The Passing Place

Self-publishing: A Guidebook for the Tourist#2: Reviews

Posted on January 28, 2017 by Mark Hayes

“There are a whole lot of people out there in internet-land trying to help you become a self-publishing genius. The vast majority of them have one thing in common. They are trying to make money out of you.”

As I believe I said last time in my rough guide to social media. This time, however, I am going to cover the subject of reviews. Why you need them, how to get them, why you occasionally can’t get them even when a person who has read your book wants to do one for you… And oh yes… Those people out in internet land who will write you a review ‘for a small fee‘, because if there is one thing you can be certain of it is that someone will always be willing to try and make some money out of your dreams of becoming a self-publishing deity…

Reviews, the How, the Why and the Pitfalls…

Amazon, once just the largest river in the southern American’s, famed for its rainforests, native peoples in Mel Gibson movies, and the occasional piranha. Now the biggest retailer of stuff via the internet in the world. A conglomerate that started out only a few short years ago in a small warehouse selling books to e-mail order, and now sells everything under the sun, is a multi-media empire and the biggest kid on the block in the world of self-publishing. Traditional bookshops have lost the battle against the internet and supermarket bookshelves, and the ones who evolved with the technology like ‘Barns and Noble’ are fighting a valiant rearguard action with their own platform ‘Kobo’. Meanwhile, there is Smashwords, iBook, generic E-readers and various platforms for self-publishing. But the king is ‘Kindle’ like it or not. Amazon is the largest, most recognisable and most arguably most important place that the self-publishing author needs to engage with, and don’t they know it… They hold the keys to the kingdom, if you want to succeed anywhere, then you have to succeed there.

How you succeed there, apart from by selling lots of books, is through reviews. Indeed, what you have with Amazon is something akin to the classic chicken and egg scenario. The easiest way to sell books on Amazon is to have lots of reviews, in order to get lots of reviews on Amazon you have to sell lots of books. And here is why…

If your book has 20-25 reviews on Amazon, then Amazon’s website will start to promote your book in the ‘Also bought by people who bought this book‘ and the ‘You might like this‘ lists you see when someone looks at a book on the site in a similar category. Which gives your book a whole lot more visibility on the site. It’s free advertising, reaching out to your core audience, and doing so in a far more efficient way than all those social media posts I talked about last time. It invites the curious to have a look at your book and does so at a time when they are seeking to buy a book. Which is a neat trick…

The next milestone and the one you really really want to attain is 50-70 reviews because at this point Amazon goes out to bat for you. They will highlight the book for spotlight positions, which means that those emails people occasionally get, (the ones in your spam folder from Amazon), with a bunch of books ‘You might like’, will start to include your book. The ‘Also bought by people who bought this book‘ and the ‘You might like this‘ lists will start to push your book to the front of the lists. In short, Amazon starts doing a lot of the heavy lifting in book promotion terms, again direct to your core audience. The people who will want to read your book, the ones who will hopefully love your book. The ones you want to read it, because ultimately while some of us may claim we don’t really care about how many sales we have so long as people who do read the book enjoy it. What we actually mean is we want as many people as possible to read our work. Most writers do not write because they want to be read, but all writers once they have written, want to be read as much as possible.

The same applies to the likes of ‘Smashwords’, ‘Barns and Noble’ and everyone else. But again Amazon is the king of the market and where you want to be. There are other factors which influence Amazon’s promotion of your work. If you can get a book high in their charts as a best seller then they will do the same thing, but while it’s relatively easy to get a high rating in the ‘free’ charts the paid ones are harder to climb, and reviews influence their decisions as much as previous sales, and when you’re first starting out reviews are easier to get than mass sales. Targeting book releases to get high in the charts, that’s a whole different topic.

So that’s the why, now the hard bit, now the how. The simple answer is, find readers, and then you find reviewers. Oh if only it were that simple…

Your friends will leave reviews if you ask them, probably. Random readers who you manage to find (and to be clear, you have to find them, they are unlikely to just turn up one day because your book is on Amazon) may leave reviews. Most don’t. Which is a position I have a modicum of sympathy for because until I started self-publishing, it would never have occurred to me to leave a review after reading a book. Occasionally, if I read it on my Kindle, and the review page at the end of the book pops up I might have given a book a few stars and a few words, but more often than not I would put the Kindle down, turn over and go to sleep, or start reading something else. It wasn’t until I started publishing my own work, and did a little research, that I realised the whole ‘why’ I spoke about earlier and started doing short reviews whenever I finished an indie book or the book of some unknown author I had stumbled across.

There are other options, book bloggers, reviewers, other writers who read and review stuff for people. You can find them on Goodreads, on Facebook groups, on the internet in general. You may remember me saying last time that ‘Engaging with the community is priceless…‘ and this is one of the many reasons why. It is also, however, one of the pitfalls, and one of the places overrun with those lovely individuals willing to help you out ‘for a small fee‘ remember them? Well, we will get to them in a moment.

Goodreads, to use an example, have hundreds of review groups, these are populated by writers and readers happy to review your work. These are a godsend, often they set up three-way review exchanges, or multiple reviews in a round robin group with other writers, it’s a great way not only to get reviews for your own work but to discover new writers, often for nothing in book exchanges. If you’re honest, open and give open, honest reviews on the books, you read. Some groups on there are just for readers looking for ‘free’ books to read in exchange for honest reviews. There is nothing wrong with that, but I advise caution, as it’s one of the pitfalls.

