At the Mountains of Madness
Encyclopedia
At the Mountains of Madness is a novella
by horror
writer H. P. Lovecraft
, written in February/March 1931
and rejected that year by Weird Tales
editor Farnsworth Wright
on the grounds of its length. It was originally serialized in the February, March and April 1936
issues of Astounding Stories. It has been reproduced in numerous collections.
William Dyer, a professor at Miskatonic University
. He writes to disclose hitherto unknown and closely kept secrets in the hope that he can deter a planned and much publicized scientific expedition to Antarctica. On a previous expedition there, a party of scholars from Miskatonic University, led by Dyer, discovered fantastic and horrific ruins and a dangerous secret beyond a range of mountains higher than the Himalayas
.
The group that discovered and crossed the mountains found the remains of fourteen ancient life forms; completely unknown to science and unidentifiable as either plants or animals. Six of the specimens are badly damaged and the others uncannily pristine. Their highly-evolved features are problematic: their stratum
location puts them at a point on the geologic time scale
much too early for such features to have naturally evolved yet. Because of their resemblance to creatures of myth mentioned in the Necronomicon
, they are dubbed the "Elder Things".
When the main expedition loses contact with this party, Dyer and the rest of his colleagues travel to their camp to investigate. The camp is devastated and both the men and the dogs slaughtered, with only one of each missing. Near the camp they find six star-shaped snow mounds, and a damaged Elder Thing buried under each. They discover that the better preserved life forms have vanished, and that some form of dissection experiment has been done on a man and a dog. Dyer elects to close off the area from which they took their samples.
Dyer and a graduate student named Danforth fly an airplane over the mountains, which they soon realize are the outer wall of a huge, abandoned stone city of cubes and cones, utterly alien compared with any human architecture
. By exploring these fantastic structures, the men are able to learn the history of the Elder Things by interpreting their magnificent hieroglyphic
murals: The Elder Things first came to Earth shortly after the Moon
was pulled loose from the planet and were the creators of life. They built their cities with the help of "Shoggoth
s", things created to perform any task, assume any form, and reflect any thought. As more buildings are explored, a fantastic vista opens of the history of races beyond the scope of man's understanding, including the Elder Things' conflicts with the Star-spawn of Cthulhu and the Mi-go
who arrived on Earth some time after the Elder Things themselves. The images also reflect a degradation in the order of this civilization, as the Shoggoths gain independence. As more resources are applied to maintaining order, the etchings become haphazard and primitive. The murals also allude to some unnamed evil in an even larger mountain range just past their city which even they fear greatly. Eventually, as Antarctica became uninhabitable even for the Elder Things, they migrated into a large, subterranean ocean.
The two eventually realize they are not alone in the city. The Elder Things missing from Lake's camp had somehow returned to life and, after slaughtering the explorers, returned to the city of their origin. Dyer and Danforth discover traces of the Elder Things' earlier exploration, as well as sledges containing the corpses of the man and dog missing from the camp.
As the two progress further into the city, they are ultimately drawn to a massive, ominous entrance which is the opening of a tunnel which they believe leads into the subterranean region described in the murals. Compulsively they are drawn in, finding further horrors: evidence of dead Elder Things caught in a brutal struggle and blind six-foot-tall penguins wandering around placidly. They are confronted with an immense, ululating horror in the form of a black, bubbling mass, which they identify as a Shoggoth. They escape with their lives using luck and diversion. On the plane high above the plateau, Danforth looks back and sees something that causes him to lose his sanity. He refuses to tell anyone (even Dyer) what he saw, though it is implied that it has something to do with what lies beyond the larger mountain range that even the Elder Things feared.
Professor Dyer concludes that the Elder Things and their civilization were destroyed by the Shoggoths they created and that this entity has sustained itself on the enormous penguins since eons past. He begs the planners of the next proposed Antarctic expedition to stay away from things that should not be loosed on this Earth.
The narrator of At the Mountains of Madness, he is a professor of geology
at Miskatonic University
and a leader of the disastrous Pabodie Expedition to Antarctica in 1930–31. Only his last name is mentioned in the text of Mountains, though he is fully identified in Lovecraft's "The Shadow Out of Time
", where he accompanies an expedition to Australia
's Great Sandy Desert
.
. As part of the Pabodie Expedition, he accompanies Dyer on a survey flight over the "Plateau of Leng" and goes mad after seeing something. He is described as "a great reader of bizarre material" and makes allusions to Edgar Allan Poe
and the Necronomicon
.
department, Professor Pabodie invented a drill for the expedition that was "unique and radical in its lightness, portability, and capacity...to cope quickly with strata of varying hardness." He also added "fuel-warming and quick-starting devices" to the expedition's four aircraft.
Lovecraft wrote of the name "Pabodie", "I chose it as a name typical of good old New England stock, yet not sufficiently common to sound conventional or hackneyed." It's an alternative spelling of "Peabody", a name Lovecraft was familiar with through the Peabody Museum
in Salem
.
department, and also a meteorologist. He is part of the Lake sub-expedition.
By the 1920s, S. T. Joshi notes in The Annotated Lovecraft that Antarctica was "one of the last unexplored regions of the earth, where large stretches of territory had never seen the tread of human feet. Contemporary maps of the continent show a number of provocative blanks, and Lovecraft could exercise his imagination in filling them in...with little fear of immediate contradiction."
The first expedition of Richard Evelyn Byrd
took place in 1928-1930, the period just before the novella was written, and Lovecraft mentioned the explorer repeatedly in his letters, remarking at one point on "geologists of the Byrd expedition having found many fossils indicating a tropical past". In fact, Miskatonic University's expedition was modelled after that of Byrd.
In Lovecraft: A Look Behind the Cthulhu Mythos Lin Carter
suggests - with Joshi noting the suggestion as "facile" - that one inspiration for At the Mountains of Madness was Lovecraft's own hypersensitivity to cold, as evidenced by an incident where the writer "collapsed in the street and was carried unconscious into a drug store" because the temperature dropped from 60 degrees to 30 degrees Fahrenheit (15 degrees to -1 degree Celsius). "The loathing and horror that extreme cold evoked in him was carried over into his writing," Carter wrote, "and the pages of Madness convey the blighting, blasting, stifling sensation caused by sub-zero temperatures in a way that even Poe could not suggest."
Joshi further cites as Lovecraft's most obvious literary source for At the Mountains of Madness Edgar Allan Poe
's only novel, The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket
, whose concluding section is set in Antarctica. Lovecraft twice cites Poe's "disturbing and enigmatic" story in his text, and explicitly borrows the mysterious phrase "Tekeli-li" from Poe's work. In a letter to August Derleth
, Lovecraft wrote that he was trying to achieve with his ending an effect similar to what Poe accomplished in Pym.
