Tag: lovecraft

On the Lovecraftian nature of United 93.

There have been sufficient people asking about my observation here that the most successful Lovecraft/Mythos movies made were Alien, Pleasantville, and United 93 – particularly the last one – that I will attempt to explain what I meant there.  Let’s dispose of Alien quickly: malevolent universe, deliberately hostile towards humanity; overwhelming doom – everybody on-board with that one?  We good?  Good. Continue reading On the Lovecraftian nature of United 93.

Balefires is coming back out in paperback.

At the end of June; Balefires is a collection of David Drake‘s fantasy short stories, and is noteworthy for having “Than Curse the Darkness,” which is probably in the top ten of most people’s short lists of Greatest Cthulhu Mythos Stories*. The collection is also available in hardback, so if you’re into instant gratification, knock yourself out.

Meanwhile, Lovecraft is Missing continues its surveys of… stuff.  Interesting stuff, but… stuff.

Moe Lane

*Including a couple written by HP Lovecraft himself, if you’ll pardon the rank heresy.

Great. Giant mountains in Antarctica.

Just great:

Alp-sized peaks found entombed in Antarctic ice

OSLO (Reuters) – Jagged mountains the size of the Alps have been found entombed in Antarctica’s ice, giving new clues about the vast ice sheet that will raise world sea levels if even a fraction of it melts, scientists said on Tuesday.

Using radar and gravity sensors, the experts made the first detailed maps of the Gamburtsev subglacial mountains, originally detected by Russian scientists 50 years ago at the heart of the East Antarctic ice sheet.

“The surprising thing was that not only is this mountain range the size of the Alps, but it looks quite similar to the (European) Alps, with high peaks and valleys,” said Fausto Ferraccioli, a geophysicist at the British Antarctic Survey who took part in the research.

Fark, of course, immediately twigged to the problem here, and it ain’t global warming. It’s the fact that there are big honking mountains in Antarctica, just like HP Lovecraft said that there were.  Which leads one to wonder what else the man was right about… if I was dumb enough to think about it too closely, of course. So I’ll just note that Charlie Stross’ “A Colder War” (found in his collection of short stories Toast) is a fun sequel to Lovecraft’s At the Mountains of Madness, particularly if you like Cold War-era paranoia.

And really, who doesn’t?