HP Lovecraft: Prophet of the Nuclear Age?

With the most recent and tragic nuclear accident in Japan, many look on with fearful anxiety at the effects of radiation. Weird fiction readers may naturally turn over their libraries for a strange and timely overlap between real world events and literary horror. In such a quest, H.P. Lovecraft's tale, "The Colour Out of Space" is the holy grail. Scholars have noted since the advent of nuclear terror that Lovecraft's "blasted heath" holds an uncanny resemblance to nuclear fallout.

Having died in 1937, nearly a decade before the atom bomb, his story couldn't have actively drawn in radioactive anxieties that lay years in the future. That, however, doesn't mean poison from strange elements couldn't have had any hand at all in Lovecraft's thinking. He was widely known as a strict materialist, and eagerly devoured the scientific developments of his day. By the 1920s and especially the 1930s, the effects of radiation first began to come into scientific light. Marie Curie had already performed her pioneering experiments with radioactive elements earlier in the century.

Lovecraft also lived during an age of "radioactive quackery" in America. Highly dangerous technologies, from radium baths to x-rays for shoe fitting, were all in vogue with medical professionals as a way to promote health. Bob McCoy's book, Quack!, gives a full overview of freakish machines and products incorporating radium and other hazardous materials. Although connections between these devices and radiation sickness were slow to materialize, causation was slowly getting recognized in Lovecraft's era.

"The Colour Out of Space" contains stark passages that cannot help but bring visions of post-apocalyptic, fallout covered landscapes to modern readers' minds. One look at what happens to the Gardner family's livestock after the land is poisoned sounds like a post-Chernobyl Ukrainian farming community:

Almost at the same time the mortality among the livestock commenced. Poultry turned greyish and died very quickly, their meat being found dry and noisome upon cutting. Hogs grew inordinately fat, then suddenly began to undergo loathsome changes which no one could explain. Their meat was of course useless, and Nahum was at his wit's end. No rural veterinary would approach his place, and the city veterinary from Arkham was openly baffled. The swine began growing grey and brittle and falling to pieces before they died, and their eyes and muzzles developed singular alterations. It was very inexplicable, for they had never been fed from the tainted vegetation. Then something struck the cows. Certain areas or sometimes the whole body would be uncannily shrivelled or compressed, and atrocious collapses or disintegrations were common. In the last stages - and death was always the result - there would be a greying and turning brittle like that which beset the hogs.

Nightmarish, poisoned landscapes such as this make radioactive inspiration behind this story plausible. In actuality, though, Lovecraft probably knew little about radiation sickness, like most intellectuals in the pre-Hiroshima age. S.T. Joshi and other scholars have suggested the life sapping, deteriorating fate of the Gardners was inspired by Arthur Machen's tale, "The Novel of the White Powder," a notable piece in The Three Impostors.

Just because a nuclear component probably wasn't a direct influence on "The Colour Out of Space" doesn't mean an end to similarities between Lovecraft's story and radioactive poisoning. Consider this a case where literature is irrevocably re-defined by discoveries and historic developments that occur well after its origination. A nuclear undertones still churn behind film adaptations of the story, such as The Colour from the Dark. Visual art driven by the tale's imagery, when it's not focused on the otherworldly color, also depicts decay related to radiation sickness.

H.P. Lovecraft may not have intentionally dreamed up the dreadful consequences of unleashing the atom. Yet, in a way, he prophesied something very similar, giving readers a contamination scenario equal in horror to those in the bleakest emergency handbooks.

-Grim Blogger