Another proposed inspiration for At the Mountains of Madness is Edgar Rice Burroughs
' At the Earth's Core
(1914), a novel that posits a highly intelligent reptilian race, the Mahar, living in a hollow earth
. "Consider the similarity of Burroughs' Mahar to Lovecraft's Old Ones, both of whom are presented sympathetically despite their ill-treatment of man," writes critic William Fulwiler. "[B]oth are winged, web-footed, dominant races; both are scientific scholarly races with a talent for genetics, engineering, and architecture; and both races use men as cattle." Both stories, Fulwiler points out, involve radical new drilling techniques; in both stories, humans are vivisected by nonhuman scientists. Burroughs' Mahar even employ a species of servants known as Sagoths, possibly the source of Lovecraft's shoggoths.
Other possible sources include A. Merritt
's "The People of the Pit", whose description of an underground city in the Yukon bears some resemblance to that of Lovecraft's Elder Things, and Katharine Metcalf Roof's "A Million Years After", a story about dinosaur
s hatching from eggs millions of years old that appeared in the November 1930 edition Weird Tales. In a letter to Frank Belknap Long
, Lovecraft declared Metcalf Roof's story to be a "rotten", "cheap", and "puerile" version of an idea he had come up with years earlier, and Joshi suggests it may have provoked him to write his own tale of "the awakening of entities from the dim reaches of earth's history."
S.T. Joshi & Schultz's An H.P. Lovecraft Encyclopedia suggest that the long scope of history recounted in the story may have been inspired by Oswald Spengler
's The Decline of the West
. Some details of the story may have been taken from M. P. Shiel's 1901 novel of Arctic
exploration, The Purple Cloud
, which was republished in 1930.
The title is believed by Joshi to derive from a line in Lord Dunsany's short story "The Hashish Man": "And we came at last to those ivory hills that are named the Mountains of Madness...".
Lovecraft's own "The Nameless City
" (1921), which also deals with the exploration of an ancient underground city apparently abandoned by its nonhuman builders, is a clear precedent for At the Mountains of Madness. In both stories, the explorers use the nonhumans' artwork to deduce the history of their species.
As for details of the Antarctic setting, the author's description of some of the scenery is in part inspired by the Asian paintings of Nicholas Roerich
, and the illustrations of Gustav Dore both of whom are referenced by the story's narrator multiple times.
described the novella as "perfect Lovecraft" and "a good deal more lucid than much of the master's work," as well as "first-water, true-blue science fiction."
, as well as Antarctica's place in the "ancient astronaut mythology".
produced a 1930s-style radio drama
of the story, featuring a full cast, original music and sound effects. It is packaged with photos from the expedition, newspaper clippings and other feelie
s.
The psychedelic rock
group H. P. Lovecraft
wrote and recorded a song titled "At the Mountains of Madness", which was based on the novella. The song appears on the band's second album H. P. Lovecraft II
and a live performance of it, recorded at The Fillmore
, is included on their Live May 11, 1968
album.
Mountains of Madness is a musical adaptation of Lovecraft's stories by Alexander Hacke
, Danielle de Picciotto
and The Tiger Lillies
.
In October and November 2010, BBC7 broadcast an abridged reading in five half-hour episodes performed by Richard Coyle. A radio adaptation of At the Mountains of Madness was also created by the Atlanta Radio Theater Company.
The story was adapted into a graphic novel
by I. N. J. Culbard and was published, in 2010, by Self Made Hero
as part of their Eye Classics line (ISBN 9781906838126). The book was named The Observer
Graphic Novel of the Month.
and screenwriter Matthew Robbins
wrote a screenplay based on Lovecraft's story, but in 2006 had trouble getting Warner Bros.
to finance the project. Del Toro wrote, "The studio is very nervous about the cost and it not having a love story or a happy ending, but it's impossible to do either in the Lovecraft universe." In July 2010 it was announced that the film would be made in 3D
and that James Cameron
would become producer, and Tom Cruise
was attached to star. This "was a startling prospect considering Lovecraft's tale had long been considered unfilmable." Del Toro confirmed that the film would begin production as early as May 2011 and start filming in June. However, in March 2011, it was announced that "Universal
refused to greenlight the project due to del Toro's insistence that it be released with an R rating rather than a PG-13." According to Salon.com
, "Universal wants to hold onto the project in the event that it changes its mind and decides to make it later, either as an R or PG-13 movie. But del Toro is already trying to set up Mountains at another studio (possibly 20th Century Fox
, which released Cameron's Titanic
and Avatar).
published Hive, by Tim Curran. In the story, set in the present, the Plateau of Leng has crumbled under the ice and snow due to geological changes, the Shoggoths are non-existent (with Dyer's accounts of them overthrowing the Elder Things having been chalked up to stress and madness), and the Elder Things, both living and ethereal, still exist under the Antarctic ice. The plot deals with a group of American explorers unearthing an Elder Thing tomb and citadel. A parallel plot also deals with an expedition using an experimental submersible to breach Lake Vostok
, which is named as the location of the underwater city to which the Elder Things fled.
in 1999. This book details the Starkweather-Moore expedition return to the ice to discover the truth about the Miskatonic Expedition. The book incorporates many of the aspects of the original Lovecraft story, including references to the Poe story, The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket
, Nicholas Roerich
, Danforth and Dyer.
is a loose sequel to At the Mountains of Madness, by Charles Stross
, where the secrets from beyond the Mountains of Madness are used by the superpowers of the cold war to dreadful effect.
Novella
A novella is a written, fictional, prose narrative usually longer than a novelette but shorter than a novel. The Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America Nebula Awards for science fiction define the novella as having a word count between 17,500 and 40,000...
by horror
Horror fiction
Horror fiction also Horror fantasy is a philosophy of literature, which is intended to, or has the capacity to frighten its readers, inducing feelings of horror and terror. It creates an eerie atmosphere. Horror can be either supernatural or non-supernatural...
writer H. P. Lovecraft
H. P. Lovecraft
Howard Phillips Lovecraft --often credited as H.P. Lovecraft — was an American author of horror, fantasy and science fiction, especially the subgenre known as weird fiction....
