I didn't understand a bit of this post but Mr. Mieville is still the best writer in this place between fantasy and science fiction that I have ever been exposed to.

So...we want strange new things. But things that fall into the pre-defined categories of Fantasy or Science Fiction (I'm summarizing) are neither strange, nor new.

And when an author is telling us about these strange new things, the author must take care to keep it sufficiently strange and new, satisfying both our requirement that we see this cool thing, and that we actively also do not wholly see it, so we can continue thinking it was as cool as it was before we saw it.

Neat. I like Mr. Mieville, too.

The bit about Gods and RPGs goes back to the original Deities and Demigods supplement to D&D. Not just Cthulhu, but any God.

At east the Call of Cthulhu game managed to introduce the Sanity mechanism, so that anyone who did face Cthulhu would emerge as a gibbering wreck of a man. It wasn't just hit points that mattered. Still, there's a thread running through gaming which focusing on excessigve firepower, handled in exquisitely tedious detail.

Back when I was active in the hobby, I preferred to use the rules as a guide. Perhaps it came from somebody wanting to play a baby Golden Dragon in the first game I DMed. Inflicting a paionful nasal blowback wasn't in the rules, but it seemed to work.

There are, alas, gamers who just don't believe in the sanity clause.

I think the issue here is a simple one. We want the strange, new, edritch, und so weiter. We want the shock of difference to amaze our minds. But we also want it grounded in the familiar. Cthulhu may be a nameless horror, but he's also a gigantic octopus.

This is a normal human trait, I believe. We want to envision powers on a scale that our minds can barely encompass. We want to read about amazing, magical things. We also want to have them fit into a scale that we can manage, to be bounded in a nutshell while simultaneously being king of infinite space.

I've played my share of RPGs, though I'm a fan of the more nebulous and/or numinous styles of fantasy. So I can see just what he means. The most interesting parts of the characters never lived in the statistics, the whole sensawunda of standing in a real honest-to-god different plane rarely survives reading the description from the book. Thankfully I always played with DMs willing to break the rules if common sense intervened (If the rules prevent a character from doing something that an ordinary person could do in real life -- get a license and buy a gun, for instance -- some GMs will hold that the rules count more than the realism.)

I've also dealt with GMs who include extras -- letters from family (if/where the characters can read), folk stories that don't actually have plot relevance, visions for events we may never actually get to -- in an earnest attempt to bring back that feeling of the world beyond numbers. It's not always sensawunda -- it stretches in both that direction and in the merely grounded. I still tend to find RPGs limited in what can and can't happen, ("Don't split the party!") but I am glad when I find someone aware that the limits can be pushed; it makes it fun enough to be worth joining in the first place.

I remember China Mieville using the example of Cthulhu having a strength of 100. But, otherwise, it's his argument at least as I remember it. Someone in the audience had asked how having played RPGs in his youth had affected his work. That was his answer and delivered, BTW, with impeccable timing. He so completely nailed the laugh.

There is a structural difference between novels and role-playing games which China Miéville (and/or Matt Cheney) is glossing over: RPGs are meant to be played collaboratively and extemporaneously by several people at once, and the detailed rules are meant to set up a common framework so that there's no time wasted by pointless disputation about what happens when someone fires a gun at you, or at a dragon. Ideally, anyway.

Call of Cthulhu (the role-playing game) is not the best example of what Miéville is talking about, since by design it tries to keep the power balance of Lovecraft's stories: if Cthulhu actually shows up in a game, the player characters get squashed, consumed, or (as Dave Bell pointed out) driven stark raving mad. He's not just a monster. The point of the game is not to go mano-a-mano against Cthulhu, but to (for example) try to stop the lunatic human cultists from completing the ritual that will summon him.

(I should mention that I haven't played the game myself, but I've read numerous articles and rulebooks over the years, and talked with several friends who play it regularly.)

Of course, nothing stops players from altering the rules and working their own variations, so that if they enjoy the idea of being able to nuke Cthulhu from orbit -- and having that actually work -- they can play that kind of game...

It's important to be able to picture it in our minds, so we ground it in things we know. Like outerspace creatures having aspects of crabs or squids (hello, Cthulu!). Then creating a splashy and exciting mindpicture is a combination of this kind of description, and extrapolation.

And I didn't read Fragano's comment, which essentially said the same thing, before I said it.

Jack Ruttan ::: (view all by) ::: July 15, 2006, 01:05 PM:

...(hello, Cthulu!)...

Hello Cthulhu

I think Peter is dead on with the reason there's an abstraction to numbers in RPGs; it allows multiple creators in a shared imaginative space to continue with the interesting bits without stopping to negotiate every detail. It's also something of an evolutionary appendage from the counter-and-map strategy games that the RPG industry is an offshot of.

However, saying "RPGs are like 'X'" is like saying "Music is like 'X'". There is some commonality, but there's a wide field including quite a bit that doesn't match Miéville’s description. Certainly, the currently popular ones (which are likely similar to the one's Miéville played as a youth) can have that tension, but just as not all music is Top 40, not all RPGs are D&D.

This is the flip side of something I've been reading about in a book about C.S. Lewis and Narnia. The author says that one of Lewis' greatest skills was to take ordinary things-a wardrobe, a cup of tea-and make them part of something larger and more wonderful, so that they in turn become infused with magic.

Well the neat thing about Cthulhu, as I remember the rules from the *original* game -- they may have changed it -- is that those hit points don't really mean anything, because there's a note at the end that even if it *were* possible to "kill" Cthulhu, he'd just regenerate.

And in the Cthulhu modern times supplement there was a section that dealt with the use of nukes against the Elder Gods, that went something like this:

Q: If you nuked Cthulhu, would he die?

A: Yes. And when he regenerated he would be radioactive.

In other words, the stats in question were just placed there in order to give your heroes something to futilely chip away against for a few seconds before they lose. :)

I recognise the tension from my classes on sf and fantasy - many students like to explore the combination of identification with a character (which is often the realistic and detailed part) with the utterly strange and new (often the setting).
Of course, what is strange and new varies: I had two students in one class, one of whom expressed his inability to identify with the old woman who is the main character of Moon's Remnant Population (due to gender and age difference), and the other, also a young man, expressed his delight in finding that same character such a perfect object of identification. I think this is why I teach sf...

Yep. It looks like China Miéville managed to critique an RPG that he never *read*. Roleplaying is *not* fiction. It's more akin to a melding structures improv and tabletop wargaming. It may well draw from literature, but it's not *prentending* to be literature. It's just using literary worlds as a venue.

If Miéville has a problem with that, I'm nto sure what it is.

The whole critique is actually pretty lame, and dismissive of game designers, and gamers. It's not "Missing lovecraft's point", because that (a) asusmes Miéville is the one true authority on Lovecraft's point, which he's not. and (b) assumes that gamers are *aiming* at the same point in Lovecraft's books, which they're not.

If you want to argue about maps and fiction, go ahead, but leave gamers and gaming out of it.