Occasionally, very occasionally, you will get an arsehole who will take a copy of your book and start giving it away on the internet. Kindle copy-tag books so this can not happen if you send them to someone’s Kindle email address. THIS IS THE ONLY WAY YOU SHOULD EVER GIVE SOMEONE A FREE COPY OF YOUR BOOK. If someone offer’s to review your book and doesn’t know their Kindle email address tell them to go to Amazon and find it in their account details. If someone is offended that you don’t just trust them, then they will get over it. If they’re really offended and offensive about it, cut them off. They may be genuine, and just easily offended but better one person hurt than a copy of your hard work on a torrent site. Unlike a print copy that could be lent to someone, then end up in a charity shop a couple of times, a torrent copy of your novel could be on every torrent site in about an hour, and it is effectively in the public domain from then on.

Another pitfall is some writers offering “like for like” reviews, often with the unfortunate words “5star for 5star...” tagged onto it. The former is just someone badly informed, the latter… well let’s just say I would not touch them with a bargepole. If you think I am about to climb on my high horse, you’re right. Offering to give someone a 5star review before you read a book is just nigh criminal. It is the reason bad indie books, by which I mean really bad indie books, get a bunch of 5star reviews, and readers get turned off by bad indie books and just go back to reading mainstream authors. None of us in the self-publish community want that…

Let me hold my hand up, I have a real problem with “5star for 5star...”, those who try to do that are right up there with the ‘for a small fee‘ brigade… I would sooner have an honest review every time, good or bad, (and they are mostly good). It corrupts the system and is let’s face it corrupt. Fortunately, for me, this is an opinion shared by Amazon, which is the other reason why you should stay clear of “like for like” reviews. If you review a writer’s book, and that writer reviews your book, Amazon’s algorithms will spot the author for author reviews and delete both. They did this not because they don’t like writers reviewing other writers but to block “5star for 5star...” review trading. Unfortunately, this also hits honest “like for like” reviews where both parties have just read and review each other books without any complicit cheating. As so often with Amazon they try to block people cheating the system, and in doing so hurt all the honest people as well. The same applies to the endless attempts to make Kindle Unlimited a fair and uncorrupted system (that’s a subject for another post, however). So, unfortunately, doing “like for like” reviews is no longer a worthwhile exercise.

Yet another pitfall is Facebook, yep old faceache… lots, if not the majority of Amazon users who use Facebook have the accounts linked. Amazon pushes it that way because it wants you to post on facebook when you buy something. It makes sound business sense for them to do this. Unfortunately, another victim of Amazons attempts to clean up the review system is they will if they have access to your Facebook profile, block reviews by anyone who is your friend on Facebook.

(STOP READING NOW AND GO TO AMAZON AND UNLINK YOU ACCOUNT WITH YOUR FACEBOOK)

… your back, good, sadly that was pointless because everyone else has their accounts linked and the algorithms work both ways.

Luckily they changed the policy so that if the reader bought on Amazon, or on Kindle, or borrowed from kindle unlimited, it will circumvent the block usually and accept the review. Unfortunately, if you get a couple of dozen print copies from CreateSpace Direct for those members of your friends and family who want signed print copies, as Amazon did not sell them to the reader, the Facebook block on reviews stands… Yes okay, you remember I said in the first post that this was based on experience… I have made mistakes, this was one of them and the reason Passing Place is missing about 20 odd reviews on Amazon…

Then there is yet another pitfall, easily fallen into if you’re less than honest about the subject of reviews, the paid review. And no I have never done this, but there are people on ‘Ffiver’ and Facebook sites and elsewhere who offer to do a paid review, ‘for a small fee‘, and you pay them to buy a copy of your book and then you pay them to do the review. Amazon doesn’t like this, the majority of writers don’t like this. But it’s the real world, and someone will always be out there offering ‘for a small fee‘ services. There are moral reasons not to use them, if you need me to explain them then it would be a waste of my time and yours for me to do so. But if you’re tempted, and your morality is flexible enough due to ‘Just want to get to 25 reviews dammit‘ here is the reason other than personal morality why you shouldn’t. Amazon will take down reviews from any account found to be selling reviews, they do get reported, and Amazon looks for them. (It was part of the reason they started their crusade against ‘fake’ reviews in the first place, and like all crusades, it is driven by zealotry and harms the innocent along the way). So if your suspect morality leads you that way be warned you’re wasting your money, and my sympathy is limited…

Like my previous post, the answer to the question of reviews is always engagement with the community and your readers. Ask people nicely for reviews, and keep asking. Find Goodreads groups with reviewers on them, find book bloggers willing to read and review your book, be careful, never pay for a review. And keep engaged, and with luck, and good judgement you hit the review targets on Amazon and your off to the races….

Adios for now

Mark..

Self-publishing: A guidebook for the tourist, will be back with another informative and occasionally rant post in the near future, feel free to follow the blog so you don’t miss a post 🙂

The previous post for those who missed it can be found here.

