\u201cIntroduction: Lovecraft Now\u201d
\nBrian Attebery<\/p>\n
A lovecraftian parody of the american \u201cblack lives matter\u201d movement and the \u201cAll Lives Matter\u201d response has been making the rounds on social media in the closing months of the 2016 election. Depicting a stylized rendering of Lovecraft\u2019s monstrous tentacle creation Cthulhu\u2014who has apparently entered the Presidential race\u2014the slogan reads \u201cNo Lives Matter.\u201d<\/p>\n
The meme (Fig. 1) succinctly captures the essence of Lovecraftian \u201ccosmic fear\u201d\u2014the perspective in the fiction of twentieth-century American author of weird fiction H. P. Lovecraft that, given the immensities of space and time, as well as the existence of alien beings such as Cthulhu of immeasurable power, human existence is meaningless. No lives matter because, undercutting human exceptionalism and pricking humanist pretensions, all human existence is inconsequential in the larger scheme of things.<\/p>\n
At the same time, however, the meme also foregrounds what many have increasingly found objectionable in Lovecraft: the sense that, to riff on Orwell, all lives may be meaningless but some are considered more meaningless than others. As many readers of JFA<\/em> will know, controversy related to Lovecraft\u2019s notorious racism assumed a new level of cultural visibility in 2014 when author Daniel Jos\u00e9 Older started a petition to change the World Fantasy Award statuette from a bust of Lovecraft to one of African-American science fiction author Octavia Butler. Older\u2019s position was that while Lovecraft\u2019s legacy was important, he was also both a bigot and a poor wordsmith; these opinions led Older to write in his petition that \u201cit\u2019s time to stop co-signing [Lovecraft\u2019s] bigotry and move sci-fi\/fantasy out of the past\u201d (Older). Taking a strong position against racism, Older told The Guardian<\/em>, \u201cincludes not championing a vile racist\u201d (Flood).<\/p>\n Older\u2019s petition elicited strong feelings on both sides of the debate, with some arguing vigorously that the face of fantasy\u2019s most prestigious award shouldn\u2019t be that of a man with such reprehensible views, while others\u2014most notably Lovecraft expert S.T. Joshi\u2014rose to Lovecraft\u2019s defense, asserting that he was a product of his times, that his views and his works could be separated, and\/or that his contributions to speculative literature overshadow his dim views of \u201ccolour.\u201d Lovecraft\u2019s defenders lost\u2014in November of 2015, it was announced that the bust of Lovecraft will be dropped and a new award created. As of this writing, the replacement is not yet known.<\/p>\n What the WFA dust-up, together with \u201cNo Lives Matter\u201d parody, makes clear is that, while the Cyclopean vistas of deep time may reduce all human achievements to lone and level stretches of sand, in the near term, human lives do matter and art and politics (and art as politics) are implicated in establishing and contesting those standards of meaningfulness. Our interest here in the World Fantasy Awards controversy over Lovecraft\u2019s image and legacy, as well as in contemporary appropriations and redeployments of Lovecraftian motifs and themes in media that didn\u2019t even exist while Lovecraft was alive, has to do in particular with the ways in which they help to establish and inflect the meaningfulness of \u201cLovecraft\u201d himself: to help establish who he was and what he stood for. What the WFA debate (which actually received coverage on America\u2019s National Public Radio and in many prominent publications, including The Guardian<\/em>, The Atlantic<\/em>, Salon.com<\/em>, and The LA Review of <\/em>Books<\/em>) did perhaps more than anything was to make still more people aware of Lovecraft\u2014a relatively obscure author at the time of his death in 1937 from cancer at the age of 46. The debate in this way helped to crystallize a trend in process for over seventy years now: the \u201cmainstreaming\u201d of Lovecraft. But which Lovecraft?