H P Lovecraft, page 1 of 15

In a 1931 letter to Frank Belknap Long, H P Lovecraft summed up what he was trying to do in his fiction as striving for “a form of non-supernatural cosmic art”, one that adhered to the new and increasingly strange ideas about reality that twentieth century physics was coming up with, yet still managed to convey the weird thrill and “sense of outsideness” of cosmic horror.

I couldn’t help but think of this when reading Benjamín Labatut’s collection When We Cease To Understand The World, in particular its third story, “The Heart of the Heart”. In When We Cease To Understand The World (a title with evident Lovecraftian resonances) and his subsequent novel The Maniac, Labatut focuses on the lives of the real-life mathematicians and scientists who formed the theories (relativity and quantum physics) that brought their own particular style of cosmic weirdness to the twentieth century. Mostly, Labatut deals with early-twentieth century figures, but “The Heart of the Heart” opens with a modern mathematician who is actually still living (Shinichi Mochizuki), and mainly focuses on another, from the second half of the twentieth century, Alexander Grothendieck. It begins with Mochizuki quietly publishing an enormous proof of “one of the most important conjectures in number theory”, known as the “abc conjecture”. It’s a proof so complicated that even when the world’s leading mathematicians pore over it, they can’t be sure it has achieved its aim. Sometime later, Mochizuki withdraws it. He has, Labatut writes, succumbed to “Grothendieck’s curse”, and goes on to outline the career of the man who (according to Wikipedia) is “considered by many to be the greatest mathematician of the twentieth century”. Grothendieck seems to have been a wellspring of new, complex theories of mathematics, finding immense depths and interconnections in even the simplest of notions. Behind it all, Grothendieck believed lay “the heart of the heart”: “a ray of light capable of illuminating every conceivable incarnation of a mathematical object”, but which was also “an entity… at the very centre of mathematics, which had completely unhinged him”. Something about this “entity” causes Grothendieck to retreat from mathematics—indeed, from the world at large, as he moves to a remote village and attempts to live on nothing but dandelion soup—and to demand certain of his works be removed from library shelves. He has, Labatut implies, glimpsed an idea so disturbing that it should remain hidden, “for the good of all of us”. The implication is that Mochizuki, a former disciple of Grothendieck, has glimpsed the same thing.

The imagery and language Labatut uses is rife with Lovecraftian resonances. That disquieting “entity… at the very centre of mathematics, which had completely unhinged him”, sounds something like Lovecraft’s idiot god Azathoth, “which blasphemes and bubbles at the centre of all infinity”. More Lovecraftian still, Grothendieck, after his retreat, “came to believe dreams were not proper to human beings, but missives from an external entity he called Le Rêveur”—which also recalls, for me, Ramsey Campbell’s Incarnate, with its inhuman source of all dreams.

There are physicists and mathematicians throughout When We Cease To Understand The World dealing with strange and disturbing new insights into the cosmic order, many of whom find themselves driven to the edge of sanity, if not beyond. (Labatut’s fiction is full of madness, fevers and suicides.) His novel The Maniac (2023) opens with the tale of Paul Ehrenfest, known to such colleagues as Einstein and Bohr as “the Conscience of Physics”, but who suffers from bouts of extreme depression, and ends up shooting not only himself, but his mentally and physically disabled son. The main subject of the novel, the mathematician John von Neumann, is, however, a complete contrast. If Grothendieck is perhaps the greatest mathematician of the twentieth century, von Neumann is surely the most influential, certainly in terms of our daily lives. The list of areas he either pioneered or took a key part in includes the development of the atom bomb (von Neumann was the one who said it should explode before it hit the ground, so as to cause the maximum damage), the Cold War (after the bombing of Japan, von Neumann urged the US to immediately bomb Russia before they could develop a similar weapon, this being, in his mind, “the only fully logical decision to make”; afterwards, he advocated the idea that came to be known as Mutually Assured Destruction—the development of such an overwhelming stock of nuclear weapons that it could destroy the world several times over, thus, in a way, “ensuring global peace by taking us to the brink of Armageddon”), the subsequent development of the hydrogen bomb (five hundred times more powerful than the atom bomb, and described in the novel as “a true horror, something that could not be justified in any sense, an evil by any measure”), but also computing (“The DNA of the entire digital universe”—the von Neumann architecture—is still the basic structure of all modern computers), game theory (an apparently abstract mathematical idea that nevertheless informs all modern warfare), AI (a late obsession with self-replicating digital entities and the workings of the brain) and, to name one positive, weather-forecasting.

