Catholic & Cosmic Horror

Last month I wrote about Christmas and cosmic horror, about Flannery O'Connor and H.P. Lovecraft. I quoted from a letter by Flannery O'Connor to her friend Betty Hester. The quotation I had is actually only an excerpt. Following is the full quotation, plus a part of the same letter that precedes it and may give it some added context:

     I write the way I do because (not though) I am a Catholic. This is a fact and nothing covers it like the bald statement. However, I am a Catholic peculiarly possessed of the modern consciousness, that thing Jung describes as unhistorical, solitary, and guilty. To possess this within the Church is to bear a burden, the necessary burden for the conscious Catholic. It’s to feel the contemporary situation at the ultimate level. I think that the Church is the only thing that is going to make the terrible world we are coming to endurable; the only thing that makes the Church endurable is that it is somehow the body of Christ and that on this we are fed. It seems to be a fact that you have to suffer as much from the Church as for it but if you believe in the divinity of Christ, you have to cherish the world at the same time that you struggle to endure it. This may explain the lack of bitterness in the stories.

     The notice in The New Yorker was not only moronic, it was unsigned. It was a case in which it is easy to see that the moral sense has been bred out of certain sections of the population, like the wings have been bred off certain chickens to produce more white meat on them. This is a generation of wingless chickens, which I suppose is what Nietzsche meant when he said God was dead.

     I am mighty tired of reading reviews that call A Good Man [Is Hard to Find] brutal and sarcastic. The stories are hard, but they are hard because there is nothing harder or less sentimental than Christian realism. I believe there are many rough beasts slouching toward Bethlehem to be born and that I have reported the progress of a few of them, and when I see these stories described as horror stories I am always amused because the reviewer always has hold of the wrong horror.

From Flannery O'Connor's first letter to Betty Hester, dated July 20, 1955.

Betty Hester was still living when The Habit of Being: Letters of Flannery O'Connor was first published. She wished to remain anonymous and was called "A" in the book. The excerpt above is from page 90. There are further quotes and commentary on this and related letters, commentary written by Maria Popova and found on the website The Marginalian, here. By the way, chickens without wings makes me think of men without chests.

I concluded what I wrote last month as follows:

An atheist or materialist is certainly capable of apprehending horror on a cosmic scale, but can his apprehension compare to that of a Christian, or perhaps more specifically to that of a Roman Catholic? I don't know. But I would like to read more from Flannery O'Connor's letter and to learn more about her conception of horror, in other words, what in her view is the "right" horror. She may or may not have been writing about horror on a specifically cosmic scale, but in Christian teaching is there much space that separates personal from cosmic horror? Or does cosmic horror descend into our lives when given a chance, distilled from vastness into potent, earthly, personal horror?

Like I said, I don't know whether an atheist or materialist is capable of apprehending cosmic horror in the same way that a Christian can. I also don't know whether a Roman Catholic specifically is more attune to cosmic horror than are other Christians. But writing what I wrote got me thinking about related things. So here goes . . .

Catholicism stands alone or almost alone in Christianity as an ancient religion. It originated literally in the ancient world. It is connected by unbroken links to the life and time of Christ and to its origins in the Levant. Not only did Catholicism arise in the ancient world, it also arose in a pagan and pre-Christian world. In contrast, Protestant religions arose in an already civilized and thoroughly Christianized world, specifically in Europe, out of direct contact with ancient, Asiatic, pagan, and pre-Christian gods and ways. Owing to its time and place of origin, the Catholic Church was in direct contact with these gods and ways. I think that's an important point when it comes to cosmic horror, for the old gods of ancient Asia and Egypt were of a kind not encountered in Medieval or Modern times--at least until now, for, although they were banished in Ancient times, they have since returned.