Josh, I don't know for sure, but I suspect that Miéville not only read the Call of Cthulhu RPG, but played it. Perhaps even ran it. He played a lot of D&D growing up (just like most of his age cohort of fantasy authors).

I think you're missing his point, which isn't about gaming but about the tensions inherent in his work.

I don't think I'm missing that there's an obvious insult towards gamers an gaming going on here.

Tensions are fine, but what's up with talking about gaming as if it were aiming at some sort of point that only Matt Cheney and China Miéville get to define?

This is a strawman argument, and it's insulting. It may not be intentional, but that's not much of excuse for poor manners that could have been avoided.

Of course, Matt Cheney is only representing a possibly misremembered version what Miéville said, so unless I get confirmation that this is really what Miéville was talking about, the insult is more from Cheney.

Clearly, Miéville rolled a 20 on his Persuasion roll for the speech.

That, or he used a Friends spell to temporarily boost his Charisma score. Or he cast Mass Charm on the audience, thereby rendering them tractable to his wily words. You'd think at least one of the con-goers would have thought to bring a Helmet of Mind Shielding, but no...

Any good role playing game will be designed for playability. Playability is not necessarily in line with what makes a good story or reality.

I recall reading in some RPG book, Shadowrun I believe, where they explicitely explain that defensive powers are cheap and easy to get and offensive powers are expensive and hard to get. And that this was done specifically so characters could beat the ever loving crap out of one another and not die.

real life is so the opposite way. The human body, as compared to a shadowrun character, is fragile as an eggshell. You can easily kill a man with your bare hands, and for the next advancement, knives and firearms are cheap and easy to come by. But no one wants to play a game where your character takes on the bad guy by himself and has a 50=50 chance of dying every time.

This really isn't showing the difference between 'telling' and 'mystery', I suppose, but it is pointing to an oft occuring difference between 'telling' and 'reality'.

The whole critique is actually pretty lame, and dismissive of game designers, and gamers. It's not "Missing lovecraft's point", because that (a) asusmes Miéville is the one true authority on Lovecraft's point, which he's not. and (b) assumes that gamers are *aiming* at the same point in Lovecraft's books, which they're not.

There have been examples of RPG books treating Lovecraftian Elder Gods in the manner Miéville describes: as Dave Bell pointed out, the first edition of Deities and Demigods had D&D stats for Cthulhu and several other Mythos entities (as well as Zeus, Osiris, etc.), as if they were just really powerful monsters, describable in exactly the same way as you would an orc or a rat, so that if your characters were sufficiently powerful -- say, 25th or 30th level, armed with Staves of the Magi and Amulets of Awesomeness and so forth[*] -- they could kick his/its/their squamous, rugose, indescribably horrible asses.

But the actual Call of Cthulhu game didn't take that approach.

I recently read an essay by game designer/writer Kenneth Hite, who argued that CoC, as a role-playing game, embodies a theme inherent in Lovecraft's stories which is analogous to that of the classic Western movie. As he sees it, the classic Western articulates a central conflict: in order to fight barbarism and defend civilization, you must pick up a gun; but those who pick up guns are barbarians. The Lovecraftian theme is: in order to defend the world from "the Outside", you must acquire (and even use) knowledge of the Outside; but in acquiring that knowledge, you move closer to being part of the Outside. (The game mechanic is your character's Sanity decreasing as his or her Mythos Knowledge increases.)

[*] Though probably not something like the Head of Vecna.

Stephen King (a lifelong Lovecraft fan) wrote in DANSE MACABRE about the tension between showing the monster/ghost/bogeyman to the reader, and only having it lurk behind a door, hinted but never explicitly shown.

"Lovecraft would open the door... but only a crack."

King compared this technique with how Robert Wise's film THE HAUNTING has the door bulge, but never open to reveal the Thing On The Other Side:

"I think both Wise and Lovecraft before him understood that to open the door, in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred, is to destroy the unified, dreamlike effect of the best horror."

But King also argues that, hard as it may be to actually show the Lurking Thing (and risk a pratfall), the writer should still try.

I'm going to go out on a limb here and guess that I'm the person with most experience in the rolegaming market in this thread - about 1.3 million words sold since 1997, and some awards won along the way for some of them. I read the description of Mieville's comments and nodded and thought "right on". The tension he talks about is one that good gaming creators think about, too, and with less freedom to explore unusual options than the authors of fiction have. A friend of mine once said, "Our audience wants marvels, and then wants us to make them mundane but still marvelous."

Sometimes I think that we're doing pretty well if we simply acknowledge outright that this tension exists and (in gaming) discuss what kinds of consequences follow from effing the ineffable versus leaving it alone. Which, comes to think of it, that the tension may be the sort of thing there's the tension about....

(I don't mean to pull a "I'm not insulted and so nobody else can possibly have a beef" trick, by the way. I just did want to note that someone who's been up to his earlobes in rolegaming for a while now was the opposite of insulted by way of balance.)

Note that it shouldn't really be called "missing Lovecraft's point" for the characters to win a temporary victory against Great Cthulhu since that's what happened near the end of Lovecraft's short story. Ship rams Cthulhu, Cthulhu goes back into dormancy after briefly awakening.

There's durable victory in "The Dunwich Horror", too, and "The Shadow Over Innsmouth", and (as far as people at large are concerned) "The Rats in the Walls" and like that. There's a certain kind of Lovecraft fan that's so enamored of the nihilism they can't see the existential heroics part.

When I heard China's answer, I thought that one of the things he was says was precisely what those who are critiquing China's answer are saying. That is, roleplaying is not literature and it doesn't pretend to be. How the Cthulhu of literature is this great unknowable while the Cthulhu of the RPG, by definition, can not be is a very good example of this.

In the context of his answer, China was not talking about gaming. He made it very clear that he was talking about conflicting impulses within himself as reflected in his writing. That is, on one hand, he loves reading RPG books because he loves the amount of detail they go into. However, he knows that he can not do the same in his own work. So he was using the question about how RPGs have affected his work to illustrate the tension between mystery and having it all explained in detail.

I don't know that he scored a critical success with this answer though. He was pretty much on all weekend. Some of his panel responses caused spontaneous mass audience applause.

Josh? Please explain to me, as a longstanding gamer, fan of China's writing, opponent of his politics and liker of his persona, especially his many comments on gaming in interviews on various BBC shows I've listened to, where's the insult?

I think there is a straw man in this thread, but it's really not in the "insult" to gaming.

We, as gamers or as readers of fantasy and sci-fi, do have a problem in the desire for detail within the otherworldly. From Dilithium Crystals, Somebody Else's Problem fields, mages casting time stop spells on runaway trains and other PSB, you can't explain the unexplainable, but you have to for it to work.

Well, that's my take, anyway.

