Lovecraft’s Uniqueness. That is what we want to explore in this essay, “What makes Lovecraft’s fiction trail-blazing?” Or specifically, while Lovecraft was a materialist and atheist, “What literary steps did he take to rekindle a myth-hunger in modern humanity?”
In this discussion, we will address the following questions: How did H.P. Lovecraft view man’s emerging relationship to machines? What lessons can humanity take from the Earth first proto-men, the Elder Things? How do those concepts apply to humanity’s relations with today’s shoggoths: Artificial Intelligence? What will sentient A.I. attitudes be towards its organic creators? How are society’s overlords preparing the populace for future A.I. rule? Will evolution ensure a future humanity that is superior to A.I.?
In this essay, I would first like briefly to touch on how Lovecraft and Tolkien’s rigorous adherence to their literary sensibilities shaped later cultural expressions of myth and the macabre. Second, I would like to sample evidence of whether Lovecraft influenced elements of Tolkien’s grand tales.
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.
The Lovecraft eZine 