Subject: (urth) AEG: Is AEG Lovecraftian?

From: Kieran Mullen <kieran at nhn.ou.edu>
Date: Mon, 03 Nov 2008 17:59:38 +0000

(I have sent this in several times and I never saw it on the list or  
on the webserver.   I am resending it.  I apologize if it appears more  
than once.)

  A very good friend of mine who has written books on horror films and  
fiction recent finished "An Evil Guest."   It was quite a slog for him  
- he found Cassie to be an unappealing protagonist and the pastiche of  
genres annoyed him.   However, his biggest complaint was that the book  
is billed as Lovecraftian horror and it simply isn't.

  That needs a bit of explanation.   For a work to be Lovecraftian I  
don't think it is simply sufficient to stick in Hastur and Cthulu and  
call it that. Lovecraft (IMO) came up with a truly original  
ontological horror premise for his fiction:  the universe is dominated  
by inhuman forces which we don't have a hope of understanding or  
defeating.  At best we can only hope that they ignore us.   (We can't  
even pray that they do - there is no God, only atoms and a void).    
Humanity is a minor irrelevance in a dark and hungry universe.  Any  
attempt to try to change that will only draw the attention of forces  
that will destroy the inquirer.

   AEG dabbles in many pulp genres without really investing in any  
single one:  the rising theatrical star, the hard-boiled detective,  
the South Sea adventure, and (in this view), Lovecraftian horror.   On  
the other hand, it may actually have a more horrifying subtext than I  
understand, if the reality-warping effects of Cassies "elevation" are  
meant to show that reality is not what we know it to be.  I am not  
sure how the last fifty pages of the novel demand a re-interpretation  
of the first parts.   Otherwise, it seems that the Lovecrfaft elements  
at the end are tacked on, and not essential to the earlier parts of  
the novel.

   So what do you think?   Is AEG just  a romp through different  
genres or is it really meant to be a horror novel?

Kieran Mullen

---

From: Dave Tallman <davetallman at msn.com>
Date: Mon, 03 Nov 2008 20:55:31 +0000

> that will destroy the inquirer.
Given that Wolfe is a Christian I doubt very much that he would write a 
work consistent with such a nihilistic Lovecraftian premise. But other 
writers, such as August Derleth (also a Christian), have expanded the 
Lovecraft universe to include a more classical view of good vs. evil. To 
me, true horror cannot exist in a universe where our ideas of sanity and 
goodness are a mere fluke, a cosmic joke. The efforts of the 
protagonists become simply silly.

But I don't think the Lovecraft parts are simply tacked on. From the 
beginning Reis announced his intention to retire to the South Seas (p. 
14). This cannot be a coincidence. Reis may have learned something 
during his time as ambassador to Woldercan. He may have realized there 
was a connected menace on Earth and determined to fight it. To some 
degree his provoking a fight between Squiddy and the Navy seems to have 
been a success. At the very least the storms took out many Cthulhu 
worshipers on the neighboring islands.

Even Lovecraft allowed the forces of good to succeed sometimes, for 
example in "The Dunwich Horror." Even he could not help rooting for 
humanity against the monsters.

---

From: Adam Thornton <adam at io.com>
Date: Mon, 03 Nov 2008 21:11:15 +0000

> humanity against the monsters.

One can make the argument that "The Dunwich Horror" is like that  
precisely *because* it is a Machen pastiche, and Arthur Machen was a  
Christian who did not share the Lovecraftian view of the world.  That,  
indeed, is exactly Ken Hite's argument.

Adam
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: smime.p7s
Type: application/pkcs7-signature
Size: 4988 bytes
Desc: not available
URL: <http://lists.urth.net/pipermail/urth-urth.net/attachments/20081103/bbc705cc/attachment.bin>

---

From: Bryan Alexander <bryan.alexander at gmail.com>
Date: Mon, 03 Nov 2008 22:10:48 +0000

I admit to bringing a Lovecraftian perspective to my reading of AEG.  That
was due in part to various things I'd heard about the novel, which were then
brought to mind with the HPL inscription.  So I suspected far more cosmic
horror from various quarters, including the flapping creature, than I ended
up with.
My Phil Dick-style expectations were confirmed instead.