I'm not sure this whole demystification process is necessarily any more integral to RPGs than superheroes are to comics. Some of my earliest and most fun experiences with things that I would identify as "RPGs" involved simply making up stories with my cousins, no rules or mechanics implied. Of course the advantage of going the rule-bound, stat-heavy route is that it can make it easier for people to latch onto the game and provide fodder for endless expansions, but this is more a matter of what is convenient and profitable than what is inherent in the form. Even so, I always admired the old AD&D Planescape setting, because it insisted on leaving so many fundamental truths about the world almost completely mysterious (e.g. the history of Sigil, the nature of the Lady of Pain, the genesis and ultimate end of the Blood War). The writers would even tease readers with obviously spurious explanation, for example suggesting that the Lady of Pain, the mysterious and near omnipotent ruler of Sigil, was in fact seven giant squirrels with a ring of levitation and an elaborate costume.

The Apollo program was the ultimate demystification and detailed examination of that hoary old SF trope, the first man on the Moon.

It's still so-amazing-that-it's-incomprehensible. Even though we know the stats for a Saturn V in mind-numbing detail (if we want to). And it doesn't stop us writing two-fisted tales of thrilling space exploration, does it?

(Although, now I think about it, I don't think I've ever seen "Apollo 13: The RPG" ...)

And I will note that many authors who engage in writing a fantasy or SF series eventually end up generating a "world book" for themselves -- no dice, perhaps,but more than enough guidelines to let them play the game against themselves.

1. Mr. Stross -- glad to see the world's leading expert on shoggoth bombing here. I think many of us would be curious on your take as to exactly precisely how many hit points a shoggoth has and how that translates into megatons?

2. A. R. Yngve wrote:

But King also argues that, hard as it may be to actually show the Lurking Thing (and risk a pratfall), the writer should still try.

Yeah, well quoted.

(............SPOILER ALERT............)

I'm a big King fan, but I'd suggest that perhaps this philosophy is why King's endings frequently are not the strongest component of his work. Recall the Hand 'o God putting in a cameo at the end of The Stand? It wasn't terrible, but (IMHO) it wasn't especially satisfactory either. Even worse was the Dark Tower's blow-by-blow dtaeh of Rnaldal Fgalg.

OTOH, to give King his props, I'd cite as excellent work the (MORE SPOILERS) last couple pages of The Dark Tower. After--what, 4500+ pages? a million words or so?--it would be impossible to construct an ending that would satisfy everybody. Or even one that would satisfy anybody. Instead he has Rlonad og bcak ot the bnniegig. Yeah, it was a bit gimmicky, but honestly, hats off. Some of his best work, IMHO.

/SPOILERS

I think there's a corollary to the effect of "the more the written work relies on the imagination of the reader, the harder it will be to film." E.g. the short story "Crouch End" vs. the filmed version or any of Lovecraft's written work vs. any of the filmed adaptations. I mean, I like Stuart Gordon's Lovecraft-flavored work (Re-Animator, Rats in the Walls, and especially the yummy, yummy Dagon) as much as the next geek but I don't think he and Lovecraft were in touch with the same Muse.*

*OR WERE THEY???!???Somebody should write a short story where it turns out that Barabara Crampton and Sonia H. Greene were the same person.

Bruce,

"effing the ineffable" may well become a permanent addition to my working vocabulary. Thanks.

Showing off my ignorance, in which work does Cthulhu first make its appearance? If I were to try to get "up to speed" on the Elder Gods, where do I start?

I Useta Be a RPG author. I suspect I burned out on the whole deal way before Bruce even started writing.

Lenora notes:

"The most interesting parts of the characters never lived in the statistics."

You're lucky; I never seemed to be able to find a group that was into more than . . . ummm, pickled wonder. I always seemed to end up with folks who wanted to know the physics of magic and biology of dragons and the most efficient method of deriving rents from the enchanted item trade. (Seriously: I once got cornered by a guy who felt compelled to tell me his character's plans to get rich . . . not by following a map to a treasure or marching with the king to battle or some other high adventure, but by somehow manipulating the Magic Steed market. It sounded as thrilling as guys in suits going over hedge fund strategies.)

I once read an interview with Warren Spector, in which he described Bruce Sterling's D&D campaign. He ditched the RPG whole scene the moment he got published, but apparently in the day Bruce was a kick-ass "DM" who didn't see much of a need for the rule books. Man, that would have been something.

I GM'd a GURPS campaign for 18+ years. (Yeah, one campaign. With pretty much the same characters, too. They got pretty moosey by the end.)

I eventually realized that when I meticulously planned an adventure, with all the details and stats of the opposition &c, it was generally no fun. Not for the players, anyway.

No, the most fun was when I was winging it. I have the ability to improvise characters with multiple NPCs and play them in real time, quite vividly I might add.

A couple of times I was able to map out a whole sequence of events that would happen "offstage" at various times, so that what the PCs saw or found depended on when they got there (Day 1: they find the stolen seal. Day 2: they find the document made with the stolen seal, and shards of jet that used to be the seal. Day 3: they find nothing.) And that way if they're wasting their time I could still have the NPCs doing their thing, and only tell the PCs about it later.

I was able to make prophesies and have them come true too. I would just tell them something weird, and figure out how to make it fit later. One time, for example, they'd killed a shriggar (37 geek points to anyone who can name the source of THAT monster), and a green cloud came from it, formed a face, and said "This round to you. But we will meet again: among the dogs of the night I will be waiting." Then dissipated.

Almost a year later, real time, the players were "helping out a town with a problem," the problem in this case being some particularly vicious wolf attacks...and then one of the townies referred to them as "dogs." "Oh, I'm sorry, did I make a mistake in my [common language name]? We don't have a separate word for wolf in our language; we call them the Night's Dogs." Ruh-roh. They'd forgotten all about the prophecy, but suddenly they realized they were in deeeeeeeeeep shiiiiiiiit.

That was fun.

If I could do this in my writing...well, but I can't, so no use crying about it.

MatGB

The argument goes more against what Matt Cheney had to say, which I also mentioned, and which you seem to have skipped.

He noted RPGs as an expression of this tension, a sublimation of geekiness within the rules and tables and worldbooks of the game that was often at odds with the fantastic potential of the material, and sometimes of the source material itself—he noted that the game of Call of Cthulhu seemed to utterly miss Lovecraft’s point: Cthulhu goes from being a creature so great and terrible that it can’t possibly be described or comprehended to being a creature with 100 hit points.

I think this totally misses the mark for roleplaying, which is not story writing, but as I said, more like improv group storytelling combined with some strategic elements.

Again, roleplaying is not aiming at the same mark, and Cheney and Miéville (to a lesser exetnt because this is second hand) imply that they should be or pretend to be (it's not clear which) aiming at that mark.

I don't know if I can make it any more clear than that.

I think that the core of what China and Patrick are getting at here could actually be seen as our culture's characteristic lust for authenticity. Not only do we crave the awful (in the original sense of the word) in our constructed realms, but we also desperately seek it in our lives. There is a general understanding that equates the essential with the true, and with worth as well. But we also feel that if an experience is too easily quantifiable, then it isn't raw enough to be essential. Beaudrillard (and Kant, Descartes, Plato, etc) aside, maybe we can approach something like unmediated experience in our actual lives. Games, however, and writing, are neccessarily limited by their medium. No world whose substance is words (or statistics) can give us that immediacy. They must be defined by their limits, and what lies beyond as much as anything. The only instances in which they can convey that sense of awe that Lovecraft excelled at is by leaving those limits of language untraced. And in truth it's this same dynamic that has helped stymie our everyday awe. Knowledge is a glass well smudged with nose prints, and flyspecks, and maybe a little pride, and it can be damn hard to see through.
Also, even thinking about Cthulhu is kind of giving me the willies right now.

