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University of South Florida Scholar Commons Digital Collection - Science Fiction & Fantasy Digital Collection - Science Fiction & Fantasy Publications 6-1-2001 SFRA ewN sletter 252 Science Fiction Research Association Follow this and additional works at: http://scholarcommons.usf.edu/scifistud_pub Part of the Fiction Commons Scholar Commons Citation Science Fiction Research Association, "SFRA eN wsletter 252 " (2001). Digital Collection - Science Fiction & Fantasy Publications. Paper 71. http://scholarcommons.usf.edu/scifistud_pub/71 This Article is brought to you for free and open access by the Digital Collection - Science Fiction & Fantasy at Scholar Commons. It has been accepted for inclusion in Digital Collection - Science Fiction & Fantasy Publications by an authorized administrator of Scholar Commons. For more information, please contact [email protected]. #2S2 Ifay/June 200' Coeditors: Barbara Lucas Shelley Rodrjgo Blanctiard Nonfiction lerie lIeil Barron Fiction Ie riews: Shelley Rodrjgo Blancliard The SFRAReview (ISSN 1068-395X) is published six times a year by the Science Fiction ResearchAssociation (SFRA) and distI~bUld to SFRA mem bers.lndividual issues are not for sale. For information about the SFRA and its benefits, see the description at the back of this issue. For a membership application, contact SFRA Treasurer Dave Mead or get one from the SFRA website: <www.sfra.org>. SUBMISSIONS The SFRAReview editors encourage submissions, including essays, review essays that cover several related texts, and interviews. Please send submis sions or queries to both coeditors. If you would like to review nonfiction or fiction, please contact the respec tive editor and/or email [email protected]. Barbara Lucas, Coeditor 1352 Fox Run Drive, Suite 206 Willoughby, OH 44094 <[email protected]> Shelley Rodrigo Blanchard, Coeditor & Fiction Reviews Editor 6842 S. 40th Place Phoenix, AZ 85040 <[email protected]> Neil Barron, Nonfiction Reviews Editor 1149 Lime Place Vista, CA 92083-7428 <[email protected]> Visit Us At: www.sfra.org NONFICTION REVIEW "HE A ••OFAFE. SUPER.ArUBA .. HORROR •• L.FEBAFURE Stefan Dziemianowia HELP WITH RECRUITMENT NEEDED Lovecraft, H.P. The Annotated Supernatural Horror in Uterature, ed. by S.T. Joshi. The SFRA's membership has hov Hippocampus Press, Box 641, New York, NY 10156, September 2000. ered around 300 for some years. 172 p. $15 + $3.50 postage, trade paper. 0-9673215-0-6. Peter Brig, the new vice president, intends to increase the number of Lovecraft's canonical essay remains a landmark of weird fiction criticism members by various means. One nearly three quarters of a century since it first saw print in the pages of an strategy is sending recruiting ma amateur press journal. Though not every critic has agreed with its assessments terials to people likely to be inter ested, most of whom have never and Lovecraft has been taken to task for omissions and imbalance in his analysis, been contacted by the SFRA. the essay has shaped reading lists and bibliographies of essential horror fiction That's where you could be ex for decades. Lovecraft was one of the first critical writers to view horror in a tremely helpful. What he would context not limited solely to the Gothic tradition, and his essay contains some welcome from you is the book title, of the earliest appraisals of Blackwood, Machen, de la Mare, and other writers year of publication, and name and who set a standard of literary excellence even as horror was curdling into a genre academic or other affiliation of au in the pages of the pulp magazines Lovecraft contributed to. thors, editors, and contributors to Before the appearance of this new edition of the essay-the first offer books about any type of fantastic ing from a new specialty press-there were already two editions long in print: the literature/film/illustration or utopian Dover paperback struck from the Abramson edition of 1945 (106 p., $6.95, intro studies that you have reviewed duced by E.F. Bleiler) and the version included in Dagon and Other Macabre Tales, since January 1998. Check past the third volume in Arkham House's standard edition of Lovecraft, which issues of the SFRA Review to iden Lovecraft authority Joshi indexed for the current corrected eighth printing of tify titles. Send information to 1986. What does this new edition offer that these editions don't? For one thing, [email protected] or to # I 20 a comprehensive bibliography of all the texts cited by Lovecraft, including cita Budgell Terrace, Toronto, Ontario tions for further critical study. But even better are Joshi's annotations and his M65 I B4. Most edited collections informative introduction on the history of the essay's composition. (Lovecraft's of essays include contributor notes, essay occupies fifty-two pages of fairly small type in this edition. Joshi"s contri which normally show academic