Flannery O'Connor wrote to Betty Hester again on August 2, 1955. Among her words:

One of the awful things about writing when you are a Christian is that for you the ultimate reality is the Incarnation, the present reality is the Incarnation, and nobody believes in the Incarnation; that is, nobody in your audience. My audience are the people who think God is dead. At least these are the people I am conscious of writing for. (p. 92)

So again, she returned to the Nietzschean idea that God is dead. Nietzsche made his observation in 1882, near the end of a century of progress and science, also of skepticism about God, faith, and religion. Also during that century, Weird returned. (Weird, however, is not an old god and is in fact not a god at all.) By the way, looking for Nietzsche in Flannery O'Connor's letters is what led me to her first letter to Betty Hester, for I didn't know when I searched that Betty Hester was "A," and "Hester, Betty" is not in the index. It was only by happenstance (or maybe not) that Nietzsche's name is in the same letter as the excerpt I had previously found about the "wrong" horror." I don't know whether "A" refers to Betty Hester's anonymity or to her last name, which is the same as Hester Prynne's Christian name in The Scarlet Letter. The scarlet letter in Nathaniel Hawthorne's novel (or romance) is of course "A."

After I wrote at Christmastime, Will Oliver left a comment explaining what Flannery meant when she mentioned the "right" horror. He concluded: "The cosmic horror is not that we are insignificant in a vast, indifferent universe, but that we are quite significant but too poor in faith to recognize that fact." Flannery O'Connor wrote: "nobody believes in the Incarnation" and "[m]y audience are the people who think God is dead." In his essay "It's All Cosmic Horror Without Christmas," Brandon Morse emphasizes God as our protector against "things more powerful and terrible than we can imagine. Things that would annihilate us if they weren't restrained." These are demons, terrible entities, dark forces. They are one possible source of our sense of cosmic horror. In his Letter to the Ephesians, St. Paul wrote:

For we are not contending against flesh and blood, but against the principalities, against the powers, against the world rulers of this present darkness, against the spiritual hosts of wickedness in the heavenly places. (Ephesians 6:12)

"heavenly places," meaning not heaven but the spiritual realm that exists above and outside of the mundane. Mr. Morse also writes about the Abyss "like a dimension of space-time so removed from God's love that going there is nightmarish even to the most evil of creatures." If we live in an ordered Cosmos, then the Abyss (or Void) exists outside of it. If demons and old gods dread going there, perhaps it's only because they originated in the Abyss and know what it's like to exist there, once and again in exile. Even they crave God's company. Absent from Cosmos, tenanting Chaos, perhaps they descend into gibbering madness, as with Lovecraft's old god Azathoth.

Ancient, Asiatic, pagan, and pre-Christian peoples worshipped and sacrificed to the principalities, powers, and rulers of darkness. These were the old gods--Baal, Asherah, Moloch, and so on--sent into exile by the advent of Christianity. But once "the people who think God is dead" began proliferating, the old gods found their way back. If we disbelieve in God and the Incarnation, then we no longer have a protector, and cosmic horrors once again impinge upon us. Old gods return. Atheists and materialists are correct in their apprehension of cosmic horror. What they fail to understand is that they have broken down the walls and thrown open the gates to such things by their disbelief. By their disbelief, they have forsaken the only power that can guard them from horrors and save them from insanity and despair. Maybe to Flannery O'Connor the "right" horror was her recognition that "nobody believes in the Incarnation," that they instead believe that "God is dead." By this formulation, No-God equates to horror.

* * *

Two more points:

First, one of the successes of Catholicism is that it has tied itself to reason, including to ancient Greek sources of knowledge and wisdom. Cosmos is ordered. It obeys laws. An understanding of it and its Creator is open to us through reason. The Abyss or Void is, in contrast, disordered, chaotic, irrational. It invites these selfsame things that are within us. To be drawn by disorder, chaos, and irrationality is to be drawn to the Abyss. To be drawn by order, law, and reason is to be drawn to God: Flannery O'Connor loved St. Thomas Aquinas and read his Summa Theologica every night before shutting her eyes. (p. 94)

Second, one of the great wonders of Medieval and early Renaissance art is its fantastic visions of hell and damnation. Call it Catholic horror art. I'm not sure that those who disbelieve in God are capable of such extraordinary and inspired visions, but the artists who created them lived in an age of faith. To them, these things were real and close at hand. They lived with hope, but they also lived with dread. All of that showed in their art.