, written in February/March 1931
1931 in literature
The year 1931 in literature involved some significant events and new books.-Events:*Cherokee playwright Lynn Riggs' play Green Grow the Lilacs premiers. It would later be adapted by Rodgers and Hammerstein as Oklahoma!....
and rejected that year by Weird Tales
Weird Tales
Weird Tales is an American fantasy and horror fiction pulp magazine first published in March 1923. It ceased its original run in September 1954, after 279 issues, but has since been revived. The magazine was set up in Chicago by J. C. Henneberger, an ex-journalist with a taste for the macabre....
editor Farnsworth Wright
Farnsworth Wright
Farnsworth Wright was the editor of the pulp magazine Weird Tales during the magazine's heyday.He was born in California, and educated in the University of Nevada and the University of Washington....
on the grounds of its length. It was originally serialized in the February, March and April 1936
1936 in literature
The year 1936 in literature involved some significant events and new books.-Events:* Life magazine is first published.* The Carnegie Medal for excellence in children's literature is established in the UK.-New books:...
issues of Astounding Stories. It has been reproduced in numerous collections.
Plot summary
The story is written in first-person perspective by the geologistGeologist
A geologist is a scientist who studies the solid and liquid matter that constitutes the Earth as well as the processes and history that has shaped it. Geologists usually engage in studying geology. Geologists, studying more of an applied science than a theoretical one, must approach Geology using...
William Dyer, a professor at Miskatonic University
Miskatonic University
Miskatonic University is a fictional university located in Arkham; a fictitious town which is said to exist in Essex County, Massachusetts. It is named after the Miskatonic River . After first appearing in the H. P...
. He writes to disclose hitherto unknown and closely kept secrets in the hope that he can deter a planned and much publicized scientific expedition to Antarctica. On a previous expedition there, a party of scholars from Miskatonic University, led by Dyer, discovered fantastic and horrific ruins and a dangerous secret beyond a range of mountains higher than the Himalayas
Himalayas
The Himalaya Range or Himalaya Mountains Sanskrit: Devanagari: हिमालय, literally "abode of snow"), usually called the Himalayas or Himalaya for short, is a mountain range in Asia, separating the Indian subcontinent from the Tibetan Plateau...
.
The group that discovered and crossed the mountains found the remains of fourteen ancient life forms; completely unknown to science and unidentifiable as either plants or animals. Six of the specimens are badly damaged and the others uncannily pristine. Their highly-evolved features are problematic: their stratum
Stratum
In geology and related fields, a stratum is a layer of sedimentary rock or soil with internally consistent characteristics that distinguish it from other layers...
location puts them at a point on the geologic time scale
Geologic time scale
The geologic time scale provides a system of chronologic measurement relating stratigraphy to time that is used by geologists, paleontologists and other earth scientists to describe the timing and relationships between events that have occurred during the history of the Earth...
much too early for such features to have naturally evolved yet. Because of their resemblance to creatures of myth mentioned in the Necronomicon
Necronomicon
The Necronomicon is a fictional grimoire appearing in the stories by horror writer H. P. Lovecraft and his followers. It was first mentioned in Lovecraft's 1924 short story "The Hound", written in 1922, though its purported author, the "Mad Arab" Abdul Alhazred, had been quoted a year earlier in...
, they are dubbed the "Elder Things".
When the main expedition loses contact with this party, Dyer and the rest of his colleagues travel to their camp to investigate. The camp is devastated and both the men and the dogs slaughtered, with only one of each missing. Near the camp they find six star-shaped snow mounds, and a damaged Elder Thing buried under each. They discover that the better preserved life forms have vanished, and that some form of dissection experiment has been done on a man and a dog. Dyer elects to close off the area from which they took their samples.
Dyer and a graduate student named Danforth fly an airplane over the mountains, which they soon realize are the outer wall of a huge, abandoned stone city of cubes and cones, utterly alien compared with any human architecture
Architecture
Architecture is both the process and product of planning, designing and construction. Architectural works, in the material form of buildings, are often perceived as cultural and political symbols and as works of art...
. By exploring these fantastic structures, the men are able to learn the history of the Elder Things by interpreting their magnificent hieroglyphic
Logogram
A logogram, or logograph, is a grapheme which represents a word or a morpheme . This stands in contrast to phonograms, which represent phonemes or combinations of phonemes, and determinatives, which mark semantic categories.Logograms are often commonly known also as "ideograms"...
murals: The Elder Things first came to Earth shortly after the Moon
Moon
The Moon is Earth's only known natural satellite,There are a number of near-Earth asteroids including 3753 Cruithne that are co-orbital with Earth: their orbits bring them close to Earth for periods of time but then alter in the long term . These are quasi-satellites and not true moons. For more...
was pulled loose from the planet and were the creators of life. They built their cities with the help of "Shoggoth
Shoggoth
A shoggoth is a fictional monster in the Cthulhu Mythos. The being was mentioned in passing in sonnet XX of H.P...
s", things created to perform any task, assume any form, and reflect any thought. As more buildings are explored, a fantastic vista opens of the history of races beyond the scope of man's understanding, including the Elder Things' conflicts with the Star-spawn of Cthulhu and the Mi-go
Mi-go
The Mi-go are a race of extraterrestrials in the Cthulhu Mythos created by H. P. Lovecraft and others. The name was first applied to the creatures in Lovecraft's short story "The Whisperer in Darkness" , taking up a reference to 'What fungi sprout in Yuggoth' in his sonnet cycle Fungi from Yuggoth...
who arrived on Earth some time after the Elder Things themselves. The images also reflect a degradation in the order of this civilization, as the Shoggoths gain independence. As more resources are applied to maintaining order, the etchings become haphazard and primitive. The murals also allude to some unnamed evil in an even larger mountain range just past their city which even they fear greatly. Eventually, as Antarctica became uninhabitable even for the Elder Things, they migrated into a large, subterranean ocean.
The two eventually realize they are not alone in the city. The Elder Things missing from Lake's camp had somehow returned to life and, after slaughtering the explorers, returned to the city of their origin. Dyer and Danforth discover traces of the Elder Things' earlier exploration, as well as sledges containing the corpses of the man and dog missing from the camp.
As the two progress further into the city, they are ultimately drawn to a massive, ominous entrance which is the opening of a tunnel which they believe leads into the subterranean region described in the murals. Compulsively they are drawn in, finding further horrors: evidence of dead Elder Things caught in a brutal struggle and blind six-foot-tall penguins wandering around placidly. They are confronted with an immense, ululating horror in the form of a black, bubbling mass, which they identify as a Shoggoth. They escape with their lives using luck and diversion. On the plane high above the plateau, Danforth looks back and sees something that causes him to lose his sanity. He refuses to tell anyone (even Dyer) what he saw, though it is implied that it has something to do with what lies beyond the larger mountain range that even the Elder Things feared.
Professor Dyer concludes that the Elder Things and their civilization were destroyed by the Shoggoths they created and that this entity has sustained itself on the enormous penguins since eons past. He begs the planners of the next proposed Antarctic expedition to stay away from things that should not be loosed on this Earth.
