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this post was submitted on 19 Sep 2023
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Honestly, the "cosmic horror" or the mere fear of the unknown kind of plays into that as well.
One could argue there's something inherently racist in sci-fi horror that depicts aliens as monsters when in fact they might just simply be different intelligent lifeforms with their own set of needs...
There might be sometimes problems among intelligent lifeforms to properly understand / communicate, or conflicts in our goals. But painting everything alien/unknown as inherently scary is kind of racist, even if in some situations it might be written in our instincts to not trust that which is unfamiliar.
TOS Star Trek had a great episode called Devil in the Dark dealing with that subject, where an inhuman monster is killing miners and it turns out that it was an intelligent life form that was protecting its eggs.
The Horta did nothing wrong!
Yeah maybe my mind is getting muddled with age but I vaguely remember several sci Fi settings with that kind of "from a certain perspective" moments in the 80s/90s. The matrix backstory is another just replace aliens with robots. Hell mars attacks though the late 90s early 2000s kinda flips that on its head by having several scenes where humans think they're just misunderstanding the martians diplomacy and the martians having 0 interest in diplomacy.
I think in most of them, the aliens were basically anthropomorphic. The only one I can think of off the top of my head that's similar to Devil in the Dark is the movie Monsters (which I personally did not like), where the aliens were viewed as a threat, but they actually just didn't care about humans.
I wasn’t even talking about his horror, to be honest. The man himself was a hot mess of being afraid of everyone different. As well as being oddly picky about who he applied it to - he was extremely antisemitic but married a Jewish woman. He hated gay people but one of his best friends was gay. It was like he hated the idea of Others but was ok with an very few individuals on a very personal level.
As for what you’ve brought up, that’s often, I think, why SF can be used to explore racism or themes of racism. By making a complete alien The Other, you can look at and explore ideas that would nowadays get folks screaming “WOKE!!!” if you tried to explore it with races of people.
Yes, his relationship with the idea of "Others" is strange... like a love/hate relationship. In fact, the cat which you mentioned (named after a racial slur, though it seems it was not him who named it) was deeply loved by him... he using his cat's name in one of his works was more of a way to honor it rather than anything else, there's letters from him claiming he was still mourning even though it was more than 20 years since it vanished.
A lot of people can hold low key prejudices against the abstract notion of a group of people but make exceptions for people that they actually know, it's really weird but that's humans for you...
Only Lovecraft wasn’t low-key at all. Dude was high-key, so much that people in his own time were saying he was racist. I mean, there’s a Hitler or Lovecraft quiz out there.
Lovecraft had very complex thinking about race, oddly enough. He was ok with his Jewish wife because she was “assimilated enough” because at the time he thought assimilation was best. Later, he went against that and thought non-whites should keep their own cultures (but those cultures were inferior) and praised groups trying to do so, and looked down on anyone not Anglo-Saxon. Dude was a paradox and how.
Hey cool that's by Zoe Quinn!
Point taken though - didn't do the whole thing but more then a few I thought were Hitler turned out to be Lovecraft. Never actually read any of his books. (Lovecraft's that is. Well Hitler's either thinking about it...)