A third point will wait until next time.

The Last Judgment, detail, by Giotto, a fresco executed in 1303-1305, in the Arena Chapel, Padua, Italy.

Giotto's fresco makes me think of this cover of Weird Tales, created by Margaret Brundage for the issue of September 1941. The cover story is "Beyond the Threshold" by August Derleth, another Catholic author. I haven't read the story. I can't say that it's about judgment or damnation. I also can't say that Margaret Brundage was inspired by Giotto's image. (Even the color scheme is the same.) Instead, call this a case of artistic convergent evolution.

Original text and captions copyright 2026 Terence E. Hanley

George Washington's Science Fiction Library

A few days after I wrote my last entry, I wondered: just what did the Founding Fathers read? Is it possible that they did actually read what we would call genre fiction? So I asked the Internet that question and got an answer, not by using AI but by going to a website called George Washington's Mt. Vernon and a sub-website--a catalogue--called "Books Owned by George Washington." I searched the catalogue using the keyword "literature." I didn't recognize any explicitly gothic or fantastic title or author. Many of the works of literature owned by George Washington were in fact by British authors of the early to mid eighteenth century. H.P. Lovecraft was supposed to have been fond of Augustan literature. Maybe he would have approved of Washington's library. But then I found the following entry in "Books Owned by George Washington":

Memoirs of the year two thousand five hundred [by] Louis-Sébastien Mercier (1795)

(Boldface added.)

By its title, Mercier's novel is instantly recognizable as a genre work. And so I looked it up on Wikipedia, which, as far as I know, is still being created by human beings. Here are the first two paragraphs of its entry on Mercier's Memoirs:

L'An 2440, rêve s'il en fut jamais (literally, in English, The Year 2440: A Dream If Ever There Was One; but the title has been rendered into English as Memoirs of the Year Two Thousand Five Hundred or Memoirs of the Year 2500, and also as Astraea's Return, or The Halcyon Days of France in the Year 2440: A Dream) is a 1771 novel by Louis-Sébastien Mercier.

It has been described as one of the most popular and controversial novels of the 18th century, one of the earliest works of science fiction, and the first work of utopian fiction set in the future rather than at a distant place in the present.

I find it impossible to reconcile my image of George Washington as a man of eminent practicality with the possibility that he read science fiction. The idea that Abraham Lincoln read tales of ratiocination by Edgar Allan Poe is easy to accept. It fits with him, I think, and with American culture of the nineteenth century. It gives Honest Abe another interesting dimension, this in a man who already has in our imaginations manifold dimensions. But then I have to realize that Memoirs of the Year Two Thousand Five Hundred is a utopian story, thus an implicitly--or explicitly--political one. It also bears in an indirect way on the French Revolution. As a man involved in politics and revolution, maybe Washington recognized the value in reading or perusing a book like Memoirs. (Both he and Mercier were Masons, too.) Whatever the case may be, it's fascinating to learn that George Washington had in his library a work of proto-science fiction.

One more thing: like Buck Rogers, Mercier's unnamed protagonist sleeps his way into the 25th century.

Original text copyright 2026 Terence E. Hanley

Weird Tales and the American Revolution

On July 4, 2026, the United States of America will reach its 250th anniversary. A century ago, in our sesquicentennial year of 1926, Weird Tales magazine was in its third and fourth years in print. I haven't found anything yet by which the publisher and editor acknowledged the sesquicentennial. I'm not sure that I will. I also haven't found and can't think of any weird tale set during the Revolutionary War or with the war as its backdrop. I admit that my title above is misleading. At least it's not clickbait.

Washington Irving (1783-1859) was the earliest American author to have appeared in Weird Tales. Born during the final year of the Revolutionary War, he died seventeen months before the Civil War commenced. His lifetime, then, stretched between two of our foundational wars. It's possible to think of American history as a fabric held up by the tentpoles of war. Irving's life might illustrate that idea. Another example, and a minor one to be sure: Weird Tales magazine was founded after the Great War had ended and possibly only because there had been a war. The great era of Weird Tales--if we can call it that--ended before the Second World War began, or at least no later than in the course of that war. Like so much American greatness, this one came in an interbellum period.

