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The paranormal, UFOs, monsters,
mysteries. As you're listening to Talking Weird

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and now from a cabin deep in
the Northwoods, your host, doctor Dean

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Bertram Well, greetings to all my
fellow weirdos and weirdo's. Welcome to Talking

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Weird on the Untold Radio Network.
I'm your host, Dean Bertraman. Those

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of us joining us live this Saturday
night or very early Sunday morning, depending

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what time is on your in thank
you for spending this time with us.

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For those of you listening or watching
after our live stream on the Saturday night,

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thank you for being with us.
I got to treat in store for

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you all today. I've just read
the book which is only just about to

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be released. It's fantastic. It's
called When the Stars Are Right HP Lovecraft

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and Astronomy, And anybody who knows
much about me knows I've been a big

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fan of HP Lovecraft since my eighteen
years. And we have the two amazing

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authors of that book here, and
one of them is actually somewhat of a

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regular not only in the chat of
this show and the other show I do

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with Jason McClean on Tuesday nights on
Mysterious lib but he's also been a guest

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on Talking Weird in the past.
The other one. He received a PhD

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in history from the University of Connecticut
and is now Assistant professor of World History

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at Bristol Community College in Fall River, Massachusetts. He has written several articles

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dealing with Lovecraft and his stories.
He's also interested in the historical development of

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the modern flat Earth movement. Tonight's
other guests. Who's the one I mentioned

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who's a longtime friend of the show
is Emery, Professor of physics and astronomy

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at Michigan State University. He has
a BA degree from Wesleyan University in a

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PhD in astronomy from Yale. Here's
the author and co author of several books

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and numerous scientific papers. He began
to read the fiction of HP Lovecraft around

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nineteen seventy, and he became intrigued
by the role of astronomy in the development

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of Lovecraft's thinking. So I'm just
so delighted to welcome to the show Doctor

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Edward Gammont and Professor Horace Smith.
Oh, glad, glad they will join

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you. It's so good to have
you back, Horace, and it's so

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great to finally meet you, Eddie. I've been looking forward to seeing this

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book for sometime since Horace told me
it was in the works, and I

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wasn't disappointed. Just an incredible book. But before we talk about that,

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and we will, I thought,
maybe maybe we'll start with you, Edward.

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Maybe for those out there or for
those of not ask us, I'm

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a big fan of Lovecrafts that way, I know who he is. For

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those of you who, for those
of the our listeners who aren't really familiar

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with Lovecraft and hist could you maybe
just give a little overview of who HB.

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Lovecraft was? Sure? Sure,
I mean just a very brief overview

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is he was an author Born in
eighteen ninety in the city of Providence,

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Rhode Island, in the United States. He died in Providence in nineteen thirty

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seven. Spent most of his life
in between birth and death living in Providence,

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with brief exception in Brooklyn, which
was very formative and a probably can

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say a negative way for him.
But he came from, say, I

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guess, kind of an upper middle
class, wealthy family which went through a

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series of declines in his youth,
basically progressively pour throughout his life, but

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in his I guess we'll say lateeen
years, early twenties, he became very

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interested in amateur press associations and from
there developed into a fiction writer, and

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especially was a pioneer of what became
known as weird fiction, which we would

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say kind of elements of fantasy,
science fiction, horror that were kind of

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unique at the time in the late
teens early nineteen twenties. Progressively became kind

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of more well known within a very
small niche of readers of a lot of

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these magazines, in particular Weird Tales
as the signature when he published. In

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near the end of his life,
he published a few stories in the emerging

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science fiction magazine Seems Amazing, Stories
Astounding, and especially those later stories of

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publishing Astounding started to get a bit
of a wider audience, I guess.

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And he's very prolific letter writer as
well. You know, if he had

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been born, say, you know, seventy years later, he probably would

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have been very active, you know, in the early Internet, probably would

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a very prolific email or forum user, you know, bulletin board poster.

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But in a way he's kind of
pioneering a lot of the similar social networks

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with the science fiction, fantasy,
horror fandoms of the nineteen twenties and thirties.

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But that being said, by the
time he dies he's very i will

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say, not popular in the wider
mainstream and essentially unknown and maybe just started

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to change at the time of his
death. But especially in the nineteen sixties,

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there's kind of a renaissance and he
becomes the subject of a lot of

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not just people republishing his work,
but running with his fiction and new directions.

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Scholarly work starts to develop around him. He quickly becomes, you know,

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basically gets a reputation as the America
or the twentieth century Edgar Allan Poe.

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Essentially have people like Alan Moore,
Stephen King, Neil Game, and

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Guillermo del Toro citing him his major
influences. I think Guermo del Toro has

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a statue of him in his house
I think says something. But you know,

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he's a pioneer of this field of
cosmic horror, where you know,

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the horror isn't vampires or Frankenstein monsters
or stuff like that, but kind of

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the horror of realizing just how insignificant
you are in the grand scheme of things.

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And a lot of his famous creations, especially the eldritch god Cthulhu,

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you know, kind of is an
embodiment of this, and through stories like

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the Call of Cthulhu at the Mountains
of Madness, the Dunwich Horror shadow over

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in Smith, he really pioneers this
new trend of horror that really fruits after

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his death. So again, he's
I think very interesting in a guy who

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was almost completely unknown in his lifetime
and then basically through a lot of the

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networking, through the uniqueness of the
stories he wrote, developed an enormous,

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enormous influence after his death, you
know, to the degree that you know,

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for example, I was just reading
a when Richard Nixon dies in the

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nineties, Hunter S. Thompson is
comparing him to HP Lovecraft in his eulogy,

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and I mean it's just, you
know, stuff that for many reasons,

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Lovecraft would never have expected during his
lifetime. Again, you know,

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we could could talk send the whole
hour talking just about his biography, but

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for those who aren't familiar, it's
kind of a brief capsule summary of Lovecraft

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and his life, and I'm sure
we'll dive into more details, you know,

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throughout the rest of the conversation,
and you mentioned then the importance of

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him being the originator of cosmic horror, and as this book looks at,

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a lot of that has to do
with his interest in more than an interest,

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his passion for astrology. Really,
so, maybe Horrors, you can

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tell us a little bit about the
book it's tired of what it means,

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and give us a little bit of
just a very brief overview about Lovecraft's interest

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and entry into the world of amateur
I said astrology, I meant astronomy,

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amateur astronomy Lovecraft Lovecraft with strangle.
Maybe if I said he had an interest

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in astrology, because of course he
was quite the skeptic. But yeah,

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so he had this incredible interest in
amateur astronomy, and that really helps shape

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the type of cosmic horror that he
would write later. So anyway, tell

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us a little bit about the book
and the astronomical aspects of Lovecraft's life.

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The book is titled When the Stars
Are Right HP Lovecraft and Astronomy, and

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the title when the part of the
title When the Stars Are Right, goes

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back to the story The Call of
Fool who or who however you want to

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pronounce his name. The idea is
that the real name is not meant to

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be pronounceable by a human, so
that gives you leeway to pronounce it however

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you will, and he'll hear it
pronounced in different ways. But in that

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story, one of the cultists of
this uh people believe in the Great Old

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Ones, and Thu, who is
returned to take over our world, was

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being interrogated and he's talking about when
he says, when the stars are right,

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they could fly from world to world, but when the stars are wrong,

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they could not live. And Tho
whose lives sleeping down beneath the Pacific

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Ocean awaiting the time when the stars
are right and he can return and presumably

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take over what's going on on our
particular small part of the universe. Now,

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of course we have the case that
may be a rather unreliable narrator telling

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us that because one of Lovecraft's ideas
this shows up in the number of stories

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is how insignificant the people are,
and presumably the cultists as well in some

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way to what's really going on in
the universe. But we thought the idea

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when the stars are right would be
a good part of the title, and

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it's also a good part of the
title because Lovecraft, from his youth,

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was a very skilled and experienced amateur
astronomer, and he was very uh when

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he wrote a story. He was
very careful to make sure that his own

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descriptions of the stars that would be
visible in the night sky, the phases

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of the moon, anything having to
do with astronomy, were accurately described,

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and he was very upset if other
writers did not do the same. He

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would take little star planispheres that show
the appearance of the heavens at different dates

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and hours during the year, and
he would send them to some other writers

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to make sure that they would avoid
the mistakes of their past writing and get

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the stars right in the more literal
sense in their in their fiction. But

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he started out he was an amateur
astronomer around nineteen oh two, when he

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was about twelve years old. He
was swept off his feet by astronomy and

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for his many of his teen teenage
years was his chief one of his chief

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interests. For a part of the
time his chief interests, he had his

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own telescopes. He would skiing to
say he made his own handwritten in heck

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graphed. I don't know if anyone
remembers the hectograph process. I remember still

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doing that, but theol a little
u thing for kind of a an even

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cheaper way of hand doing a mimiograph. And he made his own hand produced

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magazines of astronomy with titles such as
the Rhode Island Journal of Astronomy, in

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which he would report his own observations. He thought for a while that he

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could he would go into research and
while still a teenager, with his minuscule

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telescopes, he would solve the problem
of whether there was life on the Moon,

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or changes on the Moon, or
the rotation period of the planet Venus.