William Dyer
(ca. 1875–?)The narrator of At the Mountains of Madness, he is a professor of geology
Geology
Geology is the science comprising the study of solid Earth, the rocks of which it is composed, and the processes by which it evolves. Geology gives insight into the history of the Earth, as it provides the primary evidence for plate tectonics, the evolutionary history of life, and past climates...
at Miskatonic University
Miskatonic University
Miskatonic University is a fictional university located in Arkham; a fictitious town which is said to exist in Essex County, Massachusetts. It is named after the Miskatonic River . After first appearing in the H. P...
and a leader of the disastrous Pabodie Expedition to Antarctica in 1930–31. Only his last name is mentioned in the text of Mountains, though he is fully identified in Lovecraft's "The Shadow Out of Time
The Shadow Out of Time
The Shadow Out of Time is a novella by Americanhorror fiction writer H. P. Lovecraft. Written between November 1934 and February 1935, it was first published in the June 1936 issue of Astounding Stories.-Plot summary:...
", where he accompanies an expedition to Australia
Australia
Australia , officially the Commonwealth of Australia, is a country in the Southern Hemisphere comprising the mainland of the Australian continent, the island of Tasmania, and numerous smaller islands in the Indian and Pacific Oceans. It is the world's sixth-largest country by total area...
's Great Sandy Desert
Great Sandy Desert
The Great Sandy Desert is a desert located in the North West of Western Australia straddling the Pilbara and southern Kimberley regions. It is the second largest desert in Australia after the Great Victoria Desert and encompasses an area of...
.
Danforth
Graduate student at Miskatonic UniversityMiskatonic University
Miskatonic University is a fictional university located in Arkham; a fictitious town which is said to exist in Essex County, Massachusetts. It is named after the Miskatonic River . After first appearing in the H. P...
. As part of the Pabodie Expedition, he accompanies Dyer on a survey flight over the "Plateau of Leng" and goes mad after seeing something. He is described as "a great reader of bizarre material" and makes allusions to Edgar Allan Poe
Edgar Allan Poe
Edgar Allan Poe was an American author, poet, editor and literary critic, considered part of the American Romantic Movement. Best known for his tales of mystery and the macabre, Poe was one of the earliest American practitioners of the short story and is considered the inventor of the detective...
and the Necronomicon
Necronomicon
The Necronomicon is a fictional grimoire appearing in the stories by horror writer H. P. Lovecraft and his followers. It was first mentioned in Lovecraft's 1924 short story "The Hound", written in 1922, though its purported author, the "Mad Arab" Abdul Alhazred, had been quoted a year earlier in...
.
Frank H. Pabodie
A member of Miskatonic's engineeringEngineering
Engineering is the discipline, art, skill and profession of acquiring and applying scientific, mathematical, economic, social, and practical knowledge, in order to design and build structures, machines, devices, systems, materials and processes that safely realize improvements to the lives of...
department, Professor Pabodie invented a drill for the expedition that was "unique and radical in its lightness, portability, and capacity...to cope quickly with strata of varying hardness." He also added "fuel-warming and quick-starting devices" to the expedition's four aircraft.
Lovecraft wrote of the name "Pabodie", "I chose it as a name typical of good old New England stock, yet not sufficiently common to sound conventional or hackneyed." It's an alternative spelling of "Peabody", a name Lovecraft was familiar with through the Peabody Museum
George Peabody
George Peabody was an American-British entrepreneur and philanthropist who founded the Peabody Trust in Britain and the Peabody Institute in Baltimore, and was responsible for many other charitable initiatives.-Biography:...
in Salem
Salem, Massachusetts
Salem is a city in Essex County, Massachusetts, United States. The population was 40,407 at the 2000 census. It and Lawrence are the county seats of Essex County...
.
Professor Lake
Lake is a professor of biology at Miskatonic University. It is he who first discovers the Mountains of Madness as a result of his "strange and dogged insistence on a westward - or rather, northwestward - prospecting trip" based on his discovery of strange fossils. He also discovers the ancient extraterrestrial specimens that he dubs Elder Things based on their resemblance to "certain monsters of primal myth" found in the Necronomicon. He reports that his findings in Antarctica confirm his belief "that earth has seen whole cycles of organic life before known one that begins with Archaeozoic cells," and predicts that this "[w]ill mean to biology what Einstein has meant to mathematics and physics." When eight of the Elder Things turn out to be living creatures rather than fossils, they butcher Lake and the rest of his sub-expedition. For the rest of the story, he is referred to as "poor Lake".Professor Atwood
A member of the Miskatonic University physicsPhysics
Physics is a natural science that involves the study of matter and its motion through spacetime, along with related concepts such as energy and force. More broadly, it is the general analysis of nature, conducted in order to understand how the universe behaves.Physics is one of the oldest academic...
department, and also a meteorologist. He is part of the Lake sub-expedition.
Inspiration
Lovecraft had a lifelong interest in Antarctic exploration. "Lovecraft had been fascinated with the Antarctic continent since he was at least 12 years old, when he had written several small treatises on early Antarctic explorers," biographer S. T. Joshi wrote. At about the age of 9, inspired by W. Clark Russell's 1887 book The Frozen Pirate, Lovecraft had written "several yarns" set in Antarctica.By the 1920s, S. T. Joshi notes in The Annotated Lovecraft that Antarctica was "one of the last unexplored regions of the earth, where large stretches of territory had never seen the tread of human feet. Contemporary maps of the continent show a number of provocative blanks, and Lovecraft could exercise his imagination in filling them in...with little fear of immediate contradiction."
The first expedition of Richard Evelyn Byrd
Richard Evelyn Byrd
Rear Admiral Richard Evelyn Byrd, Jr., USN was a naval officer who specialized in feats of exploration. He was a pioneering American aviator, polar explorer, and organizer of polar logistics...
took place in 1928-1930, the period just before the novella was written, and Lovecraft mentioned the explorer repeatedly in his letters, remarking at one point on "geologists of the Byrd expedition having found many fossils indicating a tropical past". In fact, Miskatonic University's expedition was modelled after that of Byrd.