Weird Tales reprinted four of Irving's stories, the last being "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow" (Nov. 1928). When I said that I can't think of a weird tale that has the Revolution as its backdrop, that's not quite true. After all, the Headless Horseman is rumored to be the ghost of a Hessian soldier, while a stream in a haunted place in Irving's story flows by the tulip-tree where Major André was captured by three Americans in 1780. The American Revolution also figures in "Rip Van Winkle," which can also be called a fantasy or a weird tale. As for a weird tale of the Revolution written in later years, especially in the twentieth century, I can't think of a one.

The Civil War is closer to us in every way. Years ago I met a hog farmer in southeastern Indiana whose grandfather was a twelve-year-old boy when Morgan's Raiders came around and stole some horses from his father's barn. Only two generations separated that hog farmer from the war. Only one more separated me from him. On another farm not far away, a widow in her nineties told me that there were supposed to have been graves on a point of land above the forks of a ravine where escaped slaves had been buried. I looked where she asked me to look. Did I see, or did I only make myself see, several grave-sized areas of sunken soil on that point? Although I have an ancestor who served in the Revolutionary War--his name was William Hall--I have nothing comparable to tell about it. It really was so very long ago, closer to the English Renaissance and William Shakespeare's time than it is to our own.

I can think right away of a weird tale set during the Civil War. It's called "The Valley Was Still," and it was written by Manly Wade Wellman. Weird Tales published Wellman's story its issue of August 1939, the month before another war began. "The Valley Was Still" was adapted to film in an episode of The Twilight Zone. It was broadcast in November 1961, one hundred years and a few months after the war began. Ambrose Bierce wrote stories about the Civil War. So did Jack Matthews. Some of these are straight war stories. Others, such as Bierce's "An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge," have certain weird elements or show the influence of weird in our lives. I recently read some of the late Mr. Matthews' stories in his collection Tales of the Ohio Land (1978). Like H.P. Lovecraft and Washington Irving, Jack Matthews had a well-developed sense of place. I have been to some of the places about which he wrote. The author Fitz-James O'Brien was killed in the Civil War. Both he and Bierce had stories reprinted in Weird Tales.

Men in Revolutionary times wore breeches and stockings, gorgets and ruffles, tricorn hats and even wigs. Although they had long rifles, most carried muskets--all were muzzleloaders. The men who fought the Civil War wore trousers and kepis and fired factory-made rifles, some of which were breechloaders, as well as the first machine guns. They went up in balloons, rode on railroad trains, and communicated by telegraph. We have photographs of them in camp and in the aftermath of their battles with each other. We have images of their fresh corpses. These have immediacy and tragedy that no engraving or drawing of the eighteenth century can match. Although there weren't any movie cameras just yet, watching The General--released on New Year's Eve 1926 and starring Buster Keaton--is like opening a window into the past, a really astonishing experience when you get down to it. As we watch, it's hard to believe that we are not in fact seeing film footage from 1862. When that movie was made, there were countless thousands still living who vividly remembered the war and its events. That was only one hundred years ago. There are people still living who were alive then.

I can propose an explanation as to a lack of weird fiction set during the Revolutionary War or with the war as its backdrop. It goes something like this: the American Revolution occurred during the Age of Reason and before the Romantic Era and the return of weird. Weird, or wyrd, faded as a word and a concept during the middle centuries of the second millennium, only to return during the Romantic Era. For example, the earliest use in verse of the noun weird that I have found is in Robert Burns' poem "Her Answer," from 1795. That was of course after the Revolutionary period had ended. Less significant, I think, but still worth considering is that Americans during the Revolution were less literate as a whole than in later eras (two of the three men who captured Major André could not read), and there wasn't much of a popular press and almost no fiction.