On Mon, Nov 3, 2008 at 3:55 PM, Dave Tallman <davetallman at msn.com> wrote:

> Kieran Mullen wrote:
>
>>  That needs a bit of explanation.   For a work to be Lovecraftian I  don't
>> think it is simply sufficient to stick in Hastur and Cthulu and  call it
>> that. Lovecraft (IMO) came up with a truly original  ontological horror
>> premise for his fiction:  the universe is dominated  by inhuman forces which
>> we don't have a hope of understanding or  defeating.  At best we can only
>> hope that they ignore us.   (We can't  even pray that they do - there is no
>> God, only atoms and a void).    Humanity is a minor irrelevance in a dark
>> and hungry universe.  Any  attempt to try to change that will only draw the
>> attention of forces  that will destroy the inquirer.
>>
>>
> Lovecraft universe to include a more classical view of good vs. evil. To me,
> true horror cannot exist in a universe where our ideas of sanity and
> goodness are a mere fluke, a cosmic joke. The efforts of the protagonists
> become simply silly.
>
> beginning Reis announced his intention to retire to the South Seas (p. 14).
> This cannot be a coincidence. Reis may have learned something during his
> time as ambassador to Woldercan. He may have realized there was a connected
> menace on Earth and determined to fight it. To some degree his provoking a
> fight between Squiddy and the Navy seems to have been a success. At the very
> least the storms took out many Cthulhu worshipers on the neighboring
> islands.
>
> Even Lovecraft allowed the forces of good to succeed sometimes, for example
> in "The Dunwich Horror." Even he could not help rooting for humanity against
> the monsters.
>
> _______________________________________________
> Urth Mailing List
> To post, write urth at urth.net
> Subscription/information: http://www.urth.net
>

-- 
Bryan Alexander
http://infocult.typepad.com/
http://twitter.com/BryanAlexander
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.urth.net/pipermail/urth-urth.net/attachments/20081103/cdec52ad/attachment.htm>

---

From: Nigel Price <nigelaprice at talktalk.net>
Date: Tue, 04 Nov 2008 00:04:01 +0000

Kieran Mullen asks...

>>So what do you think?   Is AEG just  a romp
>>through different genres or is it really meant
>>to be a horror novel?

No, I don't think that AEG is a Lovecraftian horror story in the sense that
you define. As far as I understand - which is not very far at all - it
borrows some Lovecraftian elements, but does not share their underlying
philosophy, their "ontological horror premise" (great phrase!).

I've read back through all the posts here on AEG and I've reread bits of the
story but I still don't really understand how all the parts of the book fit
together. I'm trying to work it out. The nature of Gideon Chase seems to be
key. That in turn, because Gideon was born there and is probably a
human-Woldercanese hybrid, is tied up with the moral status of the planet
Woldercan.

Wolfe depicts Woldercan as a place which has talking fish, dangerous
forests, alchemy and different physics. The inhabitants superficially
resemble humans but are subtly different. They can breed successfully with
lower animals, including humans, and male Woldercaners try to seduce and
mate with human females. All in all, Woldercan sounds more like Fairyland
than a conventional science fiction alien planet. If it is a sort of SF
Fairyland, that would make the Wolders fairies, or fairy analogues anyway.

The moral status of fairies and Fairyland is moot in the European tradition.
Sometimes they are morally equivalent to humans, with the "good" and "bad"
fairies familiar in children's stories. Often, though, they are depicted as
being amoral and "other", outside human schemes of morality and, when their
stories get merged with the Christian tradition, outside the divine scheme
of salvation.

Yet another tradition, evident in stories like that of Tam Lin and some
versions of Thomas the Rhymer, has Fairyland as a subsidiary dominion of
Hell to which it pays tax (usually every seven years) in the form of human
souls. Fairies in this tradition become similar to devils or demons.

In the opening chapter of AEG, Gideon tells the President that there is no
such thing as good and evil. His position seems to be that there is no such
thing as absolute good or evil, only things that we ourselves disapprove of.
If he means that no person is ever wholly good or wholly evil, he must
surely be right. If he means that good and evil do not themselves exist,
then, from Wolfe's perspective as a Christian, he must surely be wrong. He
seems to mean both, which is confusing!

Gideon's perspective is either that of an amoral alien, analogous to the
amoral fairies I described above, with no human sense of good or evil, or he
himself is evil and is deceiving others with his untruths, which makes him
more of the "demonic" type of alien/fairy.