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As he became experienced, he realized, no, I can't really do

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that with a two or three inch
telescope. But but he was ambitious at

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the beginning. Room was for a
while going to be his career, and

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that all crashed around nineteen oh eight
when he realized that mathematics was required in

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astronomy and he met he had met
algebra in high school, found it daunting

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and realized that the mathematics and for
a professional career were probably beyond him.

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That may have contributed to it to
a breakdown. He had nineteen o nine

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that put him out of action for
several years, but he was started out

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precocious. He was actually at the
age of fifteen, he was writing astronomy

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columns for two newspapers, and the
crash when it came was devastating to him

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for a while, but perhaps not
for us, because instead of having Lovecraft

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newspaper columns or astronomy articles that anyone
could have done, we have the fiction

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that perhaps no one could have done
other than Lovecraft. And that makes them,

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I think, particularly intriguing to both
Eddie and I and was inspiration for

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this book. And it's interesting you're
talking about him looking for things like life

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on the moon and the type of
ideas that were still viable in the astronomy

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of Lovecraft's day, about thoughts about
the Moon or Mars or Venus. And

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while there was obviously some I suppose, contrasting views on the reality of life

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or the potentiality of life on those
planets, it was still scientifically within the

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realm of possibility that there may be
life in these places. So can you

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can either of you talk a little
bit about how that kind of view of

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our solar system was influential on love
Cross not only he's thinking but then his

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rooting as he transformed into perhaps,
you know, as we were saying,

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the father of the modern cosmic horror
story. Well, yeah, I'll jump

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in. I'll say, probably of
all those theories, the one that's probably

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has the most staying power in the
public eye today is the idea of life

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on Mars and the idea of there
had been a Martian civilization that was going

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into decline. They built these giant
Martian canals to bring water from the ice

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caps to irrigate the lush vegetation that
was assumed to be growing on the Martians

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surface. And these are ideas that
really emerged in the last quarter or so

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of the nineteenth century. Just in
case any when it's not familiar. In

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the year eighteen seventy seven, when
Mars and Earth were very close in Italian

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astronomer Giovanni's Scaparelli claimed he had discovered
channels on the surface of Mars. Channels

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in Italian is canally, which and
got translated into English as canals. So

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he thought he had just observed essentially
giant riverbeds on Mars. People assumed he

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had discovered artificial waterways to set off
a huge craze basically over the idea that

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Martians had basically been confirmed. I
think there's maybe some similarities to the modern

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UAP discussions that are going on today
and assumptions that are being made over what

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exactly is meant by you know,
unidentified But maybe we can talk about that

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later without you know, getting too
distracted. But one of the major proponents

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of this idea of Martians building these
waterways was an American American astronomer, I

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guess we can call him, even
though I don't think he had any formal

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training and astronomy Persial Lowell, who
again a pretty well known name for his

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Martian advocacy in nineteen oh seventy came
to give a talk at Brown University.

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Lovecraft did meet him in person,
and when you read Lovecraft's writings on astronomy,

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you can see that. You know, later on in his letters he'll

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claim that he never gave you know, personal Lowell any credence at all.

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Of course, he thought it was
all nonsense. But you know, when

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you read letters earlier to the time, when you read his astronomy calms,

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he did give this very significant idea
consideration that Lowell might have the right idea

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that at least there might be some
kind of intelligent life on Mars. But

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also it's interesting because by the end
of his life he's explicitly writing there's basically,

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you know, probably nothing on Mars
living except no maybe bacteria, which

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again pretty close to modern beliefs.
So you can see that's one way in

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which his views of extraterrestrial life change. But I think more broadly, you

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can consider the notion of what the
Martian canal scenario means. You have this

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planet that's slowly dying, this advanced
civilization that's basically unable to halt it.

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They're engaging these giant no public works, basically altering the surface of their planet

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trying to survive. You can see
a lot of echoes of you know,

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kind of the futility of trying to
survive against nature and a hostile universe.

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The idea of this ancient civilization of
aliens going into decline, leaving behind kind

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of remains that can be observed by
human explorers. So this astronomical theory,

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which again was at least I had
broad public appeal at the time, even

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if I think probably a lot of
professional astronomers were somewhat more skeptical, but

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you can see how this astronomical concept
probably contributed at least in some part to

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the eventual development of his particular strain
of weird fiction and cosmic horror. Even

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if no, it's a long line
to get there. Well, maybe one

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of you could talk a little bit
about his cosmicism, which is is it

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cosmicism or cosmicism? And I've never
heard it said, I've only ever seen

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it written. I've always said cosmicism, but they don't know if any agrees.

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But that's all I've said it too. Okay, we're cosmicism. Then,

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how perhaps he is very interest in
astronomy, and you went there a

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little bit there, but it goes
to this incredibly almost bleak idea of mankind

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being so insignificant in the universe that
the inimical forces of the universe, or

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perhaps even they're just non bo perhaps
they just don't care. But the idea

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that the universe is so much bigger
than man that we don't matter and we're

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kind of lost in this cosmic void. And I'm the book certainly suggests,

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as I never really thought about it, it makes total sense that his interest

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in astronomy really developed that type of
philosophy which becomes apparent in the hostility of

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these other entities that visit the planet
throughout so many of his writings. I

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think that's true. I think that
goes back to his teenage years and as

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he goes into astronomy. Astronomy at
this time was advancing with bigger telescopes with

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a picture of the universe, not
just of the Solar System and our nearby

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objects, but a bit of picture
of the scale of the universe, and

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became a parent that it was huge
in both time and space, compared to

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a human lifetime and compared to the
planet Earth. And he began to think

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that in this vast universe, the
Earth was looking pretty small, and all

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on Earth, the people's the wars. He would be in his twenties when

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World War One broke out and he's
writing some of his new Spaker remarks,

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and how insignificant all this fighting in
Europe was well compared to the state of

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the universe as a whole, the
size as a whole. And he developed

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this idea of cosmicism in which he
regarded people as insignificant, and that was

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associated with an atheism, because he
said he couldn't believe into in this god

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that cared about humans, that cared
about people, and he thought about this

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vast universe is in some ways a
kind of oblique idea. But although I

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think he loved astronomy, he was
amazed and wondered by these developments of the

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of the expanded scale of the universe. And I don't know that he himself

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regarded this is too as a too
much of a with a pessimistic you in

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that sense, he always had a
pitty pessimistic view. Well. He developed

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a pessimistic view about people and about
the on the planet Earth that rather as

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zenaphobic nature, particularly with the with
the immigrants coming into the US from countries

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other than this beloved England. But
this developed in this cosmicism shaped his fiction.

