Decades before “Forbidden Planet’”s theatrical run, Howard Phillips Lovecraft broke new imaginative grounds in “At the Mountains of Madness” (1931). Set in Antarctica, remote as the surface of the Moon in HPL’s day, he rewrote the deep history of the Earth in terms that disturbed our already crumbling anthropomorphic view of our prominence in the universe. There, he traced the irrational history of the primal world, often shrouded in religious myths and shamanic legends, in rational terms.