Unlike the subjects of so much of Labatut’s fiction, von Neumann is free of mental instability—at first, anyway. His “intelligence was playful, not tortured”; he was “Brilliant but childish, insightful yet incredibly shallow”. At first pursuing the logical basis for all mathematics (something that also forms the subject of one of my favourite graphic novels, Logicomics)—until Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorem proved one would never be found—von Neumann then becomes “more practical and effective than before, but also [more] dangerous”, freely engaging in “so many top-secret projects that his suit pockets were overflowing with security cards”. Where Ehrenfest, though burdened with depression, was “the Conscience of Physics”, von Neumann, free of all doubt, seemingly has no conscience at all.

(He does, though, have his own ultimate date with mortality, when it’s discovered he has terminal cancer, in all likelihood caused by his exposure to radiation during the development of the atom bomb. Previously so sure of his own special status, this proves to be the one thing the genius von Neumann cannot comprehend: “He suffered,” one of Labatut’s narrators records, “from the loss of his mind more than I have seen any human being suffer, in any other circumstance.”)

And I can’t help but reach for Lovecraftian parallels again as, aided by an elite possessing abstruse and occult knowledge, something insanely destructive and utterly without conscience rises in a remote Pacific island: Cthulhu from his sleeping depths, the first hydrogen bomb explosion from the Enewetak Atoll.

Labatut writes with a feverish, propulsive style, a headlong rush of ideas, anxieties and desperation in his subjects’ lives. (Full of long sentences, and page-spanning paragraphs, it’s a nightmare to find your place again if your concentration wavers.) But, as the sort of scientific and mathematical concepts he writes about (very lightly—you won’t come away understanding Quantum Mechanics, let alone Inter-Universal Teichmüller Theory), are usually covered much more soberly in non-fiction, there’s something fresh about Labatut’s addressing them in such an emotionally inflated, even melodramatic style.

I found both the collection When We Cease To Understand The World and the novel The Maniac very readable, but I’m a bit torn about them. They use real-life figures (The Maniac has chapters narrated by Richard Feynman, among others) to tell real-life stories, but how reliable are they? This is a heightened, compressed version of events, foregrounding insanity, desperation and genius. It is fiction, and so not necessarily true—but, at the same time, I sort of want this, Labatut’s version, to be the truth. It fits so neatly into wonderfully Lovecraftian ideas about the cosmic dangers of forbidden knowledge. But the one case where he deals with a still-living figure—Mochizuki’s withdrawal of his massive proof—has since been undermined by real-life events: Mochizuki published his proof in 2021, a year after When We Cease To Understand The World came out. (But even if it does contain Azathoth in the form of a mathematical theory, who would understand it but the insane?)

Labatut’s stories appeal to something other than knowledge about the world, though. These are modern myths about the nature of knowledge and its consequences—myths that Lovecraft, too, addressed in his fiction, which was itself written under the influence of the shockwaves of those early-twentieth century notions such as relativity and quantum physics. Perhaps Labatut’s use of real people and events could be understood by another of Lovecraft’s ideals for weird fiction: “My own rule is that no weird story can truly produce terror unless it is devised with all the care & verisimilitude of an actual hoax.” The ultimate hoax, then, is to use so much of the truth that the weird comes through merely in the embellishments: the facts are true, but the way they’re spun brings in the darkness and weirdness.