In Lovecraft: A Look Behind the Cthulhu Mythos Lin Carter
Lin Carter
Linwood Vrooman Carter was an American author of science fiction and fantasy, as well as an editor and critic. He usually wrote as Lin Carter; known pseudonyms include H. P. Lowcraft and Grail Undwin.-Life:Carter was born in St. Petersburg, Florida...
suggests - with Joshi noting the suggestion as "facile" - that one inspiration for At the Mountains of Madness was Lovecraft's own hypersensitivity to cold, as evidenced by an incident where the writer "collapsed in the street and was carried unconscious into a drug store" because the temperature dropped from 60 degrees to 30 degrees Fahrenheit (15 degrees to -1 degree Celsius). "The loathing and horror that extreme cold evoked in him was carried over into his writing," Carter wrote, "and the pages of Madness convey the blighting, blasting, stifling sensation caused by sub-zero temperatures in a way that even Poe could not suggest."
Joshi further cites as Lovecraft's most obvious literary source for At the Mountains of Madness Edgar Allan Poe
Edgar Allan Poe
Edgar Allan Poe was an American author, poet, editor and literary critic, considered part of the American Romantic Movement. Best known for his tales of mystery and the macabre, Poe was one of the earliest American practitioners of the short story and is considered the inventor of the detective...
's only novel, The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket
The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket
The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket is the only complete novel written by American writer Edgar Allan Poe. The work relates the tale of the young Arthur Gordon Pym, who stows away aboard a whaling ship called the Grampus...
, whose concluding section is set in Antarctica. Lovecraft twice cites Poe's "disturbing and enigmatic" story in his text, and explicitly borrows the mysterious phrase "Tekeli-li" from Poe's work. In a letter to August Derleth
August Derleth
August William Derleth was an American writer and anthologist. Though best remembered as the first publisher of the writings of H. P...
, Lovecraft wrote that he was trying to achieve with his ending an effect similar to what Poe accomplished in Pym.
Another proposed inspiration for At the Mountains of Madness is Edgar Rice Burroughs
Edgar Rice Burroughs
Edgar Rice Burroughs was an American author, best known for his creation of the jungle hero Tarzan and the heroic Mars adventurer John Carter, although he produced works in many genres.-Biography:...
' At the Earth's Core
At the Earth's Core (novel)
At the Earth's Core is a 1914 science fiction novel by Edgar Rice Burroughs, the first in his series about the fictional "hollow earth" land of Pellucidar. It first appeared as a four-part serial in All-Story Weekly from April 4–25, 1914. It was first published in book form in hardcover by A. C...
(1914), a novel that posits a highly intelligent reptilian race, the Mahar, living in a hollow earth
Hollow Earth
The Hollow Earth hypothesis proposes that the planet Earth is either entirely hollow or otherwise contains a substantial interior space. The hypothesis has been shown to be wrong by observational evidence, as well as by the modern understanding of planet formation; the scientific community has...
. "Consider the similarity of Burroughs' Mahar to Lovecraft's Old Ones, both of whom are presented sympathetically despite their ill-treatment of man," writes critic William Fulwiler. "[B]oth are winged, web-footed, dominant races; both are scientific scholarly races with a talent for genetics, engineering, and architecture; and both races use men as cattle." Both stories, Fulwiler points out, involve radical new drilling techniques; in both stories, humans are vivisected by nonhuman scientists. Burroughs' Mahar even employ a species of servants known as Sagoths, possibly the source of Lovecraft's shoggoths.
Other possible sources include A. Merritt
A. Merritt
Abraham Grace Merritt — known by his byline, A. Merritt — was an American editor and author of works of fantastic fiction.-Life:...
's "The People of the Pit", whose description of an underground city in the Yukon bears some resemblance to that of Lovecraft's Elder Things, and Katharine Metcalf Roof's "A Million Years After", a story about dinosaur
Dinosaur
Dinosaurs are a diverse group of animals of the clade and superorder Dinosauria. They were the dominant terrestrial vertebrates for over 160 million years, from the late Triassic period until the end of the Cretaceous , when the Cretaceous–Paleogene extinction event led to the extinction of...
s hatching from eggs millions of years old that appeared in the November 1930 edition Weird Tales. In a letter to Frank Belknap Long
Frank Belknap Long
Frank Belknap Long was a prolific American writer of horror fiction, fantasy, science fiction, poetry, gothic romance, comic books, and non-fiction. Though his writing career spanned seven decades, he is best known for his horror and science fiction short stories, including early contributions to...
, Lovecraft declared Metcalf Roof's story to be a "rotten", "cheap", and "puerile" version of an idea he had come up with years earlier, and Joshi suggests it may have provoked him to write his own tale of "the awakening of entities from the dim reaches of earth's history."
S.T. Joshi & Schultz's An H.P. Lovecraft Encyclopedia suggest that the long scope of history recounted in the story may have been inspired by Oswald Spengler
Oswald Spengler
Oswald Manuel Arnold Gottfried Spengler was a German historian and philosopher whose interests also included mathematics, science, and art. He is best known for his book The Decline of the West , published in 1918, which puts forth a cyclical theory of the rise and decline of civilizations...
's The Decline of the West
The Decline of the West
The Decline of the West , or The Downfall of the Occident, is a two-volume work by Oswald Spengler, the first volume of which was published in the summer of 1918...
. Some details of the story may have been taken from M. P. Shiel's 1901 novel of Arctic
Arctic
The Arctic is a region located at the northern-most part of the Earth. The Arctic consists of the Arctic Ocean and parts of Canada, Russia, Greenland, the United States, Norway, Sweden, Finland, and Iceland. The Arctic region consists of a vast, ice-covered ocean, surrounded by treeless permafrost...
exploration, The Purple Cloud
The Purple Cloud
The Purple Cloud is a "last man" novel by the British writer M. P. Shiel. It was published in 1901. H. P. Lovecraft later praised the novel as exemplary weird fiction, "delivered with a skill and artistry falling little short of actual majesty." Frank Belknap Long deemed it "the most unutterably...
, which was republished in 1930.
The title is believed by Joshi to derive from a line in Lord Dunsany's short story "The Hashish Man": "And we came at last to those ivory hills that are named the Mountains of Madness...".
Lovecraft's own "The Nameless City
The Nameless City
"The Nameless City" is a horror story written by H. P. Lovecraft in January 1921 and first published in the November 1921 issue of the amateur press journal The Wolverine...
" (1921), which also deals with the exploration of an ancient underground city apparently abandoned by its nonhuman builders, is a clear precedent for At the Mountains of Madness. In both stories, the explorers use the nonhumans' artwork to deduce the history of their species.
As for details of the Antarctic setting, the author's description of some of the scenery is in part inspired by the Asian paintings of Nicholas Roerich
Nicholas Roerich
Nicholas Roerich, also known as Nikolai Konstantinovich Rerikh , was a Russian mystic, painter, philosopher, scientist, writer, traveler, and public figure. A prolific artist, he created thousands of paintings and about 30 literary works...