Wolfe has stated in interviews that his starting point for AEG was the idea
of a detective who was a wizard. Gideon is a wizard, and certainly the
archetypal wizard, Merlin, is half-human and half-devil in some accounts of
his parentage.

By this account, Gideon is at best amoral and at worst positively evil.

At the start of AEG, the President of the United States attempts to recruit
Gideon to work with the FBI in catching Bill Reis. In many stories,
certainly in the 1930s pulp stories which Wolfe is pastiching, this would
make Gideon the good guy, an untouchable science fictional Eliot Ness. But
there's a strong element of satire in AEG. The USA over which the President
presides is a place where abortion has become legalised child murder, and
where the various federal agencies fight an endless turf war against each
other, possibly under the manipulative influence of demonic submarine
aliens. The moral status of the President in this story is pretty cloudy,
especially as we later come to see that Bill Reis himself may be far from
being the evildoer the President claims. As the President's agent, Gideon's
moral status is equally suspect.

That's at the start of the story. Does Gideon change?

I'm not clear in my own mind whether Bill Reis starts off bad but is changed
by the transforming power of his love for Cassie, or whether he was always
good and it just takes Cassie and the reader a long time to find the correct
moral orientation within the confusing landscapes of AEG. I think that
there's at least an element of the former because Bill Reis learned his
alchemy and other tricks on the morally dubious Woldercan.

Either way, Gideon's transforms Cassie into a star (her name, after all, is
that of an astronomical star) and its her loveliness which captures both
Gideon and Bill Reis' hearts. Somehow, this love helps to orientate all
three of them. Cassie chooses to marry Bill and Gideon goes to work for him,
although he doesn't seem to break his agreement with the President so much
as suspend it.

That seems to be one half of the story. Bill is inspired to self-sacrifice,
Cassie loves the Christ-like Bill and Gideon is working, at least for the
moment, for the good guys. Gideon may have transformed Cassie into a star in
order to trap Reis, but the her power of beauty has transformed all three of
them for the better.

But the other half of the story seems to involve putting the bad guys into a
properly inverted hierarchy of wickedness.

Cassie's story of how she came to love the neighbour's dog is instructive in
this context. Scared of the neighbour's dog but even more scared of her
violently abusive father, she finds herself sheltering with the animal and
accepting its protection. Her clear perception of the greater source of
danger enables her to accept the dog just as she later accepts the help of
the bat creatures which would otherwise have terrified her in order to
escape the agents of the evil Storm God.

The US Navy act as agents of the bad American President and pursue Bill Reis
for his gold. Reis uses that gold, however, to direct them against the Squid
God. If the US President, his navy and other agencies are not made virtuous
as such, they are at least properly directed against the greater evil of the
malevolent underwater alien.

I still don't fully understand the ending. Why does Gideon return to
Woldercan? Because it is his true home? Perhaps it's because the spell of
Cassie's star quality has been broken and without it he has fallen from
virtue back to his old immoral/amoral ways. I don't know what Cassie is
looking for.

As an allegory, AEG is confusing. But I don't think it is an allegory any
more than it's Lovecraftian horror. It uses allegory, or has an allegorical
dimension, but there's a lot more going on and the correspondences between
characters and qualities seem to be dynamic rather than static.

Nigel

---

From: Dan <autarch at cox.net>
Date: Tue, 04 Nov 2008 03:21:38 +0000

At 07:08 PM 11/3/2008, you wrote:

>Message: 5
>Date: Tue, 4 Nov 2008 00:04:01 -0000
>From: "Nigel Price" <nigelaprice at talktalk.net>
>Subject: (urth) AEG: Is AEG Lovecraftian?
>To: "Urth List" <urth at lists.urth.net>
>Message-ID: <AFEFKBJKJDDJOMBNACBNCEENDNAA.nigelaprice at talktalk.net>
>Content-Type: text/plain;       charset="iso-8859-1"
>
>Kieran Mullen asks...
>

I would agree. The flaps/panels really try to sell this as one and it 
disappointingly is not. Better to have not mentioned HPL tidbits at all
and left them as a pleasant surprise for the reader.

>Gideon to work with the FBI in catching Bill Reis.

If you reread, they want to do this to learn of his stealth technique. 
Regardless, they want to kill him.