I’ve looked at cosmic horror before on this blog in the case of individual works—is Stephen King’s Revival cosmic horror? or Lem’s Solaris?—and certainly some of my all-time favourites, from Alien to HP Lovecraft, are, but I’ve never been sure I could properly define “cosmicism”, or say why the horror in cosmic horror is “cosmic”. Ellen Greenham, in this 2022 book from Hippocampus Press (full title: After Engulfment: Cosmicism and Neocosmicism in H. P. Lovecraft, Philip K. Dick, Robert A. Heinlein, and Frank Herbert), on the other hand, can:

“The principal tenets of cosmicism are that the universe operates as an indifferent mechanism, without purpose or direction, and the human creature is not only insignificant but exists as a biological mutation or accident of elemental and chemical stellar processes.”

I’d add—or at least, this is an aspect I’ve latched onto in my look at, say, Roadside Picnic—that cosmicism presents the universe as being vast, and far weirder than we could ever expect, to the point of being overwhelmingly incomprehensible. (Though this could be seen as a bleaker variant on the sense-of-wonder of science fiction.)

In my Mewsings on Stapledon’s Last and First Men I called cosmicism the religious aspect of atheism, but I might instead say it’s a worldview not just with no God, but with an oppressive God-shaped absence, to the point where the universe seems not merely indifferent but actively hostile. As Greenham says:

“The hallmark of cosmicism embodied within Lovecraft’s corpus is the apparent lack of anything even remotely like human emotion and morality being employed in the process of human eradication. Lovecraft’s others simply swat the human creature as that creature in turn swats flies.”

Why “cosmic”, then? To the Ancient Greeks, cosmos was opposed to chaos; it was order and certainty. The idea of the “cosmos”, then, relies on having a cosmological model—an ordered mental model of how the universe works. But, as Greenham points out, such models, however accurate they may seem, inevitably fail, for “a cosmological model, like a map, is only one particular view and not the territory itself”. For her, there is always an ineradicable degree of chaos that makes the universe ultimately resist any attempt to turn it into a tame and knowable cosmos.

The horror of cosmic horror is all about incursions from the “outside”—the depths of space, other dimensions, other orders of being—but this “outside”, as Greenham says, “is simply the territory beyond the parameters of the cosmos”. “Outside” means outside one’s cosmological model. The thing that turns this into horror (as opposed to the sense-of-wonder of discovering something new), is that the outsideness is so extreme it doesn’t merely reveal flaws in the cosmological model, it shatters it so thoroughly that it destroys the protagonists’ very notion of themselves.

In cosmic horror there are usually two outcomes: madness or death. In this book, Greenham maps out an expansion of the ideas of cosmic horror into what she calls neocosmicism, and adds a third response, engulfment, a term that still captures something of the sense of fear and loss of self (as experienced by many a Lovecraft protagonist), but points to a way “the human creature” (as she refers to you and me) can move beyond a merely negative outcome:

“By choosing to be engulfed by the universe, rather than simply observe it from a distance, the human creature in neocosmicism can move beyond what stops and destroys it, to enter a vitalised engagement with the universe and with others.”

Being engulfed, one may drown, or one may (like the protagonist of Lovecraft’s “Shadow Over Innsmouth”) be transformed and take to the alien environment as one’s new home. But the transformation must be profound.

The primary Western cosmological model for centuries has been what Greenham calls “the Genesis model”, where humanity, God’s favoured creation, is “significant in its world”, and where there is a “moral code bestowed upon it by that God”. When this was assailed by the key ideas of the 19th and 20th centuries (the revolutions started by Darwin, Freud, Einstein, and others), it was replaced by “the Machine Universe”, one “without emotion or human morality”, ruled by “the cold equations” of the laws of physics. Caught between these two worldviews, you’re in what Greenham calls “the Schizophrenic Universe”, which is “no longer one stable thing or another”, “an alien and schizophrenic landscape that has become strangely separate from the human creature within it”. The way forward to a new understanding—or to a new way of relating to the universe without a full understanding—one must face the “gaping black hole between cosmos and universe” which Greenham calls the void. For, “the light,” she says, “can never be truly understood without knowledge of the darkness also”.