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And we see beings beyond the capabilities
of people in his fiction that are

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not really that can't be regarded as
like devils, that that are inimical to

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people, but they don't really care
that much about people, that have the

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ability far beyond those of humanity,
and care about people in the same way

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that we might care about wandering through
an in ant hill and not even noticing

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whether we destroy it or not.
In our with our footsteps, and that

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I think is is one of the
aspects of cosmicism that was something relatively new

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and I think in the fiction of
the day the traditional ghost story. If

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you look at Monty Road James,
for example, one of British master of

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the traditional ghost story, who is
writing about the early nineteen hundreds, then

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we have the traditional ghosts, which
is someone from the past that is for

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some reason surviving and interacting very much. The interactions with people living are the

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highlight, the main focus of the
story. Lovecraft, this gets you thinking

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about things far beyond that level,
and that maybe the people bull shouldn't be

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the focus of the story, and
in some ways that the heroes of his

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tale are kind of watchers rather.
Have we lost Horace? Eddie? Can

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you hear Horrace little? Oh?
You might be back? I think we

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lost you from I'm and Horrace up. Well, I uh, I was

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just saying, I was wondering if
Eddie you had any thoughts to say.

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I've been so like we're going on
and awful a little bit on my end,

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so if I blank out, Eddie
will have to take over. So

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I'll say, like, I think
one thing that Lovecraft has been criticized,

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I was now his His protagonists generally
tend, on the one hand, tend

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to be people very similar to how
Lovecraft himself viewed himself as you know,

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generally from you know, New England
or Hardy New England's stock as you know

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he would call it, you know, kind of and their thirties or forties.

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You know, typically you know,
university professors at is great fictional university

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Miskatonic. But no, it's typically
it's them writing down, you know,

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a narrative of you know, oh, I went to Antarctica and this is

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what I saw. Let me like
list everything there's there's not kind of the

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more what we might think of as
a typical fiction setup, you know,

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like characters discussing, you know,
things being told in the third person or

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if there's a third person's very narrowly
focused. And again, you know,

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it's this very you know, very
tight view of basically just the chance to

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recount stuff, you know, kind
of I think in modern terms you might

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say he's very interested in the world
building, not very interested in characterization,

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very thin characterization. What characterization there
is is basically someone being like, well,

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my father, you know, I
was born in this state and this

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town in New England, and then
I went to college and this town blah

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blah. So it's basically, yeah, it's you know what I found.

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One of the things I enjoyed.
I enjoyed the whole book, from cover

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to cover. It's such a wonderful
book. And we'll talk more about it

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later how people can get ahold of
it soon, because I know it's just

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about to release. But what surprised
me, because I knew, and I

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mentioned this to both of you guys
before the show, what surprised me is

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I knew it was going to be
about Lovecraft's connections to astronomy, but what

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came as a really pleasant surprise was
how much time it spent about talking about

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his influence on science fiction and the
influence of science fiction on Lovecraft. Because

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I mean, I'm not I don't
think I had just a passing interest in

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Lovecraft. I thought I had a
fairly good handle on his influences. So

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obviously there were you know, there's
people like Poe and Mackin and Dunsany and

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Merit that I was conscious were influential
of on Lovecraft's writings, and I obviously

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knew the impact he had on Horror
afterwards. But I never heard about Garrett

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P. Service. I don't even
if I'm pronouncing his name correctly, and

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his incredible influence on Lovecraft's and I
mean, maybe we can use him as

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a segue into Lovecraft being as important
to the realm of science fiction as to

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horror, and the influence of science
fiction on him being as important as the

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influence of Horror on him. Yeah, I'll dive in. I'll say Garrett.

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With Garrett P. Service in particular, I think he was, again

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much like Personal Lowell, someone who
became very influential and popularizing astronomy. But

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again, I don't think any professional
training as an astronomer. Is someone who

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maybe is roughly a similar kind of
cultural space to Carl Sagan or Neil de

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grass Tyson today, even though of
course they do have professional training, but

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someone who's very active in popular promotion
of astronomy. But he was a fiction

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writer as well. I think the
one the story we talked the most about

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in this is Edison's Conquest of Mars, which is one of a number of

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unofficial I guess basically like a copyright
infringing sequels to the War of the World

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probably the most imaginative one. It's
published very quickly after the original HG.

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Wells novel. It's about Thomas Edison
basically, you know, like using his

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scientific knowledge to build a human fleet
and fly to Mars, and essentially I

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think they end up committing genocide against
the Martians as retaliation. A lot of

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very interesting kind of science fiction staples
come out of that. For example,

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I think i've seen it read that's
the first use of the space suit and

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fiction, very early example of what
we would say call ancient Aliens, where

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it was revealed the Martians came to
Earth and build the Pyramids and the Sphinx,

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and the Sphinx is actually meant to
depict a Martian again, something that

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I think we can see a lot
of reflection of with Lovecraft. But Service

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wrote a lot of popular astronomy books
as well, and Lovecraft read the He

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claimed that he read everything that had
been published by Service, which if true,

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that would be quite extensive. But
you know, with that in mind,

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it's easy to see you echoes of
some of Lovecraft's themes in a lot

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of both the fiction and nonfiction that
Service wrote, and Service himself obviously his

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Edison's Conquest of Mars is a rip
off, will say of H. G.

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Wells. He wrote another book called
Columbus of Space that's very explicitly influenced

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00:29:30,160 --> 00:29:34,640
by Jules Verne, who again was
someone who Lovecraft as a kid wrote that

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00:29:34,680 --> 00:29:40,960
he was enormously influenced by Jules Verne. If you read no there's a few

330
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childhood stories that Lovecraft wrote that survived, you can definitely see the influence of

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kind of the Verne style adventure novel. One of the things that really kills

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me is in his letters later on
Lovecraft mentions, you know, as a

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00:29:53,319 --> 00:29:57,720
kid he basically wrote like his own
Nope from the Earth to the Moon knockoff

334
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about people going to the far side
of the moon. But you know,

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I think either mentioned he lost it
or he deliberately destroyed it as a kid,

336
00:30:04,720 --> 00:30:08,920
I would have loved to have read
that childhood story of his. And

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00:30:10,079 --> 00:30:14,640
you know, beyond H. G. Wells, beyond Jules Verne, who

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certainly did read both of those as
a kid, and Edgar Allan Poe,

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00:30:18,799 --> 00:30:23,240
who again probably is remembered most as
a horror novelist or maybe also a bit

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00:30:23,240 --> 00:30:26,559
of a crime fiction person. He
wrote science fiction as well, and you

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00:30:26,599 --> 00:30:32,839
can see in Poe's science fiction a
number of echoes of things that come up

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00:30:32,839 --> 00:30:37,039
in later Lovecraft. He also later
on he read a lot of science fiction

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00:30:37,079 --> 00:30:40,759
in general, but wasn't a big
fan. He thought a lot of it

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was drek at the time, and
I mean probably he was pretty right about

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that assessment. But no, he
did read some of the key works that

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kind of are still held in high
regard, for example, the John Carter

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00:30:53,759 --> 00:30:59,839
of Mars series by Edgar Rice Burrows. And again I mentioned Lovecraft was involved

348
00:31:00,079 --> 00:31:06,519
very much in kind of letter writing
and these science fiction and Noah writing journals

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00:31:06,519 --> 00:31:11,759
that John Carter books are originally serialized
in magazines. Lovecraft rights in this article

350
00:31:11,880 --> 00:31:18,799
or this letter to the editor complaining
that Edgar Rice Burrows had gotten the number

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00:31:18,799 --> 00:31:22,279
of days in a Martian year or
wrong, and very angrily denouncing him.

