Mountains of madness found on Pluto's Cthulhu Regio New images from NASA's New Horizons Pluto probe suggest the used-to-be-a-planet possesses methane-frost-covered mountains. The image at the top of this story (or here for readers on mobile devices) shows Pluto (left) and in the insert depicts what NASA describes as “a mountain range located in southeast Cthulhu that’s 260 …
Being able to get his whole collection for $1 on the kindle (long live public domain and fug you Disney for trying to take it away) make his stories just entertaining enough to look past his virulent racism. No way I give a modern author the benefit of the doubt of even being half as big a bigot though. Excellent creepy universe he created but not sure about naming things in the real world after it though.
Definitely recommending Houellebecq on Lovecraft
Chomping my way through an anthology at the moment as it goes. There's a definite sense of, shall we say, "time and place" about some of the language, to be sure (the cat's name in The Rats in the Walls springs to mind). Yet you're quite right that it should get some forgiveness for emanating from a less enlightened time. It's not (thus far) stuck out as being "virulently" racist, more just generally of a high level of xenophobia: there are expressions of prejudice against all sorts of "others" be they black, eskimo, South Sea, "rurals" [hillbillies], Cajuns, and indeed the many then-still-geographically-self-segregated populations hailing from distinct European countries, e.g. the Dutch or the Irish. Nautical types, even. He's pretty much an equal-opportunities bigot. I haven't seen anything about Hispanics yet, which seems odd in the modern USA context, but I'm only a third of the way through the book.
I think despite all this he did sort of acknowledge the USA to be a "broad church" where all these peoples had their place; though integration certainly wasn't on his agenda. I think it fitting to meditate on this mindset given how our country and indeed continent are currently addressing questions of demographic change that seem to bring out the Lovecraft in many of us, from what I've seen.
Given that one of the leaders of the Cult in The Call of Cthulhu was a very old half-blood[1] called Castro, I think the Hispanics are also well covered in Lovecraft's rainbow of xenophobia.
[1] I haven't read The Call of Cthulhu in its original language, only a Spanish translation. I am not completely sure what was the original word that was translated as "mestizo".
I just checked and apparently mestizo was the original word. Anyway, rainbow of xenophobia is right. I've heard it suggested that xenophobia is at the core of all his stories. While that might be an exaggeration, it's certainly true that someone messing with the other in some form and bringing about terrible consequences is a theme he repeated many times.
I'm tempted to say he was also afraid of change, but considering investigating ancient ruins and making technological progress were about equally likely to cause catastrophe, that one might be harder to argue.
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First the heart, now there's ice - that's no dwarf planet, that's a fully functional marketing device for Langnese ice-cream!
And for the record yes skilled snowboarders don't take the top off moguls but the only time you see only skilled snowboarders on the slopes is on TV. Pretty consistently you do see the reason the ski patrol is on the bunny slope is due to some dumbass deciding to try snowboarding without head gear.
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