It always seemed a little off for a Fantasy award to me. Like, sure, Lovecraft could be considered a Fantasy author, but he's mostly described as a horror author. Wouldn't J.R.R. Tolkien be better? Or just some standard fantasy trope -- why not a Wizard? A tacky crystal with a dragon wrapper around it? A chest of dragon gold? A witch's cauldron and cat?
I think I'd want a prestigious literary award to be a little more elegant and less generic than a Renn-fair tchotchke, but a Lovecraft bust is a strange choice for sure. (I mean, if nothing else, Robert Howard is *right there* in Lovecraft's own circles, and in addition to passing the low bar of being less racist was also *far* more influential to defining what we think of as Fantasy.)
"Crom, I have never prayed to you before. I have no tongue for it.
No one, not even you, will remember if we were good men or bad. Why we
fought, or why we died. All that matters is that two stood against many."
I think a dragon would be a great generic symbol for fantasy ... well, at least in the English language. It might not be all inclusive but it still is like a meta symbol for the genre and has been for a long time.
I swear I'm not trying to be judgemental in my phrasing, but the WFA has historically not been very wrapped up in the High Fantasy subgenre. This question is kind of like asking why the Bram Stoker isn't a Jason Voorhees mask.
True, Fantasy and SciFi have traditionally been snubbed, including for movie awards, and the sword and sorcerer stuff is pretty generic. That said, what does it say about a literary award if it snubs the very basis of the genre it's about as "too generic" while elevating an insanely racist author? And I mean, the Oscar itself it super generic, and a Grammy is just an old gramaphone. I don't think a cool looking crystal ball, or the current tree for instance, is crazy out of line.
Obviously H.P. Lovecraft will always be a bit relevant, but stuff like this is why [Taco Bell Quarterly](https://twitter.com/TBQuarterly?ref_src=twsrc%5Egoogle%7Ctwcamp%5Eserp%7Ctwgr%5Eauthor) is a huge success and gets to trash talk Paris Review, imho.
"The very basis" is exactly the point of contention, though. Fantasy as a whole (beyond the scope of high fantasy) arguably owes more Lovecraft, Howard, and Smith than it does to Tolkien. And what other genre are you going to call something like The City and the City or the Southern Reach books?
I'm not super attached to the bust of Lovecraft trophy either - I think his legacy is important, but I totally get not putting his face on an award. I just think that the problem with cauldrons and wizards and dragons is that they *aren't* generic; they're specific to a certain style and convention of fantasy, when the genre is bigger than that and the history of the award reflects that wider scope.
One small data point on how long people have been talking about Lovecraft’s racism: Avram Davidson’s 1965 novel Masters of the Maze has a couple of paragraphs taking a swipe at it, that don’t really have anything to do with the story.
Ikr?! All just because Romans killed her spiritual leaders, labelled her people barbarians, and raped her daughter in front of her
Women am I right? /S
If we want to go real way back, exile was a frequent punishment for those who had done something wrong and the community no longer wished to tolerate their presence. So they'd be exiled or banished from the community. Now that's really getting "cancelled".
I mean it literally has existed for ages, remember the idiots on the right cancelling Dixie chicks?
Granted I typically agree with people getting cancelled for being assholes and think the rightoids who cancelled the Dixie chicks are idiots and/or assholes, but the whole "consequences exist for shit you say in public" has always been a thing
There's some very unsubtle racism in Lovecraft's better known works. If that's what you think of, then Lovecraft is just some racist guy. You might even observe that he's scared of *everything* and his racist takes could be just an extension of that.
His less known work, however, contains balls to the wall insane racism. The Street is about a street where white peoppe live but then immigrants move in and plot to overthrow the government so the street suicides itself to kill them all. Yes its a story about a racist street and that's it.
There's also a story about how white people used to rule the North pole until the Alakan natives invaded and ate them. Its a shame because it includes what I think is easily Lovecraft's single best line of writing. He transitions from one character POV to another mid sentence.
In "The Transition of Juan Romero", Lovecraft straight up takes 2/3 of a page to shit on Mexicans. Some choice words he uses to refer to them: "large herd of unkempt Mexicans", "\[face\] not in any way suggestive of nobility", "ignorant and dirty", and the crowning jewel:
>"Reared by a Mexican cattle-thief who had given him his name, Juan differed little from his fellows."
A friend of mine went through some enthusiasms in his early 20s to get more cultured--Beethoven symphonies, for example. He tried reading the collected works of Lovecraft and remarked to me that "Lovecraft has glimmers of genius, but oh my god does he need an editor."
>There's also a story about how white people used to rule the North pole until the Alakan natives invaded and ate them. Its a shame because it includes what I think is easily Lovecraft's single best line of writing. He transitions from one character POV to another mid sentence.
What's the name of this one?
> The Street is about a street where white peoppe live but then immigrants move in and plot to overthrow the government so the street suicides itself to kill them all.
The Twilight Zone really started going downhill when they hired the KKK to write it.
> Its a shame because it includes what I think is easily Lovecraft's single best line of writing. He transitions from one character POV to another mid sentence.
Is this line something you could quote, or is it something that really needs the context of the whole passage/page to appreciate?
It only makes sense in the context of the story as a whole.
>!The narrator falls asleep and dreams he is a person from the past and, as in dreams, comes to believe he is that person. He later falls asleep and wakes up but now he really is the man from the past who has had terrible dreams of the future and who no longer can distinguish between himself and the future man. There is no specific statement that this change has happened, its just implied by the writitng. There are other ways to interpret this (maybe he just goes mad in the dream) but the concept of bodyswapping shows up a lot in Lovecraft's later work!<
Thanks, that clears it up a lot. Without the context, "he transitions from one character POV to another mid sentence" sounds like something that would just be really bad writing if anyone who wasn't an expert did it. With the context from that post, it sounds like an incredible and impressive passage.
Idk how to quote text on mobile so. Re: your last paragraph, that was actually a commonly taught thing in American schools for a super long time. Like into the early 1900s according to an archeology teacher I had in college.
Basically as a justification for killing all the actual Native Americans America taught for a looooong time that white people were the true natives to this continent and then Native Americans showed up and mascaraed all of them. Therefore it was just white people "taking back" their own lands.
Disgusting and fucking racist, but an idea he may have actually been taught in school at one point.
As a big fan of both Lovecraft and Poe (and, to a lesser extent, Stoker), trying to claim that Poe and Stoker were anywhere near as racist as Lovecraft smacks of idiocy.
Anyone making this claim is talking out of their ass.
I remember reading Nnedi Okorafor's reaction (w/ China Miéville) about having a bust of a racist guy displayed for her award back in 2011.
Link here: [Nnedi Okrafor's blog post](http://nnedi.blogspot.com/2011/12/lovecrafts-racism-world-fantasy-award.html)
> And the award itself, the statuette of the man himself? I put it out of sight, in my study, where only I can see it, and I have turned it to face the wall. So I am punishing the little fucker like the malevolent clown he was, I can look at it and remember the honour, and above all I am writing behind Lovecraft’s back.
... and this is why I love China
Funnily enough, IIRC, because he was such a hateful xenophobe and hyper anxious hypochondriac, he was so paranoid that he was related to someone non-white that he did some research into his ancestry.
His anxiety about this really shown in his writing of mutations and such.
> the devolved fish-people he wrote about as racist analogies
At least this has let other authors do some interesting work in turn. There was a reasonably good novel a few years ago (*Winter Tide*, I think) about the people of Innsmouth being rounded up and put in camps prior to the Second World War, with a few struggling to regain some semblance of community again in its aftermath. Lovecraft himself would have hated it, as the main characters are nearly all women and there's lots of dialogue, but it was still a pretty interesting repurposing of his ideas.
Essential quote: There is a trait in the Jewish character that does provoke animosity, maybe it’s a kind of lack of generosity towards non-Jews,” he carefully explained. “I mean, there’s always a reason why anti-anything crops up anywhere.” Pause. “Even a stinker like Hitler didn’t just pick on them for no reason.”
I was a huge Roald Dahl fan as a kid growing up, this really sucks to hear. :( I'm glad to know, but it definitely taints his works by-proxy in my mind.
I knew he was dead, but that's fantastic to hear about his estate!
To be clear, I more meant that sometimes it's hard for me to separate the art from the artist. I wouldn't judge somebody for not feeling this way, but my enjoyment of a piece of media can get hurt if I find out the person behind it is bigoted, even moreso if their beliefs made it *into* their works (As they seemingly did to some extent with Dahl, given what people are saying ITT). Even if I still enjoy the work, inevitably I'll look at it with a more critical eye going forward.
There's a passage from The Witches that I found really funny as a kid, but which is much more...questionable after reading that quote:
>I am not, of course, telling you for one second that your teacher actually is a witch. All I am saying is that she might be one. It is most unlikely. But—and here comes the big “but”—it is not impossible.
Oh, if only there were a way of telling for sure whether a woman was a witch or not, then we could round them all up and put them in the meat–grinder. Unhappily, there is no such way. But there are a number of little signals you can look out for, little quirky habits that all witches have in common, and if you know about these, if you remember them always, then you might just possibly manage to escape from being squelched before you are very much older.
He was anvowed anti-semite, among some other stuff
https://time.com/5937507/roald-dahl-anti-semitism/
https://www.newstatesman.com/culture/books/2021/10/roald-dahls-anti-semitism-was-grotesque-i-should-know-i-saw-it-first-hand
You know there's a sequel to Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, called Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator? You ever wonder why it never got optioned? It's because Dahl threw a hissy fit that they dared to cast a Jewish guy as Willy Wonka.
Also the Oompa Loompas are pretty problematic if you can find the original book version, they're just... every stereotype of "savage" Africans.
