Lovecraft, Science, and Epistemic Subcultures

For my first post, I want to build on discussions about literature and science that Hank, Joanna, and Dan had earlier, here and here. H. P. Lovecraft (1890–1937) wrote a series of stories for magazines such as Weird Tales during the 1920s and early 1930s, before science fiction, horror, and fantasy split into distinct genres.  He set his stories in old, decaying East Coast towns, not unlike his home, Providence, RI, and nearby small hamlets that he knew well. He filled his tales with plot devices—like archaic, mysterious texts and secret societies—that remain stock-in-trade for genre writers today. His monsters are enormous and sublime; they leave his characters whimpering with shattered minds. Yet, for all of his silliness and shortcomings, like Dickens, Kafka, and Poe, Lovecraft created an ambiance and tone that is distinctively his own. 

People have long known and written about Lovecraft’s fascination with science.  Beginning in 1914, he began writing astronomical columns for a local Providence newspaper. His understanding of the universe as a vast expanse indifferent to human desires informs his tales in which characters cower before giant and ancient beasts, realizing in these moments their ultimate insignificance in the great scope of things. That is, contemporary science strongly shaped what Lovecraft’s critics refer to as his “cosmic horror.”


Rather than draw attention to Lovecraft’s broad interests in science, I want to focus on one

aspect, namely his participation in amateur journalism and epistolary circles.[1] The hobby of amateur journalism took off in the late 19^th century with the introduction of small, cheap printing presses. Lovecraft eventually became president of the United Amateur Press Association (which was founded in 1890s). He used his own publication, The Conservative, as a soap box for his favorite causes, like decrying the League of Nations and, most infamously, supporting Aryan racial theories.  Lovecraft also took part in a few round robin letter-writing groups. Group members would send a packet of letters and writings from one to the other in a set order. When the packet came back to the first person, he would remove the piece that he put in it last time and replace it with something new. In this way, the group would constantly circulate new ideas and writings. Lovecraft likely circulated his racial theories through this route as well.

Lovecraft was born into a wealthy family in decline. He died in poverty. This economic descent combined with his beliefs about race and other intuitions about society led him to see degeneration everywhere, and these notions found their ways into his stories. For instance, in his story “The Horror of Red Hook,” Lovecraft wrote about a once patrician family that retreated from the world. After generations of inbreeding, they became “dwarfed, deformed hairy devils or apes - monstrous and diabolic caricatures of the monkey tribe.”

I’m not breaking any new ground here. All of this is well known. What interests me is how Lovecraft and others traded these ideas in periodicals of amateur journalism and these round robin epistolary groups.  They were doing more than just circulating pre-existing knowledge vouched for by professional scientists. They were putting forward their own speculations and developing and extending on the ideas of others.

Historians know that early scientists were—and, indeed, prided themselves on being—amateurs. I am more interested in lay circles, like Lovecraft’s, that persist(ed) well after the professionalization of science and technology. Some scholars have already touched on this theme. The historian of technology, Susan Douglas, has noted the importance of amateurs in shaping the initial stages of technical change in objects such as radios. We can also think of Sophia Roosth’s work on garage science. Yet, much remains to be said about the perseverance of amateurism.

Recently, I have been a great deal about two communities that have put forward idiosyncratic ideas about the world. Less Wrong claims to be “a community blog devoted to refining the art of human rationality.”  Eliezer Yudkowsky, a proponent of the singularity, began the blog in 2009 and used it as a space to broadcast his views on, well, just about everything but primarily artificial intelligence, epistemology, and ethics. Yudkowsky and the Less Wrong community often base their speculations on ‘rationality’ on research in cognitive science, behavioral economics, and related disciplines. I’ve also been interested for some time in chemtrail conspiracy theorists, a community that is more decentralized. Chemtrailers believe that contrails, or lines of condensed water left in an aircraft’s wake, are in fact, um, chemtrails, chemicals sprayed into the atmosphere by the government or some other malignant group. Chemtrail theorists have carried out their own experiments to verify their intuitions. And they have become the scourge of those proposing research on geoengineering (like these people haunting a meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science [beginning @ 1:50]).

Thinking about these communities reminded me of Lovecraft’s earlier interactions. In some ways, amateur journalism and epistolary circles of Lovecraft’s day were not unlike the blogs and webpages that Less Wrong and the chemtrailers use. (Yes, I know the dangers of cross-temporal and cross-technological comparisons.) Still, I think there is much to explore about how such groups produce and distribute their knowledge against the background of an epistemic status quo. If scientists have their journals—as Alex Csiszar has been exploring—the laity have their amateur journalism and their blogs. And such spaces give historians of science and technology and STS scholars a chance to examine and probe the practices of epistemic subcultures.

[1] Hippocampus Press has published five volumes of Lovecraft’s Collected Essays, including one dedicated to his work in amateur journalism and one on his science writings.