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Posted in self-publishing, writes | Tagged #amwriting, #selfpub | 10 Comments

The Transition of Juan Romero: the complete Lovecraft #10

Posted on January 26, 2017 by Mark Hayes

‘The Transition of Juan Romero‘ is a strange fish as far as Lovecraft’s fiction goes. Like ‘Old Bugs‘ it was first published posthumously by Arkham House as Lovecraft himself disavowed the story, and refused to allow it to be published in his lifetime. Which raises a couple of questions, firstly about the morality of publishing houses ignoring the wishes of the writer, and secondly just why Lovecraft disavowed it in the first place. The former is one of those questions that come down to the lure of the greenback winning out over the writer’s wishes. The latter is a story all of its own, and insight into Lovecraft the critic with his occasionally bitchy attitude to other writers in the amateur press circles he frequented.

‘Transition‘ was written over the course of a single September day in 1919. The sixteenth of September to be exact, which we know because of the reason Lovecraft wrote it. He had got into a discussion about what in his words was a ‘dull yarn’ by a writer called Phil Mac, who was actually Prof Philip Bayaud McDonald, who’s most renown contribution to literature is the ponderously titled ‘A saga of the seas;: The story of Cyrus W. Field and the laying of the first Atlantic cable‘. The dull yarn in question was a short story set in a desert, which is now sadly lost to the world, or not as the case may be… But the lasting result of the ‘dull yarn‘ was Lovecraft decided to show what could be done with a story set in a desert which gave us ‘The Transition of Juan Romero‘. While Phil Mac’s story may well have been dull. Lovecraft’s is far from one of his best, which probably explains why something which was the result of an exercise in proving himself more capable than another writer was quickly dismissed by Lovecraft himself. He sent it to a few friends he corresponded with, no doubt to prove his point, and if he hadn’t done so, it is unlikely the story would ever have found the light of day. Most collections of Lovecraft’s work do not even bother to include it. ‘Luckily’ for me, mine does…

Bearing in mind Lovecraft’s own opinion on ‘The Transition of Juan Romero’ my hopes were not high for this one. I knew the back story to its creation, but I had never gotten around to reading it before because, to be frank if the author disavows it then why bother. But if your going to do the complete Lovecraft, then you have to do the complete Lovecraft, even the bad ones, and having forced my way through ‘Doctor Johnson‘ it would be remiss of me to avoid this one. At least ‘The Transition of Juan Romero’ is more in the tentacle pit than ramblings about 17th-century literati. So, my hopes not high, I read.

In the end, as I said, this is far from his best, but at the same time, it is far from his worst. The stories narrator tells the tale of his time as a miner in the mid-west. An Englishman who had spent time in India before coming to the States, who has a lurking past of some description, Lovecraft makes him a little on the mysterious side. Though it seems more forced than usual, as does the MacGuffin of a Hindu ring. (Lovecraft uses the archaic spelling Hindoo which these days is considered derogatory, in his defence it was much more widespread in 1919). Juan Romero himself is described as of Incan descent, again this comes across as a bit clumsy in the way it is done. While the plot involves a bottomless abyss discovered in the middle of a gold mine and a thunderous night when the narrator’s ring begins to glow. Strange chanting in the dark and coyotes howling, mysterious voices drawing the narrator and his Incan friend into the depths of the mine. This is a story full of atmosphere, because Lovecraft threw atmosphere at it in every way he could, if anything it’s trying too hard. But the biggest fault with the whole story is the sudden rush towards the ending and the oldest of old trope’s, when the narrator wakes up to find the world has reset itself in almost all respects. Except that is for poor Juan Romero himself who has died, without a mark on his body. And the narrator’s ring has disappeared.

But here’s the things, trope-ridden though it is, a grasping hack job through it feels, this is a first draft in most respects. Thrown together in a single day and then chucked in a cupboard and forgotten about. If my own first drafts turn out half this good, then I would be a very happy man, and I have the advantage of a word processor and the insert button. It needs a second draft, a few bits scrapping, others working on and perhaps a stronger ending, but then if Lovecraft wanted this in the world he would have done that no doubt. In the end, this may not be as good as you expect a Lovecraft short story to be, but it is still worth the ink on the page and equally worth a read, though I would not suggest it as anyone’s first Lovecraft unless I did not want them to read more.

I expected to be giving this a solitary tentacle and no more, but hell its better than I expected, all be it not by much and knowing that it was never meant to be out in the world, I feel Lovecraft is owed a little leeway with this forgotten child, so I’ll give it a couple, for the atmosphere is nothing else.

Further Lovecraftian witterings

Posted in Lovecraft, retro book reviews, rites | Tagged cthulhu, horror, Lovecraft | Leave a comment

Self-Publishing: A Guidebook for the Tourist#1

Posted on January 26, 2017 by Mark Hayes

There are a whole lot of people out there in internet-land trying to help you become a self-publishing millionaire. The vast majority of them have one thing in common. They are trying to make money out of you. Indeed judging by just how many of them there are out there, one of the best ways to make money out of self-publishing would seem to be to offer to help people make money out of self-publishing ‘for a small fee‘. Which says a great deal about human nature in many ways, both about wide-eyed writers dreaming of success, and the buzzards circulating to feast off them. The promises are always large, the fee always small, and the results generally are negligible. As a wide-eyed writer myself, I know of what I speak. So in this post and some more in the future, I am going to try to offer a little advice and help to my fellow writers, based on my experience in self-publishing. I have been at it a while, so while my experience may be coloured by my own successes and failures, it will at least be utterly honest, and I promise none of this will involve a small fee…