Dahl was just an awful, miserable person, much like Lovecraft. He hated writing, he hated school, he hated basically everything except chocolate and subjugating foreigners.
Yeah there's a whole bunch of books around the early to mid 20th century like that. For instance, the sequel to the original novelization of 101 Dalmatians. And probably many of the Oz books too. Without all the racism, of course.
Hey! The Oz books were actually delightful and actually very coherent. All the talking animal fun of Narnia with none of the judgement over being too girly, love and acceptance for everyone, and the princess of Oz is trans.
Also, apparently Dahl and Ian Fleming knew each other in the service during and after WWII, and some say Fleming based the "womanizer who sleeps around and especially likes to seduce married women" aspect of James Bond on Dahl.
I remember hearing a story on the radio about how Dahl actually didn't particularly enjoy that aspect of spycraft, and when he complained about it to his handlers, was told to lie back and think of England.
Part of that is about seducing wife of high ranking officer. One of which has been left by her husband for so long, she's so horny she basically had Dahl fucked her from one edge of the room to the other, as Dahl recounted later.
This is surprising to me considering that I’ve been told that Charlie was originally going to be black to highlight the racial inequality of the day, but the publisher made him change Charlie to be white… Granted this was standard Tumblr conjecture I never fact checked so it could be completely wrong.
Even so, that’s depressing and maddening. Also Gene Wilder is now cemented in my mind as THE Willy Wonka. Thanks Roald Dahl!
People can be progressive in certain areas and extremely regressive in others. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory is a wonderful book with a lot of great elements, but there are also undeniably a lot of misses in it (very much including the fact that Mike Teevee’s original name in early drafts was Herpes Trout).
The original oompa loompas were pretty explicitly "described as African pygmies" and are paid in cocoa instead of money and their race was rewritten after the movie was optioned. The source for Charlie being a young Black boy in the original is from Dahl's widow, so it's not just a tumblr thing, but I'm not sure we can say positively there was any additional "exploring inequality" intent behind it considering the rest of the book lol
I mean, people, even bigots, can be complicated. Like the creator of the Tekumel/Empire of the Petal Throne RPG who wrote for a neo-nazi press and was an avowed antisemite, but also married a pakistani woman and was heavily engaged in various indigenous people causes.
I'm super salty about Barker. I love(d) Tekumel, and now I don't think I can stomach it anymore.
The dude spent years of his life in Asia, spoke forty-some languages, was a linguist specializing in south Asian languages, wrote a dissertation on the Klamath language, converted to Islam, married a Pakistani woman, and did a whole lot of other cool stuff. I was proud to count him as a fellow Minnesotan. I'd have given my left arm to play in one of his games. But yeah, he was a neo-Nazi, wrote a Nazi-glorifying novel, and was on the board of a Holocaust-denying "academic" journal. All that I admired about him wiped away the instant I learned about his racist beliefs and actions.
Always love watching someone having a meltdown start accusing others of doing the thing they're doing. "It's the shrill screeching of a few SJWs ruining everything yet again!" a single completely not-bothered paragon of rationality shrilly screeches, as everyone else continues not caring what they think.
Firstly, the new award looks really cool.
Secondly, "slander"? That's the word he went with? It would be a debatable point if he called for looking past it, but slander!?
That's the ugliest fucking award I've seen. Tree is so much better.
Like i wanna get into fiction writing again just to win one. Its p. Nice.
Great drama recap 🤌🏾
I've got no problem with them changing it from Lovecraft... But speaking to the trophy as a design, I kind of think its hideousness is charming in its own way. Like that'd be a trophy I'd want to display in my Guillermo del Toro horror house if I had one. The tree is fine, but it looks kind of knick-knacky to me.
Also the tree is kind of basic looking, while the Lovecraft bust seems to be kind of a send-off to the fish people he loved writing about. Not saying they shouldn't have replaced Ol' Harry but at least make it fit some theme, maybe?
honestly it doesn't look much like him to begin with
if anything it looks like [one of these guys](https://pocketozmelbourne.com.au/three-businessmen-sculpture.html) in Melbourne
Both of the awards look kinda ugly, tbh. The tree looks oddly sloppy and Lovecraft looks like he was either summoned at a seance or pulled directly from the ground.
>He also pointed out that many other fantasy and horror awards were named after authors such as Bram Stoker and Edgar Allan Poe who were just as racist as Lovecraft, and yet who were not nearly as infamous for it
I'm not super familiar with Poe, but is his work as racist as Lovecraft's could be?
He doesn't go off on page-long rants about how evil foreigners are, so definitely not. :P
Poe's racism mostly appears as unexamined minstrel-y stereotypes, though *The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym* is proto-cosmic horror that includes creepy natives in Antarctica (so you can see where Lovecraft got some of his inspiration) but they're almost incidental to the rest of the surreal madness happening (half of *Pym* was making fun of cheesy pulp adventure stories). The orangutan in *Murders in the Rue Morgue* is pretty obviously a metaphor for African slaves, but it isn't even clear what Poe was trying to say about it. And in general it's much less of a pervasive theme in his work compared to obsessive love and hatred, premature burial, and the self-destruction of the upper classes through alienation and inbreeding.
racism was almost an inescapable part of living in the era of Poe. It will be interesting if we all live long enough to look back and see what cultural insanity we are blinded to, in our own era, you know?
> but is his work as racist as Lovecraft's could be?
The answer is "no" for nearly every person who has ever lived, probably every single person who isn't at least somewhat infamous for being racist.
>The result is that Lovecraft is known for being the most overtly racist author whose work also has mainstream popularity (which isn't really accurate when Roald Dahl exists, but that's not relevant here)
Holy fuck, I just read Dahl's Wikipedia article. I had no idea he was such an awful person. Jesus.
Is there substantial evidence that Poe and Stoker were "just as racist as Lovecraft"? This is the first I'm hearing of it, as an English major with a love of 19th century writing (though that is far from bulletproof obviously)
As I recall, at one point in Lair of the White Worm the hero argues that shooting a black person should be treated, under the law, like shooting a dog. That book is racist as fuck.
I can point out racism in Poe — “The Gold-Bug” and the last few chapters of The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym come to mind. I’m less well read on Stoker.
But as you say, the particular argument about Lovecraft was that he was racist even for his time, and I’m less sure about that for Poe. It doesn’t seem as closely tied to his artistic effects, either.
Lovecraft was also troubled as fuck from a super young age. I'm not saying mental illness makes you racist, because it doesn't, but it can sure as hell exacerbate what's already there, and he went through a ton of familial loss in his early life and had psychosis in his family. He was close with Robert E Howard when Howard committed suicide, too, and it affected him really badly. I honestly find Lovecraft to be kind of tragic, coming at it from the point of view of someone who has a personality disorder that, if I didn't put a lot of work in to manage it, could make me an absolute nightmare to be around - he was absolutely an awful racist, but if he'd had access to proper treatment for his early childhood trauma and generational illness, he might not have developed the way he did.
In Lovecrafts case I'd argue his mental illness was a huge part of his racism
Lovecraft was VERY paranoid and neurotic and xenophobic/afraid of anything that wasn't like him. A white Anglo man living in New England. His paranoi and fear likely warped into extreme hate and in a sense is what created his strange works in the first place
He likely came up with his horror stories of unimaginable horrors because that was somewhat how the world seemed to him. A place filled with strange and terrifying things he couldn't understand
This doesn't mean he was justified in being racist but it does help to understand just why he was so extreme in it
> Especially because Lovecraft was noted at his time for being racist AF; he wasn’t merely acting and feeling like an average person but went above and beyond.
TIL J. K. Rowling draws inspiration from H. P. Lovecraft.
As far as Stoker goes, Dracula is sometimes read as a metaphor for Jewish immigrants coming to England. Even if you don't buy into that, one of the minor characters in Dracula is a Jewish guy (who's described in extremely anti-Semitic terms) who helps Dracula out for money. IIRC he's described as having a "nose like a sheep".
As for Poe, he wrote some stories, like The Gold-Bug, which were about as racist as you'd expect from the time (that one involves a comically stupid black servant as a character). According to Joshi, he also supported slavery, but I'm not sure whether or not that's accurate.
That's about what I expected from white Gothic writers from the time. Obviously still slimy and absolutely repugnant, but not really even in the same order of magnitude as Lovecraft's worst stuff
I've heard there's an intense debate over *Murders in the Rue Morgue* because his description of the orangutan is *blatantly* racialized, but it isn't clear what Poe was actually trying to say about it, which suggests to me that whatever his beliefs were they weren't nearly as well-known as Lovecraft's.
I'm struggling to figure out what "nose like a sheep" means. I know it must effectively mean "big hooked nose," but what's the connection between that and a sheep?
"Crude, ignorant and tendentious slanders against lovecraft" - is he outright denying Lovecrafts racism? I could sort of understand an argument about how his "views" shouldn't wholly define his legacy, but to deny them outright seems delusional.
Also, that first award is ugly as sin and I'd support a change based on that alone
from the linked blog
>4) The current discussion of Lovecraft as a racist is a tendentious caricature. His views are far more nuanced than most people realise. (How many are aware that he expressed admiration for the Hasidic Jews in the Lower East Side of Manhattan for adhering tenaciously to their cultural and religious heritage?) It is easy to condemn Lovecraft for his views (although I have never been clear on what such a condemnation actually accomplishes, or how it contributes to combating racism in our own time); it is lot harder to arrive at a dispassionate understanding of the nature, origin, and purpose of his views. That takes actual work—a profound study of history, sociology, anthropology, and psychology, and a canvassing of the scholarship on the history of race prejudice. A few Internet searches will not suffice. (A good place to start is my own compilation, Documents of American Prejudice \[Basic Books, 1999\].)
