Fool Me Once, Dzyan On You…

This article was originally published on Ferretbrain. I’ve backdated it to its original Ferretbrain publication date but it may have been edited and amended since its original appearance.

Among the various changes that have happened at Chaosium since they went under new management has been the appointment of a new Executive Editor for their fiction line, James Lowder. Much of his work since the takeover has apparently focused on handling wayward payments to contributors and contractural issues; if these problems were anything like those that had infamously affected their RPG publishing efforts, Lowder had a big job on his plate. He has now issued new submission guidelines for Chaosium’s line of tie-in books, with an eye to relaunching it in 2018.

Many tabletop RPG companies have taken a sidestep into the world of producing more conventional books – if you can arrange to get an RPG rulebook printed, after all, you’ve got most of the logistical issues licked – and back in the day Chaosium were no exception. Starting in 1993, their non-gamebook releases included both original fiction and reprints of old material, with game lines like the Arthurian-themed Pendragon and Call of Cthulhu each, as a result of being based on various literary traditions (of very different vintages), having a strong body of material available for Chaosium to republish.

Dissecting Lovecraft Part 2: The Vogon Poetry Phase

This article was originally published on Ferretbrain. I’ve backdated it to its original Ferretbrain publication date but it may have been edited and amended since its original appearance.

Now that we’ve covered Lovecraft’s juvenile works, we can take in his early adult career. Lovecraft’s transition into adulthood was, to put it mildly, a bit of a bumpy one, and it pretty much shut down his fiction output for nearly a decade. During that time, he made his big effort to craft himself into a poet, took up his science writing again, and broke into the hobby world of amateur publishing, all of which I am going to try and take in with this article. I’m also going to include a bit more biographical notes than I intend to include in other portions of this article series, firstly because I think these details are significant to the writing of The Tomb, his return to fiction, and secondly because I think there is a significant enough autobiographical dimension to The Tomb that knowing these details aids greatly in its interpretation. Lastly, I will look at The Tomb itself, to see how Lovecraft’s approach to fiction had developed as a result of life experience and a substantial number of years spent away from such stories.

At the end of Lovecraft’s last year of formal education he suffered a serious breakdown (which may have been purely psychological, or may have been connected to a serious head injury he somehow suffered whilst exploring an abandoned house), and in the future he would feel acutely embarrassed by his failure to obtain a high school graduation certificate or to attend university. One of the few writings Lovecraft issued to the outside world during his 1908-1913 period of seclusion was a letter to the Providence Sunday Journal in late 1909, in which he recounts how on a night-time walkabout on Christmas Eve he stumbled across a group of people who had mistaken Venus for lights from an airship, and was able to point out their mistake.