Social Media Strategies

So, first off, if anyone advertising services to you claim to offer ‘successful’ social media strategies, and access to 2000000 Facebook users (or Twitter feeds or whatever). Don’t. Just don’t. I know it sounds tempting, particularly when they are advertising on ‘Fiverr’ and its only five dollars. I know they offer proof that they are members of the groups they claim to be members of, and show headers with their Twitter following. I know…. but just don’t…

The first thing you need to know about social media strategies is that while they are excellent things to have if your advertising the new blockbuster movie. For something you have self-published and are looking to build an audience for, you need a more focused personal approach. But more importantly, you need to know how social media works. By which I do not mean how to update your Facebook status, or send a tweet, but how it actually works. The reason being, it is very easy to get drawn into the idea that just because a Facebook group has 30’000 members that by posting to it you’re reaching 30’000 people. It doesn’t, you won’t, and neither more to the point will those ‘friendly’ people offering to post for you, ‘for a small fee‘. What actually happens is a post may appear on someone’s feed if they have notifications for the group turned on, and a relatively high percentage won’t have. Even then it depends on algorithms deciding if your post to that group is going to appear on someone’s feed. Which depends on how often they look at and respond to posts from that group. As for people visiting the group, if its one of the ‘author advertise here‘ groups that proliferate Facebook it’s a safe bet the only ones who actually visit the group itself are authors looking to post there. Facebook pages are a better bet, if you make your own, but again now many see a post on a page is always far fewer than those who follow the page. Which in fairness Facebook will tell you when it informs you how many viewers it has reached. You can, of course, boost a post on Facebook if you pay ‘for a small fee’. Though Facebook will direct these ads at your page followers first, then the wider public of people interested in your kind of post. Which is why one of the first people to see your boosted post appear on their feed will be you… It will get to a wider audience, though, and more effectively than posting on 30 or 40 ‘author advertise here‘, groups.

You can drop a post on multiple ‘author advertise here‘ groups twice a day, posting in the for sale posts as well general feed, and do so for months on end, and achieve little. This is not to say you’ll gain nothing. I have sold books this way and indeed met some kind readers through it who have posted reviews and enjoyed the books. But if you do take this approach then accept you will be disappointed with the results, and for the sake of all that is good and holy vary the posts, have more than one hook. It is amazing to me how many people will post exactly the same advert for their book every day for months on twenty to thirty groups and somehow expect a positive reaction. What happens is people glaze over, they have seen your post so often they cease to hold a spark of interest.

Everything I have said above about Facebook goes double for Twitter. Twitter is the ultimate in disposable narrow band social media. So to make the point again the ‘for a small fee‘ what you get from those who claim they will tweet about your book is rarely if ever worth the ‘small fee’, and importantly you can do all that yourself. Though I would advise letting yourself fall down the rabbit hole of social media. More than one writer has found themselves spending more time trying to sell a book than writing the next one. Indeed that is the point where finding good social media people becomes worth that ‘small fee’.

After all that bad news, here is some good. There are people out there who will help you with social media, there are websites where the words ‘for a small fee‘ never come up, or when they do its worth it. The best example I have found is Readers Gazette, but there are others. Readers Gazette will list your book and tweet about it with a nice little professional ad’s for nothing every couple of days for a year after you register your book. (like the example below which is a link to one of my novels there). Frankly, I can not say enough good about them. Good reads equally are free to use, and an excellent way to interact with readers. In both cases, they link into Amazon Kindle, host pages for you, and offer ways to advertise when and if you put your books on sale with Amazon. There are a lot of others, but I recommend those two as a place to start. They are both free and offer free exposure to readers.

Interaction is the key word, it is always the key word. If you use social media just to post adverts then you’re missing the biggest use for it. Connecting with your readers and finding new ones, connecting with reviewers, bloggers, interviewers and other writers is what it is all about. An endless stream of adverts for your novel will not get you far. Engaging with the community is worth more than all those ‘for a small fee‘ options out there. If you take the time to look at what other people have out there, help others to spread the word about the own books, write reviews, share posts, retweet, and like stuff. Then people will reciprocate. If you want to reach people through social media, use the community, but do so by been a part of the community. What you give out will come back to you, retweets of your posts because you retweet theirs. Shares on Facebook because you share theirs. The more you engage with others in the community, the more rewards social media offer the self-publisher, and for that, there is not ‘a small fee.’ Engaging with the community, that is priceless…

Useful links for the self-publisher

Readers Gazette

Goodreads

second post in this series

Self-publishing: A Guidebook for the Tourist#2: Reviews

Links to my own social media, by all means, connect with me on them.

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Posted in publication, self-publishing, writes | Tagged #amwriting, #selfpub, self-publishing | 6 Comments

20000 Leagues under the Sea: Jules Verne: Retro Book Review

Posted on January 25, 2017 by Mark Hayes

If you want to know about a classic, and any book that survives in print long enough generally gets considered a classic, there are plenty of dry Wikipedia entries you could read. No one reviews them in the way they would a modern book. Instead, they hold them in some strange veneration, and odd facts about their creation and their creators seem more important than the books themselves to the Wiki style info-posts. This reviewer then is going to avoid that trap and talk about the book as if it was a new release.