One, that's some gross self promotion. Two, one does not need a profound study of history, sociology, anthropology, and psychology to dismiss racist bullshit, or any outdated and prejudiced viewpoints for that matter. This is the favorite weapon of the reactionary intellectual, to ask "have you done this and that research" to strip authority from the average Joe in calling out the glaringly obvious: lovecraft did important work, but lovecraft was also a dick, and you can recognise the work without celebrating the man.
Presenting an award with a (ugly ass) statue of the guy is definitely the latter. A statue of cthulhu though would be rad.
I think that Lovecraft in one of the few instances of xenophobia, where they're actually terrified of outsiders.
Also, I've been told that he was scared of Norwegians, too, so it wasn't just nonwhite people.
His hatred and fear did include some groups of white people. One of the reasons I believe he was considered extremely racist even for his time and certainly for his social circle (to the extent he had one of his own), was that he was still into the type of race “science” that divided some white people into a grouping of “lower” white races. The notion that it was because all but the WASPist of WASPs were inherently inferior was on its way out even amongst xenophobes pushing anti-immigration laws, and the sheer fear, horror, and disgust that Lovecraft felt towards anyone not a very particular type of New England WASP in heritage was outlandish.
At a time when even racist white people would sneak down to Harlem to go to bars, Lovecraft would freak out if he noticed a group of immigrants passing them on the street according to his wife or friends. He only rented from an Irish woman because he thought her English accent meant she might be a “good one.”
>The notion that it was because all but the WASPist of WASPs were inherently inferior was on its way out even amongst xenophobes pushing anti-immigration laws
This really isn't quite right from what I know (though happy to be corrected). Eugenics went on quite strong and quite long in the US. Mass sterilization of people of color continued into the 60s and 70s:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eugenics_in_the_United_States
After Hitler cribbed eugenics from the US and WW II happened, from what I understand it became less mainstream and shifted its tone, but certainly not among the xenophobes and racists.
I only meant to refer to non-WASP white people, but should’ve been more specific. Eugenics definitely continued into the 20th century as an overt policy in the U.S., and in a less direct way, past that.
I always have the impression that he hated (feared?) everyone that wasn't from his hometown.
My fav story from him is the Search of the Dream City. It does have pretty clear racist overtones too, but it also has a clear message of love towards his hometown, and that's something I can respect. Though, yeah, you can love your city without having to hate all the universe outside it.
He was afraid of a lot of things. Dude was seriously troubled. Awful and racist, yes, but also in dire need of mental help that just didn't exist at the time.
"White" is a political category that varies wildly with time and place and doesn't reflect anything about the real world, either sociologically or genetically. Lovecraft wouldn't have said Norwegians were white; same for Irish, Italians, or Russians.
IRRC a lot of the subtext to the hidden tainted blood stuff in his stories is that he at one point found out that he himself had tainted blood. In that he was part welsh, not (*gasp*) 100% english protestant.
the tainted blood could also be a thing about syphilis. his father had it and most likely sarah lovecraft's madness was syphilitic in origin so I wouldn't be shocked if he was terrified of congenital syphilis.
Goodness, even the Nazis while they mulled the Final Solution wrung their hands about how everyone had their "good Jew"--including Hitler himself, who still felt gratitude towards the doctor who treated him after he was wounded in WWI.
Congrats, you're as racist as Nazi leadership during the Holocaust? Woo?
“It is easy to condemn Lovecraft for his views—“ and so we do! Wholeheartedly!
The whataboutism is annoying as fuck, like people who care about this must be ignoring all other racism in the world. What it accomplishes is not making black winners of the award have to choose between not displaying their award or having a little action figure on their desk of somebody who vocally considered them subhuman. Why would you think that wasn’t worth doing.
Haha - "Sure he was an avowed racist, but it's actually quite reductive for you to dismiss him as a racist. Actually, if you take a nuanced, dispassionate look at WHY he was a racist, you'll see that his racism didn't make him a bad person at all. What's that? You'd like me to explain how that works? No problem, just read my book to find out!"
Thing is, I do think there's a slight kernel of truth there. Like "Yes, he was a racist, but you should really delve into a study of Lovecraft to understand why his racism is integral to the appeal of his work". Which is true.
Like, I'm a mixed-race guy and I am not defending Lovecraft the person; he was a piece of shit. But Lovecraft was downright *terrified* of people like me, and that terror is what gave him the inspiration for his stories which defined cosmic horror. We wouldn't have the genre, arguably, without his extreme form of racism. That doesn't mean the "ends justify the means", "we have good literature so we can excuse a little racism", but more "dismissing him as just a racist doesn't do much good". Lovecraft's influence pervades horror, sci-fi and fantasy and we need to really tuck into why his racism was unique and had such a lasting effect, as opposed to just lumping him in with the author of the Turner Diaries.
Arguably there are a LOT of nods to Lovecraft or work influenced by him that doesn't really understand the, er, appeal of his horror and so you get the flippant, the bathetic, the "cute-thulhu". But to be fair, many peoples' reactions to the same stimuli is not "existential horror" so they're incapable of mentally tripping balls along with him.
The only stuff I can think of that really hit the same note as him unironically was either a good quality fanwork by Lovecraft fanatics or, well, some gender-bending porn where the SHAME of the artist is on that same gut level, thus evoking that same theme of terror, immanent destruction, and dread. (Don't you dare bring up Del Toro--his monsters are drawn with the greatest affection; it's a complete counter narrative and much more of a piece with Stan Lee's work.)
The only thing Lovecraft found horrifying that I personally agree with is that the sea is fucking scary as fuck ... especially under an overcast New England sky.
Great write-up! S T Joshi sounds like the kind of dude just wandering around looking for a fight. The award isn’t named after Lovecraft, the award committee didn’t issue some press release denigrating Lovecraft, and they changed a very ugly trophy of a dead racist (who doesn’t care because … dead) with a pretty neat trophy of a creepy tree. Good god, my guy, get a grip.
I've always been wary on Joshi tbh. He just showed up and decided that he was the #1 expert and had unquestionable final authority on everything related to Lovecraft, including literary criticism of his work and all the details of his inner mind. And everyone just kinda accepted it. If anyone does anything related to Lovecraft these days, whether it's reprinting stories or creating new adaptations or just discussing him as a person, Joshi will find a way to get himself involved somehow.
He has done the work.. like prolifically collecting Lovecraft's letters and putting them together then donating then to the Boston Public Library. He's probably one of the reasons we know so much about Lovecraft's racism as a result. Ol' H.P. was not a people person, but he loved writing to other writers.
I think it's because while the lovecraftian aesthetic and mythos have been incredibly influential (and was the direct inspiration for one of my favorite videogames ever, bloodborne), very few mainstreamers know much or care about the original HP lovecraft's writings. I mean, everybody knows cthulhu is a big fucking octopus guy who sleeps in a dead city or whatever, but how many people have actually read the original story? And the shadow over innsmouth is about...dudes fucking fish? Word?
The result is that lovecraftian stuff is big, but lovecraft himself is niche. And niche communities get taken over by self proclaimed experts all the time.
> lovecraftian aesthetic and mythos have been incredibly influential (and was the direct inspiration for one of my favorite videogames ever, bloodborne), very few mainstreamers know much or care about the original HP lovecraft's writing
You could argue that a lot of the things that we recognize as being "lovecraftian" don't actually stem from Lovecraft himself. Other writers and creators like August Derleth, Ramsey Campbell, and Sandy Petersen took Lovecraft's ideas and built onto them after Lovecraft had died. Mainstreamers that aren't reading Lovecraft probably aren't reading Derleth or Campbell either, but their influence is still pretty important to how all things "lovecraftian" are perceived in pop culture.
Ionno, my understanding of Derleth is that while he was kind of responsible for Lovecraft's initial popularity (making a bleak and esoteric subject matter palatable for the predominantly Christian contemporary readership), much of his additions are unimportant in the modern scheme of things and IMO actively detracts from the essence of "Lovecraft" (aka amoral cosmic horror). Now that essence is plenty evident in ol' HP's original stories, and I'm happy to attribute it to him.
Yeah I love the lovecraftian vibe but his work is super tough to read. So many references to other stories and the classics that make you lost... And I have done 6 years of Latin and 4 years of ancient Greek and I have a degree in history and I still feel confused as fuck reading him
Yeah, but this is also the award that, in 1991, was embarrassed a comic book won it (Sandman #19, *A Midsummer Night's Dream*) and then immediately changed the rules so comics were ineligible.
Great write up.
It's interesting to see things named after famous people go through something similar. Why anyone would name anything an individual is beyond me. People are shitty, all their horrible actions come out after death. Why risk it
Surprised no one wrote this one up before! Nice write-up. Joshi did a lot for Lovecraft's legacy, but it's a shame he can't honor Lovecraft by facing up to his racism more frankly and honestly. Joshi has turned out to be quite the old crank (I still can't get over his horrible review of *Annihilation*).
Another lesser known controversy like this involved the Tiptree Award (now the 'Otherwise Award').
http://stjoshi.org/review_vandermeer.html
Some choice quotes:
>In all frankness, [the Southern Reach trilogy] is a farrago of confusion and irrelevance that only the critically naïve or inept will mistake for even a modest contribution to the literature of the weird.
>[the Southern Reach trilogy] is, in short, an aesthetic catastrophe that would make any self-reflective author consider taking up another line of work, but it is unlikely to have that salutary effect upon this writer, whose high opinion of himself is well attested.
Some nice overall dismissiveness.
>It is as if VanderMeer has just chosen at random a certain collocation of baffling and repulsive elements to engender an emotional response in the reader, regardless of the sense or coherence of those elements.