The void, of course, seems empty, meaningless, a frightening vacuum. But it has a useful purpose in this neocosmological process. Like Nietzsche’s abyss, its job is not so much to be stared into as to stare back: “The void is thus named because its function is to make void, to empty the full; to turn the human creature into a tabula rasa.” To accept a new notion of what the universe is, you must—painfully, if necessary—get rid of the old notions first, even if it means throwing everything out.

At this point, the universe becomes “a proving ground”, where “the human creature enters a relationship of ‘lethal proximity’ with the universe”. A prime example is the planet Arrakis in Herbert’s Dune, whose harsh conditions have resulted in the super-tough Fremen, a people who’ve learned to live with the “cold equations” of their particular environment. The apparent hostility of the universe, then, becomes a spur: the successful entrant into the proving ground is “facing imminent threat so that… [it] might also engage its vitality”. Ultimately, though, the idea is not to just become a machine for survival, but a human being that survives, one that seeks to find “whether it is possible to survive in the cold equations with emotion and empathy intact”.

All this points to a new relationship with the vast, sometimes hostile-seeming universe. Against the apparent insignificance of humanity that’s a given in cosmic horror, Greenham’s neocosmicism points to how the very hostility of the “proving ground” can lead to a new sense of significance: the proving ground may weed out those who can’t survive its ultra-harsh conditions, but “Gardeners do not remove weeds for the sake of the removal”. There is, then, an ultimate aim: to turn oneself into a creature that fits this universe, perhaps even adds something to it. This can, Greenham says, even be a liberating view, for:

“…in remaining indifferent to whether the human creature succeeds or fails, the universe nullifies any sense that creature might have of striving for a final result, thereby releasing that creature from the requirement—real or illusory—to be bound by a sense of finitude.”

In the end, the idea is to no longer see the individual human being as a thing contained in, and oppressed by, a vast universe, like a pea rattling around in an enormous box, but as a part of it, and perhaps even (in John Wyndham’s phrase) “the crown of creation”—the human that triumphs against incredible odds, and retains their humanity, and not because a god deemed that it was always going to be so, but through their own efforts.

Reading Greenham’s book, I kept thinking of one author she doesn’t mention, Olaf Stapledon, in particular his Last and First Men. Stapledon has some of his future races of humankind actively engage with the sort of ideas Greenham writes about. They see their role as surviving in the universe as it is, not as they wish it to be, and being prepared to accept that the end must ultimately be a tragedy—the universe’s “cold equations” (literally cold: they face the dying of the sun) will win out, but in the meantime, their role is to seek the fulfilment of their particular nature within this universe: “man is a fair spirit, whom a star conceived and a star kills”. And Stapledon adds something I think Greenham doesn’t mention, as far as I recall, a willed returned to that science-fictional sense of wonder. Stapledon’s future humans “render the universe that intelligent worship which, they felt, it demanded”, and learn to “admire the Real as it is revealed to us, and salute its dark-bright form with joy”.

It’s an excellent study of an idea that could really be applied to so much I’ve previously written about on this blog. (Reading it didn’t require an extensive knowledge of the writers she covers—I’m certainly not very familiar with Heinlein, or with Herbert beyond the first Dune book. I’m tempted now to read some more in the Dune series; not so much with Heinlein.)

You can hear Greenham interviewed on episode 152 of the Udda Ting Podcast (don’t worry about the Swedish intro, the interview itself is in English), on most podcast apps or here at Soundcloud.

