Lovecraft, Science Fiction, and Horror

Kind of a late Halloween post, but here are some thoughts I had about one of the most influential horror writers of all time.

H. P. Lovecraft is, I would argue, more important for his influence than what he personally wrote. His influence can be felt in fantasy, horror, and science fiction. He tremendously expanded the idea of what an "alien" could be, and also blended genres in interesting ways, which has made it easy to incorporate "Lovecraftian" influences in other writing. He also had a kind of novel concept of a mythos that he allowed, and in fact encouraged other writers to help build (Robert E. Howard, creator of Conan the Barbarian, was among them.)

He was writing at a time when the field of Physics was undergoing tremendous changes. Moving forward from the clockwork, familiar predictability of Newtonian physics, thinkers like Einstein were redefining the way we thought about time and space, and though Einstein himself was never satisfied with it, his work brought about the probabilistic science of Quantum Physics, which suggested that the universe was, at a fundamental level, not only subjective (that he was fine with, and was the basis of General Relativity) but also chaotic and unpredictable.

Lovecraft was certainly not the first writer to imagine alien life as hostile. While other examples could surely exist, H. G. Wells really codified the “alien invasion” trope with War of the Worlds. The book depicted a terrifying alien threat that devastated an unprepared humanity, and Earth’s victory comes not at the hands of smart and brave people, but of virulent microbes that we had only recently even discovered.

But while the Martians of War of the Worlds are truly horrific – liquefying the dead to feed themselves and existing as mushy, formless brain-things that require mechanical exobodies to do just about anything (something that had to be an inspiration for the Daleks of Doctor Who) – their threat is really a physical one. A human who saw such a creature would respond with fear, but a rational fear of a physical danger.

Lovecraft blended genres to create an amalgam that felt very much his own. Aesthetically, we often combine Lovecraftian stories with the trappings of Gothic Horror, such as that pioneered by Edgar Alan Poe. Poe’s stories are almost all horror of the mind, dealing with madness. The Casque of Amontillado is not so much terrifying because of the horrible murder that Montresor committed, but more the casual, blithe manner in which he readily confesses his sin. The Tell-Tale Heart has the killer become convinced that his victim’s heart is still beating, which we see through his mad perspective.

The Adventure genre, which flourished thanks to 19^th Century Imperialism, was also a great progenitor of Lovecraft’s style. Adventure stories suggested that the world had many hidden places – cultures that, in the “civilized” world, had never been heard of. With all these cultures came strange religious beliefs and superstitions.

Unfortunately, this also came with a lot of racism. The idea that there was such a thing as a “superior race” was still a quite-popular idea at the time. Lovecraft extended his fears about these foreign cultures to foreign people of all sorts. Despite a kind of contempt for the very notion that humanity is anything special, he still fell into the common contemporary idea that "White, Anglo-Saxons" were basically humanity at its most human and therefore best.

Fear of the Other is central to Lovecraft’s stories. But typically, this Otherness goes beyond mere foreign cultures, and extends rather into the vast cosmos.

Throughout the Enlightenment, but particularly in the Industrialization of the 19^th century, rationalism came to be the default mode of thought for the Western World. Diseases were caused by microbes rather than demons, people born with deformities might have had genetic disorders rather than curses. Alchemy gave way to Chemistry and Astrology gave way to Astronomy. We began to understand that the sun was just a big ball of hydrogen gas and the stars were the same sort of thing, just much farther away.

But Lovecraft feared that rationalism was just naïveté. Our conception of the universe had grown tremendously – from a geo- and then helio-centric universe that was really just the solar system to the concept of a galaxy and then multiple galaxies… and things have just gotten larger and stranger, with real scientists today coming up with theories of multiple universes and far more than the 3+1 dimensions that we experience day-to-day.

In a universe so vast, a few possibilities presented themselves. The first was that there could be, and perhaps it’s so likely to be almost inevitable that there are, other species, alien species, that are more complex and advanced than we are as much as we are more complex and advanced than a bacterium.

Not only is the universe so enormous that, in Lovecraft’s eyes, all of human history is essentially irrelevant, but if some greater species were to come here, they would not even destroy us out of cruelty, jealousy, or avarice, like Wells' Martians, but perhaps out of simple ignorance or apathy. Even a vegetarian cannot prevent his or her white blood cells from killing foreign bacteria. A vegan might accidentally step on an ant.

But as far as we’ve gotten here, there still isn’t a real distinct difference between Lovecraft and Science Fiction. The Xenomorph from Alien is so deadly (at least in the first movie) that it’s almost hard to believe anyone at all survived. But even though it’s faster, stronger, and maybe even smarter than the people on board the Nostromo, it’s still something that can be rationally understood.

Where Lovecraft goes farther is the idea of incomprehensibility. One of the conceits of the whole endeavor of Rationalism is that, with enough study and cleverness, any mystery is solvable. But if we are, biologically, physiologically finite in our intellectual faculties, that means that we will, at best, eventually just reach a point where our minds cannot handle the complexity of a being that is greater than we are.

And so, Lovecraft’s horror is largely about seeing the failure of rationalism.

We have learned enough to look into the cosmos, but what Lovecraft's heroes find there is so vast, powerful, and fundamentally mysterious that we must fall back on our superstitious terminology – referring to things as gods and demons and magic.

The horrors of Lovecraft defy rational explanation, not because there is no such explanation, but because the explanation is so complex, so fundamentally unlike our familiar experience of reality, that human brains cannot handle them. Ironically, or perhaps appropriately, this calls back to Biblical ideas about how humans cannot look on the face of God without being destroyed.

Lovecraft does not have much to offer in the way of comfort. Ignorance is best, and cultish superstition is essentially your best-case scenario if you do wind up wandering into these truths. But a Lovecraftian hero who embodies the modern values of relentless curiosity and intelligence is doomed to a tragic end, often going beyond the event horizon into insanity – a brain that has cracked from the pressure of knowledge that cannot fit within it.