At the Mountains of Madness
At the Mountains of Madness is a science fiction-horror novella by American author H. P. Lovecraft, written in February/March 1931. Rejected that year by Weird Tales editor Farnsworth Wright on the grounds of its length,[1] it was originally serialized in the February, March, and April 1936 issues of Astounding Stories. It has been reproduced in numerous collections.
For other uses, see At the Mountains of Madness (disambiguation).Author
The story details the events of a disastrous expedition to Antarctica in September 1930, and what is found there by a group of explorers led by the narrator, Dr. William Dyer of Miskatonic University. Throughout the story, Dyer details a series of previously untold events in the hope of deterring another group of explorers who wish to return to the continent. These events include the discovery of an ancient civilization older than the human race, and realization of Earth's past told through various sculptures and murals.
The story was inspired by Lovecraft's interest in Antarctic exploration; the continent was still not fully explored in the 1930s. Lovecraft explicitly draws from Edgar Allan Poe's novel The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket, and he may have used other stories for inspiration. Many story elements, such as the formless "shoggoth", recur in other Lovecraft works. The story has been adapted and used for graphic novels, video games, and musical works.
At the Mountains of Madness has numerous connections to other Lovecraft stories. A few include:
Inspiration[edit]
Lovecraft had a lifelong interest in Antarctic exploration. "Lovecraft had been fascinated with the Antarctic continent since he was at least 12 years old, when he had written several small treatises on early Antarctic explorers," the biographer S. T. Joshi wrote.[4] At about the age of 9, inspired by W. Clark Russell's 1887 book The Frozen Pirate, Lovecraft had written "several yarns" set in Antarctica.[5]
By the 1920s, Antarctica was "one of the last unexplored regions of the Earth in which large stretches of territory had never seen the tread of human feet. Contemporary maps of the continent show a number of provocative blanks, and Lovecraft could exercise his imagination in filling them in... with little fear of immediate contradiction."[6] However, Lovecraft was basically accurate in presenting the geographic knowledge of Antarctica as it was known at the time, and he referred to continental drift, a theory which was then not widely accepted.
The first expedition of Richard E. Byrd took place between 1928 and 1930, just before the novella was written, and Lovecraft mentioned the explorer repeatedly in his letters and remarked at one point on "geologists of the Byrd expedition having found many fossils indicating a tropical past."[7] In fact, Miskatonic University's expedition was modelled after that of Byrd.[8]
In Lovecraft: A Look Behind the Cthulhu Mythos Lin Carter suggests that one inspiration for At the Mountains of Madness was Lovecraft's own hypersensitivity to cold, as evidenced by an incident in which the writer "collapsed in the street and was carried unconscious into a drug store" because the temperature dropped from 60 degrees to 30 degrees Fahrenheit (15 degrees to -1 degree Celsius). "The loathing and horror that extreme cold evoked in him was carried over into his writing," Carter wrote, "and the pages of Madness convey the blighting, blasting, stifling sensation caused by sub-zero temperatures in a way that even Poe could not suggest."[9] S. T. Joshi called the theory "facile."[10]
Joshi further cites Lovecraft's most obvious literary source for At the Mountains of Madness as Edgar Allan Poe's only novel, The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket, whose concluding section is set in Antarctica. Lovecraft twice cites Poe's "disturbing and enigmatic" story in his text and explicitly borrows the mysterious cry Tekeli-li or Takkeli from Poe's work. In a letter to August Derleth, Lovecraft wrote that he was trying to achieve with his ending an effect similar to what Poe accomplished in Pym.[11]
Another proposed inspiration for At the Mountains of Madness is Edgar Rice Burroughs's At the Earth's Core (1914), a novel that posits a highly intelligent reptilian race, the Mahar, living in a hollow Earth. "Consider the similarity of Burroughs' Mahar to Lovecraft's Old Ones, both of whom are presented sympathetically despite their ill-treatment of man," wrote the critic William Fulwiler. "[B]oth are winged, web-footed, dominant races; both are scientific scholarly races with a talent for genetics, engineering, and architecture; and both races use men as cattle." Both stories, Fulwiler points out, involve radical new drilling techniques. In both stories, humans are vivisected by nonhuman scientists. Burroughs' Mahar even employ a species of servants known as Sagoths, possibly the source of Lovecraft's Shoggoth.[12]
Other possible sources include A. Merritt's "The People of the Pit," whose description of an underground city in the Yukon bears some resemblance to that of Lovecraft's Elder Things, and Katharine Metcalf Roof's "A Million Years After," a story about dinosaurs hatching from eggs millions of years old that appeared in the November 1930 edition Weird Tales.[13] In a letter to Frank Belknap Long, Lovecraft declared Metcalf Roof's story to be a "rotten," "cheap," and "puerile" version of an idea he had years earlier, and his dissatisfaction may have provoked him to write his own tale of "the awakening of entities from the dim reaches of Earth's history."[14]
Edward Guimont has argued that At the Mountains of Madness was inspired by contemporary discourse around life on Mars, including Mars-set fictional works and the claims of Martian canals made by Percival Lowell (whom Lovecraft met in 1907).[15] Guimont has also proposed other influences, including contemporary theories about the decline of the Norse Greenlanders and claims of survival of woolly mammoths in Alaska and particularly plot details being inspired by the 1930 discovery of the remains of Andrée's Arctic balloon expedition.[16]
An H.P. Lovecraft Encyclopedia suggest that the long scope of history recounted in the story may have been inspired by Oswald Spengler's The Decline of the West. Some details of the story may also have been taken from M. P. Shiel's 1901 Arctic exploration novel The Purple Cloud, which was republished in 1930.[17]
The title is derived from a line in Edward Plunkett, 18th Baron of Dunsany's short story "The Hashish Man": "And we came at last to those ivory hills that are named the Mountains of Madness...".[18]
Lovecraft's own "The Nameless City" (1921), which also deals with the exploration of an ancient underground city that is apparently abandoned by its nonhuman builders, sets a precedent for At the Mountains of Madness. In both stories, the explorers use the nonhumans' artwork to deduce the history of their species.[19] Lovecraft had also used that device in "The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath" (1927)
As for details of the Antarctic setting, the author's description of some of the scenery is in part inspired by the Asian paintings of Nicholas Roerich and the illustrations of Gustave Doré, both of whom are referenced by the story's narrator multiple times.
Reception[edit]
The novella was received negatively during Lovecraft's lifetime; Lovecraft stated that its hostile reception had done "more than anything to end my effective fictional career."[22] Theodore Sturgeon described the novella as "perfect Lovecraft" and "a good deal more lucid than much of the master's work", as well as "first-water, true-blue science fiction."[23] The story popularized ancient astronaut theories, as well as Antarctica's place in the "ancient astronaut mythology".[24] Edward Guimont has argued that At the Mountains of Madness, despite its terrestrial setting, helped influence later hard science fiction depictions of planetary expeditions and the Big Dumb Object trope, particularly those of Arthur C. Clarke, whose 1940 parody "At the Mountains of Murkiness" was one of his first works of fiction.[15][25]