, and the illustrations of Gustav Dore both of whom are referenced by the story's narrator multiple times.
Critical reception
Theodore SturgeonTheodore Sturgeon
Theodore Sturgeon was an American science fiction author.His most famous novel is More Than Human .-Biography:...
described the novella as "perfect Lovecraft" and "a good deal more lucid than much of the master's work," as well as "first-water, true-blue science fiction."
Significance
The story has also inadvertently popularized the concept of ancient astronautsAncient astronauts
Some writers have proposed that intelligent extraterrestrial beings have visited Earth in antiquity or prehistory and made contact with humans. Such visitors are called ancient astronauts or ancient aliens. Proponents suggest that this contact influenced the development of human cultures,...
, as well as Antarctica's place in the "ancient astronaut mythology".
Connections to other Lovecraft stories
At the Mountains of Madness has numerous connections to other Lovecraft stories. A few include:- The formless shoggoths previously appeared in "The Shadow Over InnsmouthThe Shadow Over InnsmouthThe Shadow Over Innsmouth is a novella by H. P. Lovecraft. Written in November-December 1931, the story was first published in April 1936; this was the only fiction of Lovecraft's published during his lifetime that did not appear in a periodical....
" (19311931 in literatureThe year 1931 in literature involved some significant events and new books.-Events:*Cherokee playwright Lynn Riggs' play Green Grow the Lilacs premiers. It would later be adapted by Rodgers and Hammerstein as Oklahoma!....
), "The Thing on the DoorstepThe Thing on the Doorstep"The Thing on the Doorstep" is a short story written by H. P. Lovecraft, part of the so-called Cthulhu Mythos universe of horror fiction. It was written in August 1933, and first published in the January 1937 issue of Weird Tales.-Inspiration:...
" (19331933 in literatureThe year 1933 in literature involved some significant events and new books.-Events:* February 17 - The magazine Newsweek is published for the first time.* James Joyce's Ulysses is allowed into United States.-New books:...
), and "The Haunter of the DarkThe Haunter of the Dark"The Haunter of the Dark" is a horror story in the Cthulhu Mythos genre. It was written by H. P. Lovecraft in November 1935, and published in the December 1936 edition of Weird Tales...
" (19351935 in literatureThe year 1935 in literature involved some significant events and new books.-Events:* June 15 - W. H. Auden enters a marriage of convenience with Erika Mann.* July 30 - Allen Lane founds Penguin Books to publish the first mass market paperbacks in Britain....
) - The star-headed Elder Things also appear in "The Dreams in the Witch HouseThe Dreams in the Witch House"The Dreams in the Witch House" is a short story by H. P. Lovecraft, part of the Cthulhu Mythos genre of horror fiction. Written in January/February 1932, it was first published in the July 1933 issue of Weird Tales.-Inspiration:...
" (19331933 in literatureThe year 1933 in literature involved some significant events and new books.-Events:* February 17 - The magazine Newsweek is published for the first time.* James Joyce's Ulysses is allowed into United States.-New books:...
), when the main character, Walter Gilman, visits a city of theirs in one of his dreams, and "The Shadow Out of TimeThe Shadow Out of TimeThe Shadow Out of Time is a novella by Americanhorror fiction writer H. P. Lovecraft. Written between November 1934 and February 1935, it was first published in the June 1936 issue of Astounding Stories.-Plot summary:...
", in which they are the vaguely-alluded-to antagonists of the Great Race of YithGreat Race of YithThe Great Race of Yith are aliens in the Cthulhu Mythos of H. P. Lovecraft. They first appeared in Lovecraft's short story "The Shadow Out of Time" . They are called the Great Race because they are the only beings to have mastered time travel...
. - The expedition is sponsored by the Nathaniel Derby Pickman Foundation, combining two major names in Lovecraft's fiction: Derby and Pickman. Richard Upton Pickman is the main character in Lovecraft's "Pickman's ModelPickman's Model"Pickman's Model" is a short story by H. P. Lovecraft, written in September 1926 and first published in the October 1927 issue of Weird Tales...
", while Edward Pickman Derby is the protagonist of his "The Thing on the Doorstep", and also one of his literary alter-egos. - The Elder Things record the coming of CthulhuCthulhuCthulhu is a fictional character that first appeared in the short story "The Call of Cthulhu", published in the pulp magazine Weird Tales in 1928. The character was created by writer H. P...
to Earth and the sinking of R'lyehR'lyehR'lyeh is a fictional lost city that first appeared in the H. P. Lovecraft short story "The Call of Cthulhu", first published in Weird Tales in 1928. According to Lovecraft's short story, R'lyeh is a sunken city in the South Pacific and the prison of the malevolent entity called Cthulhu.R'lyeh is...
, events referred to in "The Call of CthulhuThe Call of CthulhuThe Call of Cthulhu is a short story by American writer H. P. Lovecraft. Written in the summer of 1926, it was first published in the pulp magazine Weird Tales, in February 1928.-Inspiration:...
" (19281928 in literatureThe year 1928 in literature involved some significant events and new books.-Events:*Ford Madox Ford publishes Last Post. It is the final book of a four-volume work titled Parade's End published between 1924 and 1928....
). - The Elder Things' city is identified with the Plateau of LengLengLeng is a fictional cold arid plateau in the Cthulhu Mythos, whose location seems to vary entirely from story to story. The Plateau of Tsang, referenced by H. P...
also called Y'Pawfrm e'din Leng, first mentioned in Lovecraft's "CelephaisCelephaïs"Celephaïs" is a fantasy story by American horror fiction writer H. P. Lovecraft, written in early November 1920 and first published in the May 1922 issue of the Rainbow.The title refers to a fictional city that later appears in H. P...
" (19201920 in literatureThe year 1920 in literature involved some significant events and new books.-Events:*Agatha Christie publishes her first novel, The Mysterious Affair at Styles, introducing the long-running character detective, Hercule Poirot....
). - Some members of the expedition have read Miskatonic UniversityMiskatonic UniversityMiskatonic University is a fictional university located in Arkham; a fictitious town which is said to exist in Essex County, Massachusetts. It is named after the Miskatonic River . After first appearing in the H. P...
's copy of the NecronomiconNecronomiconThe Necronomicon is a fictional grimoire appearing in the stories by horror writer H. P. Lovecraft and his followers. It was first mentioned in Lovecraft's 1924 short story "The Hound", written in 1922, though its purported author, the "Mad Arab" Abdul Alhazred, had been quoted a year earlier in...
. - Dyer mentions "Kadath in the Cold Waste" while referring to a massive mountain range which even the Old Ones "shunned as vaguely and namelessly evil."