<\/p>\n The origins of this JFA<\/em> special issue on H. P. Lovecraft predate the WFA controversy when in 2011 we began to discuss the curious and unprecedented ubiquity of Lovecraft in contemporary American popular culture. From South Park<\/em> to Facebook memes to videogames to plushy Necronomicons<\/em>, Lovecraft was seemingly popping up everywhere\u2014and not just in anticipated venues such as weird fiction, horror fiction, and cult film, but also in much more mainstream contexts. Our question \u201cwhy Lovecraft, why now?\u201d became the focus for a call for papers for a book collection that would address Lovecraft\u2019s popularity and role in twenty-first century culture. Unsure of how many proposals we would receive and hoping for enough to constitute a volume, we were a bit stunned then to get 70 of them\u2014diverse, intriguing, and substantially more than any book collection could accommodate.<\/p>\n As with any such process of selection, there were proposals better suited to our focus or more to our taste than others, but there were so many varied and strong ones that we began to contemplate a second volume, the materialization of which can be found in these pages. The process of allocation was facilitated by the fact that the essay submissions broke upon an obvious fault line: we received a group of submissions that explored Lovecraft\u2019s work in light of contemporary theoretical paradigms such as object-oriented ontology and posthumanism\u2014these became our book collection, The Age of Lovecraft<\/em>, published by the University of Minnesota Press in 2016; and we received a group of submissions that considered contemporary \u201cappropriations\u201d of Lovecraft\u2014his influences on contemporary makers of popular culture, allusions to him to modern works, and extensions of his writings into other genres. These essays are the ones that appear here.<\/p>\n The question of what explains Lovecraft\u2019s contemporary prominence (one that we explore in much greater depth in the introduction to The Age of Lovecraft<\/em>) of course is an overdetermined one, but to a certain extent reflects a process of genealogical inheritance in which a burgeoning weird family tree reflects Lovecraft\u2019s expanding sphere of influence. A prolific letter writer, Lovecraft during his lifetime encouraged the aspirations of young writers including August Derleth, Robert E. Howard, Robert Bloch, and Fritz Leiber. Both during his lifetime and after, these authors and others participated with Lovecraft in developing what has become known as the Cthulhu Mythos, a shared fictional world finding its basis in Lovecraft\u2019s work. After Lovecraft\u2019s death, Derleth and Donald Wandrei established the publishing house Arkham House in 1939 for the purpose of preserving in hardcover Lovecraft\u2019s fiction. Lovecraft, together with these other authors, then influenced Ramsey Campbell, Stephen King, and Clive Barker, who in turn helped shape Neil Gaiman, China Mi\u00e9ville, Alan Moore, and Caitl\u00edn R. Kiernan. In film, Lovecraft\u2019s writings first influenced Roger Corman and later Ridley Scott, John Carpenter, Sam Raimi, Stuart Gordon, Joss Whedon, and Guillermo del Toro. As fantasy and science fiction have moved mainstream and these latter figures have become the central makers of popular culture, they have brought Lovecraft along with them. In keeping with this expanding sphere of influence\u2014and the central focus of the authors collected here\u2014the ways of encountering Lovecraft have now shifted and expanded.<\/p>\n Stephen King discovered Lovecraft after his mother found a box of paperbacks left behind by her estranged husband. In the past, Lovecraft often appeared through such accidental means; some might argue that he was best experienced that way, surreptitiously, almost unconsciously. For decades, those few who valued Lovecraft championed him through finding friends willing to help to preserve the pulpy writings and to publish them for a wider audience. But Lovecraft\u2014for better or worse\u2014no longer lurks only in boxes of forgotten treasures; he now enjoys a significant place in the larger convergence culture of the twenty-first century. Aspects of his life and his fiction regularly feed the expanding m\u00e9lange of commercial products, including a wide array of textual adaptations or appropriations. All these materials allow audiences a range of opportunities to rethink, expand, and play in a world they once thought limited to a handful of stories. Consider, too, the multiple internet memes such as the one which with we started, along with YouTube videos, plush dolls, action figures, fan fiction, fan art, and tentacle-ridden ski masks that populate the online marketplace. Lovecraft-inspired board games likewise provide a means of recreating\u2014and experiencing\u2014approximations of Lovecraftian spaces. Many popular games, including those with no obvious connection to Lovecraft, include some version of Lovecraft\u2019s monstrous creation Cthulhu in expansions, special editions, and so on.