But that doesn't explain why later writers would not have written weird fiction about the Revolutionary War. Or if there is any, maybe I just haven't found it yet.

I should add that, although Gothic fiction got its start in the decade before the Revolutionary War, it may not have traveled very well to America. And although one of our earliest authors, Charles Brockden Brown (1771-1810), wrote Gothic works, his were all published after the Revolutionary period, and, as far as I know, none has the Revolution as its backdrop.

In contrast to the Revolutionary War, the Civil War occurred after Romanticism had swept through western culture. The men and women of the 1860s would have been immersed in it, I think, even if it had by then decayed into a kind of sentimentalism. Weird was present nonetheless, and it was approaching a high period, if there was such a thing. If there was such a thing, maybe the high period of weird fiction ran from the 1870s or '80s until the 1930s or '40s (for a total of threescore and ten years?). And maybe world war brought that period to an end as well. Anyway, I don't sense any Romanticism or sentimentalism in the Revolutionary War. The American Revolution instead seems to have been a sober, serious, practical, and realistic matter, even if it was underlain by and fought for the highest ideals. Maybe that's why it worked so well and continues to do so now, 250 years later.

There is a recently released documentary series on the American Revolution available on pay TV. It was made by a man who gained fame--justly--for his previous series on the Civil War. Again, the Civil War is closer to us and more immediate. It would prove difficult, if not impossible, to treat the American Revolution with the same kind of effectiveness. It would be hard to evoke the same kinds of feelings in the viewer that that long-ago series on the Civil War did. But I also think that no one is really up to this task anymore. The minds of the documentary makers and too many of their experts have been taken over by small ideas and their thoughts misdirected by erroneous belief systems. And as the last episode of that series--specifically a quote: "No one is above the law"--demonstrates, their minds have also been taken over by a peculiar brand of derangement that does them no good at all and in fact causes them great harm. I hope they and the rest of the world will soon get over it, if only for their own sake.

I'll add one more thought, because I can't think of anywhere else it might go right now: one of the outgrowths of the American Revolution is our Bill of Rights. Among our rights is the right to speak freely. That right is enshrined in the First Amendment. Enshrined in the Second is a guarantee for all of the others. Non-Americans and anti-Americans harp on our keeping and bearing of arms. What they fail to understand is that we have guns because the only language that tyrants seem to understand is the sound of lead flying in their direction. Our nation began in violence because violence is very often necessary if human beings are to gain or keep their rights and their freedoms. In foreign nations of the past and today, the people are disarmed so that they might be made powerless before their governments. It's easy to take away the rights of people who can't fight back. That's happening apace in the world, including or most especially in the English-speaking world, which is where the modern concept of liberty was born. We in America don't want violence. We want peace. But we also want to be free. Too often, violence is forced upon us because there are those who will always seek to deprive us of our freedoms. That is as true here as anywhere. And so we have the fabric of our history held up, as I have said, by the tentpoles of war. The expression is that the United States of America is the Empire of Liberty. As such, we will continue and forever oppose the empires of tyranny. So I will say, exactly half a year early, Happy Birthday, America!

Copyright 2026 Terence E. Hanley

Weird Tales in 1926

Happy New Year!

Twenty-six doesn't have the ring of twenty-five. For being an even number, it's kind of odd. But in 2026, we will celebrate 250 years since we declared our independence from an Old World tyranny. Although Old World brands of tyranny still threaten us, they threaten more the common, ordinary people of Europe, many of whom are being made into subjects rather than being allowed to remain citizens. Those brands are certain to keep coming back. We will be certain to keep knocking them down. Sometimes this is a deadly activity, as it was in 1917-1918 and 1941-1945. Other times it's fun. For example, the U.S. government recently denied visas to five supreme European censors and scolds. They and their governments stamped their tiny feet in response. Let them stamp. And let's hope this remains fun. Let's hope that the fullest freedoms will soon march unimpeded down the avenues of Europe.