352
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And I think Lovecraft, again,
as a kid, very clearly was a

353
00:31:26,599 --> 00:31:30,880
fan of Burrows. Later in life
he talks ABO know Burrows is a hack

354
00:31:30,960 --> 00:31:34,559
writer. I think the fact that
Burrows ignored this letter, you know that

355
00:31:34,720 --> 00:31:38,880
from this completely unknown guy at the
time pointing out this er because I did

356
00:31:38,960 --> 00:31:45,039
check when that novel was compiled and
released as a novel. The error wasn't

357
00:31:45,079 --> 00:31:48,359
fixed, so it's still in the
actual published thing. So Burrows either never

358
00:31:48,440 --> 00:31:52,680
read Lovecraft's letter or didn't care,
or I think Burrows is kind of a

359
00:31:52,680 --> 00:31:56,160
heavy drinker, so you may just
not have may have gone right over his

360
00:31:56,240 --> 00:32:01,160
head in any case, but it's
it's also interesting the few science fiction stories

361
00:32:01,160 --> 00:32:07,880
that Lovecraft really points out as being
good. There's an author who again today

362
00:32:07,240 --> 00:32:15,279
probably is almost completely forgotten, named
Stanley weinbamb who, like Lovecraft, ended

363
00:32:15,359 --> 00:32:20,440
up dying very young of cancer.
But he wrote maybe like a dozen or

364
00:32:20,440 --> 00:32:24,720
so stories kind of in a shared
universe about you know, humans and what

365
00:32:24,880 --> 00:32:30,279
is then the future going to various
different planets in the Solar System. The

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00:32:30,359 --> 00:32:34,599
first two I think are set on
Mars. There's a couple of others on

367
00:32:35,279 --> 00:32:38,359
Venus, on the moons of Jupiter
and Saturn, and some of the asteroids.

368
00:32:39,359 --> 00:32:43,839
Very these are stories I think still
hold up day and they're very imaginative

369
00:32:43,880 --> 00:32:49,200
take of alien life form. You
can see how there would have appealed to

370
00:32:49,279 --> 00:32:53,440
Lovecraft. Arthur C. Clarke also
writes about Stanley Winbomb being a big influenza

371
00:32:53,759 --> 00:32:59,200
and then maybe maybe a bit better
well known, but I think also probably

372
00:32:59,279 --> 00:33:02,440
not well member. Even so is
Olaf stapled In, and in particular his

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00:33:04,319 --> 00:33:07,759
really expansive novel Last and First Men, which is this you know, you

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00:33:07,799 --> 00:33:15,240
know again, it covers the future
history of humanity from what in Stapleton's you

375
00:33:15,279 --> 00:33:17,920
Know time would have been the very
near future up until you know, I

376
00:33:17,960 --> 00:33:22,839
think it goes past a billion years
into the future and just traces how humanity

377
00:33:22,960 --> 00:33:30,480
goes from being on Earth into basing
unrecognizable evolutionary forms. And again you can

378
00:33:30,480 --> 00:33:35,240
see how this is something where you
know, you're covering humanity going across billions

379
00:33:35,279 --> 00:33:38,960
of years, you know, thousands
of light years of space. Clearly,

380
00:33:39,000 --> 00:33:44,599
this is something that's very interesting to
Lovecraft. And again there's some echoes of

381
00:33:44,599 --> 00:33:49,240
his fiction in particular and a shadow
over in Smith when he kind of tackles

382
00:33:49,319 --> 00:33:53,480
some of these issues of alternative human
evolution. We can say you can see

383
00:33:53,480 --> 00:33:58,119
a lot of that in a stapled
In. But for me, at least,

384
00:33:58,119 --> 00:34:02,759
that's kind of the more interesting ways
in which Lovecraft was reading science fiction.

385
00:34:02,839 --> 00:34:07,000
What he thought was really kind of
the key standouts of the genre of

386
00:34:07,079 --> 00:34:14,440
his time. I was fascinated that
service had kind of been almost perhaps the

387
00:34:14,480 --> 00:34:17,920
originator is suggested in the book of
Almost an Ancient Astronaut Theory with his point

388
00:34:19,039 --> 00:34:22,960
or a suggestion that Egyptian culture had
been influenced by Martians. Of course,

389
00:34:23,000 --> 00:34:29,280
whenever you read in one of I
suppose what we recognize as one of the

390
00:34:29,320 --> 00:34:32,719
precursors of ancient astronaut theory in the
occult space, like a book like Bergier

391
00:34:32,760 --> 00:34:38,199
and Pale's Mourning of the Magicians,
they'll mention Lovecraft and Shells fought almost in

392
00:34:38,239 --> 00:34:44,639
the same sentence as progenitors of this
kind of idea. So it's fascinating and

393
00:34:44,679 --> 00:34:46,199
I'm sure this is something Horrors will
be interested in as well. And maybe

394
00:34:46,199 --> 00:34:52,199
you'll want to field that you talk
about thoughts intersection with Lovecraft, because ironically

395
00:34:52,719 --> 00:34:55,559
Lovecraft is the great amateur astronomer in
this space. And as we both know

396
00:34:55,599 --> 00:34:59,840
because we've talked about it before,
Horrce and you knew before we talked about

397
00:35:00,480 --> 00:35:04,159
Fort's enemy is the astronomer, like
the people he dislikes the most in the

398
00:35:04,199 --> 00:35:07,880
sciences of the astronomers. So it's
interesting that these two forces fought on one

399
00:35:07,920 --> 00:35:13,239
side and Lovecraft on the other,
are both thought to have influenced ancient astronaut

400
00:35:13,320 --> 00:35:15,840
theory, and they intersected as well. Maybe maybe you Horace or Eddie or

401
00:35:15,840 --> 00:35:22,400
whoever wants to feel that can talk
about the Lovecraft and Fought intersection. I'll

402
00:35:22,480 --> 00:35:27,679
say a few words and then that
he can jump in. Lovecraft did read

403
00:35:28,559 --> 00:35:32,320
Fort's books, so I think he
thought more highly of the Book of the

404
00:35:32,400 --> 00:35:38,599
Damned than some of the Wedder books, if I recall yeah, I think,

405
00:35:39,239 --> 00:35:46,679
yeah, yeah, he had some
criticisms of some of the wed with

406
00:35:47,199 --> 00:35:58,000
I don't think he was reading them
as accepting the ideas about the sorry gassle

407
00:35:58,119 --> 00:36:04,199
Sea of the Sky from Charles Fort
literally, but he but he was looking

408
00:36:04,239 --> 00:36:13,960
at them his ideas of things that
might might be useful. And in fact

409
00:36:14,079 --> 00:36:23,280
he in this the all the letters
I recall about uh for from from Lovecraft,

410
00:36:23,719 --> 00:36:29,079
He's actually kinder than I would have
thought he might have been. If

411
00:36:29,079 --> 00:36:34,679
that if Eddie had that same impression, yeah, I mean I think he

412
00:36:34,880 --> 00:36:38,239
thought that Fort was someone who was
not to be taken seriously. But you

413
00:36:38,239 --> 00:36:44,760
know, he collects a collector of
random factoids, ran collector of interesting stories.

414
00:36:45,119 --> 00:36:47,760
So you know, I think Lovecraft
appreciated those for what they were.

415
00:36:47,760 --> 00:36:52,880
I certainly don't think and I think
in one of his letters he kind of

416
00:36:52,880 --> 00:36:58,199
criticizes Fort for not really having any
kind of specific or like an idea,

417
00:36:58,199 --> 00:37:04,639
an organizing principle or ideology or methodology
maybe, but you know, yeah,

418
00:37:04,639 --> 00:37:08,440
I think he definitely preferred a Book
of the Damned over I think new Lands

419
00:37:08,639 --> 00:37:13,639
was the other hero. I'm not
sure if he read any of the others,

420
00:37:14,199 --> 00:37:17,960
although there is ah this maybe is
steering it in maybe a different direction.

421
00:37:19,039 --> 00:37:23,719
But one of Lovecraft's closest associate or
closest friends. And again, Lovecraft

422
00:37:23,880 --> 00:37:28,440
was not a shut in like is
often referred to, but he did have

423
00:37:28,480 --> 00:37:31,039
a number of very close friends who
he only knew through letter writing, which

424
00:37:31,039 --> 00:37:37,039
again maybe echoes of some people forming
friendships over you no internet connections these days.