Wondering where to look next (after Stapledon’s Last and First Men and Lem’s Solaris) for works that touch on the sort of cosmic themes Lovecraft addressed, though without his emphasis on horror, I wondered if Arthur C Clarke’s Rendezvous with Rama might be a good candidate. Clarke, whose “The Sentinel” was the kicking-off point for 2001: A Space Odyssey, is both an old-school hard-SF writer and one whose work strayed into themes of “the metaphysical, even to the mystical” (as the Encyclopedia of Science Fiction puts it). In fact Rama, published in 1973, was the first novel Clarke wrote after his collaboration with Kubrick (the novel of 2001, which was written alongside the screenplay, came out in 1968, but only after it had been revised and rewritten — at Kubrick’s behest — throughout the four preceding years), and reading it I found myself wondering if Rama might be a result of Clarke blowing off steam about the things Kubrick (who ultimately had final say on 2001) wouldn’t allow into the novel. (Clarke was very respectful and polite about Kubrick and their working relationship, despite the director’s demands over the novel resulting in Clarke apparently coming close to financial hardship at one point. The closest I could find to any criticism of Kubrick from Clarke, though, was this, from when the director’s demands for yet more edits meant they had to cancel the existing publishing contract and find a new one: “There seems to be a right way to do things, a wrong way, and Stanley’s way.”)

Rendezvous with Rama opens by introducing us to Project Spaceguard, an effort to alert Earth (and, this being a few centuries in the future, the other inhabited planets of the solar system) about any potential collisions with comets and other objects. A new object has been spotted passing Jupiter, heading sunwards. It’s dubbed Rama, and it soon becomes clear this is no wandering asteroid:

“Its body was a cylinder so geometrically perfect that it might have been turned on a lathe — one with centres fifty kilometres apart. The two ends were quite flat, apart from some small structures at the centre of one facet, and were twenty kilometres across; from a distance, when there was no sense of scale, Rama looked almost comically like an ordinary domestic boiler.”

The closest spacecraft, Commander Norton’s Endeavour, is diverted to intercept and explore this object in the roughly month-long window before it gets too close to the sun. Landing on one of its flat ends, the Endeavour’s crew finds its way into the interior, which contains an entire landscape — there’s even a band of (at first frozen) sea about halfway along.

It soon becomes evident Clarke’s focus is on the very practical problems of exploring such an object, and the sort of physical environment it presents. For instance, it has a certain amount of gravity, but because the explorers are inside it, when you’re standing close to the axis, gravity is pulling equally in all directions, so it cancels out to zero-G. But gravity is felt increasingly as you move towards the surface of this artificial world. And, where any other author might provide a quick method to get people from the axis (where you enter Rama) down to the surface, Clarke spends several chapters on his characters exploring the best method of traversing the several kilometres of stairs: as it’s in low gravity, for instance, it’s tempting to just float down, but will this world’s gravity be enough to result in injury? And then there’s the Coriolis Effect caused by being inside a spinning object, meaning if you drop, say, some supplies above one point, they might land several kilometres to the side. And once Rama gets closer to the sun and starts to warm up, climatic changes kick in and its sea thaws, meaning Clarke gets to describe what he thinks would happen in such an artificial enclosed environment.

The closest parallel to a work by Lovecraft, I’d say, is At the Mountains of Madness, where scientists are exploring a remote alien city. But where Lovecraft’s city is covered in enough wall-art to give us a good idea of the culture and history of its former inhabitants, Clarke gives us few clues as to what the Ramans might look like, or what this massive object is for. He doesn’t even have his characters speculate, as though they’re too scientifically disciplined to do so on such little evidence. Perhaps it’s because Clarke knew how inevitably disappointing it could be to bring his aliens into the light after such a long build-up; but I can’t help feeling he was simply having too much fun focussing on the physical problems associated with this artificial world. He’d maybe get to the aliens, but only once he’d got through all the physics — and there’s plenty of physics to get through.

But since I was on the look out for hints of Lovecraftian cosmic awe, I did spot a few instances. Rama opens with mention of the 1908 Tunguska explosion (when “Moscow escaped destruction by three hours and four thousand kilometres — a margin invisibly small by the standards of the universe”). But where Lovecraft would have taken that near-miss as evidence of how overwhelmingly random the universe’s destructive forces are, and so how little human life matters, Clarke takes it as just one more practical problem humans have to deal with. Hence the creation of Project Spaceguard, to spot asteroids on their way towards Earth.

