Thursday, December 31, 2009

Brian Lumley's Titus Crow series: part 1

Brian Lumley's Titus Crow series - The Burrowers Beneath, The Transition of Titus Crow, The Clock of Dreams, Spawn of the Winds, In the Moons of Borea, and Elysia - is often criticized for being totally un-Lovecraftian in tone. This is certainly a valid criticism - Lumley includes such elements as benevolent Kthanid, the golden-eyed cousin of Cthulhu, Eminence (ruler) of the Elder Gods; Elysia, the Elder Gods' paradise-world; Cthulhu and Kthanid presented as rulers of their respective factions, equal or superior to universal beings like Yog-Sothoth; Nyarlathotep as not an actual being but the telepathy used by the Great Old Ones; et cetera. Furthermore, Lumley's characters are far more resilient and far more proactive than Lovecraft's, tracking down and destroying minions of the Great Old Ones in a variety of locations. Psychic powers flow freely, and Titus Crow is "rebuilt" by alien robots into something of a literal superhero.

However, despite all of the above... the books are highly enjoyable. They are simply not in the same theme, arguably not even the same genre, as Lovecraft's work; they use elements of the Cthulhu Mythos freely, but present a very different interpretation of these beings. This isn't a bad thing, though; Lovecraft himself wrote in what we would now consider distinct genres (though the lines were nearly nonexistent in his time); "In the Walls of Eryx" is undeniably science-fiction, The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath and "Celephais" nearly pure fantasy. The Titus Crow books, in theme and style, belong to the pulp adventure tradition of writers like Edgar Rice Burroughs, Robert E. Howard, and C. L. Moore; and they are good pulp adventure, especially for something written so late in the 20th century.

If you come to the Titus Crow books expecting cosmic horror in the manner of Lovecraft, you will likely be disappointed. If you take them for what they were written to be, however, they are very fun reads.

Part 2 will review the first two books of the series - The Burrowers Beneath and The Transition of Titus Crow.

Sunday, December 6, 2009

Mysteries of Yith, Part 2: What Were Those Darned Cones?

Every other Mythos species on Earth seems to either be explicitly alien (Flying Polyps, Elder Things, Star-spawn of Cthulhu, etc.) or have believable relations to known Earth life (the fish- and frog-like Deep Ones, the reptilian Serpent Men, the hominid Voormis, etc.) The one exception are the cone-creatures which the Yithians' minds possessed when they fled to Earth from Yith. These cone-creatures are implied to be a native Earthly evolution, yet have no resemblance to any known form of life. So what are they, and how did they get here?

Are they Aliens?
Of course, there's the possibility that they are not native to Earth at all, but are relics of some previous alien colonization of Earth. This seems to be a copout, however, in the absence of any evidence of it.

Animals?
The cones are clearly not from any vertebrate lineage.

Perhaps they are some form of mollusk. The large base of the cone, used to move the creature, seems very similar to the foot of a gastropod. The tentacles would not be unusual for a mollusk, either. The 'trumpet' like organs on the tip of one tentacle, and the location of the mouth and pseudo-'head' on another, are a more difficult problem, however. Still, the Yithians would be radically divergent from all existing mollusks simply by the fact of adapting to be large and terrestrial, so it does not seem unusual that they would evolve new organs (the 'trumpets' are likely hearing organs, as hearing that is adapted for water will not function well on land).

A bigger problem is that the Yithians originate too early for any known mollusks - before the appearance of animals at all.

Something Stranger?
The Yithians may well be the last remnant of an otherwise entirely unknown early evolutionary line of eukaryotes, neither animal, plant nor fungus, and not fossilized due to the lack of bones. They may be exceptionally distant relatives of slime molds, which can sometimes achieve surprising sizes.

With their intelligence, the Yithians could have survived the cold of the "Snowball Earth" Cryogenian period and the appearance of true animals, which would have wiped out the rest of the early eukaryote line that produced them.