Lila, glad to help. I didn't invent the phrase but I love it.

"lust for authenticity"

Ahhhh . . . . this sloshes over to another phenomena:

The Miracle Explainers.

Several years back, NBC (?) ran a summer replacement series in which scholars explained Biblical miracles, e.g., unusual tides parted the Red Sea; Samson yanked on a crucial load-bearing pillar; Shadrach, Meschach, and Ibednego hid in a cool spot.

They specials had hokey computer graphics to lend high-tech authenticity to what seemed like really strained explanations.

But what really got me was the rationalization for the exercise: If people could see that miracles could really happen, they might take the Bible more seriously.

Huh? They want to start a religious revival in an age of doubt by removing the supernatural, divine-intervention aspect from miracles?

I was at that panel at Readercon. I mentioned in the Readercon thread that quoting China does not often convey the context in which he was speaking, or his quotes are often misconstrued. I went fully expecting to be annoyed by him based on things I'd read, but found him quite articulate and interesting.

I think, in this case, Matt Cheney's summary misfires a bit. The "missing the point" part (which I don't recall China saying) is Matt's summation of the joke (again, in my opinion). Someone asked how gaming influenced his writing. That prompted an interesting point about the conflict an author has between knowing what he's writing and writing what the reader needs to know to feel what the author is trying to convey. As a gamer, he was pointing out that it's is at once grand---the mystery of what is---and minute---how it gets that way. As readers, we want the grand, but we want it to hang together in some kind of logic. He wasn't knocking gamers--in fact, I thought he was making a world-building analogy between gamers and authors. I don't think he was saying one was better than the other.

I think the discussion of the nature of RPGs distracts from point Melville was making. Let's try another analogy - realistic or quasi-realistic figure painting. If the painting is to look realistic, the painter can't show every detail. Unless there is an artfully arranged mirror in the painting, for example you can't realistically show the front and the back of a figure at the same time. Both prose and painting have styles other than realism of course - but most of them rely even less on accumulations of detail than relistic ones. Not just in horror, but in any type of writing, the author better not tell everything she knows.

Xopher: One time, for example, they'd killed a shriggar (37 geek points to anyone who can name the source of THAT monster)

Oh dear, I fear I am a geek: Frank Herbert's The Godmakers.

Charlie Stross pointed out that "many authors who engage in writing a fantasy or SF series eventually end up generating a "world book" for themselves -- no dice, perhaps,but more than enough guidelines to let them play the game against themselves."

Shhh! We're not supposed to TALK about the Worldbook in front of readers! The profit lies in doling out bits and pieces of our secret Worldbooks in series of novels and accompanying moychandise...

What are writers supposed to do, just give away the Worldbook to the readers? That would of course eliminate those reader comments and criticisms I always get:
"But you didn't explain the..."
"Why didn't you give more space for Character X..."
"In the next book, I expect an explanation of why..."
;-)

I didn't invent the phrase but I love it.

As it happens, I invented it, and used it in a song (semi-rhyming with "screw the inscrutable"), but I doubt that I'm the only one who did.

Linkmeister asked:
Showing off my ignorance, in which work does Cthulhu first make its appearance? If I were to try to get "up to speed" on the Elder Gods, where do I start?

I'm pretty sure that the only one of Lovecraft's original stories in Cthulhu appears onstage, as it were, is "The Call of Cthulhu".

The Mythos stories aren't a chronological sequence, by any means; more a set of stories which happen to share more or less similar backgrounds (as well as similar themes). The other Mythos stories by Lovecraft, in addition to "The Call of Cthulhu", would probably include "The Dunwich Horror", "The Shadow Over Innsmouth", "The Shadow out of Time", "The Whisperer in Darkness", "The Haunter of the Dark", "The Lurking Fear", "The Case of Charles Dexter Ward", and the short novel At the Mountains of Madness.

There are several collections of Lovecraft's stories in press; any one of them which has some or all of the stories listed above would probably be a good place to go.

The Library of America Lovecraft collection has all the short stories mentioned (not Mountains of Madness). Peter Straub edited it. S. T. Joshi did a Penguin collection, which has corrected texts (I do not believe the differences are major, which is not meant as an insult to Joshi's work). There's a Del Rey Lovecraft collection that has the mentioned stories except for Charles Dexter Ward. Mountains of Madness is available in several editions. Indeed, you could always haunt a used bookstore and find perfectly readable paperbacks.

The Del Rey Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos collection has only two stories by Lovecraft; the rest are Mythos yarns by others of the era and later -- Clark Ashton Smith, Bob Bloch, Fritz Leiber, Karl Wagner, Steve King, Joanna Russ. Ah, you ask, does the Crypt-Keeper pull your leg? No, but . . . something is . . . *evil laughter interrupted by phlegmy coughing*

Try Ingles with Eldritch Vapour, for the partly squamous, partly rugose cough.

A little poking around on amazon.co.uk reveals that there's actually an edition of Lovecraft's At the Mountains of Madness with an introduction by ... (wait for it) ... China Miéville.

John M. Ford said:
The Library of America Lovecraft collection has all the short stories mentioned (not Mountains of Madness).

Are you sure about the last bit? The Table of Contents page from Amazon's "Search Inside" viewer does list At the Mountains of Madness. (Since the whole book is something like 850 pages long, one would hope it could include that story, which I think is one of the two best that Lovecraft wrote.)

I've eBayed a chunk of my RPG stuff, but I remember several games, mostly not very successful, which tried for a hard-SF approach to space. Maybe more Star Cops than Apollo XIII, but trying for the slow travel, hostile environment feel. But nobody bothered with the idea of having hundreds of ingenious engineers on the other end of a radio link.

The least fantastic attempts I can recall were a couple of supplements for the Cyberpunk games, entitled Near Orbit and Deep Space. There was a related anime-inspired game called Mekton, with the obvious difference being different damage from the weapons, and you could combine them to do Gundam with explosive decompression.

But three men in a cramped capsule, depending on those hundreds of engineers: that's something that would be a difficult RPG. Who do the characters play? What do they do that can be done by the players, and what needs a game mechanism? What are they risking?

The astronauts follow instructions. They're effectively NPCs. The engineers? How do you roleplay what they do? Is it just rolling dice using some system for inventing things? It might work as a game at MIT...

I think the idea can illustrate the difference between a story and a game. It's not just that it really happened. You can, without any conceptual awkwardness, reveal the problems and solutions, and describe how the astronauts, or the engineers, feel, and you have a novel.

But I don't think it's a story that works as a game.

For a game, there needs to be a combination of problems and solutions which is within the grasp of the players, who are not, usually, engineers or astronauts. And an Apollo XIII game seems to have too many killer choices; too many points where the wrong choice kills the astronauts.

