I've been re-reading lately a story that I first encountered some time late in 1947, when I was twelve years old, in Donald A. Wollheim's marvelous anthology Portable Novels of Science: H.P. Lovecraft's novella “The Shadow out of Time.” As I've said elsewhere more than once, reading that story changed my life. I've come upon it now in an interesting new edition and want to talk about it again.

The Wollheim book contained four short SF novels: H.G. Wells’ “The First Men in the Moon,” John Taine's “Before the Dawn,” Olaf Stapledon's “Odd John,” and the Lovecraft story. Each, in its way, contributed to the shaping of the imagination of the not quite adolescent young man who was going to grow up to write hundreds of science fiction and fantasy stories of his own. The Stapledon spoke directly and poignantly to me of my own circumstances as a bright and somewhat peculiar little boy stranded among normal folk; the Wells opened vistas of travel through space for me; the Taine delighted me for its vivid recreation of the Mesozoic era, which I, dinosaur-obsessed like most kids my age, desperately wanted to know and experience somehow at first hand. But it was the Lovecraft, I think, that had the most powerful impact on my developing vision of my own intentions as a creator of science fiction. It had a visionary quality that stirred me mightily; I yearned to write something like that myself, but, lacking the skill to do so when I was twelve, I had to be satisfied with writing clumsy little imitations of it. But I have devoted much effort in the many decades since to creating stories that approached the sweep and grandeur of Lovecraft's.

Note that I refer to “Shadow Out of Time” as science fiction (and that Wollheim included it in a collection explicitly called Novels of Science) even though Lovecraft is conventionally considered to be a writer of horror stories. So he was, yes; but most of his best stories, horrific though they were, were in fact generated out of the same willingness to speculate on matters of space and time that powered the work of Robert A. Heinlein and Isaac Asimov and Arthur C. Clarke. The great difference is that for Heinlein and Asimov and Clarke, science is exciting and marvelous, and for Lovecraft it is a source of terror. But a story that is driven by dread of science rather than by love and admiration for it is no less science fiction even so, if it makes use of the kind of theme (space travel, time travel, technological change) that we universally recognize as the material of SF.

And that is what much of Lovecraft's fiction does. The loathsome Elder Gods of the Cthulhu mythos are nothing other than aliens from other dimensions who have invaded Earth: this is, I submit, a classic SF theme. Such other significant Lovecraft tales as “The Rats in the Walls” and “The Colour out of Space” can be demonstrated to be science fiction as well. He was not particularly interested in that area of science fiction that concerned the impact of technology on human life (Huxley's Brave New World, Wells’ Food of the Gods, etc.), or in writing sociopolitical satire of the Orwell kind, or in inventing ingenious gadgets; his concern, rather, was science as a source of scary visions. What terrible secrets lie buried in the distant irrecoverable past? What dreadful transformations will the far future bring? That he saw the secrets as terrible and the transformations as dreadful is what sets him apart at the horror end of the science fiction spectrum, as far from Heinlein and Asimov and Clarke as it is possible to be.

It is interesting to consider that although most of Lovecraft's previous fiction had made its first appearance in print in that pioneering horror/fantasy magazine, Weird Tales, “The Shadow Out of Time” quite appropriately was published first in the June, 1936 issue Astounding Stories, which was then the dominant science fiction magazine of its era, the preferred venue for such solidly science fictional figures as John W. Campbell, Jr., Jack Williamson, and E.E. Smith, Ph.D.

I should point out, though, that it seems as though Astounding's editor, F. Orlin Tremaine, was uneasy about exposing his readers, accustomed as they were to the brisk basic-level functional prose of conventional pulp-magazine fiction, to Lovecraft's more elegant style. Tremaine subjected “The Shadow Out of Time” to severe editing in an attempt to homogenize it into his magazine's familiar mode, mainly by ruthlessly slicing Lovecraft's lengthy and carefully balanced paragraphs into two, three, or even four sections, but also tinkering with his punctuation and removing some of his beloved archaisms of vocabulary. The version of the story that has been reprinted again and again all these years is the Tre-mainified one; but now a new edition has appeared that's based on the original “Shadow” manuscript in Lovecraft's handwriting that unexpectedly turned up in 1995. This new edition—edited by S.T. Joshi and David E. Schultz, published as a handsome trade paperback in 2003 by Hippocampus Press, and bedecked with the deliciously gaudy painting, bug-eyed monsters and all, that bedecked the original 1936 Astounding appearance—is actually the first publication of the text as Lovecraft conceived it. Hippocampus Press is, I gather, a very small operation, but I found a copy of the book easily enough through Amazon.com, and so should you.

