| Some quite well known writers are extraordinarily mis-represented. I, as a reader, have at times been put off trying an author for decades, only to find, when I did try, that what you get is nothing like what you’ve been warned about.
Sometimes this is the reader’s fault. With Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind, I perhaps did my own misrepresenting. I assumed that the book would be steeped in the values of a bygone age and thus “dated”. When I actually took the trouble to read it I was struck instead by its timeless quality; it will never go out of date.
With the James Bond books I am not taking the blame. How was I to know that in spite of all the accusations of sadism and casual violence levelled against the books, as a matter of fact Bond has a fundamental aversion to killing in cold blood? He is aghast even at the thought of shooting the assassin Scaramanga in The Man with the Golden Gun. And the women in the books, despite their stereotypical portrayals in film, are all well-drawn characters, definitely not all the same.
The most astonishing example of misrepresentation by critics which I have ever come across, concerns the master of horror, Howard Phillips Lovecraft (1890-1937). Certainly there is a side of him that conforms to the image given out by the critics. Many of his tales are admittedly of the claustrophobic, disgusting kind of horror story; full of ghoulish loathsomeness. However there is another side to him, and this side is completely ignored, so far as I know, by almost all commentators – except his biographer L Sprague de Camp and the publisher and fan August Derleth. This other side is the science fictional side.
Lovecraft’s output was meagre, yet he was one of the greatest science fiction writers. Three of his longer tales are unsurpassed in their gift for evoking the awesome, threatening vistas of time and space: At the Mountains of Madness, The Shadow Out of Time and The Whisperer in Darkness.
Lovecraft’s theme is that Earth is not primarily Man’s world; there have been other, far mightier races before us, and our hold on our world is more tenuous than we think. We lead our comfortable little lives, unaware that our minds may be snatched from our bodies by Time-masters from the Triassic period, or our brains surgically removed and taken out to Pluto and beyond; or that creatures lie dormant underneath the Antarctic ice-cap, which if wakened might destroy the world. Horror, to be sure, but liberating horror; horror that excites the imagination by far extending its range.
I must mention one other great Lovecraft tale, not precisely science fiction, but one that straddles the boundary between science fiction and fantasy. This is The Shadow Over Innsmouth. The horror of being trapped in a sinister seaport town, the gradual hints of unholy interbreeding with sea creatures, gives way to the different horror of mental alienage – that one might get to like the idea of changing one’s species. That is the touch that turns what would have been a good story into a great one.
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