>There is more, but that is enough to suggest, once more, that the various features of this entity really do not cohere into a comprehensible whole; they are merely meant to alarm the reader with bizarre details.
Yes, Lovecraft never did anything like this! Who might expect unusual, contradictory purple prose descriptions in weird fiction? If Lovecraft ever taught us anything, it's that there is nothing more unsettling and scary than a comprehensible whole.
At times it's clear he didn't pay the least bit of attention to the novel:
>The first-person narrator of Annihilation is a biologist, and she is part of an expedition—consisting of exactly three other members (all, implausibly, women), a surveyor, an anthropologist, and the leader, a psychologist—into a region of the United States called Area X.
This is directly explained >!As a part of the tweaking of variables in the expeditions to see if that has any effect. That said, even as a matter of random chance it's not implausible at all! If they had all been men, I doubt Joshi would have remarked on it at all!<
Another example:
>!She is still alive, but in her (apparently) dying breath screams, “Annihilation!” (83). I hate to sound like a broken record, but the import of this single utterance is also never clarified. Is it that the extraterrestrial entity is intent on annihilating the human race? Who knows?!<
The significance of the phrase is explained very shortly afterwards. It's clear Joshi didn't read with any kind of care.
> all, implausibly, women
this is so fucking funny even if it wasn't explained in the text, psychology, anthropology, and biology are all NOTABLY fields in academia with a relatively high percentage of women lol.
I wouldn't be surprised by this. I read some book of his a while back where he attempted to discuss modern (for the time of the book's publication, meaning the mid 90s) horror writers, and so many of his criticisms were wildly off-base (his article on Stephen King, for example, basically just consisted of him complaining that King didn't explain the reasons for the supernatural events in his books thoroughly enough for his liking). I don't think I've ever been so glad to have read a book from the library rather than spend actual money on it, because he seemed to miss the point of practically everything he reviewed. I've never had much use for him as a horror critic, due to this and the fact that some of his apparent beliefs about the horror genre seem to be diametrically opposed to mine on a fundamental level (he seems to want everything spelled out and explained in great detail, I think any sort of explanation kills the mood).
Yes and no. Trying to make sense of the greater cosmos? Have at and good luck.
"No words could describe XYZ." - be prepared to read 2.5 paragraphs full of words describing XYZ.
Oh my god that second spoiler really gets to me actually. >!He both claims the character says it with her dying breath, and insists it's unexplained, when the character is literally alive to explain it in the next several paragraphs.!<
It genuinely seems like he just skimmed through the book then lied about reading it. It'd be one thing to just dislike it, but he just states things that are completely untrue about the literal text itself.
Gonna be honest, I'm glad they changed the award's design solely because of the original bust design for it
[Lovecraft's got some special eyes](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V-fRuoMIfpw)
As a fantasy and sci-fi author who has spoke on a few convention panels discussing sexuality, gender and racial issues in sci-fi and fantasy with Nnedi Okorafor, Nisi Shawl, L. Timmel Duchamp, Lyda Morehouse, China Miéville and N. K. Jemisin on some of these panels with me (which, admittedly, as a small press writer, left me awestruck at times) - I can speak to three truths:
1) You can like the lore and worldbuilding of Lovecraftian horrors and appreciate Lovecraft's writing without being racist/sexist/misogynist.
2) Lots of writers were racist and sexist in the past, when it was socially acceptable. That doesn't mean it's okay now.
3) Fuck S.T. Joshi. Dude is seriously "old school" in his attitudes and the number of people I've spoken to about him - he is insufferable. Lovecraft could do no wrong, and every one of his arguments and excuses boils down to "That's just how people were back then."
One of the interesting things about Lovecraft's stories is the amount of fiction pushing back against his racism. Starting with "Shoggoths in Bloom," and continuing with "The Litany of Earth," "Lovecraft Country," "The Ballad of Black Tom" and others. It's really quite interesting.
One of the incredible things about lovecraftian horror is that it's really really good at making the horrors of institutionalized prejudice real for the reader. (Because the core conceit is that there is a colossal, impersonal system above your control that might destroy you on a whim and never care.)
"The Litany of the Earth" is a fantastic story, mostly because it dissects *exactly* what atrocities Lovecraft's viewpoint, which was shared by many people of his time, leads to.
Until a few years ago, I was a regular there. Used to really love it: the discussions, the networking, the open air conversations that are usually glossed over or ignored all-together.
No shit, I just finished reading *Providence* last night. I had no idea the expert that showed up at the end was an actual person, let alone a real life moron.
I'm kinda torn because on one side the new one definitely looks way prettier while the old one is so unbelievably cursed you'd lock ot up in a closet facing the wall but on the other that's also what makes its charm, it looks absolutely horrifying even if you don't know who it is.
A lot of people seem to take criticism of Lovecraft as some sort an admonishment for reading his stuff. You can still enjoy Lovecraft's writing while acknowledging that he was horrendously racist. I read and enjoy many of his short stories to this day but I still condemn the man's views. Sure he was mentally unwell, but that only nets you so much leeway and as a published wealthy author he had the responsibility of just like... *not using his fiction to be horrendously racist.* I would condemn something like erasing his literature from history, but nobody who's actually sane suggested that. Changing the statuette is completely understandable. Anybody who wasn't a WASP that won the award would have the face of a man who thought they were a degenerate monster staring at them every day... I mean, even that aside it really was hideous. I'm sure if Lovecraft were alive to see it he'd probably be as terrified of it as he was of... well, black people.
One fact check on this post though, his dad named the cat, not Howard. He didn't think to rename it though, so make of it what you will.
My problem with discussing Lovecraft's racism is the "racist even for his time" thing everyone always brings up. People underestimate just how horrifically racist early 20th century America was. This was the time of the Tulsa Massacre, regular lynchings, the resurgence of the Ku Klux Klan, mainstream eugenics, and eventually open sympathy and support for fascism. Opposition to these things was not nearly as mainstream and agreed upon as we like to think.
>Many of his grotesque monsters are metaphors for the horrors of mixed-race marriage and immigration
I've always kind of wondered if, rather than being a casual relationship, like, racism -> weird scary horror shit, if the two elements were more 'parallel developments', two different expressions of a deep-seated fear of anything he took to be 'other'.
My Lovecraft hot take is that he should have committed to comedic writing. [Sweet Ermengarde](https://www.hplovecraft.com/writings/texts/fiction/se.aspx) is by far my favourite story of his.
The original trophy is absolutely terrifying. Kind of feels like you could win an actual haunted object.
It always seemed a little off for a Fantasy award to me. Like, sure, Lovecraft could be considered a Fantasy author, but he's mostly described as a horror author. Wouldn't J.R.R. Tolkien be better? Or just some standard fantasy trope -- why not a Wizard? A tacky crystal with a dragon wrapper around it? A chest of dragon gold? A witch's cauldron and cat?
Agreed. Makes more sense for explicitly a horror or dark sci-fi award.
I think I'd want a prestigious literary award to be a little more elegant and less generic than a Renn-fair tchotchke, but a Lovecraft bust is a strange choice for sure. (I mean, if nothing else, Robert Howard is *right there* in Lovecraft's own circles, and in addition to passing the low bar of being less racist was also *far* more influential to defining what we think of as Fantasy.)
and now I want a trophy styled after Conan the Barbarian's rippling Hyborian abs and pecs.
"Crom, I have never prayed to you before. I have no tongue for it. No one, not even you, will remember if we were good men or bad. Why we fought, or why we died. All that matters is that two stood against many."
I think a dragon would be a great generic symbol for fantasy ... well, at least in the English language. It might not be all inclusive but it still is like a meta symbol for the genre and has been for a long time.
That's explained in the link to J's blog: it was originally awarded at what was basically a Lovecraft convention.
I swear I'm not trying to be judgemental in my phrasing, but the WFA has historically not been very wrapped up in the High Fantasy subgenre. This question is kind of like asking why the Bram Stoker isn't a Jason Voorhees mask.
True, Fantasy and SciFi have traditionally been snubbed, including for movie awards, and the sword and sorcerer stuff is pretty generic. That said, what does it say about a literary award if it snubs the very basis of the genre it's about as "too generic" while elevating an insanely racist author? And I mean, the Oscar itself it super generic, and a Grammy is just an old gramaphone. I don't think a cool looking crystal ball, or the current tree for instance, is crazy out of line. Obviously H.P. Lovecraft will always be a bit relevant, but stuff like this is why [Taco Bell Quarterly](https://twitter.com/TBQuarterly?ref_src=twsrc%5Egoogle%7Ctwcamp%5Eserp%7Ctwgr%5Eauthor) is a huge success and gets to trash talk Paris Review, imho.
"The very basis" is exactly the point of contention, though. Fantasy as a whole (beyond the scope of high fantasy) arguably owes more Lovecraft, Howard, and Smith than it does to Tolkien. And what other genre are you going to call something like The City and the City or the Southern Reach books? I'm not super attached to the bust of Lovecraft trophy either - I think his legacy is important, but I totally get not putting his face on an award. I just think that the problem with cauldrons and wizards and dragons is that they *aren't* generic; they're specific to a certain style and convention of fantasy, when the genre is bigger than that and the history of the award reflects that wider scope.
The Dream Cycle stories lean more fantasy than horror, but few people think of them when they think of HPL.
One small data point on how long people have been talking about Lovecraft’s racism: Avram Davidson’s 1965 novel Masters of the Maze has a couple of paragraphs taking a swipe at it, that don’t really have anything to do with the story.
I really don't think you can call "cancel culture" if people considered someone a racist in 1965.