<\/p>\n All these permutations and expansions of Lovecraft challenge conventional approaches to adaptation that typically focus on what happens when literary texts are adapted for the big screen. Even though film adaptations are significant in their own right, the turn to other media may shed light not only on the process of adaptation but also on the way the Lovecraftian weird functions. As two of the articles in this issue demonstrate, Lovecraft\u2019s fiction is quite well suited to graphic novels. Adaptations of Lovecraft\u2019s work into comics began with a 1950 retelling of \u201cIn the Vault.\u201d Since then, weird tales have appeared intermittently in comic form; in the last ten years, however, multiple comic adaptations have appeared, suggesting that comic writers and artists are championing Lovecraft more than ever. An adaptation of At the Mountains of Madness <\/em>by I. N. J. Culbard appeared in 2010. Culbard also adapted The Case of Charles Dexter Ward <\/em>(2012), The Shadow out of Time <\/em>(2013), and The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath <\/em>(2014). Self Made Hero, a comics publisher, has also released two volumes of The Lovecraft Anthology <\/em>(2011 and 2012). The stories that made up Batman: The Doom that Came to Gotham<\/em>, which originally appeared in 2000 and 2001, were collected and published in a single volume in late 2015. Mike Mignola, the author and cover artist for those Batman tales is also the creator of Hellboy<\/em>, a comic series (and movie franchise) deeply indebted to Lovecraft\u2019s Cthulhu Mythos. Alan Moore, whose Neonomicon <\/em>(2011) is discussed below, has long commented on Lovecraft\u2019s influence on his large body of work, including such texts as Watchmen<\/em>, V for Vendetta<\/em>, and From Hell<\/em>.<\/p>\n This issue, which focuses on Lovecraft\u2019s influences and adaptations of his literary work into other media, begins with Amy Ransom\u2019s \u201cLovecraft in Quebec: Transcultural Fertilization and Esther Rochon\u2019s Reevaluation of the Powers of Horror,\u201d an article that explores Lovecraft\u2019s three short trips to Quebec, his recorded impressions of the province, its history and culture, and his influence on key French-Canadian authors such as Michael Tremblay, Daniel Sernine, Yves Meynard, and, especially, Esther Rochon. Ransom argues that each of these authors delve into Lovecraftian space in ways that not only pay homage to the Cthulhu mythos, but that also find ways of expanding it, questioning it, and revising it. Ransom shows how Esther Rochon, attuned to the same sort of discomfort expressed by those signing the petition to have Lovecraft\u2019s face removed from the WFA statuette, reverses the \u201caffective charge\u201d within the tried-and-true Lovecraftian tropes in order to transcend some of the limitations Lovecraft seemed to place on the possibilities of understanding race, abjection, and Otherness.<\/p>\n From tours of Quebec we shift to journeys through intertextual space as Rebecca Janicker\u2019s \u201cVisions of Monstrosity: Lovecraft, Adaptation and the Comics Arts\u201d examines selections from the two volumes of the comic series The Lovecraft Anthology <\/em>to shed light on our understanding of adaptive practices. Whereas many scholars focus on film adaptations of Lovecraftian texts, Janicker demonstrates that comics may be a better medium for capturing and expanding Lovecraft\u2019s moods, his stories, and his weirdness. With this in mind, Janicker foregrounds Lovecraft\u2019s exuberance for the visual arts, especially his youthful enjoyment of illustrated texts and his allusions to painters and paintings in his fiction, to underscore the important connection between word and image in Lovecraft\u2019s work.