Let’s play a game of imagination, shall we? But first, a li’l background:

In the early 20th Century, renowned horror/science-fiction author Howard Phillips Lovecraft penned a number of phantasmagoric tales concerning incomprehensibly-strange extraterrestrial “gods,” alien species as ancient as—if not older than—the very earth beneath our feet, and remnant technologies so advanced they anticipate by Clark’s Third Law by nearly thirty years. In the cold, materialistic world of his imagination, we Human beings were to those grand old intelligences of our prehistory little more than bright cockroaches: insignificant twists of thinking matter whose myriad lives and deaths and dreams were as meaningless to the vast and uncaring Universe as the hordes of bacteria killed by a handful of hand sanitizer are to us.

Despite Lovecraft’s florid (yet often lovely) prose, the trappings of mythology and theosophy which inspired and informed his writings, and his fantastic imagery, his stories were almost all grounded in a fictional reality so carefully realized, and documented, that many a reader not only in his day but in ours has thought Arkham, Massachusetts, to be a real town north of Boston; and even today there are still those who insist that the blasphemous Necronomicon of the mad Arab Abdul Alhazred is, indeed, an actual text. Rather than dispel Lovecraft’s fantasies, this realism sharpens them, gives them an extra dimension of sober verisimilitude that most of the other “weird fiction” of HPL’s day lacks.

Few authors have ever written so convincingly of their inventions that the inventions have damn near become real. But Lovecraft was one of the first great world-builders, and in stories such as “The Colour Out of Space” and “The Shadow Out of Time” he combined the scientifically-verifiable with the utterly fantastic in such a careful documentary fashion that his incredible world of Great Cthulhu and Nyarlathotep, insidious colours from beyond the reach of classical chemistry, and body-hopping transcendant minds seem to exist, palpably, in realms just down the street from our own, or just behind the page we are reading.

Given the man’s almost journalistic ability to depict the outré in such clear terms, it’s no surprise that of all the great fantasists in the history of weird fiction, only Lovecraft’s creations have become so familiar to us, so embedded in our culture’s archetypes. For example, I am not surprised that everytime I caught the trailer to J. J. Abrams’ Cloverfield before a movie, at least three or four people in the theatre shouted, “That’s got to be Cthulhu wrecking Manhattan!”

One of the reasons for Lovecraft’s “believability” was that his fictional world was contemporaneous with his own era: the 1900s through the 1930s. He never shied away from including references to important dates, organizations, and other elements of “the real world” into his stories in order to enhance their realism. At the Mountains of Madness, for instance, is so full of information concerning the history of Antarctic exploration and the then-known geography, geology, and paleontology of the Lost Continent that the first few chapters read like a “traveller’s guide” to Antarctica! In “The Shadow Over Innsmouth,” Lovecraft delineates the history of fictional Innsmouth in such detail that one can easily use the text as a primer on many a real Massachusetts coastal town, such as Newburyport.

By Lovecraft’s death in 1937, the world within his fiction was poised on the brink of discovering a host of shattering wonders: scientific expeditions from Miskatonic University (“official” site) in Arkham had discovered not only the remnants of the “Elder Things”‘ civilization in the Antarctic, but had also stumbled upon the ruins of the Great Race’s Cretaceous capitol in what is now Australia. Great Cthulhu had almost been released from his aeons-long imprisonment when a quirk of geology had thrust a portion of his capitol/necropolis, R’lyeh, above the Pacific waters in the late 1920s, and contact with the Fungi from Yuggoth seemed inevitable after certain strange occurrences in Vermont.

So now it’s time to play our game.

Let us imagination the remainder of the 20th Century and the dawn of the 21st in light of Lovecraft’s “discoveries.” Let us imagine a 20th Century in which the realities of alien contact as well as archaeological (nay, paleontological) revelation has put the Human species in a very precarious position: living like rats in the shadows of vanished titans, playing with tools and ideas that could eradicate us in a fortnight, making deals with monstrous gods, dreaming of growing up to be gods themselves. A

Footnotes to the Human Species is a series of stories and vignettes which continue to elaborate the world that H. P. Lovecraft created in such landmark stories as “The Call of Cthulhu,” At the Mountains of Madness, “The Shadow Out of Time,” and “The Whisperer in Darkness.” Readers are advised that it’s best to be familiar with those stories in order to fully understand the present ones, but by no means is it absolutely necessary. In writing these tales, I have limited myself to extending only H. P. Lovecraft’s own “Mythos.” Many, many other writers have, over the decades, added to, altered, and reinterpreted Lovecraft’s ideas—in some cases (ahem, August Derleth) perverting Lovecraft’s materialistic ideals—to create the chaotic stew that is the so-called “Cthulhu Mythos.” You’ll find none of those other authors’ influences here. My fiction is based solely in extrapolation from HPL’s own source materials, and none other.

Following Lovecraft’s own “truthiness” in fiction, you will find many names, places, and events here that will be familiar to you from “real life.” You may find yourself reading about persons you, indeed, know (myself included)—but do remember, at all times, that we are playing a game here, and even though our imaginings are based in truth, they are not always true! (In other words, don’t freakin’ sue me if I base a character on you and that character gets eaten by a shoggoth.)

So welcome to this dark, and oftimes dismal, archive of glimpses from the last days of Humanity’s existence on Earth. I warn you, though, that just as in “real life” there is very, very little light to be found in these tales; so cherish every last photon when you can. The Human Era is fleeting, but remember: even footnotes can contain great observations upon the titanic texts they cower beneath.

AUTHOR’S NOTE: Please be aware that the many Wikipedia links above are provided only to give those unfamiliar with Lovecraft’s creations a sort of starting-point. Many of the articles feature information developed after HPL’s death by various other authors who continued to develop his Mythos. A lot of the information, in fact, pertains to the Call of Cthulhu RPG produced by Chaosium, Inc.—which plays rather loosely with Lovecraft’s work. Readers interested in really getting to know Lovecraft’s fiction should consult Wikisource’s complete collection of Lovecraft’s fiction, which I have personally edited and maintained over the past year or two to ensure that the texts represented there are as accurate as possible. After all, nothing beats a primary source!