The Second Rome

According to a tradition found among many Eastern Orthodox Christian communities, Constantinople (modern Istanbul, Turkey) was the Second Rome, to which the seat of Christianity shifted after the fall of Rome to the barbarians in the Fifth Century.

When readers of speculative fiction think of Constantinople and the Byzantine (Eastern Roman) Empire, we tend to think of Harry Turtledove, the Byzantinist who launched his career with stories of alternate and fantastical Constantinoples. However, he is certainly not the only one to write of what the Byzantine Empire might have been. David Drake and Eric Flint wrote a six-book time travel series about Belisarius, in a world in which a living computer from the far future has traveled backward in time to prevent a horrific racist enemy from manipulating India's caste-based culture into a monstrous tyranny dedicated to the preservation of a "pure" humanity.

And in Historical Lovecraft: Tales of Horror Through Time
we see the marks of the meddling of the Great Old Ones in that part of human history, in "Silently, Without Cease" by Daniel Mills. His jumping-off point is the Plague of Justinian, one of the earliest known outbreaks of bubonic plague in Western Civilization. In the manner typical of virgin-field epidemics, it cut a wide swathe through a population with little genetic resistance to the Yersina pestis bacterium. Coming at a critical juncture in history, it wrecked the Emperor Justinian's plans to reunite the Eastern and Western Empires and restore the glory of the Roman Empire at its height. From that point forward, the history of the Eastern Roman Empire would be a slow but steady erosion, first to the Zoroastrian Persians and then to various Muslim forces, first Arabic-speaking and then Turkish.

In the Cthulhu Mythos, Nyarlathotep is associated both with the Egyptian pharaohs and with plagues and other apocalyptic events. Thus it seems natural to suggest that the mysterious ragged figure who arrives with the plague and subsequently heads West, with him or one of his minions.

The Holy and the Abominable

Among the terrible cults we encounter in the works of H. P. Lovecraft is the Esoteric Order of Dagon. Masquerading as an ordinary Masonic Temple of the sort that can be found in many cities and towns all across the United States, it is in fact dedicated to the appeasement of monstrous aquatic entities from before the dawn of civilization. Appeasement that even goes to the point of wedding such beings and creating hybrid children, resulting in the population of the town of Innsmouth, Massachusetts having an ever-increasing proportion of its population showing strange deformities.

Interestingly enough, the name of Dagon is not unique to Lovecraft and his various colleagues. It goes all the way back to the Bible, to the Old Testament, where various Prophets of the Lord strove against priests of Dagon. For an avid reader of Lovecraft, those accounts can bring a delightful frission of fear -- are we seeing yet again the tentacle-prints of the Great Old Ones upon human history?

In Historical Lovecraft: Tales of Horror Through Time
we have "The Chronicle of Aliyat Son of Aliyat" by Alter S. Reiss, which takes us to Judah in the time of King Uzziah. The author is a professional archaeologist who has done work on Philistine sites in Israel, and draws upon modern archaeological and geological evidence as well as the Biblical account of the fall of Ashdod and the abominable Temple of Dagon there, giving us a delightfully creepy suggestion of an intersection between one of the West's most holy books and eldritch abominations.

The Pollution of Deep Time

One of the distinctive characteristics of cosmic horror is its fascination with deep time. The traditional monsters of folklore -- the vampire, the werewolf, the zombie -- all are monsters on a human scale. They are the result of human misdeeds, however terrible, and generally originate in recent history relative to the protagonist of the story. Even Dracula dates back only centuries.

But H. P. Lovecraft and his various colleagues and imitators take a longer view, fitting with the rapidly expanding timescale of human and geological history that was developing in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. From the Biblically-derived date of 4004 BC for the creation of the world, history and pre-history suddenly stretched backward not mere thousands but millions of years -- numbers beyond even a literate and numerate person's capacity to grasp emotionally. Suddenly the entirety of written history and civilization shrank to an insignificant coda to unimaginable dark ages knowable only by such traces as fossils left in ancient stone.

And what is unknown is by its very nature frightening. We're afraid of the dark because it limits our ability to see, and thus know, our surroundings. Thus we imagine various monstrosities and horrors lurking in those shadows, waiting to gobble us up.

How much more frightening those shadows lying across deep time, the thousands and millions of years about which we could know so little. Might they too hold their horrors and monstrosities, not mere bogeymen on human scale, but vast and horrible intellects utterly incommesurate with humanity, even indifferent to our existence, taking no more note of our civilization than we do an anthill built in the way of a road or wall?

Thus it is fitting that the very first story in the new Innsmouth Free Press anthology Historical Lovecraft: Tales of Horror Through Time should deal with the very dawn of human history. In "The God Lurking in Stone" Andrew Dombalagian takes us to Neolithic Mesopotamia, before the first of the Mesopotamian civilization, to tell the story of a boy whose encounter with entities ancient, unknown and terrible may have been the root of the myths about the Sumerian god Marduk.