In 1926, America celebrated its sesquicentennial, including at the world's fair in Philadelphia. That doesn't seem to have turned out very well. Our bicentennial celebration in 1976 was much better and more memorable, I think. I remember it at least, including images of the tall ships in New York Harbor, many of which came from our friends in Europe. You can still find bicentennial books and collectibles at secondhand stores. I don't think I have ever seen a collectible or book about the American sesquicentennial.

In 1926, Weird Tales magazine turned three years old. It was the second full year of the magazine, as well as the second full year with Farnsworth Wright as editor. I doubt that the sesquicentennial was on the minds of the publisher, editor, staff, writers, and readers of "The Unique Magazine." At least I haven't found any evidence that it was.

Weird Tales is supposed to have been the first American magazine devoted exclusively to fantastic fiction. But was it really? Part of the problem with this idea is that most people don't really know what weird fiction is. They don't seem to know that weird fiction is not necessarily the same as fantasy or horror. Weird fiction is, I think, its own separate sub-genre. There need not be a fantastic or supernatural element in a work of weird fiction. There should be, however, a weird element. It's not weird if it doesn't have weird.

I haven't read every issue of Weird Tales in the period beginning in March 1923 and ending in March 1926. (The month of March is important for a reason. We'll get to that in a minute.) What I can say is that not every story in the issues that I have read is a tale of fantasy, pseudoscience, or supernatural horror. Without reading further, I can't say which issue, if any, was the very first devoted exclusively to fantasy during that three-year period. However . . .

In April 1926, a new magazine appeared on newsstands in America. Although it had its predecessors, it was "a new sort of magazine." That was in fact the title of the opening essay of Amazing Stories, edited by Hugo Gernsback. There were only six stories in that inaugural issue. All were reprints, but all were fantastic. Until we know something different, Amazing Stories will have to remain as a candidate for the first American magazine devoted exclusively to fantastic fiction.

By the way, the first several issues of Amazing Stories were made up of all reprints. One of those was "The Malignant Entity" by Otis Adelbert Kline, originally in Weird Tales in May/June/July 1924.

Something else big happened in April 1926. That was the month in which H.P. Lovecraft returned to Providence after two years of marriage and life in New York City. The exact date was April 17, 1926. Later that year, in the summer in fact, Lovecraft wrote "The Call of Cthulhu," which was published in the February 1928 issue of Weird Tales. And another something else big happened in regards to Lovecraft when Weird Tales published his story "The Outsider" in its issue of April 1926.

August Derleth made his debut in the pages of "The Unique Magazine" in May 1926. His story was "Bat's Belfry." He had just turned sixteen years old when it appeared. Perhaps he submitted it at the age of fifteen, thereby making of himself a prodigy. In July 1926, Bassett Morgan had her first story in Weird Tales. She was a popular but not a prolific author. She lived to see the American bicentennial. In August 1926, "The Woman of the Wood" by A. Merritt was published. It proved to be the most popular story in Weird Tales in the period 1924 to 1938. Edmond Hamilton had his first story in Weird Tales in that same August issue. His was entitled "The Monster-God of Mamurth." In September 1926, Everil Worrell made her debut with "The Bird of Space."

Harry Houdini died on October 31, 1926. He had contributed to Weird Tales as it struggled through the first half of 1924. Cleveland Moffett, who was in a later incarnation of Weird Tales, had preceded him in death, on October 14. Marietta Hawley, aka "Josiah Allen's Wife," died on March 1, 1926. Her poem "The Haunted Castle" was printed posthumously in Weird Tales.

Richard Matheson, Anne McCaffrey, Roger Corman, J.O. Jeppson, Frank M. Robinson, Jeffrey Hunter, and Poul Anderson were born in 1926. Only the late Mr. Matheson was in Weird Tales.

