At the Mountains of Madness

"At The Mountains Of Madness is one of Lovecraft’s longer contributions to speculative fiction, and it develops the Cthulhu Mythos much more fully. It’s about an Antarctic expedition that penetrates further into the continent than any expedition preceding it, and discovers evidence of a long-abandoned city. As they begin to explore the city, they piece together a story about extraterrestrial entities that preceded human life on the planet by millennia. They had conflicts among themselves, and had servants called shoggoths, who were amorphous blobs of protoplasm that could be shaped in different ways… So, we get a whole history of another civilization, a very powerful one, traces of which are still present in our universe. It’s really an exercise in world-building. Very much so. And the irony with Lovecraft is that, on the one hand, he has this notion of indifferentism, or cosmic dread that human beings don’t matter very much. At the same time, the difficulty with him is that he’s notorious for his racism. So, on the one hand, human life doesn’t matter; but in his day-to-day existence, some humans did matter much more than others. And that’s the kind of “sticky wicket” that we have with Lovecraft that we have to keep coming back to: the racism is braided into his fiction in such a way that you can’t really extricate it. A lot of the motor force of his fiction is anxiety about things like miscegenation or hybrids, which we’ll talk about a little bit more, actually, with the next story."