That last problem often comes up in games based on fictional settings. There was a James Bond game. How does a game cope with the Lone Agent? On the other hand, when they remade The Mummy there was so much that gamers could, and did, recognise. Films, and even novels, can take up some of the gaming cliches.

Firefly is almost standard Traveller; it drips the game cliches like some movies drip blood.

Dave Langford, not only are you a geek, but you've entered a competition below your class. You're in the Übergeek (or Gicque Grande) category. But 37 points doesn't raise your total by more than .00001%, so I don't suppose it matters.

Seriously, I thought I was the only one who read that book. Like many of Herbert's pre-Dune books—The Green Brain, anyone?—I wished the count had been one lower.

The point isn't that one is good and one is bad, the point is the tension between them is productive. So you have the princess with hair that's never been cut, and you show her taking an hour every morning to comb that hair with help and special tools. So then when she pulls out one hair and rapidly strings a bow with it, and shoots an arrow from that bow that flies seven miles and... kills the dragon/splits the mountain open/knocks the apple from the head... you're ready for the wonder because you believed the comb, and you want to see the fading scales of the dead dragon/shadows of the chasm leading into the mountain/chunks of apple and looks of horrified bemusement in the same detail you saw the hair being pulled through the bristles with only the faintest wince, and you can.

You need both. You need the tension.

The thing I learned from gaming was quite different, it was how to see the shape of stories from on top and how a long story is a set of small events that don't all seem to be going in the same direction but are. I learned that if I set the parameters up right I could have the characters do whatever they wanted to and that would come around with the inevitability of wyrd to where the story was going. If I can do this with a group of real people playing the characters in real time, when I can't go back and change anything, I thought, I really ought to be able to do it in a novel, and it turned out I was right.

I always thought of this as the difference between magic realism and fantasy; there isn't that tension in magical realism, it seemed to me. Magical things happen and there is no attempt to understand or explain it, and it's not useful, couldn't possibly be expressed in a number. Whereas in fantasy there can be Academies of Magic where people study and can understand, to some degree, how it works, and how to use it.

This is just my superficial idea formed by reading a little bit of magical realism and a little bit of fantasy.

Charlie Stross's comment about going to the moon, which I really liked, reminded me of something Thomas Carlyle said. Of course I don't agree with everything he thought (like slavery being awesome), but somewhere in Sartor Resartus he said it doesn't stop being a miracle just because we understand how it works. I like to think so too.

Beautiful example, Jo. That's exactly right.

-l.

Xopher: [..] I thought I was the only one who read that book. Like many of Herbert's pre-Dune books—The Green Brain, anyone?

Hadn't read that one, but re-reading Hellstrom's Hive through an X-Files filter added something to that book.

I read an interview with Herbert (forgotten where), describing how that book came to be published. There had been a popular theatrically released insect documentary film (how many of those have we seen) in the 70's titled The Hellstrom Chronicle. Herbert was approached by a publisher who had bought print rights related to the film, who was interested in putting out a “Hellstrom” anything, and wanted to commission Herbert to do a quickie novel.

Herbert said his side of the conversation went something like, “That's awful, that's immoral, I won't d...uh, wait a minute, I've got something here, all I need to do is change some of the names...”, and pulled a previously unsold story of an insect inspired cult out of his desk drawer.

If it seems like I'm making fun of the book, I'm not. I read and enjoyed the original serialization in Galaxy shortly after it had come out (I think these may have been the first issues of Galaxy magazine that I had picked up).

I'm serious in my retro-recommendation: Fans of the X-Files should also enjoy Hellstrom's Hive, by Frank Herbert.

This relates to something that I've tried to express a few times, generally not very well, which is why fantasy written by horror writers often seems to feel so much more fantastical than fantasy written by fantasy writers. It's like they don't feel the need to justify themselves. Some fantasy reads as if people are going "See! See! Look how solid this world is, and how realistic and how completely internally consistent! Now you HAVE to take it seriously!" And solidity and internal consistency are good things, obviously, and I'm hardly going to advocate against them, but too often it seems we go overboard and cut wonder out along with it.

Maybe it's the difference between having a foot in fairy tales and a foot in RPGs. (And I am an avid lover of the RPG, mind you, so this isn't a slam by any stretch.)

The best example I can think of this is Santa Claus. We all know Santa Claus lives at the North Pole and has flying reindeer and elves. And small geek amusements with working out the airspeed of a laden reindeer aside, we generally don't worry much about Santa's immortality or anything else, because hey, it's Santa Claus, and that's the way it WORKS. He is a singular, wonderous, and fantastical thing, and that's fine.

If Santa appeared in a lot of fantasy novels, he'd be the latest member of the dynastic ruling House of Klaus, in a society where young elves are telepathically bonded to flying reindeer at puberty, and sent out on dangerous missions to deliver the sacred Gifts, and by the third book in the series, Santa would have been assassinated by someone and the succession would be thrown into jeopardy when the young Claus Jr bonded to a reindeer against all tradition and reason, but it'd work out okay because the evil armies of Thanksgiving would be marching towards the pole, and only the plucky Claus and associated reindeer could smite the forces of the Turkey Berserkers and save the day.

Ah...you know, I had a point in there, but damnit, now I kinda want to go write about turkey berserkers...

Your point is valid, UrsulaV.

SANTA CLAUS AND THE RADIANT REINDEER: Book Three of the Giftgiver Saga
;)

That's hilarious, UrsulaV!

I think your point in the first paragraph is dead on.

I've come to dislike fantasy that tries too hard to be hard SF. For me -- your mileage may vary -- it is the quality of the writing that allows me to suspend disbelief and accept the sub-creation.

This may explain why I've never* written material for fantasy RPGs, because what thrills me in fantasy lit is hard to express in RPG terms. (Such as: A trio of buskers. Humble, scruffy, bumbling, seemingly foolish but possessed of immense wisdom and power. Perhaps a bit like the core Marx Brothers. They are the avatars of beings from mythology, effectively immortal and with a limited set of powers which are utterly irresistable . . . the power of the plot point. To have to give these guys hit points and a list of Advantages and Disadvantages is demeaning besides the point. They are "singular, wonderous, and fantastical," and why shouldn't that be good enough?)

* That I can remember . . .

I'm reminded of the distinction in DC Comics' horror titles between the mysteries in the House of Mysteries and the secrets in the House of Secrets. Mysteries raise questions that their keeper won't answer; secrets raise questsions where the answer is very much the point. I like that there's a place for both - it's not any better to make mysteries out of secrets than vice versa.

UrsulaV: IMO what you're talking about is just plain bad; I can't argue that horror isn't just as bad, because I generally don't read horror, but I suspect the same defect can show up in bad horror.

Erwin et al: IMO Ward doesn't belong in the Cthulhu mythos; he and his predecessor were resurrectionists, working with human remains, not summoners of eldritch beings. This could just me being too mechanical/geekRPGish/....