425
00:37:37,079 --> 00:37:43,000
But one of his very close epistolary
friends we never met in person,

426
00:37:43,159 --> 00:37:49,159
was Clark Ashton Smith, another very
good weird fiction author but also poets sculptor

427
00:37:49,239 --> 00:37:52,920
who lived in Auburn, California.
There is one and they wrote a few

428
00:37:52,960 --> 00:37:58,599
letters about Fort back and forth.
Smith also was a fan. But Smith

429
00:37:58,679 --> 00:38:01,119
and I think it's nineteen three,
you know, he talks in a letter

430
00:38:01,159 --> 00:38:06,440
to Lovecraft about how a few years
earlier in the late nineteen twenties, he

431
00:38:06,559 --> 00:38:08,519
saw what he referred to as you
know, the black media rite, which

432
00:38:08,559 --> 00:38:15,480
is this giant, black, silent
cylindrical object that flew overhead, which you

433
00:38:15,480 --> 00:38:19,400
know today would pretty clearly call that
a UFO. So, you know,

434
00:38:19,599 --> 00:38:22,719
he didn't have doesn't have a term, but he's telling Lovecraft. Yeah,

435
00:38:22,719 --> 00:38:24,239
a couple of years ago, I
saw this, you know, mysterious black

436
00:38:24,320 --> 00:38:30,079
media rte fly overhead. I bet
Charles Fort wouldn't have a good run at

437
00:38:30,119 --> 00:38:35,000
this. And Lovecraft's immediate response our
book mediate in terms of letter writing responses.

438
00:38:35,039 --> 00:38:37,840
You know, Oh, it could
be any number of natural phenomenon.

439
00:38:37,880 --> 00:38:39,920
We don't need to jump right to
the forty in explanation. I think he

440
00:38:39,960 --> 00:38:45,519
actually even uses forty and at the
time, which is a pretty close linked

441
00:38:45,480 --> 00:38:52,440
to the Interestingly enough, Lovecraft had
at least two friends who themselves were friends

442
00:38:52,440 --> 00:38:55,840
with Theodore Dreiser, the founder of
the forty in Society. One of them

443
00:38:55,880 --> 00:39:00,800
offered to connect him with Lovecraft and
lovecraft base. He said, no,

444
00:39:00,920 --> 00:39:04,159
thank you, that's fine, but
it is kind of one of these interesting

445
00:39:04,199 --> 00:39:07,199
what ifs. You know, if
Lovecraft had met up with the forty in

446
00:39:07,360 --> 00:39:12,159
Society in the early thirties, right
after it was formed. But sadly,

447
00:39:12,519 --> 00:39:15,719
I Lovecraft was kind of a bit
self sabotaging in a number of ways like

448
00:39:15,800 --> 00:39:27,440
that. I think I was interested
that that actually Lovecraft dad an early intersection

449
00:39:27,599 --> 00:39:35,280
with unidentified aerial phenomena of a sort
that we've talked about I've mentioned before on

450
00:39:35,960 --> 00:39:37,719
this program, so I won't go
into it. No, No, men

451
00:39:37,880 --> 00:39:40,760
mentioned it again because it's fascinating.
I know exactly what you're talking about.

452
00:39:42,599 --> 00:39:47,559
So this is nineteen o nine.
At the time is just before Christmas.

453
00:39:49,480 --> 00:39:55,679
The New England newspapers are overwhelmed with
reports of a mysterious airship that flies only

454
00:39:55,719 --> 00:40:05,239
at night, and it's reported over
moving over Worcester in Massachusetts. It's reported

455
00:40:05,800 --> 00:40:14,440
over a Willamantic, my hometown in
Connecticut, and people are out doing their

456
00:40:14,480 --> 00:40:20,679
Christmas shopping or are scanning the skies
for this airship. And it was said

457
00:40:20,679 --> 00:40:25,039
in Worcester that the streets were blocked
the street cars couldn't go through because so

458
00:40:25,119 --> 00:40:30,920
many people were at one time out
in the street looking for the mystery airship,

459
00:40:30,960 --> 00:40:38,239
which was supposed newspapers said it was
supposedly the work of a mysterious invented

460
00:40:38,239 --> 00:40:44,880
tilling Hast, a name that shows
up in later a Lovecraft story, but

461
00:40:45,960 --> 00:40:52,000
just before Christmas and Providence Lovecraft is
out. This has actually during the period

462
00:40:52,039 --> 00:40:57,119
where it had his breakdown of nineteen
oh eight, so this is one of

463
00:40:57,159 --> 00:41:02,320
the few windows we have on these
activity during right after this breakdown us out,

464
00:41:02,400 --> 00:41:07,559
he sees Christmas shoppers out in the
street, and a bunch of gathered

465
00:41:07,599 --> 00:41:12,599
at the street corner pointed to something
in the sky, and Lovecraft things,

466
00:41:12,800 --> 00:41:20,039
uh, well, there this getting
them interested in astronomy. Mosey over and

467
00:41:20,159 --> 00:41:23,639
see what's going on. And he
goes over and there pointing look, it's

468
00:41:23,400 --> 00:41:30,159
the airship. I can see it. I can see it's headlights shining the

469
00:41:30,199 --> 00:41:36,920
sky. And the dismayed Lovecraft had
to tell them that what they were pointing

470
00:41:36,960 --> 00:41:44,039
out was the plane at Venus rather
than tilling Hass mystery airship. So that

471
00:41:44,199 --> 00:41:51,360
may have said set Lovecraft on a
rather skeptical view of people's reports of objects

472
00:41:51,400 --> 00:41:59,679
in the sky. But but it
was something that appeared that he reported,

473
00:41:59,719 --> 00:42:05,920
and in a number of times this
this this account of people mistaking a planet,

474
00:42:06,280 --> 00:42:10,519
and he said people needed to read
newspaper columns so they would realize what

475
00:42:10,599 --> 00:42:15,400
was going on. In the heavens, and you're right because Charles Fort writes

476
00:42:15,440 --> 00:42:19,840
about that case as well. Of
course they're tilling his nineteen oh nine airships,

477
00:42:19,880 --> 00:42:23,119
so there's an immediate connection between the
two of them. M hm.

478
00:42:27,519 --> 00:42:35,000
Yes, he was a very uh
uh I dropped out, I think for

479
00:42:35,039 --> 00:42:37,599
a moment here. Uh. Yeah, we have you now, horse,

480
00:42:37,639 --> 00:42:45,840
you're here now, okay about yeah, I'm actually uh, it's very interested

481
00:42:45,880 --> 00:42:51,480
that there was interested in this.
Uh. At the time, it was

482
00:42:51,559 --> 00:42:57,960
also interested in the space travel from
the Earth to space. But I think

483
00:42:58,000 --> 00:43:04,480
he noticed how glibly early science fiction
writers had people going from the Earth to

484
00:43:04,559 --> 00:43:08,559
the Moon or to Mars, and
he realized how hard this would be in

485
00:43:09,320 --> 00:43:13,840
practice. In fact, he didn't
think people would go to the Moon for

486
00:43:13,880 --> 00:43:17,320
a long time because it was going
to be so difficult and so expensive,

487
00:43:17,639 --> 00:43:22,559
and why would people spend all that
money. He thought the ordinary person wouldn't

488
00:43:22,599 --> 00:43:25,880
want to spend all that money to
go to the moon, and he thought

489
00:43:25,960 --> 00:43:30,400
if they did, the people on
that first trip might not make it back

490
00:43:30,440 --> 00:43:37,519
alive. And in actually some ways
he was rather rather more realistic about space

491
00:43:37,559 --> 00:43:43,639
travel and its difficulties than were many
of the science fiction writers of the time.

492
00:43:45,000 --> 00:43:50,320
For himself. When he has his
creatures moving through space, like the

493
00:43:51,119 --> 00:43:55,559
Great Old Ones or the Amigo,
they're often not going in the physical spaceships,

494
00:43:57,239 --> 00:44:01,960
but are flying through the ether on
some kind of wings that can not

495
00:44:02,199 --> 00:44:09,800
flap against air, but against the
ether filling the universe. And then he

496
00:44:09,840 --> 00:44:19,039
does have some mention of space space
ships, of rockets, and of ways

497
00:44:19,159 --> 00:44:23,039
of getting this space. But he
realized this was going to be a very

498
00:44:23,079 --> 00:44:30,360
difficult endeavor, and he kept away
from the easy space journeys that appeared in

499
00:44:30,440 --> 00:44:37,360
many of his contemporaries writing where people
glossed over the difficulties of traveling through space.