- At the very end of the story, Danforth links the horror beyond the forbidden mountain range to Yog-SothothYog-SothothYog-Sothoth is a cosmic entity of the fictional Cthulhu Mythos and the Dream Cycle of H. P. Lovecraft. Yog-Sothoth's name was first mentioned in his novella The Case of Charles Dexter Ward...
and "The Colour Out of SpaceThe Colour Out of Space"The Colour Out of Space" is a short story written by American fantasy author H. P. Lovecraft in March 1927. In the tale, an unnamed narrator pieces together the story of an area known by the locals as the "blasted heath" in the wild hills west of Arkham, Massachusetts...
". - The Mi-GoMi-goThe Mi-go are a race of extraterrestrials in the Cthulhu Mythos created by H. P. Lovecraft and others. The name was first applied to the creatures in Lovecraft's short story "The Whisperer in Darkness" , taking up a reference to 'What fungi sprout in Yuggoth' in his sonnet cycle Fungi from Yuggoth...
are the focus of "The Whisperer in DarknessThe Whisperer in Darkness"The Whisperer in Darkness" is a short story by H. P. Lovecraft. Written February–September 1930, it was first published in Weird Tales, August 1931. Similar to "The Colour Out of Space" , it is a blend of horror and science fiction...
". - Several times throughout, Dyer makes reference to Albert Wilmarth, the main character of "The Whisperer in DarknessThe Whisperer in Darkness"The Whisperer in Darkness" is a short story by H. P. Lovecraft. Written February–September 1930, it was first published in Weird Tales, August 1931. Similar to "The Colour Out of Space" , it is a blend of horror and science fiction...
"
Adaptations
The H. P. Lovecraft Historical SocietyH. P. Lovecraft Historical Society
The H. P. Lovecraft Historical Society or HPLHS is the organization that hosts Cthulhu Lives!, a group of live-action roleplayers for the Cthulhu Live version of Call of Cthulhu. Founded in Colorado in 1984, it is now based in Glendale, California...
produced a 1930s-style radio drama
Dark Adventure Radio Theatre: At the Mountains of Madness
Dark Adventure Radio Theatre: At the Mountains of Madness is a 2006 radio drama performed by the H. P. Lovecraft Historical Society, and based on the novella At the Mountains of Madness by H. P. Lovecraft...
of the story, featuring a full cast, original music and sound effects. It is packaged with photos from the expedition, newspaper clippings and other feelie
Feelie
Infocom used the term feelie to refer to the extra content included with the boxed versions of their interactive fiction computer games. Feelies differed from game to game and were of the same theme as the game they came packaged with...
s.
The psychedelic rock
Psychedelic rock
Psychedelic rock is a style of rock music that is inspired or influenced by psychedelic culture and attempts to replicate and enhance the mind-altering experiences of psychedelic drugs. It emerged during the mid 1960s among folk rock and blues rock bands in United States and the United Kingdom...
group H. P. Lovecraft
H. P. Lovecraft (band)
H. P. Lovecraft was an American psychedelic rock band, formed in Chicago, Illinois in 1967 and named after horror writer H. P. Lovecraft. Much of the band's music was possessed of a haunting, eerie ambience, and consisted of material that was inspired by the macabre writings of the author whose...
wrote and recorded a song titled "At the Mountains of Madness", which was based on the novella. The song appears on the band's second album H. P. Lovecraft II
H. P. Lovecraft II
H. P. Lovecraft II is the second album by the American psychedelic rock band H. P. Lovecraft and was released in September 1968 on Philips Records. As with their debut LP, the album again saw the band blending psychedelic and folk rock influences, albeit with a greater emphasis on psychedelia than...
and a live performance of it, recorded at The Fillmore
The Fillmore
The Fillmore Auditorium is a historic music venue in San Francisco, California, made famous by Bill Graham. Named for its original location at the intersection of Fillmore Street and Geary Boulevard, it lies on the boundary of the Western Addition and the Pacific Heights neighborhoods.In 1968,...
, is included on their Live May 11, 1968
Live May 11, 1968
Live May 11, 1968 is a live album by the American psychedelic rock band H. P. Lovecraft and was released in 1991. The eight tracks included on the album were all recorded at The Fillmore West in San Francisco, California on May 11, 1968, soon after the band's original bass player Jerry McGeorge...
album.
Mountains of Madness is a musical adaptation of Lovecraft's stories by Alexander Hacke
Alexander Hacke
Alexander Hacke is a guitarist, bass guitarist, singer, experimental / industrial / electronic musician from Germany....
, Danielle de Picciotto
Danielle de Picciotto
Danielle de Picciotto is an American born artist, musician and film maker. She was born in Washington, USA, but now lives and works in Berlin, Germany...
and The Tiger Lillies
Tiger Lillies
The Tiger Lillies are a three-piece band, formed in 1989 and based in London. They have toured worldwide and won acclaim with their opera Shockheaded Peter....
.
In October and November 2010, BBC7 broadcast an abridged reading in five half-hour episodes performed by Richard Coyle. A radio adaptation of At the Mountains of Madness was also created by the Atlanta Radio Theater Company.
The story was adapted into a graphic novel
Graphic novel
A graphic novel is a narrative work in which the story is conveyed to the reader using sequential art in either an experimental design or in a traditional comics format...
by I. N. J. Culbard and was published, in 2010, by Self Made Hero
Self Made Hero
SelfMadeHero is a British graphic novel and manga publishing company, and imprint of Metro Media Ltd, who specialise in adapting works of literature.They launched with two lines in 2007:...
as part of their Eye Classics line (ISBN 9781906838126). The book was named The Observer
The Observer
The Observer is a British newspaper, published on Sundays. In the same place on the political spectrum as its daily sister paper The Guardian, which acquired it in 1993, it takes a liberal or social democratic line on most issues. It is the world's oldest Sunday newspaper.-Origins:The first issue,...
Graphic Novel of the Month.
Film
Director Guillermo del ToroGuillermo del Toro
Guillermo del Toro is a Mexican director, producer, screenwriter, novelist and designer. He is mostly known for his acclaimed films, Blade II, Pan's Labyrinth and the Hellboy film franchise. He is a frequent collaborator with Ron Perlman, Federico Luppi and Doug Jones...
and screenwriter Matthew Robbins
Matthew Robbins (screenwriter)
Matthew Robbins is an American screenwriter, film producer and director. He is good friends with Steven Spielberg, George Lucas, Guillermo Del Toro and Walter Murch and has had cameo appearances in THX 1138 and Close Encounters of the Third Kind...
wrote a screenplay based on Lovecraft's story, but in 2006 had trouble getting Warner Bros.
Warner Bros.
