kelner, Jeffrey Carver, Laurence Brothers, and Karl Schroeder.

Friday, February 15, 7:00 p.m.: Game Editing

A discussion of how editing works in different kinds of games, and why it's important. Featuring me, Carlos Hernandez, Melanie Meadors, and M.C. DeMarco.

Saturday, February 16, 10:00 a.m.: Classic Dungeons & Dragons

Join me for a very old-school Basic D&D game. Characters will be provided. This session is only one hour, so be prepared to think fast!

Saturday, February 16, noon: Reading

I'll be reading from Arkad's World and taking any questions my listeners might have.

Saturday, February 16, 4:00 p.m.: Signing

I'll be at the signing table with Dan Kimmel, Bracken MacLeod, and Karl Schroeder. I'll sign whatever you bring me.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Pop Culture: Hold On to Your Hats!

As cultures develop a large and relatively affluent middle class, they develop what we call "pop culture." The upper class have "high culture" more or less by definition, and the lower class don't have the leisure time or spare wealth to create culture at all.

Tom Wolfe chronicled this in post-WWII America, as people got rich enough to indulge subcultures like custom cars, surfing, and stock car racing. It's a damned shame Mr. Wolfe never got around to examining some other products of that boom: science fiction, comics, and (a bit later) roleplaying games.

It happened elsewhere, too. As Japan became the world's second-biggest economy, Japanese pop culture items like anime, manga, J-pop girl groups, and giant monsters became global phenomena rivaling America's. The same happened for Korea in the 1990s.

Well, in the past twenty years China has acquired a middle class of 340 million people. Three hundred million in Africa are now urban and middle class. A quarter of a billion in India. So the number of pop-culture "consumers" — and the number of pop-culture creators — has more than tripled worldwide.

This means that American pop culture and European pop culture and Japanese pop culture will soon be joined by equally huge and influential Chinese, Indian, and African creations. Not just new comic books and movies, but new genres. The as-yet-uncreated equivalents of roleplaying games or custom vans.

And not a moment too soon. As anyone paying attention to Hollywood will attest, American media are in a creative slump right now. There are a heck of a lot of remakes, reboots, sequels, and "reimaginings" going on. Not to mention an increasingly frenetic mining of older "properties" for material. A 69-page picture book by Dr. Seuss has spawned two feature-length films, when it originally required some creative padding by Chuck Jones just to make it into a half-hour cartoon.

I can't predict when, but I'm willing to bet that in the next few years an Indian "Bollywood" or Nigerian "Nollywood" film will be a global breakout hit, as big as Star Wars or Harry Potter. Some Latin American or Chinese children's entertainment will be picked up as cheap filler content by global media companies and turn into a huge fad to rival Pokemon.  

For a writer, this is an . . . interesting time. On one hand, translation rights on books now bring in almost as much as the English-language royalties. The downside is that I'm already competing with Cixin Liu for readers in both America and China, and I'm certain he will be followed by a bigger cohort of new talent. And that's just within written science fiction. I'm also competing with other media.

I think one reason science fiction magazines have been having a rocky time in the past few decades is partly due to the sheer amount and variety of other options. Even if you only like science fiction, you still can choose among Japanese anime, Japanese and European comics, Anglophone novels, American films, and European computer games to satisfy your scientifictional craving. That landscape is only going to expand.

It's going to be quite a ride. Let's see what the new Global Nerds can do.

Mr. President, We May Be Looking . . .

. . . at a wargames GAP! Apparently the Pentagon needs to find replacements for the generation of beardy wargame grognards who are starting to fail their final saving rolls. Here's an article about the problem from War on the Rocks.  

Dragon Awards!

Congratulations to this year's Dragon Award winners:

Best Science Fiction Novel: Artemis by Andy Weir.

Best Fantasy Novel: Oathbringer by Brandon Sanderson.

Best Young Adult/Middle Grade Novel: Children of Blood and Bone by Tomi Adeyemi.

Best Military Science Fiction or Fantasy Novel: A Call to Vengeance by David Weber, Timothy Zahn, and Thomas Pope.

Best Alternate History Novel: Uncharted by Kevin J. Anderson and Sarah A. Hoyt.

Best Media Tie-In Novel: Leia: Princess of Alderaan by Claudia Gray.

Best Horror Novel: Sleeping Beauties by Stephen King and Owen King.

Best Comic Book: Mighty Thor by Jason Aaron and James Harren, Marvel Comics.

Best Graphic Novel: Brandon Sanderson’s White Sand Volume 1 by Brandon Sanderson, Rik Hoskin, and Julius M. Gopez, Dynamite Entertainment.

Best Science Fiction or Fantasy TV Series: Game of Thrones, HBO.

Best Science Fiction or Fantasy Movie: Black Panther, directed by Ryan Coogler.

Best Science Fiction or Fantasy PC/Console Game: Middle-earth: Shadow of War by Monolith Productions.

Best Science Fiction or Fantasy Mobile Game: Harry Potter: Hogwarts Mystery by Jam City.

Best Science Fiction or Fantasy Board Game: Red Dragon Inn 6: Villains by Slugfest Games.

Best Science Fiction or Fantasy Miniatures/Collectible Card/Role-Playing Game: Magic: The Gathering Unstable by Wizards of the Coast.

Island of Lost Games: A Footprint in the Sand!

Exciting news about one of the first titles I covered in the "Island of Lost Games" series — John Hill, one of the original Droids gaming group, ran across my post and sent this reply:

I enjoyed your recent post about the game "Droids", though the circumstances that led me to discover it leave much to be desired.  The gentleman that is listed in the "Edited by..." credit of the Droid book, Derek Stanovsky, passed away unexpectedly on Nov. 1, at the age of 54.  I was trying to find leads to Neil Moore to inform him of Derek's passing.  Sadly, I, and several others that had some involvement with Droids failed to find any leads to Mr. Moore.

I find it delightful that there is a conversation and interest in this game after all these years.  And to answer the question at the end of your article, I have indeed played the game.  Sadly, Droids was developed at a time that I was very busy with my engineering degree, so I didn't get to play it extensively, but I definitely recall playing a few sessions with Neil as Game Master.

I'm attaching a photo you may find amusing.  Originally, we we're going to use photos of droid models instead of the illustrations.  I took apart several of my various tank and spaceship models and built some Droids.  Everyone loved the model, but the pictures left a lot to be desired.  If only we'd had the image manipulation stuff available now, I'm sure we could have made it work.

Thanks again for the kind words about the game.

Here's the photo of Mr. Hill's Droid model.

It's wonderful to hear from someone with a connection to the game. If anyone knows where to find Neil Moore, drop me a line and I'll forward the information to Mr. Hill.

 

For more stories about relics of the past and adventures in the future, buy my ebooks: Outlaws and Aliens, and Monster Island Tales!