This was an idea formed on my old blog, which is also the driving force between my Complete Lovecraftian posts. I try to avoid weighing them down with facts dry facts. Though interesting ones are a different matter. I have tried to do the same with this Verne Classic, and given the current (and wonderful) steampunk vogue, the tale of Captain Nemo and his remarkable craft is one that bares revisiting.

20000 Leagues Under the Sea: Jules Verne

Something that you should bear in mind right at the start is if your reading Jules Verne, unless you’re reading it in French, you’re not reading the original text. In all probability your not reading the complete text either. There have been numerous translations and editions over the years. Almost all of which are abridged translations. There is a reason for the popularity of abridging Monsieur Verne’s opus, a clue to which lays in the original French title which when translated fully actually read ‘20000 leagues under the sea: an underwater tour of the world.’ As my copy happens to be the unabridged one, unlike the abridged comic book version I read as a child, I read the full translation for this review.

In the unabridged versions of the novel, an undersea tour of the world is exactly what the book is. It’s a travelogue by submarine, which crisscrosses its way through all the oceans of the world. And like all good travelogues, while doing so it makes an effort to educate its reader. Verne does this by listing in very long and equally laborious lists the marine life of every sea through which the Nautilus passes, and the and conditions found in every corner of the oceans depths. If you are interested in knowing the state of marine science in 1870, this is almost certainly the book for you, because those lists makeup of large portions of the original book and any unabridged translations. This frankly which may put off a great many modern readers.

For the generation’s of tv viewers and internet surfers that have arisen since the publication of the original in 1870, the wonders of ocean life not some great mystery in the way there were to the late Victorians. We have seen the blue planet, wildlife documentaries and for that matter, Jaws. Verne was an avid amateur oceanographer, but the knowledge of the oceans in 1870 was limited. Something which shows to even the untrained eye.

To me, the travelogue is one of the charms of the unabridged version. There is something fascinating in discovering just how wrong Verne gets things. Bearing in mind that of its time this was a reflection of prevailing wisdom and knowledge of sea life. It somewhat hearts warming to know how far we have come. When as an average ill-informed reader with only passing knowledge of the nature of sea life gathered from osmosis by years of half watching David Attenborough on the BBC, I can spot the flawed logic and misinformed wisdom in Verne’s travelogue, it says something for our progress as a society.

There is, however, an important point to see in all that travelogue. Jules Verne did not write steampunk. A point which should be obvious, but 20000 leagues has been referred to more than once as proto-steampunk. It isn’t, what Verne wrote was Science Fiction. The kind of Science Fiction that doesn’t call itself SfiFi. It’s Solaris, not Star Wars. Gattaca, not Terminator. It has little in common with modern Steampunk fiction beyond its setting and brass ‘n cog technology. But when Verne was writing this he was describing the cutting edge and the world to come, not a world that never was. This was proto- Hard Science Fiction.

Yet what makes this really a classic of early sfi and a precursor to modern steampunk fiction is that its heart it’s a fascinating adventure story. Which is what the mostly abridged editions read by teenagers and adults are like. Certainly back in the dim distant past of my teenage years this was the case, when I first read a graphic novel version. The fascinating character of Captain Nemo ( which, as every schoolboy used to know, is Latin for no one) and his still incredible machine Nautilus remain a piece of magic that drags you into his strange underwater world. Submarines may be no longer a thing of fiction, this steampunk craft is still a beautiful creation in of itself. There are loads of movie versions, comic book adaptations and heavily abridged version still popular today. Nemo and the Nautilus crop up in all kinds of places. Not least Alan Moore’s ‘League of extraordinary gentlemen’ novels, in which Nemo is of Hindu origins, and becomes the father of a dynasty sub-mariner pirates. For all the problems with the Hollywood movie of the same name, ‘disavowed’ by Moore himself, the Nautilus is wonderfully realised. While steampunk is steeped in the whole sub-mariner ethos, in its icons and oddity.

So back to the original idea behind this review. Would it be published today?
I suspect if Mr Verne were to approach a publisher with his manuscript the first thing he would be gifted with would be a good editor with instructions to cut it down to its marrow. Take out the extensive travel log of lists, remove the natural history opus. Make it a steampunk pulp novel of about half its length and try to convince Mr Verne to put in, at least, a couple of prefatory female characters. “There’s not a corset or a bodice in there.” would be the cry. Rightly too in some respects. At its heart, it’s a great story filled with mystery and character. But it would struggle to be published as it was written without heavy editing was it new and fresh today.
In part, that is perhaps sad. If understandable.
If you’re going to read it, read it in full. Enjoy it for what it is. Because it deserves to be enjoyed. And you can always skip past the lists if you desire.
Though there is much to be said for the various abridged versions of the classic.

the unabridged version available on Amazon ( and many other places)
+http://www.amazon.com/Leagues-Under-Unabridged

Posted in book reviews, pointless things of wonderfulness, retro book reviews, steampunk | Tagged #nautalus, steampunk | 5 Comments

Hope Amid the Slaughter

Posted on January 24, 2017 by Mark Hayes

There is the tiniest spark of hope in the face of a malignant cancer that is eating away at the natural world.

