Digital Fiction and its Awesome Potential for H.P. Lovecraft

Penguin Books, the publishing company well known for mass market literature, is currently posting works by contemporary authors for the next six weeks utilizing experimental methods to relay their fiction. Their "We Tell Stories" series already has a sci-fi tale by author Charles Cumming, using Google maps to visually convey San Francisco locales appropriate for the original text. This is an imperfect, though tantalizing experiment in the growing realm of digital fiction. As today's Entropist entry on the "io9 Blog" observes, this new methodology using blogs and Google maps holds fascinating potential for science fiction.

Naturally, the same holds true for other forms of fiction, and the weird should be no exception. H.P. Lovecraft, who steeped many of his stories deep in the rich history of New England, would be an excellent case for testing Google maps on his stories. Imagine zooming across New York quarters mentioned in the story "He," or reasonable New England facsimiles of Innsmouth and Arkham, and you begin to get the idea. It's true that modernity might banish part of the illusion, but a good number of historical sites mentioned by Lovecraft are still preserved, unadulterated. Moreover, who can say what the future holds for this technology and parallel developments? It may well be possible in, say, a decade or two, to modify Google's satellite photography to reasonable equivalents of various historical periods. Following Lovecraft's sights in New York, Providence, or Vermont in all their early twentieth century glory would be an incredible development. And Lovecraft may not be the only one, if the technology should lean in this direction. Following Arthur Machen's settings for his weird tales across London and Wales would be equally grand. Or in a modern case, the derelict chasms of many American cities would be ample accompaniments to the environments of gloriously icy bleakness described in Thomas Ligotti's stories.

As an aside, it shouldn't be difficult to apply Google maps to H.P. Lovecraft in one regard right now: his biographical sites of interest in Providence and elsewhere. Cataloging Swan Point Cemetery, his handful of residences, favorite parks and historical haunts, and locations of (regrettably) absent structures featured in his fiction (like the real church based on the fictional Church of Starry Wisdom, which was dismantled in the early 1990s) is very possible. In fact, it's almost surprising no one has yet compiled these bits of Lovecraftiana into a Google Earth overlay, though the time for it is imminent.

-Grim Blogger