The sheer scale of time associated with the spacecraft Rama — Clarke points out it must have been “more than two hundred thousand years since Rama passed near any star” — comes close to another Lovecraftian note, as Lovecraft got a particular horror-thrill from the passage of time (he called time itself an “especial enemy of mine”), and even more so with vast eons (“After vigintillions of years great Cthulhu was loose again”), but in Clarke’s hand two hundred thousand years feels like a number of interest to note, and no more. As a scientist dealing with astronomical objects and forces, he’s used to massive numbers.

Commander Norton does get a glimpse of the sort of vertiginous fear Lovecraft associated with the cosmic/alien as he descends to Rama’s surface:

“His well-ordered universe had been turned upside down, and he had a dizzying glimpse of those mysteries at the edge of experience which he had successfully ignored for most of his life.”

But he has the mental discipline to rein himself in:

“There was mystery here — yes; but it might not be beyond human understanding… At all costs, he must not let Rama overwhelm him. That way lay failure — perhaps even madness.”

He goes on to muse that “The wonder and strangeness of Rama would banish its terrors, at least for men who were trained to face the realities of space.” (And I suspect Clarke was of that generation of SF writers who throughout their lives continued to find the very word “space” inherently thrilling.)

Ultimately, for Clarke, Rama is a physical puzzle, not the calling card of cosmic horrors Lovecraft would have made of it. I’ve always felt that, by the time of At the Mountains of Madness, Lovecraft’s insistence on horror as the only response to the unusual was wearing a little thin, certainly when assigned to the scientists who make up that story’s Antarctic expedition, who’d more likely be positively thrilled to discover an alien city. But the almost complete lack of awe felt by Clarke’s protagonists leaves the weird fiction reader in me feeling something is, perhaps, missing in Clarke’s approach, where such an awesome alien object is merely an intriguing physical puzzle.

The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction talks of Clarke, in his work as a whole, presenting “images of humanity childlike in stature compared to the ancient, inscrutable wisdom of Alien races” — and that is, I think, his most characteristic note. Not the humans-as-insects of Lovecraft, but humans-as-children.

As I said above, I couldn’t help but read Rama with the feeling that something, shall we say, monumental might be looming over it — Clarke’s collaboration with Stanley Kubrick. And Kubrick does get a brief allusion in the text of Rama, with the mention of “Sid Krassman’s famous late-twentieth century [film] Napoleon” — that being something the real S. K. was planning as his follow-up to 2001. In the end, I never really felt Rama showed any evidence of letting off left-over steam from the Kubrick collaboration — I suspect Clarke was just too genuinely good-natured a person to have any resentments at all — but it was interesting that both 2001 and Rama end with a space-baby of sorts. With 2001, it’s the Star Child (which seems to have been Clarke’s suggestion); in Rama, it’s the news that one of Commander Norton’s wives (in this future, men and women can have multiple spouses) has been inseminated, thousands of miles away on Mars. Norton is the father, but:

“Like every astronaut, Norton had been sterilised when he entered the service; for a man who would spend years in space, radiation-induced mutation was not a risk — it was a certainty.”

It’s not, then, the mystical wonder-child of 2001, but a combination of scientific miracle and practical necessity, something that feels more in line with Clarke’s approach.

Clarke might create situations of awe and wonder — the size of Rama, the implications of its hundreds of thousands of years’ journey — but is always ready with a bathetic counter-note (“Rama looked almost comically like an ordinary domestic boiler”) or has his characters focusing too much on the immediate practicalities — as trained astronauts would have to, practicalities being so necessary to their survival — to stand back and really bask in the sort of awe (or horror) a weirder-minded writer might.

Ultimately, there’s something childlike about Clarke himself. He’s intrigued by Rama as a sort of toy — what can it do? what’s it like inside? what happens if we drop things? — rather than the religious-level object the title of the novel implies.

Rendezvous with Rama won a host of awards, including the Hugo, Nebula, John W Campbell Memorial Award and BSFA Award. It was followed by several sequels — all collaborations — but I have to say, I’m not tempted to read them. Rama’s power is in its suggestiveness. Filling in the answers to the questions it raises will, I suspect, only turn it into one more spaceship in the crowded vacuum that is science-fictional space.