500
00:44:37,800 --> 00:44:43,920
There's one picture he wrote in the
nineteen oh three I Think thereabouts that

501
00:44:44,039 --> 00:44:47,400
Eddie found, which which Frebbie amused
me very well. It's is reproduced in

502
00:44:47,440 --> 00:44:52,920
the book. It's a drawing he
made of a train going up from the

503
00:44:52,920 --> 00:45:00,000
Earth into the Moon and UH person
in UH equipped for are going to the

504
00:45:00,039 --> 00:45:07,119
moon dressed up and looks like a
deep sea diving suit. In his on

505
00:45:07,159 --> 00:45:10,639
the page when he wrote, he
often included a lot of drawings in these

506
00:45:10,679 --> 00:45:17,039
little journals of the self published as
a teenager, and those are online.

507
00:45:17,119 --> 00:45:23,119
You can go look at them on
the Brown University Digital repository, and they're

508
00:45:23,159 --> 00:45:30,519
just fun to go through. Uh
they're they're just amusing to read. As

509
00:45:30,559 --> 00:45:37,400
he gets more sophisticated, Uh see, he gets to writing his own newspaper

510
00:45:37,480 --> 00:45:39,760
columns. In fact, they get
a little bit less charming and more of

511
00:45:39,800 --> 00:45:46,039
the ordinary newspaper affair of the day. So some of the earlier things the

512
00:45:46,119 --> 00:45:52,679
more eccentric, and I think I'm
more fun to read. And perhaps just

513
00:45:52,719 --> 00:45:57,880
to go back to some of you
were saying that perhaps the lack of spaceships

514
00:45:57,920 --> 00:46:01,159
and the lack of that technic,
technical, logical kind of accompaniment to the

515
00:46:01,199 --> 00:46:06,760
great old ones is the reason so
much of this resonates more in horror and

516
00:46:06,800 --> 00:46:10,519
science fiction, because again, as
I mentioned before, while I'm conscious of

517
00:46:10,559 --> 00:46:15,760
people who are meant to be the
horror influences on Lovecraft, everybody's conscious of

518
00:46:15,199 --> 00:46:19,920
how Lovecraft went on to influence horror. We mentioned it before, whether it's

519
00:46:19,920 --> 00:46:22,719
Stephen King or John Carpenter. I'm
in name almost any author in the space

520
00:46:22,760 --> 00:46:28,159
today in every second movie you see
is loaded with Lovecraft ideas. But also

521
00:46:28,480 --> 00:46:32,159
what I was less conscious of was
his influence on science fiction. And there's

522
00:46:32,199 --> 00:46:37,519
a wonderful chapter. I never even
thought about in there about big dumb objects

523
00:46:37,559 --> 00:46:40,599
in sci fi and Lovecraft's influence on
that. Maybe we can use that as

524
00:46:40,639 --> 00:46:44,760
a stepping off point. We can
one of you can explain what big dumb

525
00:46:44,800 --> 00:46:50,440
objects are and how that shows Lovecraft's
influence on the broader science fiction. Well,

526
00:46:50,559 --> 00:46:58,079
I think Eddie chose that use that
expression. I'm happy to jump in

527
00:46:58,159 --> 00:47:01,039
out. So this is a genre, very specific genre of I guess we

528
00:47:01,079 --> 00:47:05,920
would generally call it space opera.
I suppose it really came up in the

529
00:47:06,039 --> 00:47:10,559
nineteen seventies. I think that was
the big decade. But the typical uh

530
00:47:10,880 --> 00:47:15,159
kind of like two examples that we
talked about in the book. But I

531
00:47:15,199 --> 00:47:20,159
think most people are probably familiar with
Arthur C. Clarke's Rendezvous with Rama and

532
00:47:20,280 --> 00:47:24,960
Larry Nivens Ring World. But in
the the way in which the big dumb

533
00:47:25,000 --> 00:47:30,320
object genre goes or bdo we can
call it as you know, there's some

534
00:47:30,480 --> 00:47:35,960
giant object in space that's you know, built by incredibly advanced aliens, you

535
00:47:35,960 --> 00:47:39,559
know, huge number of years ago. Now it's abandoned. A small number

536
00:47:39,599 --> 00:47:43,960
of you know humans go land there, explore it, you know, try

537
00:47:43,960 --> 00:47:47,719
to figure out who built it?
Why uncover some deep mystery? You know,

538
00:47:47,800 --> 00:47:51,840
some of them die along the way, the rest make it back to

539
00:47:52,000 --> 00:47:57,039
Earth to report on what's going on. But this is the basic format of

540
00:47:57,079 --> 00:48:00,519
this. I'd like to say,
No Rama by Clara ring World by Niven.

541
00:48:00,599 --> 00:48:06,400
These are really the ones that popularize
that genre, and there have been

542
00:48:06,400 --> 00:48:08,480
a few other ones. I think
those are probably still the best known ones.

543
00:48:09,159 --> 00:48:12,760
But again, you know, like
the idea, you know, humans

544
00:48:12,840 --> 00:48:21,079
going to some location finding a giant
structure built by inscrutable advanced aliens that have

545
00:48:21,119 --> 00:48:25,800
been long since died out. It
struck me as very evocative of particularly at

546
00:48:25,800 --> 00:48:30,920
the Mountains of Madness, but also
a later novella he wrote, The Shadow

547
00:48:30,960 --> 00:48:37,280
out of Time. Notably also these
two Mountains of Madness Shadow out of Time.

548
00:48:37,519 --> 00:48:42,800
These aren't structures in space. They're
like ancient cities on Earth and inhospitable

549
00:48:42,880 --> 00:48:46,119
locations, the first one in the
Antarctica, the second one in the Great

550
00:48:46,199 --> 00:48:52,000
Sandy Desert of Australia. But because
of the remoteness, you have these expeditions

551
00:48:52,079 --> 00:48:57,480
going there that are fairly evocative of
later space voyages. They're kind of standings,

552
00:48:57,760 --> 00:49:01,159
and actually at the Mountains of Madness
be and as Lovecraft trying to think

553
00:49:01,199 --> 00:49:07,400
about an interplanetary story. So there
even is that kind of space voyage genesis

554
00:49:07,440 --> 00:49:14,800
in this novella about going to an
alien city in Antarctica. But again note

555
00:49:14,840 --> 00:49:21,239
these the big Dumb Object genre is
very evocative of these two novellas that Lovecraft

556
00:49:21,280 --> 00:49:24,480
wrote at the end of his life. These novellas were not published in Weird

557
00:49:24,599 --> 00:49:30,360
Tales, kind of the more horror
and fantasy oriented there were published in the

558
00:49:30,719 --> 00:49:37,480
much more science fictional focused Astounding Stories
I think it was called at the time,

559
00:49:37,800 --> 00:49:40,639
which was widely read by kind of
a lot of the emerging figures in

560
00:49:42,039 --> 00:49:47,760
what would become the science fiction space
opera genre. For example, Arthur C.

561
00:49:49,000 --> 00:49:52,559
Clark was an early reader. He
has a biography. He has one

562
00:49:52,559 --> 00:49:57,000
of his many biographies is called Astounding
Days, and it's about his memories of

563
00:49:57,039 --> 00:50:01,400
reading astounding science fiction. He has
a chat acron remembering reading these two stories

564
00:50:01,440 --> 00:50:07,679
by Lovecraft. Larry Niven, which
I haven't found anything specific about him,

565
00:50:07,679 --> 00:50:12,639
but he's certainly familiar with Lovecraft.
He's written a number of Lovecraft pastiches.