Erwin et al: IMO Ward doesn't belong in the Cthulhu mythos; he and his predecessor were resurrectionists, working with human remains, not summoners of eldritch beings. This could just me being too mechanical/geekRPGish/....

No, I'd be perfectly happy to accept your description. The truth is that I conjured that list half out of my memory and half from a list of "essential Lovecraft stories" in a Call of Cthulhu rulebook (in which "Ward" was second in the list, right after "The Call of Cthulhu" itself, so go figure...). It's been too long since I read "Ward", so I don't have a good memory of it.

(I left "The Colour out of Space" off my list because I do remember it, and didn't think it was really a "Cthulhu mythos" story -- even though I think that and At the Mountains of Madness are the two best of his stories.)

And now I really will have to go order a collection or two from Amazon, since my existing Lovecraft books are, unfortunately, entombed in the stygian, arctic wastes of southern Wisconsin.

The Fields We Know have become awesomely large; that makes setting things outside them, or at the edges of them, rather more of a challenge than once it was.

Understanding where that edge is has become much, much more of a challenge, too; are the very ylf to be found in in a Riemann state transposition manifold somewhere in some quantum juxtaposition?

If they are, there are few who will believe it.

UrsulaV - that was brilliant.

Thanks, folks. Here's the LoA edition mentioned above. It looks like it does include Mountains of Madness, though.

I'll have to go check the local used bookstore first; I've given Amazon enough of my money this summer.

Linkmeister: There's also an SFBC Lovecraft compendium called Black Seas of Infinity which claims to collect more of Lovecraft's work than any edition since the original Arkham House edition of The Outsider in the '30s. I haven't tried to compare the table of contents between the two. I bought it to try to consolidate, but I haven't had the heart to try to compare it with any of my other Lovecraft collections and weed anything out.

P.S. My youngest - never exposed to Lovecraft - recently went through a period of running around the house shouting "Te-ke-li-li!" I think he must have been consorting with shoggoths in dreamland.

Dave Langford: You aren't just the Übergeek, you're the Umbo Stetson of Übergeekdom.

Xopher: [..] I thought I was the only one who read that book. Like many of Herbert's pre-Dune books—The Green Brain, anyone?

Actually, now that I've had more time to think about it, I think I have read this. I don't recall alot about the novel, but I'd read the first part in a pulp (purchased at a fortunately placed second hand book shop, before a long bus ride).

If it is the story I'm thinking of: there is an ongoing global attempt to eradicate insects (they eat our food, they spread disease). Like the WHO eradicating polio, insects are being wiped out, and the survivors are contained within shrinking boundaries. One of the last insect sanctuaries is the Amazon. Under intense evolutionary pressures, an insect hive is able to mimic a human being (one of the Brazilians enlisted to work on the Amazonian insect eradication project) and pass through the cordon.

I liked this idea (the insect hive as an entity), and thought (a few years later) it could lend itself to Dr Who. I imagined a story in which the comeuppance of The Master (and his apparant death) was being consumed by army ants. In a later episode, we discover that his consciousness has “infected” the insect colony, and his body is now a morphable insect mass.

[ I offer the idea free and clear; if they were planning to do this, don't not on my account. If it never occurred, feel free. ].

The novel was an ecological parable. Even in the first chapter, there were hints that the Chinese (and other participants in this global project) were re-introducing insects into areas they had been cleared from.

I'm reminded of the distinction in DC Comics' horror titles between the mysteries in the House of Mysteries and the secrets in the House of Secrets.

Unless I'm greatly mistaken, that distinction was introduced much, much later by Neil Gaiman.

whether or not the distinction between house of mysteries and house of secrets was introduced by Gaiman there is a self-evident distinction between the meanings of the words themselves.

"Also, even thinking about Cthulhu is kind of giving me the willies right now."

www.cthul.hu shows as "under construction." Don't say you weren't warned.

To me what Mieville is talking about is the tension between the ineffable and the umm, effable.

I remember when I first read the Lovecraft canon and found it deliciously creepy, but read the ersatz-Lovecraft produced by Derleth and generally found it ho-hum. Part of the reason was that Derleth opened the door too far, and revealed such hum-drum conventionality as a pantheon of elemental gods. Zzzz.

(Stross is really the creepiest of the heirs of Lovecraft. I've read "A Colder War" all too often, and it weirds me out every time. Of course, Stross is combining the Lovecraftian Thing with the Explanation of the Conspiracy of Everything Thing, which is [to me] always an attraction.)

I remember when Pohl invented the mysterious Heechee and then ultimately revealed them to be Just Like Us (well, aside from being otters with huge asses, anyway). They were more interesting when they were mysterious.

The problem is we always want to know more, want that door open just another inch. (The other obvious analogy is the strip-tease. We want more to come off, but once it's all off, it's over.)

ps: I read "The Godmakers," too, and rather liked it, partly because it was an Explanation of the Conspiracy of Everything. Non-Dune Herbert has its attractions. What was the short story where some guy figures out how to prevent any explosion, and thinks he's abolished war..?

Rob Rusick: I don't know if that's The Green Brain, but I'm pretty sure I've read the story you're describing.

--Mary Aileen

CHip: Ward doesn't belong in the Cthulhu mythos; he and his predecessor were resurrectionists, working with human remains, not summoners of eldritch beings. This could just me being too mechanical/geekRPGish/...

I think what it actually is, is you getting Charles Dexter Ward confused with Herbert West. Ward's story definitely involves the summoning of an eldritch being (followed shortly thereafter, as is traditional, by the departure of Mr Ward).

Rob Rusick, Mary Aileen Buss: Yes, that's The Green Brain.

It may not have been brilliant, but I liked it considerably more than some of Frank Herbert's post-Dune novels. (If nothing else, it was shorter...)

I read Lovecraft by way of the Illuminatus! trilogy, which, honestly, I found much more exciting.

Of course, it was the seventies and I was hormonal at the time.

Cthulhu = giant octopus = Kraken?

Captain Jack Sparrow may be in more danger than he thinks...

Bryan: If you tell someone a secret, they know it. If you tell someone a mystery, they only know OF it. They can then COME to know it only by approaching it and trying to touch it. And the rest of their lives may be spent trying to really know it.

My friend Judy Harrow says that the Mysteries (she means of Wicca) have been out in paperback since the 1960s. I think she's primarily referring to Stranger in a Strange Land, where the central mystery is "Thou art God."

I have an interesting history with that Mystery (oo, a Mystery History).

When I first heard it, I thought its meaning was obvious, and that it was obviously false. After all, if I had been God, Bruce James would have been consumed by hellfire right there in the hallway of Kinawa Middle School. (All I have to say is, if I'd had pyrokinesis in Junior High, I would have made Carrie look like a piker. Good thing, because Bruce James grew up into a perfectly decent human being.)

When I learned a little more (a Secret, in fact, though it's pretty well known these days) I thought its meaning was obvious, and that it was obviously true, a tautology, in fact, since 'thou' means the divine self of a person...and that is what I believe Crowley meant when he said (or channelled) "Do as Thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law."