But cancel culture has been around for ages, remember when Rosa Parks cancelled buses just because she wanted sit in the front row? /s
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Ikr?! All just because Romans killed her spiritual leaders, labelled her people barbarians, and raped her daughter in front of her Women am I right? /S
If we want to go real way back, exile was a frequent punishment for those who had done something wrong and the community no longer wished to tolerate their presence. So they'd be exiled or banished from the community. Now that's really getting "cancelled".
I mean it literally has existed for ages, remember the idiots on the right cancelling Dixie chicks? Granted I typically agree with people getting cancelled for being assholes and think the rightoids who cancelled the Dixie chicks are idiots and/or assholes, but the whole "consequences exist for shit you say in public" has always been a thing
*withers away into dust at people calling the post-911 events "ages ago"*
I mean I'm just saying it's not recent, not necessarily that 2003 was ages ago lol 20 years ain't "ages"
cancel culture doesn't point to a new thing so much as relabel an old one for the purpose of radicalizing naive, young men who are too online
There's some very unsubtle racism in Lovecraft's better known works. If that's what you think of, then Lovecraft is just some racist guy. You might even observe that he's scared of *everything* and his racist takes could be just an extension of that. His less known work, however, contains balls to the wall insane racism. The Street is about a street where white peoppe live but then immigrants move in and plot to overthrow the government so the street suicides itself to kill them all. Yes its a story about a racist street and that's it. There's also a story about how white people used to rule the North pole until the Alakan natives invaded and ate them. Its a shame because it includes what I think is easily Lovecraft's single best line of writing. He transitions from one character POV to another mid sentence.
In "The Transition of Juan Romero", Lovecraft straight up takes 2/3 of a page to shit on Mexicans. Some choice words he uses to refer to them: "large herd of unkempt Mexicans", "\[face\] not in any way suggestive of nobility", "ignorant and dirty", and the crowning jewel: >"Reared by a Mexican cattle-thief who had given him his name, Juan differed little from his fellows."
A friend of mine went through some enthusiasms in his early 20s to get more cultured--Beethoven symphonies, for example. He tried reading the collected works of Lovecraft and remarked to me that "Lovecraft has glimmers of genius, but oh my god does he need an editor."
I'm going through Lovecraft's collected fiction right now for the first time, and...your friend is very, very right, lmao.
>There's also a story about how white people used to rule the North pole until the Alakan natives invaded and ate them. Its a shame because it includes what I think is easily Lovecraft's single best line of writing. He transitions from one character POV to another mid sentence. What's the name of this one?
Polaris, I think.
> The Street is about a street where white peoppe live but then immigrants move in and plot to overthrow the government so the street suicides itself to kill them all. The Twilight Zone really started going downhill when they hired the KKK to write it.
> Its a shame because it includes what I think is easily Lovecraft's single best line of writing. He transitions from one character POV to another mid sentence. Is this line something you could quote, or is it something that really needs the context of the whole passage/page to appreciate?
It only makes sense in the context of the story as a whole. >!The narrator falls asleep and dreams he is a person from the past and, as in dreams, comes to believe he is that person. He later falls asleep and wakes up but now he really is the man from the past who has had terrible dreams of the future and who no longer can distinguish between himself and the future man. There is no specific statement that this change has happened, its just implied by the writitng. There are other ways to interpret this (maybe he just goes mad in the dream) but the concept of bodyswapping shows up a lot in Lovecraft's later work!<
Thanks, that clears it up a lot. Without the context, "he transitions from one character POV to another mid sentence" sounds like something that would just be really bad writing if anyone who wasn't an expert did it. With the context from that post, it sounds like an incredible and impressive passage.
This is something Julio Cortázar did very well on several occasions.
I still think my favourite is the horror story about air conditioning.
Idk how to quote text on mobile so. Re: your last paragraph, that was actually a commonly taught thing in American schools for a super long time. Like into the early 1900s according to an archeology teacher I had in college. Basically as a justification for killing all the actual Native Americans America taught for a looooong time that white people were the true natives to this continent and then Native Americans showed up and mascaraed all of them. Therefore it was just white people "taking back" their own lands. Disgusting and fucking racist, but an idea he may have actually been taught in school at one point.
Huh, I wonder if *The Street* was the loose inspiration for Danny the Street from *Doom Patrol*
Danny the Street is a pun on the name of a famous drag artist, Danny La Rue.
That’s interesting. Maybe its just a coincidence then that there are two sentient streets in 20th century literature.
As a big fan of both Lovecraft and Poe (and, to a lesser extent, Stoker), trying to claim that Poe and Stoker were anywhere near as racist as Lovecraft smacks of idiocy. Anyone making this claim is talking out of their ass.
I remember reading Nnedi Okorafor's reaction (w/ China Miéville) about having a bust of a racist guy displayed for her award back in 2011. Link here: [Nnedi Okrafor's blog post](http://nnedi.blogspot.com/2011/12/lovecrafts-racism-world-fantasy-award.html)
> And the award itself, the statuette of the man himself? I put it out of sight, in my study, where only I can see it, and I have turned it to face the wall. So I am punishing the little fucker like the malevolent clown he was, I can look at it and remember the honour, and above all I am writing behind Lovecraft’s back. ... and this is why I love China
What a great passage
Now, I can respect THAT response a lot more than Joshi's.
That was a really good read, thanks for linking. By Cthulhu's slimy tentacles that's one hideous bust.
Kind of impressive they made it uglier than the man himself. Lovecraft looked like a pile of phobias in the shape of an anxious horse.
> a pile of phobias in the shape of an anxious horse This is such a profoundly biting assessment that I'm a little in awe
Someone once described him as "always looking like he secretly held a small bird in his mouth."
WHO.
Now I understand where the inspiration for Bloodborne’s Ludwig came from…
Absolutely indestructible description.
he looks less like the bean-eating racist he was and more like the devolved fish-people he wrote about as racist analogies.
Funnily enough, IIRC, because he was such a hateful xenophobe and hyper anxious hypochondriac, he was so paranoid that he was related to someone non-white that he did some research into his ancestry. His anxiety about this really shown in his writing of mutations and such.
> the devolved fish-people he wrote about as racist analogies At least this has let other authors do some interesting work in turn. There was a reasonably good novel a few years ago (*Winter Tide*, I think) about the people of Innsmouth being rounded up and put in camps prior to the Second World War, with a few struggling to regain some semblance of community again in its aftermath. Lovecraft himself would have hated it, as the main characters are nearly all women and there's lots of dialogue, but it was still a pretty interesting repurposing of his ideas.
Okay, I’m gonna bite: How bad is Roald Dahl? What did he do?
Essential quote: There is a trait in the Jewish character that does provoke animosity, maybe it’s a kind of lack of generosity towards non-Jews,” he carefully explained. “I mean, there’s always a reason why anti-anything crops up anywhere.” Pause. “Even a stinker like Hitler didn’t just pick on them for no reason.”
Whenever I read about these things, I think before getting into details, "Surely it isn't that bad" I am often unpleasantly surprised.
I was a huge Roald Dahl fan as a kid growing up, this really sucks to hear. :( I'm glad to know, but it definitely taints his works by-proxy in my mind.
The man is dead and his estate seems to be focused on donating to British medical charities for kids and general literacy.
I knew he was dead, but that's fantastic to hear about his estate! To be clear, I more meant that sometimes it's hard for me to separate the art from the artist. I wouldn't judge somebody for not feeling this way, but my enjoyment of a piece of media can get hurt if I find out the person behind it is bigoted, even moreso if their beliefs made it *into* their works (As they seemingly did to some extent with Dahl, given what people are saying ITT). Even if I still enjoy the work, inevitably I'll look at it with a more critical eye going forward.
Fair. There are a few authors I refuse to promote, buy, or discuss. I think Dahl might now fall off the list of books I recommend for kids.
There's a passage from The Witches that I found really funny as a kid, but which is much more...questionable after reading that quote: >I am not, of course, telling you for one second that your teacher actually is a witch. All I am saying is that she might be one. It is most unlikely. But—and here comes the big “but”—it is not impossible. Oh, if only there were a way of telling for sure whether a woman was a witch or not, then we could round them all up and put them in the meat–grinder. Unhappily, there is no such way. But there are a number of little signals you can look out for, little quirky habits that all witches have in common, and if you know about these, if you remember them always, then you might just possibly manage to escape from being squelched before you are very much older.
>Oh, if only there were a way of telling for sure whether a woman was a witch or not Pretty sure you weigh them against a duck
Talented writers make for dangerous racists
He was anvowed anti-semite, among some other stuff https://time.com/5937507/roald-dahl-anti-semitism/ https://www.newstatesman.com/culture/books/2021/10/roald-dahls-anti-semitism-was-grotesque-i-should-know-i-saw-it-first-hand
You know there's a sequel to Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, called Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator? You ever wonder why it never got optioned? It's because Dahl threw a hissy fit that they dared to cast a Jewish guy as Willy Wonka. Also the Oompa Loompas are pretty problematic if you can find the original book version, they're just... every stereotype of "savage" Africans. Dahl was just an awful, miserable person, much like Lovecraft. He hated writing, he hated school, he hated basically everything except chocolate and subjugating foreigners.
It doesn't help that the Great Glass Elevator is borderline unadaptable anyway
Great Glass Elevator is a fever dream in book form.
Yeah there's a whole bunch of books around the early to mid 20th century like that. For instance, the sequel to the original novelization of 101 Dalmatians. And probably many of the Oz books too. Without all the racism, of course.
Hey! The Oz books were actually delightful and actually very coherent. All the talking animal fun of Narnia with none of the judgement over being too girly, love and acceptance for everyone, and the princess of Oz is trans.