>  In many stories,

No. He learns of Reis' technique and orchestrates his death despite being 
employed by him. Despite his declarations of love etc for Cassie, he does 
nothing to rescue her at the end, contact her (his ethermail was in 
response to her own) to discover her well being or as far as we know pay 
her the 80k he still owes her. The end implies she met with him but it is 
apparent he does little or nothing to help her bring back Bill.

>alchemy and other tricks on the morally dubious Woldercan.

Reis told her he planned to destroy her until she rode with him in his 
limo. He also says he doesn't
normally kill his enemies, but win them over to his side if useful, or 
defang them if not. I'm not sure if
this means Cassie is a powerful enemy that requires killing, or a lesser 
one that is of no use to him.

>Woldercan? Because it is his true home?

I think it is because he successfully fulfilled his contract with the 
President and uncovered
Reis' technique and eliminated him as they discussed at the beginning. 
Either this is the reward
he truly wanted, or he needs the ambassadorship to learn Reis' technique in 
order to provide this
informatin to the President.

>Perhaps it's because the spell of

Interestingly, Chase states to himself at one point he would still love her 
if he unmade her. Like all good pulp heroines,
Cassie is looking for love.

Dan

---

From: Matthew Keeley <matthew.keeley.1 at gmail.com>
Date: Tue, 04 Nov 2008 04:15:43 +0000

> malevolent underwater alien.

Yes, but I'm not sure how much Wolfe can condone this - he spent time
as a soldier, and so I imagine he's pretty sympathetic to the poor
suckers on the boats, who, through no fault of their own, end up in a
battle with an eldritch horror. Surely Reis could have found a better
way to tell the US about the Squid God? One that didn't result in mass
destruction of US forces?

-Matt

---

From: Stanisław Bocian <sbocian at poczta.fm>
Date: Wed, 05 Nov 2008 16:47:59 +0000

Hello!

> Adam

Ken Hite is intelligent and well-read, but superficial. He treats Lovecraft as a
quaint idiot-savant with a literary talent. If you want a good
introdution to Lovecraft, I suggest Michel Houellebecq. He treats
Lovecraft seriously and attempts to understand what he  tried to said,

http://trashotron.com/agony/reviews/2005/houellebecq-lovecraft.htm
http://blog.urbanomic.com/dread/archives/houellebecq-lovecraft.pdf

Lovecraft was a very intelligent man, and his perception of the world
was very clear. Most scientists limit their thinking to their
professional area, and never consider the consequences for everyday
life. Perhaps rightly - the affair of James Watson, who dared to
apply the genetics to human races and intelligence shows that
too much science won't be tolerated.

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/fury-at-dna-pioneers-theory-africans-are-less-intelligent-than-westerners-394898.html

But Lovecraft was uncompromising. He perceived clearly
that the unavoidable result of the acceptation of modern science
(which he valued as a rationalist) will be the destruction of the
civilisation. And for Lovecraft the Western civilisation was clearly
the most valuable thing in the world. The impersonal blind cosmic
forces don't value it, and even cannot understand it - but it is the
result of their own deficiency. The Western Civilisation is good, but
it won't help it to survive in the alien cosmos. It is a beautiful
dream, belonging in the Dreamlands, not in the real world (cf. The
Search of Unknown Kadath).

In Machen, the civilisation is threatened by Evil, supernatural evil
directed by destructive and hostile forces. Those forces are
dangerous, but can be repulsed, although not destroyed. In Lovecraft
there is no evil as such. The civilisation is threatened by
dissolution, from without (primitive Negroes, Polacks and similar aliens
dragging down American cities) and from within (progress of science,
which refutes the basic rules on which the civilisation is built).

His final treatment of that problem is "The Mountains of Madness".
Here the rational civilisation of the Old Ones is destroyed both by
inferior race and by their own science - they are defeated by the
servant race of Shoggoths.

-- 
Best regards,
Stanislaus B.

----------------------------------------------------------------------
Wymysl wierszyk, wygraj cyfrowke!
Sprawdz >>> http://link.interia.pl/f1f5a

---

From: Matthew Keeley <matthew.keeley.1 at gmail.com>
Date: Wed, 05 Nov 2008 17:16:41 +0000

> which refutes the basic rules on which the civilisation is built).

The thing about Lovecraft and race is that his personal life seems to
belie some of his writing. Remember that he married a Ukrainian Jew.
Strange fellow, Lovecraft.

Really good analysis there - it makes me want to go back and read more HPL.

-Matt