af butions dwarf that: preface and introduction (13 pages), notes (36 pages), bibli filiation. A photocopy of such notes ography of authors and works cited by Lovecraft (52 pages), and index (10 pages». would suffice, along with the book's Though Lovecraft is generally revered as one of the horror writers of the title and year, or you can copy and twentieth century most knowledgeable about the field in which he wrote, at the e-mail the information. It you see a time he was assigned the essay, he was actually unfamiliar with several writers and name that you know to be a cur works now regarded as seminal to horror literature. As Joshi notes, Lovecraft had rent member, delete it, but Peter will read the Gothics piecemeal and cribbed extensively from Edith Birkhead's The check this and gather the needed Tale of Terror (1921) for his commen tary in the early sections of the survey. An additional information for letter omnivorous reader in a variety of areas, Lovecraft still completely overlooked the mailing recruitment material. Many fiction of trend-setting ghost story master 1\1. R. J amee until he began researching thanks. the essay. The essay went through several revisions between its fust publication in Neil Barron 1927 and Lovecraft's death in 1937, and he took his work on it seriously enough to continue adding writers whose work he picked up on the interim. He pro CORRECTION fessed his admiration for the fiction of William Hope Hodgson in paragraphs Karen McGuire's review of Berthold added in 1934, and it's arguable that they helped spark the revival of interest in Schoene-Harwood's Mary Shelley: Hodgson's work. Frankentstein was indeed in issue Even more interesting are the correspondences Joshi finds between the #25 IThe table of contents did not works Lovecraft read to write the essay and Lovecraft's own fiction. It was in this reflect this. The review is on page essay that Lovecraft first began to identify what he called "a sense of the cosmic" 15. in the work of weird fiction writers he respected. Joshi defines cosmicism as "the Shelley Rodrigo Blanchard suggestions of vast gulfs of space and time and the consequent triviality of the human race," and it's hardly surprising that Lovecraft's fiction began increasingly LATEST HEINLEIN to show this quality after the essay was written, in stories like "The Call ofCthulhu," JOURNAL "·The Dtu1\vich Horror," "The Shadow Out of Time" and most of the other tales The January 200 I semi-annual is of "cosmic horror" on which his reputation rests today. Joshi has read the same sue (# 8) reached me in mid-Feb texts Lovecraft read in preparation to write the essay, and he identifies interest- ruary. Jane Davitt exam- ing echoes in Lovecraft's writings of both well-known and obscure works. In Lovecraft's case, this was more than simple mimicry. His research of the essay almost certainly helped him to articulate his own aesthetic for supernatu ral horror, and one suspects his immersion in the work of other writers who ines the differences be made their mark showed him not just what to do, but what not to do, as he tween Heinlein's Red Planet in the created his own body of memorable and weird fiction. 1949 Scribner's edition and the [Admirers of Lovecraft sometimes quote the first sentence of this essay revised 1990 Ballantine edition. Edi as a dogma: "The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the tor Patterson studies"Requim," first oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown." This statement has published in 1940. Robert James been investigated by psychologists, so I asked Alan Elms, who teaches psychol investigates "The Age of Reasoning: ogy at UC Davis, what his colleagues have concluded. He replied: Starship Troopers and the History As for the 'oldest and strongest emotion of mankind,' Freud voted for of the Franchise in America." The pleasure (''Lust'' in German, which can also be translated as "desire''). He saw fear text of a radio play based on Ray as important too, with fear of castration being most important to mankind (for Bradbury's'The ManWhoTraveled womankind, of course, it has already happened). Even fear of death, Freud said, in Elephants," by Brad Linaweaver, is a disguised version of castration anxiety. Karen Horney, Freud's ftrst feminist presented at the 1998 Dragon Con, disciple and critic, more nearly resembled Lovecraft in proposing that the earliest is printed, along with an introduc (and for most people the most powerful) element in personality development is tion by the producer and brief com basic anxiety-the child's fear of being helpless and alone in a dangerous world. ments by Bradbury. Letters and a Psychologists have long conducted empirical studies to demonstrate either the cumulative index to issue I Uuly presence of certain specific innate fear responses (fear of falling, etc.) or the early 1997) - 8 conclude this 52-page, learning of fear responses Oohn E.