While I don't think Lovecraft ever advocated genocide/ethnic cleansing, or really was openly in favor of violence towards races he viewed as inferior, and though he did mellow out a little as he got older, his racism definitely went beyond subtext. One of the most famous examples is the story "The Rats in the Walls", which features a cat named, not even joking, "N*gger Man". Which is based off a cat Lovecraft himself owned with the same name. The example I think of, though, is the story "Polaris", which features "squat, hellish yellow fiends" that, from the way they're described, sound like some kind of bestial goblin-like monsters... until it's made very clear at the end that he's talking about Inuit people (or, as he writes it, "Esquimaux".) Just... wow. Luckily, this sort of thing turns up pretty rarely and most of his work is great, but it's something that gives one pause when admitting they're a Lovecraft fan, for sure.

Spoiler: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1ZEv0YmRg_KWZLLRaYR_mMw4IjbLBroJT

That's hard for me to imagine, as it's one of my favorite stories... anywhere.

But... as for "sticking to audiobooks," I can agree with that. In fact, listening to Wayne June read "At the Mountains of Madness" is really my personal favorite. Look for that version.

"Madness" is basically like "The Thing" (the Kurt Russell version)... but more of it. Imagine finding, not a single "thing" but an entire city built by the "things." And then waking some of them up... only to discover that they're not the worst "thing" out there. In fact, it's sort of like putting the B&W Toby Keith "vegetable man" Thing up against the 1980s Things... ;)

Part of why Lovecraft is so hard to read for some folks is that his writing is generally written as "telling what happened after the fact." Almost all of his stories are memoirs. "Madness" differs slightly, in that the storyteller is attempting to convince people not to go back to Antarctica, for fear of what they might bring back.

Yeah. The worst case I'm familiar with from his work is in "The Horror at Red Hook," which talks about people of various ethnicities in fairly derogatory ways.

Honestly, I never got (from his writing) that LOVECRAFT was racist at all. I did get from his writing that some of his CHARACTERS were racist. That's a HUGE difference. It's not... especially when reading the "memoir" style writing Lovecraft was so fond of... entirely reasonable to assume that "what the characters say is what the author thinks."

If someone can provide direct quotes from him... AS HIMSELF... saying terrible, racist things... I'd accept it, of course. But, I think people these days are just really anxious... almost EXCITED... to find reasons to yell "racist!"

Again, "At the Mountains of Madness" has elements which are almost exactly what I'm talking about. Initially, the storyteller (the surviving nominal leader of the doomed Antarctic expedition) talks about the "Old Ones" as monsters. And yet, near the end, he has an epiphany and realizes that, for all their differences, they were really not very different from himself... and were behaving much as humans do.

In general, from my reading of Lovecraft, I get that he played some of his characters up as racists (or as other negative stereotypes) mainly to drive home his REAL point... that we are all pretty much insects compared to the greater powers of the universe.

The storyteller in "The Rats in the Walls" is from a family which emigrated from Europe to the Deep South (during the slavery era).

It would be RIDICULOUS to portray a character from that world as "modern and open-minded." OF COURSE a character who was from a slaveholder family... even one which much of their wealth during the Civil War... will come across as racist. To expect otherwise would be like to attempt to "clean up" "Gone with the Wind" by making all the slaves into "well-paid employees" who were there by choice.

You can't tell "period stories" without being true to the period, and you can't tell stories about people from a particular time without being true to how people of that particular time really thought.

It's sad that people, today, seem not to understand that anymore.

Sure, complain about how things were. Point out how wrong it was. But don't pretend things weren't really that way.

Lovecraft had many racist characters, because that's the way people really were in that era. To have them all sparkly rainbows and loveiness would be... well, frankly... STUPID.

Lovecraft may be "racist" by modern SJW standards, but for the time in which he lived, he was actually pretty enlightened. He got how insignificant our differences, as a species, really are... particularly when compared to the vastness of the universe outside of our tiny little neighborhood.

The big difference between Lovecraft and Howard was, that the older Howard got the more lenient he became with his views. His later stories have, for him and his times, some pretty respectful portrayals of other races. It has been discussed a to sone degree, if Howard had even actually seen or spoken with a black man during his life, keeping in mind he shot himself at the age 30, and if his views were more of heresay he had picked from other people and from books.

I still do think Burroughs was a lot worse than Lovecraft though.

Ah, the long, comfortable best sellers...

They have their function. They cannot be the rule.

I was actually referring to Lovecraft, I know Robert E. Howard was also racist in his writings (big fan of both Cthulhu Mythos and Conan!) but Lovecraft was more extreme IMHO.

How was Burroughs worse than them?
From what I heard, Lovecraft was deeply troubled by the shit Nazis were doing in Germany in that time (what he heard from a friend who visited Germany). Lovecraft was racist, but he wasn't a violent psychopath. He might have supported their racial theories, but not their methods.

Well aware about Phrenology, but difference between science and faux science is simply time and place, science is almost inseparable from ideology in most cases.

Especially in his early Tarzan stories there is hardly any humanity given to native Africans and killing them is just fun hobby for Tarzan. There is also a lot of stuff on how Tarzans English genes make him superior overe the blacks. He does tone it down quite a bit on his later works, but he never gets over the patronizing tone whwn ever he is describing other than white characters.

To be fair, Tarzan was described as a demigod in his first couple of stories, he's hardly a patronizing only to black...

One guy that stands out is Sapper, who wrote the Bulldog Drummond stories. That guy had a serious bug up his butt about non-British people in general.
As I recall, Lovecraft sympathized with the Nazis in their early days, which wasn't particularly unusual. A lot of people were very intrigued by the new governments in Berlin and Moscow, thinking they were wonderful experiments that pointed the way of the future. Robert E. Howard hated the Nazis from the start and he at least in part got Lovecraft to come around to his way of thinking after he basically pointed out that in a Nazi society, eccentric intellectuals like them would be among the first thrown against the wall.

I'm loving how this thread has essentially derailed into the discussion of literature. Like the actual game being announced in the OP just that uninteresting to us.

Well, the actually interesting Lovecraft game got removed from GOG, so...

Yes, "The Thing" :)

As I said - story has FANTASTIC start... And rest?...
Alleged interpretation of "space cucumbers" history by two, not exactly prepared for such assumptions, explorers?

Revelation, at the end, what exactly those "space cucumbers" left after themselves - now that's VERY promising and intriguing.

If I remember correctly setting (Antarctic) was inspired by one of Poe's works
(sorry, don't remember which one).
I don't think Lovecraft himself wouldn't called "Mountains" his best.

PS: And yes, Wayne June is great.

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