566
00:50:12,920 --> 00:50:16,119
So it was interesting to me that
these two stories that were the only ones

567
00:50:16,159 --> 00:50:22,199
published in these more explicitly science fiction
mediums that we know we're read by these

568
00:50:22,559 --> 00:50:30,119
pioneers of space opera of early science
fiction, then got reflected in their notions

569
00:50:30,159 --> 00:50:35,840
of this particular space opera genre.
It's interesting also, I mean, I

570
00:50:35,880 --> 00:50:38,199
don't think this is the only case
of it. But at the Mountains of

571
00:50:38,199 --> 00:50:45,159
Madness you describing this very extensive.
Again, no, part of Lovecraft's interest

572
00:50:45,239 --> 00:50:49,840
is basically using fiction as an excuse
to write about what might otherwise have been

573
00:50:49,880 --> 00:50:54,719
a non fiction article. Basically,
but he's very interested in antarctic exploration or

574
00:50:54,800 --> 00:51:00,239
the cutting edge of antarctic exploration of
his day. He writes an extreme in

575
00:51:00,360 --> 00:51:04,920
detail about you know, the outfitting
of this expedition to Antarctica, and at

576
00:51:04,960 --> 00:51:09,440
the Mountains of Madness, it's essentially
the nineteen thirties equivalent of a space expedition.

577
00:51:09,960 --> 00:51:15,760
This is published an Astounding science fiction
are astounding stories. I guess one

578
00:51:15,800 --> 00:51:21,440
of the people who helped secretly got
copies of Astounding and read it was Verner

579
00:51:21,559 --> 00:51:24,760
von Braun, who at the time
was now working for the Nazi government in

580
00:51:24,800 --> 00:51:29,960
Germany on the V two missile or
what would eventually would be working on the

581
00:51:30,039 --> 00:51:37,559
V two missile. After the war, he develops the first plan for a

582
00:51:37,760 --> 00:51:43,960
Martian exploration, which again is very
similar to the same Antarctic expedition tropes that

583
00:51:44,079 --> 00:51:49,320
Lovecraft was drawn from. So it
is kind of evocative to think, you

584
00:51:49,360 --> 00:51:52,639
know Verner von Braun reading at the
Mountains of Madness, and then you years

585
00:51:52,719 --> 00:51:59,639
later keeping it in mind while developing
his own expedition, and notably in von

586
00:51:59,719 --> 00:52:05,559
braun kind of initial mission outline to
Mars, his astronauts were landing at the

587
00:52:05,599 --> 00:52:08,400
South Pole on Mars too, so
there is that kind of a explicit,

588
00:52:08,760 --> 00:52:14,440
interesting parallel there too. We have
We have a question from Ed Schultz,

589
00:52:14,480 --> 00:52:16,800
who's a regular viewer of the show
and also a guest on the show.

590
00:52:16,800 --> 00:52:20,719
He's actually about to come out with
his own book, Confessions of a Psychic

591
00:52:20,760 --> 00:52:23,039
Priest, which I can't wait to
read. In fact, I've read quite

592
00:52:23,039 --> 00:52:27,760
a bit of the of the proofs
and they're excellence. So anyway, Ed

593
00:52:27,880 --> 00:52:32,480
asks any parallels with Stargate, obviously, the popular film and TV series,

594
00:52:32,480 --> 00:52:37,760
which I know Ed's a fan of. I will say I've seen the Stargate

595
00:52:37,840 --> 00:52:40,239
movie. I've really only seen a
few episodes of any of the show,

596
00:52:40,280 --> 00:52:45,639
so I can't comment on if Lovecraft
has brought more up with the show.

597
00:52:45,679 --> 00:52:50,400
But I know the movie very much
was influenced by Eric von dan Akin,

598
00:52:51,519 --> 00:52:55,360
among I think Graham Hancock actually also
is a big influence on it, even

599
00:52:55,360 --> 00:53:00,280
though Hancock tends not to write about
aliens. But that's a whole other kettle

600
00:53:00,320 --> 00:53:07,079
of fish. So there's definitely the
von Danikin influence in Stargate. There's an

601
00:53:07,119 --> 00:53:10,599
author, I guess we can,
we can kind of calm like a polymath,

602
00:53:10,639 --> 00:53:15,800
a renaissance man named Jason Colavito,
who has written extensively on kind of

603
00:53:16,800 --> 00:53:23,559
tracking the lovecrafty and influence in a
von Danikin. As far as we can

604
00:53:23,599 --> 00:53:29,119
tell, as far as far as
has been noted, von Danikin did not

605
00:53:29,480 --> 00:53:35,280
read Lovecraft directly before writing Chariots of
the Gods. He seems to be more

606
00:53:36,760 --> 00:53:40,119
aware of Lovecraft later on potentially,
But also you kind of have to take

607
00:53:40,119 --> 00:53:44,159
a lot of what von Danikin says
with a grain of salt, because he

608
00:53:44,199 --> 00:53:47,960
has been convicted of fraud multiple times, I believe, But I mean,

609
00:53:49,079 --> 00:53:52,679
we know von Danikin did read Morning
of the Magicians, which itself you know,

610
00:53:53,239 --> 00:53:59,199
was influenced by Lovecraft. Sites Lovecraft, so I think indirect we have

611
00:53:59,280 --> 00:54:05,119
Stargate through von Danikin, through Morning
Magicians, through Lovecraft. Then again,

612
00:54:05,159 --> 00:54:08,880
like we said, you know,
Lovecraft himself probably we can guess did read

613
00:54:10,440 --> 00:54:15,079
Edison's Conquest of Mars, where a
lot of this comes up. Although interestingly,

614
00:54:15,639 --> 00:54:19,800
this idea, you know, aliens
coming to Earth in the past,

615
00:54:20,000 --> 00:54:25,199
influencing in particular Egyptian civilization, this
pops up a few times. Like one

616
00:54:25,239 --> 00:54:29,920
thing that really interesting me was doing
a lot of research on the science fiction

617
00:54:30,039 --> 00:54:34,880
stories Lovecraft would have been reading.
It comes up not super often, but

618
00:54:35,000 --> 00:54:40,159
it's there. It's the ancient Aliens
trope is decently popular in the nineteen twenties

619
00:54:40,199 --> 00:54:46,639
and thirties. Typically it's connecting Aliens
with Atlantis or what I did my dissertation

620
00:54:46,719 --> 00:54:52,039
on Great zimbabwey that comes up a
few times, or the Greeks or the

621
00:54:52,079 --> 00:54:55,679
Egyptians. The author I mentioned,
Stanley Weinbomb he has one of his stories

622
00:54:55,679 --> 00:54:59,760
where they realize, you know,
the Martians had come to Earth and the

623
00:55:00,000 --> 00:55:05,199
Egyptian god thought was based on a
Martian that had landed in Egypt, you

624
00:55:05,239 --> 00:55:08,039
know, a long time ago.
So again, a lot even beyond a

625
00:55:08,320 --> 00:55:13,679
service, a lot of the stuff
that Lovecraft was reading kind of independently came

626
00:55:13,760 --> 00:55:17,320
up with these ancient aliens notions,
and again, it's kind of an interesting

627
00:55:17,320 --> 00:55:23,159
way in which something that's an explicitly
science fictional trope kind of gets recycled into

628
00:55:25,360 --> 00:55:31,880
pop science or pop ostensibly nonfictional science, to the degree you have ancient aliens

629
00:55:31,920 --> 00:55:36,360
now being brought up, you know, in the US House of Representatives and

630
00:55:36,639 --> 00:55:39,920
members of the US House of Representatives
appearing on the TV show, which is

631
00:55:39,960 --> 00:55:45,599
an interesting feedback loop of its own, but I won't dive too deep into

632
00:55:45,639 --> 00:55:52,960
that right now. That's I might
add that a contrast to the stargate kind

633
00:55:52,960 --> 00:55:57,679
of idea where you go through a
gate and people go to another world,

634
00:55:58,800 --> 00:56:07,599
Lovecraft sometimes use the mind exchange notion, where some person on Earth would switch

635
00:56:07,719 --> 00:56:15,000
minds with an alien creature and the
alien would take over the humans body,

636
00:56:15,480 --> 00:56:22,039
whereas the human would be find himself
on some distant time, perhaps not just

637
00:56:22,199 --> 00:56:28,760
necessarily a different distant place, but
some some other location than the current time

638
00:56:28,800 --> 00:56:32,320
and place, not by traveling there, but by his mind going there is

639
00:56:32,360 --> 00:56:38,000
the alien switches place with him,
which I thought was was kind of an

640
00:56:38,840 --> 00:56:46,039
interesting idea in itself that I guess
has had some follow up more recently,

641
00:56:46,199 --> 00:56:52,320
but not the pattern taken by things
like Stargate. Well, it's interesting too,

642
00:56:52,519 --> 00:56:55,559
how much of at least particularly to
make us as you know, Horace.