Also in 1926, The Moon Maid by Edgar Rice Burroughs was published in book form, combining his Moon trilogy of "The Moon Maid" (1923), "The Moon Men" (1925), and "The Red Hawk" (1925). None of those stories was in Weird Tales, but knowing that didn't stop me from writing about them awhile back. The year 2026 is in the Moon trilogy: it's the year that Julian 5th and his crew land on the Moon. As it turns out, the middle book of the trilogy is about a future dystopia in which the Moon Men rule over the people of Earth. Julian 6th, who keeps as a piece of contraband an American flag, leads a revolt against the Moon Men. Unfortunately it fails. Nonetheless, "The Moon Men" is a pro-American and patriotic work. Larger than that, it is pro-human and pro-freedom. Burroughs hardly seems to have been capable of it, but he wrote a visionary work. Writing more than one hundred years ago, he looked ahead to our time, the current year, and in some ways our current situation. Flags and the flying of flags have become controversial, not only in the United States but also in Europe. People should be able to fly the American flag, the Pine Tree Flag, the Gadsden Flag, and, in the United Kingdom, the Union Jack without fear of disapproval and vilification by their own governments and scolds in the mainstream media. But that isn't always true today.

This year I will write about Weird Tales and its authors of 1926, but I also plan to write about other things, including meeting some requests, returning to some unfinished series from the past, and completing some entries that have lingered in draft form for months and years. I invite you to remain, to read and learn, if I have anything to teach you, and to leave comments in the space below. Welcome to the sixteenth calendar year of my blog.

A poster for the Sesquicentennial International Exposition in Philadelphia, June 1 to December 1, 1926. Art by Dan Smith (1865-1934). Published by Elliot Brewer. The half-clad woman in this image would seem to be Liberty. Referred to in the caption as "The Voice of the Liberty Bell," she seems to be emerging from the bell as from a cornucopia, bearing the Stars and Stripes and shedding stars as she emerges like a new constellation. The clock in the bell tower of Independence Hall reads 5:12 or thereabouts. I like to think that I'm up on my knowledge of the American Revolution, but I can't think of any significance as to the time. I guess it had to read one time or another, but I'm always on the lookout for secret and hidden meanings in things. 

Citation: "The Sesquicentennial International Exposition, Philadelphia," Smith, Dan, 1926, Library Broadside Collection, 34463, Tennessee State Library and Archives, Tennessee Virtual Archive, https://teva.contentdm.oclc.org/digital/collection/broadsides/id/36, accessed 2025-12-27.

Text and caption copyright 2026 Terence E. Hanley

Merry Christmas!

Galaxy Science Fiction, January 1956, with cover art by Emsh. We might think that January 1956 was too late for a Christmas cover, but I believe this issue would have been on the newsstand in December 1955 and so not too late after all. Science fiction asks the question What if? Well, Ed Emshwiller answered the question What if Santa Claus had to deliver Christmas presents to the stars and planets? in this clever cover illustration. Included in the cleverness is the artist's use of his signature as the name of the author of How To Manage Reindeer in Space. By the way, Emshwiller was born in 1925, and so we can add his name to the list of those for whom 2025 is the centennial of their arrivals upon Earth. As for the date in this illustration, it looks like December 2055, so one hundred years after Christmas 1955. Unfortunately, the artist was off by one day, for, according to an online future calendar created by Seattle Pacific University, Christmas 2055 will be on a Saturday rather than on a Friday. That's a meaningless quibble. But next year, in 2026, Christmas will in fact fall on a Friday. Before then, I will wish everyone a Merry Christmas!

Caption copyright 2025 Terence E. Hanley

A Lovecraft Sighting at Christmas

An essay about God, Christmas, and the birth of Jesus Christ is a strange place to find a discussion of H.P. Lovecraft, but that's where I came upon another Lovecraft sighting. As a bonus, there is also the phrase cosmic horror in the title of the essay. The essay is called "It's All Cosmic Horror Without Christmas," and it's by Brandon Morse. Go to the website RedState in order to read it. Mr. Morse's essay is dated today, December 23, 2025.

I'm planning to write more about cosmic horror in 2026. I'm afraid I haven't exhausted that topic yet. There is always more to read, more to learn, more ideas about which to think and write. One of my topics in the new year will be August Derleth on H.P. Lovecraft and Clark Ashton Smith, also a possible difference between horror and terror.