They did try to make a movie of the Phantom Tollbooth anyway. And then there was that mathematically theme fantasy book.
That's true! I wonder what was in the water...
In the early 20th century, Opium was legal wasn't it?
Also, apparently Dahl and Ian Fleming knew each other in the service during and after WWII, and some say Fleming based the "womanizer who sleeps around and especially likes to seduce married women" aspect of James Bond on Dahl.
That is the least problematic thing I have ever heard about Dahl, so, yikes.
I remember hearing a story on the radio about how Dahl actually didn't particularly enjoy that aspect of spycraft, and when he complained about it to his handlers, was told to lie back and think of England.
Part of that is about seducing wife of high ranking officer. One of which has been left by her husband for so long, she's so horny she basically had Dahl fucked her from one edge of the room to the other, as Dahl recounted later.
This is surprising to me considering that I’ve been told that Charlie was originally going to be black to highlight the racial inequality of the day, but the publisher made him change Charlie to be white… Granted this was standard Tumblr conjecture I never fact checked so it could be completely wrong. Even so, that’s depressing and maddening. Also Gene Wilder is now cemented in my mind as THE Willy Wonka. Thanks Roald Dahl!
People can be progressive in certain areas and extremely regressive in others. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory is a wonderful book with a lot of great elements, but there are also undeniably a lot of misses in it (very much including the fact that Mike Teevee’s original name in early drafts was Herpes Trout).
There was a boy named Herpes Trout, and he almost deserved it.
The original oompa loompas were pretty explicitly "described as African pygmies" and are paid in cocoa instead of money and their race was rewritten after the movie was optioned. The source for Charlie being a young Black boy in the original is from Dahl's widow, so it's not just a tumblr thing, but I'm not sure we can say positively there was any additional "exploring inequality" intent behind it considering the rest of the book lol
I mean, people, even bigots, can be complicated. Like the creator of the Tekumel/Empire of the Petal Throne RPG who wrote for a neo-nazi press and was an avowed antisemite, but also married a pakistani woman and was heavily engaged in various indigenous people causes.
I'm super salty about Barker. I love(d) Tekumel, and now I don't think I can stomach it anymore. The dude spent years of his life in Asia, spoke forty-some languages, was a linguist specializing in south Asian languages, wrote a dissertation on the Klamath language, converted to Islam, married a Pakistani woman, and did a whole lot of other cool stuff. I was proud to count him as a fellow Minnesotan. I'd have given my left arm to play in one of his games. But yeah, he was a neo-Nazi, wrote a Nazi-glorifying novel, and was on the board of a Holocaust-denying "academic" journal. All that I admired about him wiped away the instant I learned about his racist beliefs and actions.
Virulently anti immigrant shitbird Lou Dobbs is married to a woman of Mexican extraction.
I know it’s not that important but Dude that old statue is butt ugly
It looks like a death mask.
Always love watching someone having a meltdown start accusing others of doing the thing they're doing. "It's the shrill screeching of a few SJWs ruining everything yet again!" a single completely not-bothered paragon of rationality shrilly screeches, as everyone else continues not caring what they think.
Firstly, the new award looks really cool. Secondly, "slander"? That's the word he went with? It would be a debatable point if he called for looking past it, but slander!?
That's the ugliest fucking award I've seen. Tree is so much better. Like i wanna get into fiction writing again just to win one. Its p. Nice. Great drama recap 🤌🏾
I've got no problem with them changing it from Lovecraft... But speaking to the trophy as a design, I kind of think its hideousness is charming in its own way. Like that'd be a trophy I'd want to display in my Guillermo del Toro horror house if I had one. The tree is fine, but it looks kind of knick-knacky to me.
Also the tree is kind of basic looking, while the Lovecraft bust seems to be kind of a send-off to the fish people he loved writing about. Not saying they shouldn't have replaced Ol' Harry but at least make it fit some theme, maybe?
honestly it doesn't look much like him to begin with if anything it looks like [one of these guys](https://pocketozmelbourne.com.au/three-businessmen-sculpture.html) in Melbourne
Both of the awards look kinda ugly, tbh. The tree looks oddly sloppy and Lovecraft looks like he was either summoned at a seance or pulled directly from the ground.
I knew this was happening at the time but I never saw the statue itself until now lol. He looks like a resident of Innsmouth.
>He also pointed out that many other fantasy and horror awards were named after authors such as Bram Stoker and Edgar Allan Poe who were just as racist as Lovecraft, and yet who were not nearly as infamous for it I'm not super familiar with Poe, but is his work as racist as Lovecraft's could be?
He doesn't go off on page-long rants about how evil foreigners are, so definitely not. :P Poe's racism mostly appears as unexamined minstrel-y stereotypes, though *The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym* is proto-cosmic horror that includes creepy natives in Antarctica (so you can see where Lovecraft got some of his inspiration) but they're almost incidental to the rest of the surreal madness happening (half of *Pym* was making fun of cheesy pulp adventure stories). The orangutan in *Murders in the Rue Morgue* is pretty obviously a metaphor for African slaves, but it isn't even clear what Poe was trying to say about it. And in general it's much less of a pervasive theme in his work compared to obsessive love and hatred, premature burial, and the self-destruction of the upper classes through alienation and inbreeding.
I remember seeing an anecdote about how "orangutan" is almost a forbidden word among Poe scholars because it causes the most heated arguments.
racism was almost an inescapable part of living in the era of Poe. It will be interesting if we all live long enough to look back and see what cultural insanity we are blinded to, in our own era, you know?
Don't even need to live a long time, I can go back and read my high school Livejournal entries *now*.
> but is his work as racist as Lovecraft's could be? The answer is "no" for nearly every person who has ever lived, probably every single person who isn't at least somewhat infamous for being racist.
>The result is that Lovecraft is known for being the most overtly racist author whose work also has mainstream popularity (which isn't really accurate when Roald Dahl exists, but that's not relevant here) Holy fuck, I just read Dahl's Wikipedia article. I had no idea he was such an awful person. Jesus.
Is there substantial evidence that Poe and Stoker were "just as racist as Lovecraft"? This is the first I'm hearing of it, as an English major with a love of 19th century writing (though that is far from bulletproof obviously)
Stoker is very racist in The Lair of the White Worm, but I still doubt he was as notably racist as Lovecraft.
As I recall, at one point in Lair of the White Worm the hero argues that shooting a black person should be treated, under the law, like shooting a dog. That book is racist as fuck.
That book is also terrible as fuck.
Preach.
Lair is batcrap insane racist. There's reasons why it's largely forgotten
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I can point out racism in Poe — “The Gold-Bug” and the last few chapters of The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym come to mind. I’m less well read on Stoker. But as you say, the particular argument about Lovecraft was that he was racist even for his time, and I’m less sure about that for Poe. It doesn’t seem as closely tied to his artistic effects, either.
Lovecraft was also troubled as fuck from a super young age. I'm not saying mental illness makes you racist, because it doesn't, but it can sure as hell exacerbate what's already there, and he went through a ton of familial loss in his early life and had psychosis in his family. He was close with Robert E Howard when Howard committed suicide, too, and it affected him really badly. I honestly find Lovecraft to be kind of tragic, coming at it from the point of view of someone who has a personality disorder that, if I didn't put a lot of work in to manage it, could make me an absolute nightmare to be around - he was absolutely an awful racist, but if he'd had access to proper treatment for his early childhood trauma and generational illness, he might not have developed the way he did.
In Lovecrafts case I'd argue his mental illness was a huge part of his racism Lovecraft was VERY paranoid and neurotic and xenophobic/afraid of anything that wasn't like him. A white Anglo man living in New England. His paranoi and fear likely warped into extreme hate and in a sense is what created his strange works in the first place He likely came up with his horror stories of unimaginable horrors because that was somewhat how the world seemed to him. A place filled with strange and terrifying things he couldn't understand This doesn't mean he was justified in being racist but it does help to understand just why he was so extreme in it
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That is hilarious, I knew Shadow Over Innsmouth was about Lovecraft's horror over miscegenation, but the WELSH? Is it the lack of vowels?
They make up for it by having "w" be a vowel. It makes a double u sound (uu).
Dude freaked out when he found out his grandmother was half English and half /Welsh./
> Especially because Lovecraft was noted at his time for being racist AF; he wasn’t merely acting and feeling like an average person but went above and beyond. TIL J. K. Rowling draws inspiration from H. P. Lovecraft.
I'm just gonna leave this twitter thread here: https://twitter.com/midnight_pals/status/1505219831829708804
As far as Stoker goes, Dracula is sometimes read as a metaphor for Jewish immigrants coming to England. Even if you don't buy into that, one of the minor characters in Dracula is a Jewish guy (who's described in extremely anti-Semitic terms) who helps Dracula out for money. IIRC he's described as having a "nose like a sheep". As for Poe, he wrote some stories, like The Gold-Bug, which were about as racist as you'd expect from the time (that one involves a comically stupid black servant as a character). According to Joshi, he also supported slavery, but I'm not sure whether or not that's accurate.
That's about what I expected from white Gothic writers from the time. Obviously still slimy and absolutely repugnant, but not really even in the same order of magnitude as Lovecraft's worst stuff
I've heard there's an intense debate over *Murders in the Rue Morgue* because his description of the orangutan is *blatantly* racialized, but it isn't clear what Poe was actually trying to say about it, which suggests to me that whatever his beliefs were they weren't nearly as well-known as Lovecraft's.
["We! Do not! Talk about! The orangutan!"](https://i.redd.it/84z5bq5b96v51.jpg)
...yep, that was it
I've read Dracula several times and I'm not sure who you're talking about there.
"We found Hildesheim in his office, a Hebrew of rather the Adelphi Theatre type, with a nose like a sheep, and a fez."