<\/p>\n Janicker\u2019s discussion of comic adaptations then sets the stage for Adam Kozaczka\u2019s analysis of Neonomicon <\/em>(2011), Alan Moore\u2019s sexually charged Lovecraftian graphic novel. In \u201cH. P. Lovecraft, Too Much Sex, and Not Enough: Alan Moore\u2019s Playfully Repressive Hypothesis,\u201d Kozaczka discusses the complex ways Moore brings sexuality into his representations of the Cthulhu Mythos in order to comment on sexual politics, repression, and heteronormativity. Even though Neonomicon <\/em>ultimately privileges a heterosexual, reproductive sexuality, it does so in ways that nevertheless critique the themes, plots, and characters typically associated with Lovecraftian horror.<\/p>\n Lovecraft\u2019s popularity fuels an industry that uses his creations to develop games, Internet memes, toys, music, movies, and parodies. There is also a significant fan culture using these items. Justin Mullis\u2019s \u201cPlaying Games with the Great Old Ones: Ritual, Play, and Joking within the Cthulhu Mythos Fandom\u201d draws on insights from anthropology, religious studies, and fan culture to comment on the ways this large fan base creates an \u201cas if\u201d world to make sense of the problems and challenges of daily life. Fan practices, Mullis concludes, reflect the same kinds of hopes and aspirations as traditional religious communities.<\/p>\n The final piece in this issue, David McWilliam\u2019s \u201cBeyond the Mountains of Madness: Lovecraftian Cosmic Horror and Posthuman Creationism in Ridley Scott\u2019s Prometheus <\/em>(2012),\u201d addresses the film\u2019s use of Lovecraftian pessimism to posit a universe in which human beings are not only insignificant but also irrelevant. Prometheus<\/em>, according to McWilliam, offers a nihilistic form of posthuman creationism that undermines assumptions about the sanctity of human life by revealing a universe in which anthropocentrism gives way to the realization that humans are simply experimental subjects in an inscrutable alien plan.<\/p>\n This final proposition\u2014that humans are simply experimental subjects in an inscrutable alien plan\u2014brings us back to Cthulhu and the slogan \u201cno lives matter.\u201d Though the Lovecraftian parody is amusing, the essays included here highlight the point that, at least in terms of human time, lives do matter, but that the meaning of those lives is never fixed and set. Instead, there is a perpetual contest over meaning and the process of becoming. This is as true of \u201cLovecraft\u201d as he is invented and reinvented by critics, artists, and readers, as it is of the ethnicities represented within his work.<\/p>\n Works Cited<\/p>\n Flood, Alison. \u201cWorld Fantasy Awards Pressed to Drop HP Lovecraft Trophy in Racism Row.\u201d TheGuardian.com<\/em>. 17 Sept. 2014. Web. 28 Mar. 2016 http:\/\/www. theguardian.com\/books\/2014\/sep\/17\/world-fantasy-awards-hp-lovecraft-racismrow-statuette Older, Daniel Jos\u00e9. \u201cPetitioning the World Fantasy Award: Make Octavia Butler the WFA Statue Instead of Lovecraft.\u201d Change.org<\/em>. Web. 28 Mar, 2016. https:\/\/ www.change.org\/p\/the-world-fantasy-award-make-octavia-butler-the-wfa-statueinstead-of-lovecraft<\/p>\n Introduction: Lovecraft Now Lovecraft in Quebec: Transcultural Fertilization and Esther Rochon\u2019s Reevaluation of the Powers of Horror Visions of Monstrosity: Lovecraft, Adaptation and the Comics Arts P. Lovecraft, Too Much Sex, and Not Enough: Alan Moore\u2019s Playfully Repressive Hypothesis Playing Games with the Great Old Ones: Ritual, Play, and Joking within the Cthulhu Mythos Fandom Beyond the Mountains of Madness: Lovecraftian Cosmic Horror and Posthuman Creationism in Ridley Scott\u2019s Prometheus<\/em> (2012) Classic? SF? Ernest Mathijs\u2019s John Fawcett\u2019s <\/em>Ginger Snaps Balaka Basu, Katherine R. Broad, and Carrie Hintz\u2019s Contemporary Dystopian Fiction for Young Adults: Brave New Teenagers Britte Lange\u2019s Die Entdeckung Deutschlands: Science Fiction als Propaganda <\/em>[The Discovery of Germany: Science Fiction as Propaganda] Natacha Vas-Deyres, Patrick Bergeron, Patrick Guay, Florence Plet-Nicolas, and Dani\u00e8le Andr\u00e9\u2019s Les Dieux cach\u00e9s de la science-fiction fran\u00e7aise et francophone (1950-2010) <\/em>[The Hidden Gods of French and Francophone