Warner Bros. Entertainment, Inc., also known as Warner Bros. Pictures or simply Warner Bros. , is an American producer of film and television entertainment.One of the major film studios, it is a subsidiary of Time Warner, with its headquarters in Burbank,...
to finance the project. Del Toro wrote, "The studio is very nervous about the cost and it not having a love story or a happy ending, but it's impossible to do either in the Lovecraft universe." In July 2010 it was announced that the film would be made in 3D
3-D film
A 3-D film or S3D film is a motion picture that enhances the illusion of depth perception...
and that James Cameron
James Cameron
James Francis Cameron is a Canadian-American film director, film producer, screenwriter, editor, environmentalist and inventor...
would become producer, and Tom Cruise
Tom Cruise
Thomas Cruise Mapother IV , better known as Tom Cruise, is an American film actor and producer. He has been nominated for three Academy Awards and he has won three Golden Globe Awards....
was attached to star. This "was a startling prospect considering Lovecraft's tale had long been considered unfilmable." Del Toro confirmed that the film would begin production as early as May 2011 and start filming in June. However, in March 2011, it was announced that "Universal
Universal Studios
Universal Pictures , a subsidiary of NBCUniversal, is one of the six major movie studios....
refused to greenlight the project due to del Toro's insistence that it be released with an R rating rather than a PG-13." According to Salon.com
Salon.com
Salon.com, part of Salon Media Group , often just called Salon, is an online liberal magazine, with content updated each weekday. Salon was founded by David Talbot and launched on November 20, 1995. It was the internet's first online-only commercial publication. The magazine focuses on U.S...
, "Universal wants to hold onto the project in the event that it changes its mind and decides to make it later, either as an R or PG-13 movie. But del Toro is already trying to set up Mountains at another studio (possibly 20th Century Fox
20th Century Fox
Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation — also known as 20th Century Fox, or simply 20th or Fox — is one of the six major American film studios...
, which released Cameron's Titanic
Titanic (1997 film)
Titanic is a 1997 American epic romance and disaster film directed, written, co-produced, and co-edited by James Cameron. A fictionalized account of the sinking of the RMS Titanic, it stars Leonardo DiCaprio as Jack Dawson, Kate Winslet as Rose DeWitt Bukater and Billy Zane as Rose's fiancé, Cal...
and Avatar).
Hive
In May 2005, Elder Signs PressElder Signs Press
Elder Signs Press, Inc is a Michigan-based book publisher distributed through the Independent Publishers Group. It specializes in horror, science fiction, and fantasy titles.-History:...
published Hive, by Tim Curran. In the story, set in the present, the Plateau of Leng has crumbled under the ice and snow due to geological changes, the Shoggoths are non-existent (with Dyer's accounts of them overthrowing the Elder Things having been chalked up to stress and madness), and the Elder Things, both living and ethereal, still exist under the Antarctic ice. The plot deals with a group of American explorers unearthing an Elder Thing tomb and citadel. A parallel plot also deals with an expedition using an experimental submersible to breach Lake Vostok
Lake Vostok
Lake Vostok is the largest of more than 140 subglacial lakes found under the surface of Antarctica. The overlying ice provides a continuous paleoclimatic record of 400,000 years, although the lake water itself may have been isolated for 15 to 25 million years. The lake is named after the...
, which is named as the location of the underwater city to which the Elder Things fled.
Beyond the Mountains of Madness
Chaosium games released a campaign book titled Beyond the Mountains of Madness for their Call of Cthulhu rpg systemRole-playing game
A role-playing game is a game in which players assume the roles of characters in a fictional setting. Players take responsibility for acting out these roles within a narrative, either through literal acting, or through a process of structured decision-making or character development...
in 1999. This book details the Starkweather-Moore expedition return to the ice to discover the truth about the Miskatonic Expedition. The book incorporates many of the aspects of the original Lovecraft story, including references to the Poe story, The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket
The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket
The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket is the only complete novel written by American writer Edgar Allan Poe. The work relates the tale of the young Arthur Gordon Pym, who stows away aboard a whaling ship called the Grampus...
, Nicholas Roerich
Nicholas Roerich
Nicholas Roerich, also known as Nikolai Konstantinovich Rerikh , was a Russian mystic, painter, philosopher, scientist, writer, traveler, and public figure. A prolific artist, he created thousands of paintings and about 30 literary works...
, Danforth and Dyer.
A Colder War
A Colder WarA Colder War
"A Colder War" is an English-language, alternate history novelette by Charles Stross written circa 1997.The story fuses the Cold War and the Cthulhu Mythos by exploring the consequences of a follow-up to the expedition in H. P. Lovecraft's At the Mountains of Madness...
is a loose sequel to At the Mountains of Madness, by Charles Stross
Charles Stross
Charles David George "Charlie" Stross is a British writer of science fiction, Lovecraftian horror and fantasy. He was born in Leeds.Stross specialises in hard science fiction and space opera...
, where the secrets from beyond the Mountains of Madness are used by the superpowers of the cold war to dreadful effect.
See also
- Ancient astronautsAncient astronautsSome writers have proposed that intelligent extraterrestrial beings have visited Earth in antiquity or prehistory and made contact with humans. Such visitors are called ancient astronauts or ancient aliens. Proponents suggest that this contact influenced the development of human cultures,...
- Elder Things
- The MoundThe Mound (short story)"The Mound" is a novella H. P. Lovecraft wrote as a ghostwriter from December 1929 to January 1930 after he was hired by Zealia Bishop to create a story based on the following plot synopsis:...
- The Shadow Out of TimeThe Shadow Out of TimeThe Shadow Out of Time is a novella by Americanhorror fiction writer H. P. Lovecraft. Written between November 1934 and February 1935, it was first published in the June 1936 issue of Astounding Stories.-Plot summary:...
- A Colder WarA Colder War"A Colder War" is an English-language, alternate history novelette by Charles Stross written circa 1997.The story fuses the Cold War and the Cthulhu Mythos by exploring the consequences of a follow-up to the expedition in H. P. Lovecraft's At the Mountains of Madness...
External links
- At The Mountains of Madness, H.P. Lovecraft; complete text
- At The Mountains of Madness, H.P. Lovecraft; HTML text indexed by chapter
- Review of the Astounding Stories edition with front cover and illustrations. Retrieved on 2010-03-08.
- The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym, Edgar Allan Poe; complete text
- At the Earth's Core, Edgar Rice Burroughs; complete text from litrix.com
- "The People of the Pit", A. Merritt; complete text from Horrormasters (pdf)
- At The Mountains of Madness Narrated by Richard Coyle for BBC Radio.