Shadows Out of Time

Introduction

I hope the title of this book is not misleading. If you are expecting an entire volume of spinoffs from Lovecraft’s The Shadow Out of Time, complete with consciousness-swapping across the aeons, cone-shaped scholarly beings compiling their archives while dinosaurs roam outside their cities and some nameless doom threatens them from below, this isn’t it. I did indeed include a few stories of that sort, as such titles as Robert Guffey’s “Toward a General Theory of Yithian Psychology” and Robert M. Price’s “Crom-Ya’s Triumph” imply. (Crom-Ya, as aficionados will recall, was a Cimmerian chieftain that Lovecraft’s protagonist met when imprisoned in one of those alien bodies during his sojourn in the past.)

But the focus of this book is a lot broader. In his 1933 essay “Notes on Writing Weird Fiction,” Lovecraft wrote:

The reason why time plays a great part in so many of my tales is that this element looms up in my mind as the most profoundly dramatic and terrible thing in the universe. Conflict with time seems to me the most potent and fruitful theme in all human expression.

Italics are his, by the way. Contributors were given that quote and told, “Go. Great Race of Yith optional.” This book is the result.

Most Lovecraftian fiction, by Lovecraft and his numerous successors, could actually be titled “The Shadow Out of Time.” Surely the commonest theme in supernatural fiction— describing, for example, the entire corpus of M.R. James — is that of some menacing force that lingers longer than it should, in the grave or elsewhere, which reaches out to touch the present. Dracula is a shadow out of time as much as any Yithian, or any Jamesian lich, or any dinosaur awakened by atomic testing in a 1950s monster movie. Ancient things that lurk and wait.

Lovecraft’s whole philosophical and aesthetic outlook emphasized the precarious nature of humanity, that our existence is but a transitory incident of no great consequence in the universe at large, a universe which remains forever out of reach. Today, as space telescopes reveal the presence of thousands of planets (and by implication, billions) revolving forever out of reach in our own galaxy alone, and the existence of billions of galaxies, Lovecraft’s work resonates more than ever. Somewhere in his letters he remarked that if the Earth ceased to be, “Arcturus would twinkle as before.” In “Notes on Writing Weird Fiction” he also remarked on his “persistent wish” to achieve “the illusion of some strange suspension or violation of the galling limitations of time, space, and natural law which frustrate our curiosity about the infinite cosmic spaces beyond the radius of our sight and analysis.”

I write this as the Webb Space Telescope has just been launched. Given his lifelong fascination with astronomy, Lovecraft would no doubt have been thrilled, as the radius of our sight and analysis have increased exponentially, first with the Hubble telescope, and now this, but it would not have relieved him of that crushing sense of cosmic insignificance. We can see so very much. We may be able to see far back into time, near to the creation of the universe. But we still can’t go there. In the event of our extinction, Arcturus will indeed go on twinkling.

The theme of conflict with, or transcendence over, time does not always evoke fear in Lovecraft. It usually does, because he was a horror writer, and that’s what he did, but “The Silver Key” is a time story, in which the hero seeks to escape back in time to the pleasant refuge of his childhood. Rod Serling wrote several Twilight Zone episodes like that, most notably “A Stop at Willoughby.” A conflict with time can be one of yearning, and the emotion we feel is sorrow over the loss of that which can never be retrieved…unless, by fantastic means, it is.

On a much more sinister note, there is “The Case of Charles Dexter Ward,” which is the most traditionally gothic of Lovecraft’s major fictions, and which has something in common with all those M.R. James stories about things from out of the tomb which ought to be dead but aren’t. Here a sorcerer, killed by a mob in the late 18th century, has laid a trap in time designed to be sprung on a descendant, which allows for his resurrection in the 1920s. Joseph Curwen (the bad guy) and his colleagues have indeed triumphed over time and are able to resume their cosmically sinister labors, at least until they come to a fortuitous end.

And then, of course, there are the Lovecraft stories which are, or border on, science fiction, which address the cosmos of space-time directly. Cthulhu, Yog-Sothoth, and their compatriots are all revenants out of time. They transcend the “natural laws” which imprison mankind. At the Mountains of Madness could indeed have been entitled The Shadow Out of Time if Lovecraft had seen fit to do so, because it is about that which lingers for millions of years in ancient ruins in Antarctica, survivals from a whole different cycle of life and civilization on the planet. Most transcendent of all of course is The Shadow Out of Time (the actual novella of that title), with its Great Race of body-swapping aliens who have conquered both space and time and range up and down the millennia, collecting the minds of humans and other beings, to learn what they know and induce them to write down histories of their own times. The hero, an economics professor from Arkham, blacks out in the middle of a class one day and spends five years inside the body of one of the Great Race of Yith, where he meets fellow captives ranging from the Cimmerian Crom-Ya to post-human entities. What he learns about the final fate of mankind is too shocking to put down.

That’s a lot of territory to cover. That’s what this book is about. That is why it is not necessary for writers to pastiche or imitate Lovecraft, but merely to expand on his themes, which go on forever.

Darrell Schweitzer

Dec 20, 2021

SHADOWS OUT OF TIME