sf, 1950-2010] David Lavery\u2019s Joss Whedon, A Creative Portrait: From B<\/em>uffy the Vampire Slayer to <\/em>The Avengers Aurora Bern\u00e1rdez and Carles \u00c1lvarez Garriga\u2019s Cort\u00e1zar de la A a la Z: un \u00e1lbum biogr\u00e1fico <\/em>[Cort\u00e1zar from A to Z: A Biographical Album] Christopher Robichaud\u2019s Dungeons & Dragons and Philosophy: Read and Gain Advantage on All Wisdom Checks Helen Conrad-O\u2019Briain and Gerard Hynes\u2019s J. R. R. Tolkien: The Forest and the City Caroline Webb\u2019s Fantasy and the Real World in British Children\u2019s Literature Judith Wolfe and Brendan Wolfe\u2019s C. S. Lewis\u2019s<\/em> Perelandra: Reshaping the Image of the Cosmos Gerry Canavan and Kim Stanley Robinson\u2019s Green Planets: Ecology and Science Fiction Javier Ordiz\u2019s Estrategias y figuraciones de lo ins\u00f3lito en la narrativa mexicana (siglos XIX\u2013XXI) <\/em>[Strategies of the Strange in Mexican Narrative (Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries)] P. Telotte\u2019s Science Fiction TV Artur Blaim\u2019s Gazing in Useless Wonder: English Utopian Fictions, 1516-1800 Jon Towlson\u2019s Subversive Horror Cinema: Countercultural Messages of Films from Frankenstein to the Present Theresa Freda Nicolay\u2019s Tolkien and the Modernists: Literary Responses to the Dark New Days of the 20th Century Barbara Brodman and James E. Doan\u2019s The Universal Vampire Origins and Evolution of the Legend Sebastian Stoppe\u2019s Unterwegs zu neuen Welten. Star Trek als politische Utopie <\/em>[En route to New Worlds: Star Trek as Political Utopia] Monika B. Hilder\u2019s The Gender Dance: Ironic Subversion in C. S. Lewis\u2019s Cosmic Trilogy<\/em> and Surprised by the Feminine: A Rereading of C. S. Lewis and Gender Editor\u2019s Introduction \u201cIntroduction: Lovecraft Now\u201d Brian Attebery A lovecraftian parody of the american \u201cblack lives matter\u201d movement and the \u201cAll Lives Matter\u201d response has been making the rounds on social media in the closing months of the 2016 election. Depicting a stylized rendering of Lovecraft\u2019s monstrous tentacle creation Cthulhu\u2014who has apparently entered the Presidential race\u2014the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"parent":0,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-738","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.fantastic-arts.org\/jfa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/738","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.fantastic-arts.org\/jfa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.fantastic-arts.org\/jfa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.fantastic-arts.org\/jfa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.fantastic-arts.org\/jfa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=738"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/www.fantastic-arts.org\/jfa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/738\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":739,"href":"http:\/\/www.fantastic-arts.org\/jfa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/738\/revisions\/739"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.fantastic-arts.org\/jfa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=738"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}Articles<\/h3>\n
\nCarl Sederholm and Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock<\/p>\n
\nAmy J. Ransom<\/p>\n
\nRebecca Janicker<\/p>\n
\nAdam Kozaczka<\/p>\n
\nJustin Mullis<\/p>\n
\nDavid McWilliam<\/p>\nReview Essay<\/h3>\n
\nPaul Kincaid<\/p>\nReviews<\/h3>\n
\nRev. by Aalya Ahmad<\/p>\n
\n<\/em>Rev. by Lisa Arter<\/p>\n
\nRev. by Bruce Beatie<\/p>\n
\nRev. by Sophie Beaul\u00e9<\/p>\n
\nRev. by Nellene Benhardus<\/p>\n
\nRev. by Jaime R. Brenes Reyes<\/p>\n
\n<\/em>Rev. by A. P. Canavan<\/p>\n
\n<\/em>Rev. by Ian Faith<\/p>\n
\n<\/em>Rev. by Melanie Griffin<\/p>\n
\n<\/em>Rev. by Carl Kears<\/p>\n
\n<\/em>Rev. by Megan Mandell<\/p>\n
\nRev. by Bret Noble<\/p>\n
\n<\/em>Rev. by Amy J. Ransom<\/p>\n
\n<\/em>Rev. by Matthew Reza<\/p>\n
\n<\/em>Rev. by Joshua Richardson<\/p>\n
\n<\/em>Rev. by Don Riggs<\/p>\n
\n<\/em>Rev. by Cristina Santos<\/p>\n
\nRev. by Simon Spiegel<\/p>\n
\n<\/em>Rev. by Richard C. West<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"