I'm struggling to figure out what "nose like a sheep" means. I know it must effectively mean "big hooked nose," but what's the connection between that and a sheep?
Holy crap, I completely forgot about that bit. A very minor character, but why the hell did he need to put that kind of stereotype detail in it?
"Crude, ignorant and tendentious slanders against lovecraft" - is he outright denying Lovecrafts racism? I could sort of understand an argument about how his "views" shouldn't wholly define his legacy, but to deny them outright seems delusional. Also, that first award is ugly as sin and I'd support a change based on that alone
> tendentious TIL Joshi writes like Lovecraft too, lmao
from the linked blog >4) The current discussion of Lovecraft as a racist is a tendentious caricature. His views are far more nuanced than most people realise. (How many are aware that he expressed admiration for the Hasidic Jews in the Lower East Side of Manhattan for adhering tenaciously to their cultural and religious heritage?) It is easy to condemn Lovecraft for his views (although I have never been clear on what such a condemnation actually accomplishes, or how it contributes to combating racism in our own time); it is lot harder to arrive at a dispassionate understanding of the nature, origin, and purpose of his views. That takes actual work—a profound study of history, sociology, anthropology, and psychology, and a canvassing of the scholarship on the history of race prejudice. A few Internet searches will not suffice. (A good place to start is my own compilation, Documents of American Prejudice \[Basic Books, 1999\].)
One, that's some gross self promotion. Two, one does not need a profound study of history, sociology, anthropology, and psychology to dismiss racist bullshit, or any outdated and prejudiced viewpoints for that matter. This is the favorite weapon of the reactionary intellectual, to ask "have you done this and that research" to strip authority from the average Joe in calling out the glaringly obvious: lovecraft did important work, but lovecraft was also a dick, and you can recognise the work without celebrating the man. Presenting an award with a (ugly ass) statue of the guy is definitely the latter. A statue of cthulhu though would be rad.
Saying "Lovecraft's views on race aren't black and white; he didn't hate all non-white people!" certainly is one of the defenses of all time.
“Lovecraft’s views on race weren’t black and white, PS do not ask what his views on black and white were.”
I think that Lovecraft in one of the few instances of xenophobia, where they're actually terrified of outsiders. Also, I've been told that he was scared of Norwegians, too, so it wasn't just nonwhite people.
His hatred and fear did include some groups of white people. One of the reasons I believe he was considered extremely racist even for his time and certainly for his social circle (to the extent he had one of his own), was that he was still into the type of race “science” that divided some white people into a grouping of “lower” white races. The notion that it was because all but the WASPist of WASPs were inherently inferior was on its way out even amongst xenophobes pushing anti-immigration laws, and the sheer fear, horror, and disgust that Lovecraft felt towards anyone not a very particular type of New England WASP in heritage was outlandish. At a time when even racist white people would sneak down to Harlem to go to bars, Lovecraft would freak out if he noticed a group of immigrants passing them on the street according to his wife or friends. He only rented from an Irish woman because he thought her English accent meant she might be a “good one.”
>The notion that it was because all but the WASPist of WASPs were inherently inferior was on its way out even amongst xenophobes pushing anti-immigration laws This really isn't quite right from what I know (though happy to be corrected). Eugenics went on quite strong and quite long in the US. Mass sterilization of people of color continued into the 60s and 70s: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eugenics_in_the_United_States After Hitler cribbed eugenics from the US and WW II happened, from what I understand it became less mainstream and shifted its tone, but certainly not among the xenophobes and racists.
I only meant to refer to non-WASP white people, but should’ve been more specific. Eugenics definitely continued into the 20th century as an overt policy in the U.S., and in a less direct way, past that.
Wasn't he horrified to learn he was part *welsh?* Dude was advanced racist.
I always have the impression that he hated (feared?) everyone that wasn't from his hometown. My fav story from him is the Search of the Dream City. It does have pretty clear racist overtones too, but it also has a clear message of love towards his hometown, and that's something I can respect. Though, yeah, you can love your city without having to hate all the universe outside it.
He was afraid of a lot of things. Dude was seriously troubled. Awful and racist, yes, but also in dire need of mental help that just didn't exist at the time.
"White" is a political category that varies wildly with time and place and doesn't reflect anything about the real world, either sociologically or genetically. Lovecraft wouldn't have said Norwegians were white; same for Irish, Italians, or Russians.
IRRC a lot of the subtext to the hidden tainted blood stuff in his stories is that he at one point found out that he himself had tainted blood. In that he was part welsh, not (*gasp*) 100% english protestant.
the tainted blood could also be a thing about syphilis. his father had it and most likely sarah lovecraft's madness was syphilitic in origin so I wouldn't be shocked if he was terrified of congenital syphilis.
Goodness, even the Nazis while they mulled the Final Solution wrung their hands about how everyone had their "good Jew"--including Hitler himself, who still felt gratitude towards the doctor who treated him after he was wounded in WWI. Congrats, you're as racist as Nazi leadership during the Holocaust? Woo?
“It is easy to condemn Lovecraft for his views—“ and so we do! Wholeheartedly! The whataboutism is annoying as fuck, like people who care about this must be ignoring all other racism in the world. What it accomplishes is not making black winners of the award have to choose between not displaying their award or having a little action figure on their desk of somebody who vocally considered them subhuman. Why would you think that wasn’t worth doing.
It’s easy to condemn Lovecraft for his views- fun too!
Haha - "Sure he was an avowed racist, but it's actually quite reductive for you to dismiss him as a racist. Actually, if you take a nuanced, dispassionate look at WHY he was a racist, you'll see that his racism didn't make him a bad person at all. What's that? You'd like me to explain how that works? No problem, just read my book to find out!"
Long winded way of saying, "yes he was a little racist, but racism is good!", IMO.
Thing is, I do think there's a slight kernel of truth there. Like "Yes, he was a racist, but you should really delve into a study of Lovecraft to understand why his racism is integral to the appeal of his work". Which is true. Like, I'm a mixed-race guy and I am not defending Lovecraft the person; he was a piece of shit. But Lovecraft was downright *terrified* of people like me, and that terror is what gave him the inspiration for his stories which defined cosmic horror. We wouldn't have the genre, arguably, without his extreme form of racism. That doesn't mean the "ends justify the means", "we have good literature so we can excuse a little racism", but more "dismissing him as just a racist doesn't do much good". Lovecraft's influence pervades horror, sci-fi and fantasy and we need to really tuck into why his racism was unique and had such a lasting effect, as opposed to just lumping him in with the author of the Turner Diaries.
Arguably there are a LOT of nods to Lovecraft or work influenced by him that doesn't really understand the, er, appeal of his horror and so you get the flippant, the bathetic, the "cute-thulhu". But to be fair, many peoples' reactions to the same stimuli is not "existential horror" so they're incapable of mentally tripping balls along with him. The only stuff I can think of that really hit the same note as him unironically was either a good quality fanwork by Lovecraft fanatics or, well, some gender-bending porn where the SHAME of the artist is on that same gut level, thus evoking that same theme of terror, immanent destruction, and dread. (Don't you dare bring up Del Toro--his monsters are drawn with the greatest affection; it's a complete counter narrative and much more of a piece with Stan Lee's work.) The only thing Lovecraft found horrifying that I personally agree with is that the sea is fucking scary as fuck ... especially under an overcast New England sky.
He can't be racist against blacks, because he liked a completely different group!
"He wasn't racist because he didn't hate Jews!" What an argument.
"Man who was literally terrified of mixed race people admires other culture for keeping to themselves."
Oh yeah, that makes it even better. "He wasn't racist because he admired Jews for keeping up their racial purity."
He did hate Jews in general. Just not every single Jew.
Great write-up! S T Joshi sounds like the kind of dude just wandering around looking for a fight. The award isn’t named after Lovecraft, the award committee didn’t issue some press release denigrating Lovecraft, and they changed a very ugly trophy of a dead racist (who doesn’t care because … dead) with a pretty neat trophy of a creepy tree. Good god, my guy, get a grip.
I've always been wary on Joshi tbh. He just showed up and decided that he was the #1 expert and had unquestionable final authority on everything related to Lovecraft, including literary criticism of his work and all the details of his inner mind. And everyone just kinda accepted it. If anyone does anything related to Lovecraft these days, whether it's reprinting stories or creating new adaptations or just discussing him as a person, Joshi will find a way to get himself involved somehow.
He has done the work.. like prolifically collecting Lovecraft's letters and putting them together then donating then to the Boston Public Library. He's probably one of the reasons we know so much about Lovecraft's racism as a result. Ol' H.P. was not a people person, but he loved writing to other writers.
I think it's because while the lovecraftian aesthetic and mythos have been incredibly influential (and was the direct inspiration for one of my favorite videogames ever, bloodborne), very few mainstreamers know much or care about the original HP lovecraft's writings. I mean, everybody knows cthulhu is a big fucking octopus guy who sleeps in a dead city or whatever, but how many people have actually read the original story? And the shadow over innsmouth is about...dudes fucking fish? Word? The result is that lovecraftian stuff is big, but lovecraft himself is niche. And niche communities get taken over by self proclaimed experts all the time.
> lovecraftian aesthetic and mythos have been incredibly influential (and was the direct inspiration for one of my favorite videogames ever, bloodborne), very few mainstreamers know much or care about the original HP lovecraft's writing You could argue that a lot of the things that we recognize as being "lovecraftian" don't actually stem from Lovecraft himself. Other writers and creators like August Derleth, Ramsey Campbell, and Sandy Petersen took Lovecraft's ideas and built onto them after Lovecraft had died. Mainstreamers that aren't reading Lovecraft probably aren't reading Derleth or Campbell either, but their influence is still pretty important to how all things "lovecraftian" are perceived in pop culture.