643
00:56:55,639 --> 00:57:00,880
One of my major interests at the
moment is Ray Palmer and Richard Shaver

644
00:57:00,000 --> 00:57:04,519
and the Shaver Mystery. How much
you can see what you guys are talking

645
00:57:04,559 --> 00:57:12,639
about, this fiction feeding into eventually
actual pseudo scientific tropes. I think the

646
00:57:12,800 --> 00:57:17,159
entry way for Lovecraft and this type
of thinking into the modern uthology is directly

647
00:57:17,199 --> 00:57:22,199
through the Shaver mystery, because you
can't look at the Shave Mystery without really

648
00:57:22,239 --> 00:57:24,920
thinking about Lovecraft, certainly without thinking
about Merit and other people in that space

649
00:57:24,960 --> 00:57:30,039
that Shaver actually acknowledges or influencers on
him. And then that goes directly into

650
00:57:30,199 --> 00:57:35,440
UFO belief. So you have somebody
riding in the same space as Lovecraft admittably

651
00:57:35,800 --> 00:57:39,679
ten years post, ten years after, and that's Richard Shaver regurgitating many of

652
00:57:39,679 --> 00:57:44,239
these ideas. I shouldn't say reggitating
that, but that's I'm kind of revisiting

653
00:57:44,280 --> 00:57:51,440
many of these ideas but pushing them
forward as fictional representations of a fact of

654
00:57:51,519 --> 00:57:55,159
things which actually happened, and so
that whole kind of ancient civilization idea,

655
00:57:55,320 --> 00:58:00,079
which was popular in science fiction becomes
put forward in Amazing Stories in the mid

656
00:58:00,239 --> 00:58:07,599
forties as genuine historical fact. And
then I think that bleeds into the UFO

657
00:58:07,960 --> 00:58:12,760
belief and bleeds eventually into the popularity
of ancient aliens and ancient astronaut theory and

658
00:58:12,840 --> 00:58:17,079
things like that. Well, Shaver
himself he wrote an article, a short

659
00:58:17,199 --> 00:58:21,320
article called I Think it was Lovecraft
in the Darrows. I mean, so

660
00:58:21,519 --> 00:58:24,519
he was making that connection right there. But you know, speaking of early

661
00:58:24,679 --> 00:58:30,440
UFOs, I didn't mention this in
the book itself because I only came across

662
00:58:30,480 --> 00:58:35,079
it later on. But one of
the early figures in a kind of like

663
00:58:35,320 --> 00:58:39,960
UFO writing is Donald Kehoe, who
now twenty years earlier, was writing for

664
00:58:40,079 --> 00:58:45,320
Weird Tales. He published stories in
the same issue that Lovecraft published stories,

665
00:58:45,360 --> 00:58:50,119
and so we know, like Lovecraft
read all of Weird Tales, he read

666
00:58:50,159 --> 00:58:54,960
Donald Kehoe. We know Donald Kehoe
probably read not just the Lovecraft stories in

667
00:58:55,039 --> 00:59:00,639
the articles or in the issues he
was publishing his stories in. He's probably

668
00:59:00,719 --> 00:59:05,159
reading a lot of other ones also, So almost certainly it's not just through

669
00:59:05,199 --> 00:59:08,719
Shaver, but Kehoe himself probably did
re Lovecraft. And that's on top of

670
00:59:08,719 --> 00:59:14,079
you know, let's he get to
the sixties once the UFO field is really

671
00:59:14,119 --> 00:59:19,079
you know, taking off or kind
of trying to be uh more systematized.

672
00:59:19,159 --> 00:59:22,880
I guess that's also the air of
the Lovecraft renaissance. I think you can

673
00:59:22,920 --> 00:59:29,519
see a lot of similar intersections there. This was just an amazing show.

674
00:59:29,559 --> 00:59:32,199
I could talk to you guys for
another two or three hours to Lovecraft and

675
00:59:32,320 --> 00:59:37,800
Shaver nation Astronaut's theory. But listen, the book is fantastic. Can we

676
00:59:37,239 --> 00:59:40,920
can you guys talk about how people
are gonna can get ahold of I know

677
00:59:42,000 --> 00:59:45,400
it's about to be released. It's
not quite available rights as far as I

678
00:59:45,440 --> 00:59:51,039
know, Is that correct? Right? It is? Can be ordered from

679
00:59:51,119 --> 00:59:57,760
the Hippocampus Press website, but I
haven't gotten the physical copy of the book

680
00:59:57,840 --> 01:00:02,880
yet. The publisher thinks the copies
will be out before the end of August,

681
01:00:04,639 --> 01:00:08,519
so hopefully they won't be the way
too much. It can be ordered

682
01:00:08,760 --> 01:00:16,639
through the Hippocampus Press and probably often
it will be linked to Amazon later on,

683
01:00:16,719 --> 01:00:21,360
but I haven't seen it. It
hasn't appeared there there at the moment,

684
01:00:22,480 --> 01:00:28,719
but certainly you can order it from
Hippocampus Press and it will be on

685
01:00:28,800 --> 01:00:36,719
its way as soon as they get
the actual copies printing out. And if

686
01:00:36,719 --> 01:00:39,800
you're in the area of Providence,
you can go to Eddie giving a reading

687
01:00:39,920 --> 01:00:45,360
from the book tomorrow morning at the
if you're going to the HP Leftcraft Film

688
01:00:45,440 --> 01:00:50,880
Festival that's going on there, not
I am sure up to the level of

689
01:00:50,920 --> 01:00:55,360
the Midwest the Weird Film Festival,
but but no, the Hblevecraft Film Festival.

690
01:00:55,400 --> 01:00:58,599
I've never been there, but I've
only had good things, so that's

691
01:00:58,599 --> 01:01:00,800
going to be an NX. I
would love. I wish I was near

692
01:01:00,880 --> 01:01:04,559
Providence so I could go on.
And what about what about websites for you

693
01:01:04,599 --> 01:01:07,320
guys? Do you have any other
websites you'd like to point anybody out or

694
01:01:07,800 --> 01:01:14,800
I am perpetually working on my personal
website, so it's it's in development continuously.

695
01:01:15,239 --> 01:01:19,039
As of now. I am still
available on I guess what we now

696
01:01:19,079 --> 01:01:22,000
have to call X the everything app. I We'll see how long that last.

697
01:01:22,599 --> 01:01:28,320
But yeah, it's at Edward Gaemont. I'm there for now. I'm

698
01:01:28,360 --> 01:01:30,679
sure if you search my name,
it probably is the first to come up.

699
01:01:31,119 --> 01:01:36,119
But as of now, it's probably
the best way best, considering how

700
01:01:36,559 --> 01:01:40,159
semi functional it is to get in
touch with me. Yeah, for me,

701
01:01:42,119 --> 01:01:46,960
just my university website comes up,
so I probably should make something a

702
01:01:46,960 --> 01:01:52,440
little bit more focusing on the different
books, but I haven't done that yet.

703
01:01:53,400 --> 01:01:59,400
One of the excuses for E.
Meredis professors is you're retired. You

704
01:01:59,400 --> 01:02:05,079
don't have to get anything done.
Well. Well, on that wonderful note,

705
01:02:05,320 --> 01:02:07,800
please let me know when it's available, and Jason and I will certainly

706
01:02:08,199 --> 01:02:13,320
mention it as the book of the
week on Mysterious Library on Tuesday night,

707
01:02:13,360 --> 01:02:15,000
and at some stage we'll get around
I'm sure to talking about the book on

708
01:02:15,119 --> 01:02:20,039
there as well. I'd love to
have you both back on sometime in the

709
01:02:20,039 --> 01:02:23,880
not too distant future, because just
a fascinating conversation, gentlemen. And until

710
01:02:23,920 --> 01:02:27,119
I get to talk to you both
again, and everybody else out there,

711
01:02:27,559 --> 01:02:30,480
keep it weird. Bye, good
evening,