An H. P. Lovecraft Encyclopedia

Two juvenile scientific journals (eventually combined) written by HPL, 1903–4. The first five issues bear the title Astronomyas follows: 1, No. 1 (August 1903); 1, No. 2 (September 1903); 1, No. 3 (October 1903); 1, No. 4 (November 1903) (combined with The Monthly Almanack;includes An Annual of Astronomy for the Year 1903: First Edition: Novr. 25, 1903);1, No. 5 (December 1905). The next issue is titled The New Monthly Almanack for December, 1903. The next appears as Astronomy: January 1904: Combined with the Monthly Almanack. The final issue bears the title The Monthly Almanack: Combined with “Astronomy”: Feb’y, 1904

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The publications consist largely of technical charts of the solar system and constellations, data on the moon’s phases, planetary aspects, and the like.

“Astrophobos.”

Poem (42 lines in 7 stanzas); written in mid-November 1917. First published in the United Amateur

(January 1918). The title means “[one who] fears stars,” and tells of a person who looks to the stars for beauty and tranquillity but finds in them only horror and sadness.

At the Mountains of Madness.

Short novel (41,500 words); written February 24–March 22, 1931. First published in Astounding Stories(February, March, and April 1936); first collected in O;corrected text in MM;

annotated version in An1and TD.

The Miskatonic Antarctic Expedition of 1930–31, led by William Dyer (his full name is given only in “The Shadow out of Time”), begins promisingly but ends in tragedy and horror. Employing a new boring device invented by engineer Frank H.Pabodie, the expedition makes great progress at sites on the shore of McMurdo Sound (across the Ross Ice Shelf from where Admiral Byrd’s expedition had only recently camped). But the biologist Lake, struck by some peculiar markings on soapstone fragments he has found, feels the need to conduct a subexpedition far to the northwest. There he makes a spectacular discovery: not only the world’s tallest mountains (“Everest out of the running,” he laconically radios the camp), but then the frozen remains—some damaged, some intact—of monstrous winged, barrel-shaped creatures that cannot be reconciled with the known fauna of this planet. They seem half-animal and half-vegetable, with tremendous brain capacity and, apparently, with more senses than we have. Lake, who has read the Necronomicon,jocosely thinks they may be the Elder Things or Old Ones spoken of in that book and elsewhere, who are “supposed to have created all earth-life as jest or mistake.”

Later Lake’s subexpedition loses radio contact with the main party, apparently because of the high winds in that region. Dyer feels he must come to Lake’s aid and takes a small group of men in some airplanes to see what has gone amiss. To their horror, they find the camp devastated—by the winds or the

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sled dogs or some other nameless forces—but discover no trace of the intact specimens of the Old Ones. When they come upon damaged specimens “insanely” buried in the snow, they are forced to conclude that it is the work of the one missing human, Gedney. Dyer and the graduate student Danforth decide to take a trip by themselves beyond the titanic mountain plateau to see if they can find any explanation for the tragedy.

As they scale the plateau, they find to their amazement an enormous stone city, fifty to one hundred miles in extent, clearly built millions of years ago, long before any humans could have evolved from apes. Exploring some of the interiors, they are forced to conclude that the city was built by the Old Ones. Because the buildings contain, as wall decorations, many bas-reliefs supplying the history of the Old Ones’ civilization, they learn that the Old Ones came from space some fifty million years ago, settling in Antarctica and eventually branching out to other areas of the earth. They built their huge cities with the aid of shoggoths—amorphous, fifteen-foot masses of protoplasm that they controlled by hypnotic suggestion. Over time the shoggoths gained a semi-stable brain and began to develop a will of their own, forcing the Old Ones to conduct several campaigns of resubjugation. Later, other extraterrestrial races—including the fungi from Yuggoth and the Cthulhu spawn—came to the earth and engaged in battles over territory with the Old Ones, and eventually the latter were forced back to their original Antarctic settlement. They had also lost the ability to fly through space. The reasons for their abandonment of the city, and for their extinction, are unfathomable.