August Derleth was a Roman Catholic. H.P. Lovecraft was famously an atheist or materialist, at least at the surface, or at least a few layers down from the surface. I doubt that they would have agreed very much on what constitutes cosmic horror. I'm not sure that Derleth would have had the same kind of depth in his thinking as Lovecraft. In any case, in his essay, Brandon Morse approaches cosmic horror from the side of the believer. His approach gives us something different to think about in terms of cosmic horror. He even mentions the horrors of the Abyss. One difference  between the Christian and Lovecraftian viewpoints is that Lovecraft did not allow for a protector. We live at the mercy of malign entities. The Christian on the other hand believes that in God we have a protector of matchless power, thus Mr. Morse's title.

The following quotation is from Flannery O'Connor (1925-1964). Since reading it, these words and the idea underlying them have been on my mind:

"I am mighty tired of reading reviews that call A Good Man [Is Hard to Find] brutal and sarcastic. The stories are hard, but they are hard because there is nothing harder or less sentimental than Christian realism. . . . When I see these stories described as horror stories I am always amused because the reviewer always has hold of the wrong horror." (From a letter to Betty Hester, July 1955; presumably the ellipses are not in the original.)

An atheist or materialist is certainly capable of apprehending horror on a cosmic scale, but can his apprehension compare to that of a Christian, or perhaps more specifically to that of a Roman Catholic? I don't know. But I would like to read more from Flannery O'Connor's letter and to learn more about her conception of horror, in other words, what in her view is the "right" horror. She may or may not have been writing about horror on a specifically cosmic scale, but in Christian teaching is there much space that separates personal from cosmic horror? Or does cosmic horror descend into our lives when given a chance, distilled from vastness into potent, earthly, personal horror?

Original text copyright 2025 Terence E. Hanley

Sleep

Today is the first day of winter and the day and the earth sleep.

Gil Gerard died last week, on December 16, 2025, at age eighty-two. If you watched American television in the 1970s and '80s and were a fan of science fiction and fantasy, you remember Gil Gerard as the star of Buck Rogers in the 25th Century (1979-1981). The premise of Buck Rogers should be familiar to everyone by now: a man of an earlier time sleeps, only to awaken in a later time and to a greatly altered world.

Buck Rogers in the 25th Century was based on the comic strip of the same name, which made its debut on January 7, 1929, with art by Dick Calkins and a script by Philip Francis Nowlan. The comic strip was based in turn on Nowlan's novella Armageddon 2419 A.D., first published in Amazing Stories in August 1928. In the original, Buck is placed into suspended animation by the collapse of an old coal mine and his exposure to a radioactive gas. The date of the collapse is December 15. Throw away the year and you have the day before Gil Gerard's death, his first day of eternal sleep.

The sleeper who awakes is common in science fiction and fantasy. I have written these past two months about Washington Irving and "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow." Well, his other very famous story is "Rip Van Winkle" (1819), in which the title character sleeps twenty years, through the American Revolution, after having gotten drunk with the ghostly crew of the ship the Halve Maen. He awakens into America and his own lost past.

The sleeper or man in suspended animation is in other stories. They include: Looking Backward: 2000-1887 by Edward Bellamy (1888); When the Sleeper Awakes (1899) or The Sleeper Awakes (1910) by H.G. Wells; Beyond This Horizon by Robert A. Heinlein (1942); "The Marching Morons" by C.M. Kornbluth (1951); After Utopia by Mack Reynolds (1977); the Star Trek episode "Space Seed" (1967); The Planet of the Apes, with a script by Rod Serling (1968); Sleeper, co-written and directed by Woody Allen (1973); and Idiocracy, directed by Mike Judge (2006).

Sleeping in science fiction and fantasy is a kind of time travel. As a form of time travel, it's related to the dilation of time in relativistic physics and as such is ready-made for the science fiction author's purposes. Before falling into sleep, Gil Gerard offered us a time-and-space-travel valediction: "See You Out Somewhere in the Cosmos."

Original text copyright 2025 Terence E. Hanley