However, I must start with the opposite of hope. The West African black rhino has gone the way of the dodo, which is to say it has become extinct. This is not to imply it has gone the way of the Saber-tooth tiger or the T-rex, creatures which came to extinction as a natural end. For, while it is true to say the tree of life sometimes springs off a new branch and prunes back on an old one, that is not the way the West African black rhino went to the wall. Instead, they reached their end in the most insidious of ways. Wiped off the face of the earth by a predator unlike any other. One that hunts not for its own survival but for lesser reasons. The predator is known as man.

Remember that malignant cancer I mentioned at the start, that would be us.

We, the human race, have hunted the Rhino for sport, destroyed its habitat, then poached and finally killed off this great West African herbivore. We, as a species, have ended the existence of a creature with no natural predators. A majestic creature that can draw a line of descent back millions of years. Only to be killed off by a predatory species who have hunted them, not to eat, not to feed our young, or maintain our own survival. One which has hunted them because we covert only one piece of the rhino. The single piece of them which makes them so recognisable and unique among creation, their horns.

Yes, that’s it, for their horns.

The rest of the carcas is just left to rot. The hunters do not even butcher it for meat. Maybe it feeds a few hyena’s and buzzards but otherwise is just wasted flesh putrefying in the West African sun. Or at least, the hunters did, as I say, the rhinos are all gone now.

Why then do we hunt them for their horn? Why would one species hunt another just to cut off one small part of it?

Well, it’s simple enough really, the horn that nature gave the rhino to defend itself from other predators than us, looks a little bit phallic.

And there, in a nutshell, you have it. Humans with their wonderous imagination and greed looked at this wonderful creature, saw its single proudly jutting horn and decided that as it looked a little bit like an erect male member. And because of this vague similarity, humans decided that by crushing the horn into a powder and taking it as a medicine, a man could become a powerful lover.

Yes, there you have it, powdered rhino horn, the herbal medicine Viagra of choice…

Only, of course, it isn’t, it is at best a placebo effect. You could be taking talcum powder, and it would have the same none effect as long as you believed it was what it said on the bottle. But cultural history and ancient medical practices say differently. With the same kind of logic that prescribes a course of leeching for haemophilia.

To be clear, I have no axe to grind about alternative medicines. If they work for you, then all power to your ginger root. Crush that basil, parsley, and clover root, mix it up and add a little walnut oil, then cure your warts. Get rid of your cough with elderberry powder mixed with seaweed. Cure your bad back with needles strategically placed in your left foot. Homoeopathy has a place. Thousands of years of folk medicine can’t all be wrong. Western medicine is far from always right.

But when these alternative medicines leads to the trade in bits of animal, particularly endangered ones, it is just wrong.

Powered rhino horn, something you can now buy for 1000 dollars an ounce and probably going up as I write, has cost the world this magnificent creature. All because each horn was worth tens of thousands on the black market, and humanity’s ability to put a price on the priceless is unending.

Such a horn on a living breathing rhino would, in case your in any doubt about my opinion here, be the only priceless thing here. Yet even with the extinction of the West African Black Rhino, the slaughter has not stopped, because it’s close relative the East African Black Rhino remains, for a little while, open to exploitation. So the poaching goes on.

In a bid to halt poaching, Rhino’s in Namibia are routinely dehorned by the Namibian government game wardens in an attempt to halt the slaughter. Of course, it means they are mutilating the poor creature, but it’s better than being slaughtered by poachers right? Except it isn’t, because if the poachers track a rhino for a couple of days, when they discover it has been dehorned they kill it anyway. Perhaps they do this out of frustration or just malevolent evil, or just to try and make the Namibian government stop dehorning as a practice. It hardly matters why, when the result is still a dead Rhino festering in the sun.

Douglas Adams, that fine writer of guidebooks to the universe and answerer of ultimate questions, also once wrote a book called ‘Last Chance To See’, which is a wonderful read. In it, among other endangered species he visited the West African Black Rhino. So moved by this majestic animal was he, that he became a lifelong advocate for the preservation of the species. He once climbed Mount Kilimanjaro in a rhino suit in order to raise money to help preserve them. Sadly for us all, both Douglas Adams and the West African Black Rhino are no longer with us. The rhino outlasted Mr Adams by almost a decade. I suspect would be of little consolation to either of them. The charity he helped to found ‘Save the Rhino’s’ is still working today to say the remaining Rhino species, there is a link at the bottom to their website.

So this brings me back to that slither of hope I motioned in the beginning. Which came to me in the form of my son who sent me the following message:-

“I give up on humanity, the African rhino is extinct”

My son was fifteen when he sent me this message, and to be frank a little pissed about the extinction of a species. So there you go, there is my slither of hope. My hope that the next generation may manage not be as destructive, murderous, and basically as shit as my own. It is only a small slither of hope, however, because I remember giving up on humanity myself at much the same age…..

