H.P. Lovecraft's The Shadow Out Of Time

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Oh man. It's that time again. To wonder about things that make one go insane. Thinking about things that should not be. D:
 
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I liked covers from the other stories. They were simple but disturbing. This one looks like 80s sci-fi book.
 
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@phil777: meh. If you've ever read the original story this is based on, the thing that's so insanity producing is really quite tame:
humanity isn't the only intelligent race the earth will ever produce, our time as the top species of the planet is limited, and there is a species in the past which can project themselves through time to take control of earlier and later beings to have a complete history of the world and therefore the most thorough possible scientific knowledge. Lovecraft lived after Darwin; the first two of those points should not have come as a shock, and the third… well, so what? Disturbing, but not insanity-producing. But then Lovecraft was a racist so extreme that even in a time when public blatant racism was common other racists found him disturbing (many of the monsters in his stories are exaggerated black/asian/semitic stereotypes, although not in this particular story), and so the idea of anything other than a white male human being as the supreme ruler of the planet would really drive him nuts.
 
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HPL did nothing wrong. If anything he was way ahead of his time.
 
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@zawarudo: well, no, he lived in the heyday of the Ku Klux Klan, so I'd say he was in his time. If he had lived in Germany, of course, he died about 7 or 8 years too early.

A lot of his stuff is just kind of silly, when you strip out the overwrought, turgid adjectives and get right down to it. You could write a very good parody in which somebody with a prissy, overblown, polysyllabic style of narration walks into a restaurant, eats a meal, goes to wash his hands in the restrooms, and then gets shocked to the point of passing out and spending time in an insane asylum because somebody failed to flush a toilet — revealing to the narrator that the clean, friendly atmosphere of the restaurant was connected through hidden, underground means to a literal sewer! Which of course must mean that the employees are evil servitors of filth, serving the unwitting genteel customers with food in order that they, too, would need to use a toilet — in fact, to his shock and horror the narrator discovers hours later that he needs to poop! Such a twist ending! Scandalous!
 
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Beautiful work. Really looking forward to remaining English translations.
 
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Lovecraft is nuts now that I read up on him. Not only did he detest all other races, he even detested whites that were protestant and that weren't from england.
 
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Anytime you find out what the world thinks to be true is false, the sensation of the ground falling from under you is the precursor to insantiy.
 

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