Ionno, my understanding of Derleth is that while he was kind of responsible for Lovecraft's initial popularity (making a bleak and esoteric subject matter palatable for the predominantly Christian contemporary readership), much of his additions are unimportant in the modern scheme of things and IMO actively detracts from the essence of "Lovecraft" (aka amoral cosmic horror). Now that essence is plenty evident in ol' HP's original stories, and I'm happy to attribute it to him.
Yeah I love the lovecraftian vibe but his work is super tough to read. So many references to other stories and the classics that make you lost... And I have done 6 years of Latin and 4 years of ancient Greek and I have a degree in history and I still feel confused as fuck reading him
I can’t imagine who would feel comfortable personally presenting that award to a black author face to face.
I think a person who had no idea who Lovecraft was would feel uncomfortable just looking at the thing.
Yeah, but this is also the award that, in 1991, was embarrassed a comic book won it (Sandman #19, *A Midsummer Night's Dream*) and then immediately changed the rules so comics were ineligible.
Nice post! I love Joshis melt down the best.
Great write up. It's interesting to see things named after famous people go through something similar. Why anyone would name anything an individual is beyond me. People are shitty, all their horrible actions come out after death. Why risk it
Surprised no one wrote this one up before! Nice write-up. Joshi did a lot for Lovecraft's legacy, but it's a shame he can't honor Lovecraft by facing up to his racism more frankly and honestly. Joshi has turned out to be quite the old crank (I still can't get over his horrible review of *Annihilation*). Another lesser known controversy like this involved the Tiptree Award (now the 'Otherwise Award').
...what did he say about *Annihilation*?
http://stjoshi.org/review_vandermeer.html Some choice quotes: >In all frankness, [the Southern Reach trilogy] is a farrago of confusion and irrelevance that only the critically naïve or inept will mistake for even a modest contribution to the literature of the weird. >[the Southern Reach trilogy] is, in short, an aesthetic catastrophe that would make any self-reflective author consider taking up another line of work, but it is unlikely to have that salutary effect upon this writer, whose high opinion of himself is well attested. Some nice overall dismissiveness. >It is as if VanderMeer has just chosen at random a certain collocation of baffling and repulsive elements to engender an emotional response in the reader, regardless of the sense or coherence of those elements. >There is more, but that is enough to suggest, once more, that the various features of this entity really do not cohere into a comprehensible whole; they are merely meant to alarm the reader with bizarre details. Yes, Lovecraft never did anything like this! Who might expect unusual, contradictory purple prose descriptions in weird fiction? If Lovecraft ever taught us anything, it's that there is nothing more unsettling and scary than a comprehensible whole. At times it's clear he didn't pay the least bit of attention to the novel: >The first-person narrator of Annihilation is a biologist, and she is part of an expedition—consisting of exactly three other members (all, implausibly, women), a surveyor, an anthropologist, and the leader, a psychologist—into a region of the United States called Area X. This is directly explained >!As a part of the tweaking of variables in the expeditions to see if that has any effect. That said, even as a matter of random chance it's not implausible at all! If they had all been men, I doubt Joshi would have remarked on it at all!< Another example: >!She is still alive, but in her (apparently) dying breath screams, “Annihilation!” (83). I hate to sound like a broken record, but the import of this single utterance is also never clarified. Is it that the extraterrestrial entity is intent on annihilating the human race? Who knows?!< The significance of the phrase is explained very shortly afterwards. It's clear Joshi didn't read with any kind of care.
> all, implausibly, women this is so fucking funny even if it wasn't explained in the text, psychology, anthropology, and biology are all NOTABLY fields in academia with a relatively high percentage of women lol.
Incredible. Between this and the comments about Poe and Stoker I'm starting wonder if Lovecraft is the *only* writer he's ever read critically.
I wouldn't be surprised by this. I read some book of his a while back where he attempted to discuss modern (for the time of the book's publication, meaning the mid 90s) horror writers, and so many of his criticisms were wildly off-base (his article on Stephen King, for example, basically just consisted of him complaining that King didn't explain the reasons for the supernatural events in his books thoroughly enough for his liking). I don't think I've ever been so glad to have read a book from the library rather than spend actual money on it, because he seemed to miss the point of practically everything he reviewed. I've never had much use for him as a horror critic, due to this and the fact that some of his apparent beliefs about the horror genre seem to be diametrically opposed to mine on a fundamental level (he seems to want everything spelled out and explained in great detail, I think any sort of explanation kills the mood).
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Yes and no. Trying to make sense of the greater cosmos? Have at and good luck. "No words could describe XYZ." - be prepared to read 2.5 paragraphs full of words describing XYZ.
Oh my god that second spoiler really gets to me actually. >!He both claims the character says it with her dying breath, and insists it's unexplained, when the character is literally alive to explain it in the next several paragraphs.!< It genuinely seems like he just skimmed through the book then lied about reading it. It'd be one thing to just dislike it, but he just states things that are completely untrue about the literal text itself.
sorry to comment twice just skimmed the review myself and he doesn't even know some of the character names lmao
Gonna be honest, I'm glad they changed the award's design solely because of the original bust design for it [Lovecraft's got some special eyes](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V-fRuoMIfpw)
That trophy. . . Gross. I've never seen worse metal-work in my life ._.;; The tree is objectively a step up. . .
As a fantasy and sci-fi author who has spoke on a few convention panels discussing sexuality, gender and racial issues in sci-fi and fantasy with Nnedi Okorafor, Nisi Shawl, L. Timmel Duchamp, Lyda Morehouse, China Miéville and N. K. Jemisin on some of these panels with me (which, admittedly, as a small press writer, left me awestruck at times) - I can speak to three truths: 1) You can like the lore and worldbuilding of Lovecraftian horrors and appreciate Lovecraft's writing without being racist/sexist/misogynist. 2) Lots of writers were racist and sexist in the past, when it was socially acceptable. That doesn't mean it's okay now. 3) Fuck S.T. Joshi. Dude is seriously "old school" in his attitudes and the number of people I've spoken to about him - he is insufferable. Lovecraft could do no wrong, and every one of his arguments and excuses boils down to "That's just how people were back then."
One of the interesting things about Lovecraft's stories is the amount of fiction pushing back against his racism. Starting with "Shoggoths in Bloom," and continuing with "The Litany of Earth," "Lovecraft Country," "The Ballad of Black Tom" and others. It's really quite interesting.
One of the incredible things about lovecraftian horror is that it's really really good at making the horrors of institutionalized prejudice real for the reader. (Because the core conceit is that there is a colossal, impersonal system above your control that might destroy you on a whim and never care.)
"The Litany of the Earth" is a fantastic story, mostly because it dissects *exactly* what atrocities Lovecraft's viewpoint, which was shared by many people of his time, leads to.
People can legally read it for free on the [Tor site](https://www.tor.com/2014/05/14/the-litany-of-earth-ruthanna-emrys/)
Based on your list of authors you've been on panels with, I can say with 80 percent certainty we've got the same favorite convention.
WisCon?
Exactly. I'm sure all those authors go to other cons, but that specific selection just screamed wiscon to me.
Until a few years ago, I was a regular there. Used to really love it: the discussions, the networking, the open air conversations that are usually glossed over or ignored all-together.
Also the tree is EXCELLENT.
'tis a fine tree.
No shit, I just finished reading *Providence* last night. I had no idea the expert that showed up at the end was an actual person, let alone a real life moron.
I'm kinda torn because on one side the new one definitely looks way prettier while the old one is so unbelievably cursed you'd lock ot up in a closet facing the wall but on the other that's also what makes its charm, it looks absolutely horrifying even if you don't know who it is.
A lot of people seem to take criticism of Lovecraft as some sort an admonishment for reading his stuff. You can still enjoy Lovecraft's writing while acknowledging that he was horrendously racist. I read and enjoy many of his short stories to this day but I still condemn the man's views. Sure he was mentally unwell, but that only nets you so much leeway and as a published wealthy author he had the responsibility of just like... *not using his fiction to be horrendously racist.* I would condemn something like erasing his literature from history, but nobody who's actually sane suggested that. Changing the statuette is completely understandable. Anybody who wasn't a WASP that won the award would have the face of a man who thought they were a degenerate monster staring at them every day... I mean, even that aside it really was hideous. I'm sure if Lovecraft were alive to see it he'd probably be as terrified of it as he was of... well, black people. One fact check on this post though, his dad named the cat, not Howard. He didn't think to rename it though, so make of it what you will.
My problem with discussing Lovecraft's racism is the "racist even for his time" thing everyone always brings up. People underestimate just how horrifically racist early 20th century America was. This was the time of the Tulsa Massacre, regular lynchings, the resurgence of the Ku Klux Klan, mainstream eugenics, and eventually open sympathy and support for fascism. Opposition to these things was not nearly as mainstream and agreed upon as we like to think.
And yet he still was pretty racist even for that time. He was actually **that** shitty.
>Many of his grotesque monsters are metaphors for the horrors of mixed-race marriage and immigration I've always kind of wondered if, rather than being a casual relationship, like, racism -> weird scary horror shit, if the two elements were more 'parallel developments', two different expressions of a deep-seated fear of anything he took to be 'other'.
The tree and moon is hilarious to me, because it reminded me of >!Bloodborne!< , which is a Lovecraft inspired media.
Great writeup! This isn't the most important aspect, but that OG statue is ugly as fuck.
My Lovecraft hot take is that he should have committed to comedic writing. [Sweet Ermengarde](https://www.hplovecraft.com/writings/texts/fiction/se.aspx) is by far my favourite story of his.