Until that was the aforementioned Mr Adams inspired me to a little bit of hope when I first read Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy. The hope that we were not irretrievably stupid petty, greedy creatures. Which also remains a small slither of hope.

links

https://www.savetherhino.org

Posted in amreading, goodreads, politics, rights | Tagged #douglasadams, #rhinos, towelday, wwfc | Leave a comment

Old Bugs: The Complete Lovecraft #9

Posted on January 23, 2017 by Mark Hayes

Lovecraft tells the tale of ancient star beings lurking under the oceans. Insect intelligence watching human from the outer planets. Strange monsters in the darkness waiting only to pray upon those who are foolish enough to call attention to their fleeting existence. The strange and the incomprehensible that were here before us and wait only for the stars to be right before they come again, from the dark cold places of the world. Often chilling, often uncanny, occasionally just a little on the weird side, but all with a kind of darkness at their heart, an understanding that, as Lovecraft put it…

So when you read a tale by H.P.Lovecraft entitled ‘Old Bugs’, one probably assumes, quite naturally, that this is a tale about ancient insect intelligence’s lurking in the dark waiting to consume humanity, or something along those lines…

It may come as a mildly disappointing surprise to realise that the ‘Old Bugs’ in the title punctually refers to an itinerant alcoholic in an imagined 1950’s Chicago, earning his poison through odd jobs around a particularly disreputable speakeasy. You might think however that this does not mean it’s not still going to be usual Lovecraftian fare. After-all there is the question of what drove ‘Old Bugs’ to the demon drink in the first place, what horror had he witnessed that he needed to drown it in cheap rotgut moonshine…

Well, no, the only thing that drove ‘Old Bugs‘ to drink was, as described by Lovecraft, his own low character and lack of moral fortitude, and while there is a tale here, it is a morality tale about the evils of drink, with a twist that is telegraphed early on, and comes as little surprise. Indeed the most interesting thing about this tale is not the tale itself, but how, and why it was written, as well as the authors prejudiced that lead to it been written in the first place.

H.P. was a lifelong teetotaler who believed firmly in prohibition and the corrupting nature of drink. So firm was he in his convictions that ‘Old Bugs’ was written after his friend Alfred Galpin suggested in 1919 that they try alcohol, before the prohibition laws went into effect. It was not actually published until 1959 by ‘Arkham House’ long after Lovecraft’s death, which suggest in part that it was not written for public consumption. Indeed, the original manuscript contains a note at the end that was written for Galpin himself, ‘Now will you be good?’

This note, and the use of both Alfred Galpin, and his fiancee’s real name in the story point to the motivation behind its writing, which is entirely overt by the end. The question of why Lovecraft was so firm in his tee-totality and his belief in prohibition is more open to conjecture. He was known to declare on numerous occasion:-

‘I have never tasted intoxicating liquor, and never intend to.’ H.P.Lovecraft

The truth of this declaration has on occasion been a matter of debate, for his vehemence on the subject must have had some root (he wrote extensively on the subject of prohibition in private letters and elsewhere). Some have pointed to his breakdown as a teenager, and wondered if he actually flirted with drink in that period of his life. However the subject of prohibition was very much a central facet of American life in the formative years of his life before it finally came into effect in 1920, and the temperance league were a powerful and in somewhat attractive force. Oddly enough Lovecraft’s home state of Rhode Island was one of only two which opted out of ratifying the Prohibition Act, which points to it been a particularly hot topic in Providence.

The story itself, atypical though it is, has many of Lovecraft’s hallmarks. The slightly dispassionate nature of the prose. The unsympathetic nature in which he presents his characters, almost with a distaste for their lives and their weaknesses. That he holds his vision of his friend Galpin, projected thirty years in the future and having succumbed to the bottled demon, in contempt is obvious. Lovecraft is preaching here, but the tale hangs together, all the same, its moral message, while far from hidden, takes second place to the story itself. For which we should be thankful.

It has a twist that you can see coming, even if you do not know the history behind the tale’s telling. But on the whole, it works. It is what it is, disappointing, but mostly because this is not what you read Lovecraft for. It is still well crafted and well written. Though you have to forgive the teetotal writers vision of a 1950’s where prohibition remained intact. Seen from the point of view of a future for him over sixty years in our past it has a certain twee quality to it. It’s not the 50’s as we know them, all Thunderbird’s, bright colours and rock’n roll. That aside it’s enjoyable in of itself, it just lacks the Lovecraft we open the pages of his books for. As such I am giving it only 2 out of 6, Though as a morality tale it is perhaps worth a couple more bottles than tentacles…

Further Lovecraftian witterings

Posted in Lovecraft, retro book reviews | Tagged cthulhu, horror, Lovecraft | Leave a comment

Memory: The complete Lovecraft#8

Posted on January 21, 2017 by Mark Hayes

There are short stories, and there are shorter stories, and then there are micro stories. ‘Memory’ is the shortest of all H.P.Lovecraft tales, a flash fiction masterpiece before the term flash fiction had even been conceived. It is also among one of the most beautiful, insightful and chilling. Written in 1919, it was published in 1923 in ‘The National Amateur‘, it takes up no more than a page, yet manages to convey a terrifying vision of eternity and humanities place within it, in a mere 353 words. The bleak nature of humanity’s existence, in a cold uncaring cosmos, is a consent theme in Lovecraft’s work. In ‘Memory’ he wastes not a single word while giving us an unsettling context to our place within that cosmos and eternity itself.

‘Memory’ is also one of the works of Lovecraft that is entirely in the public domain. So rather than talk about it, I shall instead urge you to just read it in full. It will not take you long, but if it does not send a shiver down your spine… Well, then you probably need to think upon it for a while.

