![]() ![]() Nature holds different terrors for us: climate change, chemical pollution, GMOs. From medicine’s recognition of the importance of microbiota to our health, to zoology’s awareness of animals’ capacity for emotion, we inhabit a moment at which the idea of a separation between human beings and the natural world seems quaint. In 2015, we live in a society far more comfortable with the blurring of human-nature binaries than were Lovecraft’s readers in the 1930s. Realizing how much he doesn’t know about the universe, the narrator loses his faith in “external Nature and Nature’s laws” and forever afterward faces “a hideously amplified world of lurking horrors.” Such plotlines are typical of Lovecraft, one of the foremost contributors to the literary tradition known as “The Weird.” Whereas Golden Age science fiction emphasized scientists’ and engineers’ ability to manipulate the laws of a knowable universe, “Weird” stories played up the horror of characters’ (and readers’) encounters with the unfathomable. ![]() Confronted by the strangeness of a nonhuman world, the scientists fall apart as their anthropocentric perspectives are challenged. LOVECRAFT’S classic horror tale At the Mountains of Madness, a group of scientific researchers stumble across the ruins of an alien civilization in Antarctica. ![]()
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