Despite Tremaine's revisions, a few of Astounding's readers still found Lovecraftian prose too much for their 1936 sensibilities. Reaction to the story was generally favorable, as we can see from the reader letters published in the August 1936 issue ("Absolutely magnificent!” said Cameron Lewis of New York. “I am at a loss for words.... This makes Lovecraft practically supreme, in my opinion.") But O.M. Davidson of Louisiana found Lovecraft “too tedious, too monotonous to suit me,” even though he admitted that the imagery of the story “would linger with me for a long time.” And Charles Pizzano of Dedham, Massachusetts, called it “all description and little else."

Of course I had no idea that Tremaine had meddled with Lovecraft's style when I encountered it back there in 1947 (which I now realize was just eleven years after its first publication, though at the time it seemed an ancient tale to me). Nor, indeed, were his meddlings a serious impairment of Lovecraft's intentions, though we can see now that this newly rediscovered text is notably more powerful than the streamlined Tremaine version. Perhaps the use of shorter paragraphs actually made things easier for my pre-adolescent self. In any case I found, in 1947, a host of wondrous things in “The Shadow Out of Time."

The key passage, for me, lay in the fourth chapter, in which Lovecraft conjured up an unforgettable vision of giant alien beings moving about in a weird library full of “horrible annals of other worlds and other universes, and of stirrings of formless life outside all universes. There were records of strange orders of beings which had peopled the world in forgotten pasts, and frightful chronicles of grotesque-bodied intelligences which would people it millions of years after the death of the last human being."

I wanted passionately to explore that library myself. I knew I could not: I would know no more of the furry prehuman Hyperborean worshippers of Tsathoggua and the wholly abominable Tcho-Tchos than Lovecraft chose to tell me, nor would I talk with the mind of Yiang-Li, the philosopher from the cruel empire of Tsan-Chan, which is to come in AD 5000, nor with the mind of the king of Lomar who ruled that terrible polar land one hundred thousand years before the squat, yellow Inutos came from the west to engulf it. But I read that page of Lovecraft ten thousand times—it is page 429 of the Wollheim anthology, page 56 of the new edition—and even now, scanning it this morning, it stirs in me the quixotic hunger to find and absorb all the science fiction in the world, every word of it, so that I might begin to know these mysteries of the lost imaginary kingdoms of time past and time future.

The extraordinary thing that Lovecraft provides in “Shadow” is a sense of a turbulent alternative history of Earth—not the steady procession up from the trilobite through amphibians and reptiles to primitive mammals that I had mastered by the time I was in the fourth grade, but a wild zigzag of pre-human species and alien races living here a billion years before our time, beings that have left not the slightest trace in the fossil record, but which I wanted with all my heart to believe in.

And it is the ultimate archaeological fantasy, too, for Lovecraft's protagonist takes us right down into the ruined city, which in his story, at least, is astonishingly still extant in remotest Australia, of the greatest of these ancient races. It is here that Lovecraft's bias toward science-as-horror emerges, for the narrator, unlike any archaeologist I've ever heard of, is scared stiff as he approaches his goal. He has visited it in dreams, and now, entering the real thing, “Ideas and images of the starkest terror began to throng in upon me and cloud my senses.” He finds that he knows the ruined city “morbidly, horribly well” from his dreams. The whole experience is, he says, “brain-shattering.” His sanity wobbles. He frets about “tides of abomination surging up through the cleft itself from depths unimagined and unimaginable.” He speaks of the “accursed city” and its builders as “shambling horrors” that have a “terrible, soul-shattering actuality,” and so on, all a little overwrought, as one expects from Lovecraft.

Well, I'd be scared silly too if I had found myself telepathically kidnapped and hauled off into a civilization of 150 million years ago, as Lovecraft's man was. But once I got back, and realized that I'd survived it all, I'd regard it as fascinating and wonderful, and not in any way a cause for monstrous, eldritch, loathsome, hideous, frightfully adjectival Lovecraftian terror, if I were to stumble on the actual archives of that lost civilization.

But if “Shadow” is overwrought, it is gloriously overwrought. Even if what he's really trying to do is scare us, he creates an awareness—while one reads it, at least—that history did not begin in Sumer or in the Pithecanthropine caves, but that the world was already incalculably ancient when man evolved, and had been populated and repopulated again and again by intelligent races, long before the first mammals, even, had ever evolved. It is wonderful science fiction. I urge you to go out and search for it. In it, after all, Lovecraft makes us witness to the excavation of an archive 150 million years old, the greatest of all archaeological finds. On that sort of time-span, Tut-ankh-amen's tomb was built just a fraction of a second ago. Would that it all were true, I thought, back then when I was twelve. And again, re-reading this stunning tale today: would that it were true.

Copyright (c) 2005 Robert Silverberg