Norilana Moving Sale

After a years-long battle to save her home finally ended in defeat this past winter, Vera Nazarian is moving cross-country to a rental in Vermont. In order to fund this cross-country move, she really needs a lot of sales of her Norilana books.

If you're not sure what you might like, take a look at these reviews from The Billion Light-Year Bookshelf:

Mansfield Park and Mummies

Northanger Abbey and Angels and Dragons

The Duke in His Castle

Sky Whales and Other wonders

After the Sundial

Clockwork Phoenix 2

Clockwork Phoenix 3

Warrior Wisewoman 2

Warrior Wisewoman 3

Marion Zimmer Bradley's Sword & Sorceress XXIII

Marion Zimmer Bradley's Sword & Sorceress XXIV

Cause For Concern

Recently Vera Nazarian announced that several Norilana anthologies would be postponed due to the worsening economy. In addition, another anthology would be published under a different arrangement.

Shortly thereafter, she announced that another anthology editor had decided to take her lineup to be published elsewhere, albeit under a new title, since the old title had belonged to a series.

Now another editor who had previously announced a one-year sabbatical in his annual anthology for purely personal reasons is looking at the possibility that he may go to another publisher for future volumes.

This is worrisome to me because it is looking very similar to what happens when there is a run on a bank. That is, concern about the future of the institution leads to an increasing number of people to decide to get out while it's still possible, resulting in an escalation of the institution's erosion.

Of course a publisher isn't quite like a bank -- editors deciding to pull their anthologies and seek other publishers isn't going to directly deprive other titles of their existence the way a large number of people withdrawing deposits can make it impossible for the bank to make good on the remaining depositors' money. The biggest question will be how book buyers behave -- if they keep buying existing Norilana titles, the situation can still be turned around.

Free Sample of Mansfield Park and Mummies Available

If you've been uncertain if whether Mansfield Park and Mummies: Monster Mayhem, Matrimony, Ancient Curses, True Love, and Other Dire Delights
is for you, Vera Nazarian has just posted three sample chapters on the Norilana website. So take a look now!

The Regency Egyptologist

You may have heard about the recent Jane Austen mashups bringing sea monsters and zombies into the dear old classics Sense and Sensibility and Pride and Prejudice. Now Vera Nazarian, who as publisher of Norilana Books has already brought us James Fairfax, an alternate Jane Austen in which a royal decree permits same-sex marriage, now brings out her own hilarious parody, Mansfield Park and Mummies: Monster Mayhem, Matrimony, Ancient Curses, True Love, and Other Dire Delights.

As a historian (MA, Illinois State University, 1996) with a background in languages (BA in Russian Language and Literature, 1989), I find it of particular interest because, unlike the sea monster and zombie mashups, the introduction of mummies into Regency society is not merely an aventitious intrusion by the author's whim. Far from it, the period in which Jane Austen was writing was also the period in which modern Egyptology was developing as a science, casting off its roots as glorified grave-robbers to actually study the artifacts as evidence of a culture now departed from this mortal coil. Most critically, the discovery of the Rosetta Stone by Napoleon's forces made possible the decipherment of the Egyptian sacred writings, the heiroglyphics, and opened the books of Egyptian religious and secular writing. Henceforth historians would be able to examine Egyptian temple and palace records much as they had long been able to read ancient Greek and Roman documents.

But Egyptology wasn't that far removed from its grave-robbing cousins yet. Artifacts were regularly removed from their original locations with little or no concern for preserving provenance or context, and certainly no concern whatsoever about respect for the cultures that had originally created them. Mummies were regularly brought to Britain and unwrapped in exhibitions little better than circus sideshows in a process that destroyed incalculable amounts of information about them which later generations could have learned through non-destructive means. Never mind the question of disrespect for the people whose mortal remains these were.

Now imagine that by supernatural means the ancient Egyptians forcibly expatrated from their beloved Nile Valley are able to express their objections to this mistreatment. Thus that nagging feeling of violation and guilt manifests itself in the form of the horror novel in which the mummy rises and objects in the most forceful manner possible to his victimization. Frightening as the traditional mummy movie may be, might there be just a little sense that the anonymous Ancient Egyptian beneath those wrappings has a reason to be wandering about and mugging presumptuous moderns?

But Vera Nazarian is not a writer of the gruesome variety of horror. No, her weapon is the subtle rapier wit that Jane Austen wielded against her own contemporaries, drawing instead upon the liminal unease of a world in which the boundaries between dead and living have drawn dangerously thin. The darkly handsome young gentleman with the raptor beak of a nose and the guttural accent isn't a Jewish banker from the Continent or even an Arab sheik, but an Ancient Egyptian prince returned from the grave to woo our beautiful young heroine Fanny Price -- leaving us to wonder what might befall her should she yield to his blandishments. And if he has been able to break the Law of Death and return to the land of the living, might it be possible that other boundaries could grow weak and even dissolve away, allowing the supernatural to run wild in the staid society of the English upper crust? Vampires and werewolves cast a dark shadow across the ancient writing that mysteriously appears upon a whitewashed English wall, and just what is that creature known only as the Brighton Duck?