Lovecraft's Moon

by John Michael Greer
(Cumberland MD USA)

Kaor, Zendexor! Apologies for the long silence; Jasoomian responsibilities kept me off the spacelanes for way too long. (On the upside, I scored five battered paperback volumes of Leigh Brackett's, three of them OSS.)

You asked about the moonbeasts and the Moon in Lovecraft's "The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath" on the 19th of last month. There is indeed a scene set on the Moon; Randolph Carter is drugged and kidnapped by moonbeasts in the sinister basalt city of Dylath-Leen, and conveyed on one of their galleys to the far side of the Moon. The near side, which they passed, was notable for ruined temples of unwholesome gods; the far side had forests, fields of white fungus, an oily sea, and a city of windowless gray towers and red-litten streets beneath a black and starry sky. The moonbeasts themselves are fine aliens, giant grayish-white toadlike things with no eyes but a cluster of pinkish sensory tentacles on their snouts. Carter gets away, due to the timely arrival of allies, but it's a close shave.

Whether or not "The Dream-Quest" counts as an OSS story, though, is a tricky question. In the story's cosmology, each world has its own attached dreamworld, to which the inhabitants can resort in dreams. Human dreamers can sometimes travel to the dreamworlds of the other planets in the solar system, though with grave risks, and three went beyond to the dreamworlds of extrasolar planets, though two of them came back stark staring mad. The dreamworlds, though, are, well, worlds of dream; in the dreamlands, cats can leap to the Moon at certain seasons, and ships can sail up into the sky, to the city of Serranian in the clouds or to the Moon. The dream-Moon is not the kind of place that behaves in accordance with orbital laws!

I heartily agree that Lovecraft could have written some thumping good OSS stories. Me, I wish he'd set some stories on Mars. "The Nameless City" shows that he could handle desert scenes beautifully, "At the Mountains of Madness" demonstrates that he could portray a scientific expedition believably -- and I like to try to imagine the eldritch horrors with which he could have peopled the Martian deserts and canals, and the aura of encroaching, incomprehensible nightmare the members of a doomed expedition would have faced as they struggled helplessly against the inevitable. OSS Mars just seems so perfect for him, with its dead civilizations and aeons-old ruins haunted by nameless shadowy things...

(On an unrelated note, I agree about Brackett's Eric John Stark stories. The Skaith trilogy could have been set on Titan or Ganymede, say, without any difficulty at all, and that would fit much better with the rest of Stark's history than suddenly dragging in a Galactic Union.)

{Note from Zendexor: many thanks John for clearing up the matter of the lunar scenes in The Dream Quest... We could maybe class it as "under the OSS influence" - as it's yet another facet of the Moon's fictional character-gestalt. I've never yet managed to read the book properly, not yet having achieved the right frame of mind, but I acknowledge the power in it and hope one day to manage it.}