As I touched the Mystery a little more, I came to the conclusion that the meaning of that little three-word sentence was not at all obvious, and that the best I could figure out was that it probably wasn't true, since I was beginning to directly sense the Presence...something much bigger than myself, and therefore (I thought) not ME.

Now, after decades, I've come to the conclusion that the meaning of 'Thou art God' is not at all obvious, but it's definitely true, and as with all true Mysteries I can't explain why. It's something I only fully understand while touching the Mystery, and when I'm doing that I can't verbalize much of anything about it. I prophesy, but I can't theologize!

(Isn't that a nice neat mathematical progression? It's a literary device for mapping the progress of my understanding, not the actual territory of that growth.)

One more example. If I tell you that the Secret Names of the God and Goddess in my tradition are Fred and Ethel, you then know those names (and in some traditions I would be issued a Writ of Banishment and cast out, with the candles and everything). If instead I tell you what I really think, which is that when the Goddess decided to speak Her Name, the universe began in fire and force, and we can hear the echo of that beginning to this day, but when She finishes pronouncing Her Name, the Universe will be over—I've told you a Mystery. On one level it's obvious what I'm referring to, but the deeper truth will be hidden from you until you touch it for yourself.

An unlit candle across the room from a burning one is bathed in the light; yet it cannot burn for itself until they touch.

Speaking of At The Mountains of Madness... It's probably the only Lovecraft story I was never able to finish. I think I dropped the book after the scene where modern-day explorers come across the corpse of a lovecraftian creature that the narrator then proceeds to describe in minute details. Did Lovecraft forget the lessons of his whole life? Or is this one of the stories that were 'improved' by August Derleth?

On the one hand, I find myself firmly in camp of preferring the ineffable side of the equation. On the other hand, I'm not so sure that Lovecraft is a very good example of it. When I first encountered Lovecraft some thirty years ago, I found him extremely disappointing, because it seemed to me that so many stories boiled down to "and then I saw something so indescribably horrible that I cannot describe how horrible it was, so I won't even try. Also, squamous." (I feel obliged to point out that my attitude toward Lovecraft has mellowed over the years -- although I still defy convention and maintain that Herbert West was his best work.)

As an alternative, consider Charles Ashmore's Trail, by Ambrose Bierce. Bierce's prose is the opposite of Lovecraft's. It's pure, journalistic style documents events that simply cannot be. Bierce shows you everything -- and everything isn't enough. (Bierce's fictional tales of vanishings -- see also The Difficulty of Crossing a Field -- have proven so powerful over time that, half-remembered or deliberately distorted, they have entered the realm of urban legend and "strange-but-true" Forteana.)

Now, call me a cynic, but I can't imagine a story like this appearing today without including some description of wherever young Charles has disappeared to, probably with references to alternate universes, quantum mechanics, and the like. I could see someone stretching this one-page story out to a novella-length dissertation about the Shadow World to which people vanish, and how they survive there. I have no desire to read that story.

One of the big problems I have with these elaborately crafted alternate realities populated by sexy-sexy vampires and demons-among-us and "real" wizards is that, by abandoning the conceit that these stories take place in the real world, you remove the power of these stories to disturb and frighten. But then I think a lot of genre fans really don't enjoy being disturbed.

Serge:
Some comments on At the Mountains of Madness, partly because, upstream, I described it as one of my two favorite Lovecraft stories.

The analysis of the corpse that you mention is basically part of the low, slow build-up; it isn't supposed to be a scary scene in and of itself. (There are scary scenes later, to be sure; on the other hand, one of the reasons I like the novel is that its primary horror is intellectual/cosmological.)

Also, the modern-day explorers (including the narrator) in the story are scientists, so describing the corpse in minute details is what they would do. It helps maintain the illusion that they are epistomologically still on top of things, that this is just an extremely fruitful scientific expedition, and that they're not in the least bit of danger from exploring the unknown. Of course, it's in no small part this desire to investigate all the details which dooms them.

(For what it's worth, the Call of Cthulhu adventure Beyond the Mountains of Madness, conceived of as a sequel to Lovecraft's novel -- "What went wrong with last year's Miskatonic University Antarctic expedition? Let's mount a new one and find out!" -- is one of the most genuinely disturbing and scary RPG scenarios I've ever read.)

Drat, Peter. That'll teach me. By the way, would you agree that Lovecraft hasn't fared too well on the silver screen? The closest to a successful Lovecraftian visual tale, if not an outright adaptation, was probably Quatermass and the Pit.

HP said:
One of the big problems I have with these elaborately crafted alternate realities populated by sexy-sexy vampires and demons-among-us and "real" wizards is that, by abandoning the conceit that these stories take place in the real world, you remove the power of these stories to disturb and frighten. But then I think a lot of genre fans really don't enjoy being disturbed.

Except... I would argue that a sufficiently well-crafted world, and sufficiently well-limned and sympathetic characters, set things up so that you can be disturbed and frightened for the sake of that world and those characters.

That, at least, is how I interpret my reactions to, for example, scenes in some of Barbara Hambly's Darwath books. (I mention her partly because she's a fantasy writer who uses elements of horror.)

Thanks for the Ambrose Bierce links, by the way -- something new to read!

Serge said:
Drat, Peter. That'll teach me. By the way, would you agree that Lovecraft hasn't fared too well on the silver screen? The closest to a successful Lovecraftian visual tale, if not an outright adaptation, was probably Quatermass and the Pit.

Hmm... you've got me there, since I've seen almost nothing in the way of filmed Lovecraft adaptations. What I've read suggests you're almost certainly right. (I have long-ago, dim memories of seeing Quatermass and the Pit on TV and being kind of spooked, but that was before I'd ever heard of Lovecraft.)

Babylon 5 occasionally tried for a sort of Lovecraftian deep time, cosmic horror affect: more successfully in a few episodes in the first three seasons, more directly (and perhaps less successfully) in one of the 2-hour "movies" (Thirdspace).

I have a soft spot for the tongue-in-cheek TV movie Cast a Deadly Spell, featuring Fred Ward as tough-talking, two-fisted private eye Phil Lovecraft... but I don't think that really counts.

Ah, yes, Cast A Deadly Spell... Doesn't count, Peter? Maybe. But it was a fun movie.

I think Roger Corman adapted The Color from Out of Space with Vincent Price in it. Was more cheesy than spooky.

Peter,

Six degrees of Cthluhlu: Although Bierce is probably best known today for The Devil's Dictionary and Incident at Owl Creek Bridge, he actually has a connection to the Cthlulhu Mythos. His story "An Inhabitant of Carcosa" (1886) invents the ancient city of Carcosa, and his Haita the Shepherd (1893) introduces the god Hastur, both of which were later borrowed by Robert Chambers for The King in Yellow. Lovecraft read Chambers, and name-checked Hastur in "The Whisperer in the Darkness." Derleth ran with it, completing the tranformation of Bierce's simple "god of the shepherds" into Hastur the Unspeakable, one of the Great Old Ones.

The title is "An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge," in case someone wants to Google it up.

