At the Mountains of Madness Read Online Free Page B

ethnically heterogeneous conveyance? The Shoggoth is a mass presence, various, multicolored, refusing to behave.
    The Shoggothian qualities of the ethnically mixed working class are made absolutely overt in Lovecraft’s description of a visit he paid to New York’s Lower East Side. “The organic things inhabiting that awful cesspool could not . . . be call’d human. They were monstrous and nebulous adumbrations of the pithecanthropoid and amoebal . . . slithering and oozing . . . in a fashion suggestive of nothing but infesting worms or deep-sea unnamabilities . . . I thought of some avenue of Cyclopean and unwholesome vats, crammed to the vomiting point with gangrenous vileness, and about to burst and inundate the world.”  20 Out of what but precisely such Cyclopean vats could the Shoggoths be fashioned?
    The Shoggoth is a hysterically hallucinated coagulum of the victorious insurgent masses. It is one of Lovecraft’s most astonishing creations, and is nothing less than the pulp-artistic pinnacle of class terror. Its advent provides a magnificent ending to
At the Mountains of Madness,
in which the evolution of his politics and the expression of his familiar themes are refracted through his literalized radical uncanny into a vivid expression of the alien and the alienated. By taking us to the beginning of prehistory and ends of the earth, Lovecraft lays bare the pathologies and anxieties at the heart of industrial modernity.
     
    C HINA M IéVILLE was born in 1972, and lives and works in London. His novels, which include
Perdido Street Station
and
Iron Council,
have won the Arthur C. Clarke and British Fantasy awards. His nonfiction includes
Between Equal Rights,
a study of international law.
    NOTES
     
1.
S. T. Joshi,
A Dreamer and a Visionary: H. P. Lovecraft in His Time
(Liverpool University Press, 2001), p. 300.
2.
From “Notes on Writing Weird Fiction.”
3.
Letter to Fransworth Wright, July 5, 1927.
4.
José Monleón,
A Specter Is Haunting Europe: A Sociohistorical Approach to the Fantastic
(Princeton University Press, 1990).
5.
John Long,
Mountains of Madness: A Scientist’s Odyssey in Antarctica
(Joseph Henry Press, 2001).
6.
Victoria Nelson,
The Secret Life of Puppets
(Harvard University Press, 2001), p. 152.
7.
Joshi, p. 360.
8.
Joshi, p. 55.
9.
Joshi, p. 222.
10.
Leon Trotsky, “Céline and Poincaré: Novelist and Politician,” 1933.
11.
Michel Houellebecq,
H. P. Lovecraft: Against the World, Against Life
(with thanks to Robin Mackay for the translation).
12.
Joshi, p. 346.
13.
Letter to Clark Ashton Smith, September 30, 1934.
14.
Ibid.
15.
From “Some Repetitions on the Times,” 1933.
16.
Ibid.
17.
Letter to Clark Ashton Smith, October 28, 1934.
18.
Ibid.
19.
Ibid.
20.
Letter to Frank Belknap Long, May 21, 1924.

A T THE
M OUNTAINS OF
M ADNESS

I
    I am forced into speech because men of science have refused to follow my advice without knowing why. It is altogether against my will that I tell my reasons for opposing this contemplated invasion of the antarctic—with its vast fossil-hunt and its wholesale boring and melting of the ancient ice-cap—and I am the more reluctant because my warning may be in vain. Doubt of the real facts, as I must reveal them, is inevitable; yet if I suppressed what will seem extravagant and incredible there would be nothing left. The hitherto withheld photographs, both ordinary and aërial, will count in my favour; for they are damnably vivid and graphic. Still, they will be doubted because of the great lengths to which clever fakery can be carried. The ink drawings, of course, will be jeered at as obvious impostures; notwithstanding a strangeness of technique which art experts ought to remark and puzzle over.
    In the end I must rely on the judgment and standing of the few scientific leaders who have, on the one hand, sufficient independence of thought to weigh my data on its own hideously convincing merits or in the light of certain primordial and highly baffling