Lovecraft was an avid reader and would have been familiar with the works of Wells and Verne-and possibly Flammarion as well, who was widely translated and in circulation during Lovecraft’s youth. Although Jules Verne tended to steer away from aliens in his fiction, one can make a case that he capitalized on the Victorian terror regarding cephalopods when he had a giant squid attack the Nautilus in 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea.īy all accounts, H.P. Wells described the Martians as having pulsating bodies, a beak-like mouth, and lank, tentacular appendages. In his book, Lumen, he imagines extraterrestrial beings from a star in the constellation Andromeda who live in water and must “keep their tentacles in unceasing motion.” He wrote popular science books about astronomy and biology. Camille Flammarion was, in many ways, the Neil deGrasse Tyson of his day. For some reason, the Victorians found squids and octopi truly frightening. My octopus-inspired aliens and scary squid are really heirs to a science fiction trope that goes well back to the nineteenth century. The first thing that came to mind was a giant squid. When Captain Firebrandt from The Pirates of Sufiro returns in Kepler’s Cowboys, I wanted to give him a truly dangerous and frightening opponent in the water. That said, when I invented the Alpha Centaurans for my novel The Pirates of Sufiro, I gave them tentacles to make them immediately distinct and “alien” as I was getting the action off the ground.
This is one of the best photos I’ve taken of an octopus at the Seattle Aquarium in 2008: Octopi often seem elusive when I visit aquariums and either hide or don’t give me very good photo ops. Personally, I’ve always found cephalopods fascinating and a little mysterious. Lovecraft describes his most famous creation as, “a monster of vaguely anthropoid outline, but with an octopus-like head whose face was a mass of feelers, a scaly, rubbery-looking body, prodigious claws on hind and fore feet, and long, narrow wings behind.” During my research, I discovered that Cthulhu is part of a long line of terrifying monsters inspired by octopi and squids. The presentation dovetails with the convention’s theme, “Cthulhu For President.” H.P. I’m in the process of assembling a presentation for Wild Wild West Con in Tucson, Arizona that discusses the origins of terrifying aliens from space coming to invade the Earth.
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