Serge wrote:

By the way, would you agree that Lovecraft hasn't fared too well on the silver screen?

OK, yes, no argument. But there have been some exceptions that were at least watchable and, in a couple of cases, quite good.

He's not universally loved, but I credit director Stuart Gordon with having his heart in the right place. Those not thrilled by his earier splatterfests (Re-Animator, From Beyond) may still enjoy some of his later work: In 2001ish he did a relatively restrainted* adaptation of "The Shadow Over Innsmouth" called Dagon that was, IMHO, the bee's knees. I was less fond of his 2005 offering for the Showtime Masters of Horror series Dreams in the Witch House, but many folks liked it better than I did.

If you're OK with branching out into stuff that isn't directly descended from Lovecraft titles but still retains some of his flavor, I would strongly encourage you to check out John Carpenter's Prince of Darkness. It's my favorite horror movie of all time, and I watch a lot of horror movies. Almost as good and even more overtly Lovcrafty was In the Mouth of Madness.

I also heartily recommend the book Lord of a Visible World. It's an edited collection of Lovecraft's correspondance to various folks that provides an absolutely fascinating insight into the way his mind worked.

Last but not least, Guillermo del Toro is working on an adaptation of "At the Mountains of Madness."

*"restrained" for Stuart Gordon anyway

These days there's so much ghost-hunting on TV, with terribly earnest researchers sitting around in empty houses, surrounded by scientific instrumentation, and scaring themselves sill with the stories they're "investigating".

It's not the same territory as HPL, not quite, but MR James can be pretty effective. And the events are not really explained. There's no attempt to make the supernatural into something scientific.

George Lucas forgot that and tried to make The Force scientific. Obi-wan didn't need to count Luke's mitochlorians to know the Force was strong within him. You can go and read a quantum theory of ghosts in A Random Walk Through Science, but that is not a ghost story.

As for Quatermass and the Pit, one aspect we forget is that there was a whole different style in the days of black-and-white TV. They could use shadows as part of the scenery, and shoot scenes without a set. Even in the most mundane drama, the art of suggestion was a key part of the craft of making the programme.

It occurs to me that Sin City uses a lot of the same visual approach.

Serge, the Corman film you're thinking of is Die, Monster, Die!, starring Boris Karloff (and not Price). This one was produced by Corman but directed by ... someone else whose name escapes me. The special effects are pretty lame, but it's a bit more Lovecraftian than the Corman-produced, psychedelic-sixties version of The Dunwich Horror. (I actually enjoy both movies, but as great AIP cheesefests, not as Lovecraftian adaptations.)

Corman did direct a much better Lovecraft adaptation, but you wouldn't know it from the title: Edgar Allan Poe's The Haunted Palace is actually a fairly decent adaptation of The Case of Charles Dexter Ward, with a few stray bits from Shadow Over Innsmouth tossed in for good measure. This one does star Vincent Price. The supporting cast is very good, too (Debra Paget, Elisha Cook, Lon Chaney, Jr.).

By the way, Stuart Gordon's adaptation of Dreams in the Witch House for Showtime's Masters of Horror series is really quite good -- I thought it was better than Dagon. The DVD's out now, and I highly recommend it.

Xopher: D'oh! The one title I didn't double-check before posting, and I got it wrong.

Once upon a time I got to be the guy who wrote the "The Protodimension Sourcebook" for Game Designer's Workshop's "Dark Conspiracy". If you've never heard of it, think cyberpunk universe, light on the cyber with a side of Cthluoid horrors seeking entry into our universe via various and sundry minions and you've pretty much got it. Your mission is to shoot the minions, of course.

Rather than bash what Mr. Miéville is saying, I'd like be the guy who screams, "Amen" from the choir. The book I wrote didn't need to exist. Defining rules for spooky weird physics did not make them more spooky or weird.

When the game first came out the idea was that there were a handful of people out there who knew what was really going on and you were one of them. Everyone else was supposed to be oblivious to what was happening; rationalizing away the little bits of weirdness they saw.

By the time GDW went out of business, the general sense of the material they were publishing was that everyone knew exactly what was going on and had done things to cope with the issue in much the same way people in earthquake zones strap their hot water tanks to the basement wall.

I wholeheartedly agree, Dave, about B&W films and TV. That's probably why I thought the new version of Outer Limits was inferior to the original, in spite of the latter's dinky SFX. As for Quatermass and the Pit, it was filmed in color, but it still managed to work. How could it not with a cast that included Andrew Keir, James Donald and Barbara Shelley? The latter could really convey an expression of horror without having to scream.

Xopher,

I tend to say that a Secret is a Fact, and a Mystery is a Process.

The mysteries that I have approached (most of them are around sacraments, because of who and what I am) have been important not for the endpoint, but for the journey there.

The classic example in the circles I have run with is St Teresa of Avila's The Interior Castle. It's a book, and therefore can be read. Were there a secret buried in the last chapter, a reader could read the book, find the secret, and know the fact. But the book is about a mystery, and the process of reading it can be the process of approaching the mystery. Many people (including me) don't finish the book, because they don't finish the journey.

One other thing: knowing a fact may or may not change you. Journeying toward a mystery certainly will.

There are two different Quatermass and the Pits: There's the feature-length film shot in color (aka Five Million Years to Earth), which more Americans are familiar with from endless Creature Feature and Sunday Matinee reruns, and there's the BBC series which was shot in B&W and featured a different cast, which is practically unknown outside Britain and the commonwealth but is more fondly remembered by those who've seen it.

I think Dave is talking about the series and Serge is talking about the movie.

I'm sure Nigel Kneale was familiar with HPL, but I think his stuff is sui generis.

I haven't seen the movie since I was a kid, and would love to see it restored and uncut. I'd also give my left *** to see the BBC version, but I'm not holding my breath for a Region 0 NTSC version.

abi...do you have, like, an official fan club?

*touches forehead to the floor in your general direction*

Of course, HP. About your wish to see the movie restored and uncut... How different is the British original from the American release? I have the latter on DVD and the picture is so crisp that, in the scene where Quatermass goes inside an abandonned house and finds mysterious claw marks on walls, I was able to see that some of the graffiti in the background say "Killroy was here".

There have been some recent good Lovecraft films. The 2005 Call of Cthulhu is very good. The story of that name is not one I thought aged well, but the movie, done as an old b&w silent, helps because of the visuals. It didn't scare me, but I found it aesthetically pleasing. Return to Innsmouth did not impress me as much -- but the director did nail the most interesting part of the story, which is, oddly, perhaps, a moral choice.

Rats in the Walls is one of my favorite Lovecraft stories. I knew nearly everything about it going in, and it still worked for me. It may walk an interesting line between showing and not showing. No squamous beasties that I recall, just human horrors. Does it show or not-show?

Color out of Space did scare me. Brr.

I could probably go on far too long about the rpg Call of Cthulhu. It is a lousy example to use if you really want to make the point about putting numbers on the indescribable because, as was already pointed out, the text says outright that the numbers aren't meaningful. Cthulhu will reform. Nyarlathotep will switch forms. Okay,