Memory: by H.P.Lovecraft

In the valley of Nis the accursed waning moon shines thinly, tearing a path for its light with feeble horns through the lethal foliage of a great upas-tree. And within the depths of the valley, where the light reaches not, move forms not meet to be beheld. Rank is the herbage on each slope, where evil vines and creeping plants crawl amidst the stones of ruined palaces, twining tightly about broken columns and strange monoliths, and heaving up marble pavements laid by forgotten hands. And in trees that grow gigantic in crumbling courtyards leap little apes, while in and out of deep treasure-vaults writhe poison serpents and scaly things without a name.
Vast are the stones which sleep beneath coverlets of dank moss, and mighty were the walls from which they fell. For all time did their builders erect them, and in sooth they yet serve nobly, for beneath them the grey toad makes his habitation.
At the very bottom of the valley lies the river Than, whose waters are slimy and filled with weeds. From hidden springs it rises, and to subterranean grottoes it flows, so that the Daemon of the Valley knows not why its waters are red, nor whither they are bound.
The Genie that haunts the moonbeams spake to the Daemon of the Valley, saying, “I am old, and forget much. Tell me the deeds and aspect and name of them who built these things of stone.” And the Daemon replied, “I am Memory, and am wise in lore of the past, but I too am old. These beings were like the waters of the river Than, not to be understood. Their deeds I recall not, for they were but of the moment. Their aspect I recall dimly, for it was like to that of the little apes in the trees. Their name I recall clearly, for it rhymed with that of the river. These beings of yesterday were called Man.”
So the Genie flew back to the thin horned moon, and the Daemon looked intently at a little ape in a tree that grew in a crumbling courtyard.

And that’s it, the whole of it, and in my opinion, for whatever it is worth in this cold uncaring eternity, is that it is a work of near perfection. And oh, oh, so cold… I could say more, but I believe the tale speaks for itself better than I ever could. Indeed, it would seem odd to write more words to describe and critic it that exist within the work itself. It is, however, joyful in its bleak wonder. The universe existed without us, it will exist long after we are gone, and the best we can hope for is that it remembers us, if only fleetingly as a moment of ‘Memory‘ in some demons mind.

It may come as no small surprise, therefore, I give this particular story a whole set of 6 tentacles out of 6…

Posted in Lovecraft, retro book reviews, rites | Tagged cthulhu, horror, Lovecraft | 1 Comment

Beyond the Wall of Sleep : The Complete Lovecraft #7

Posted on January 21, 2017 by Mark Hayes

“I have an explanation of sleep come upon me.” – Shakespeare

From the first of the dreamland mythos in ‘Polaris’, we move straight on to a second and much lauded ‘Beyond the walls of sleep‘, it has inspired heavy metal bands including ‘Black Sabbath‘ and movie makers (though to call the 2004 movie of the same name’inspired‘ stretches the definition, IMDB gives it a woeful 2.4/10 )… and as so often with Lovecraft, it has inspired multiple writers. Stephen King even quotes from it in ‘On Writing‘, he non-fiction guide to the art of the novel. While King uses a passage from the tale to demonstrate how ‘not’ to write dialogue, never Lovecraft’s strongest suit, it’s done so with genuine affection for both this particular story and Lovecraft’s work in general.

Written and published in 1919 (in an amateur publication called of all things ‘Pine Cones‘), Lovecraft himself said the story was partly inspired by an article in the New York Tribune in April of that year, from which he took the idea of the ‘backwards‘ Catskills population, which his narrator likens to ‘white trash in the south‘, and from the same article he took the family name of his lunatic ‘Slater‘. Quite what the real ‘Slater’ family thought of this is never recorded, but I suspect Lovecraft was reasonably sure they would never read his tale themselves considering his opinions…

As with ‘Polaris‘ Lovecraft is, you see, showing his prejudices, though as always he does so through his narrator. It is clear that they are opinions that Lovecraft shared to an extent himself. More amusingly, however, his narrator, a man obsessed with trying to understand dreams also displays his own (and possibly Lovecraft’s) prejudices against that other great interpreter of dreams Sigmund Freud with the wonderfully dismissive-

‘Freud to the contrary with his puerile symbolism.’ – Lovecraft

-Clearly, there is little respect due for the Austrian psychotherapist in the narrator’s view. Which establishes that he is a man of opinions if nothing else.

The narrator, unnamed as so often in Lovecraft’s fiction, tells the reader of his time working as an orderly in the state mental institution, and how he came into contact with a man named Joe Slater.Joe was incarcerated on the grounds of insanity after committing a string of murders. What interests the narrator about him is not so much the crimes Slater committed, but the murderer’s state of mind when he did so. Slater it seems has no recollection of the killings, only of ‘awakening’ for want of a better word, to find blood, quite literally, on his hands.

Slater’s history is a strange one, a member of a remote hill-billy type clan, he has little education and an intellect that is none the worse for it. Except when he has his episodes that is. For, occasionally, when he sleeps he becomes someone else entirely, and sometimes that ‘other‘ takes charge of the body of Joe Slater beyond his dreams. An event with occasionally bloody results. Little wonder then the courts found Slater to be insane, the narrator, however, thinks otherwise.

In someway’s this story is a reversing of the one told in ‘Polaris‘. Rather than the sleeper travelling in his dreams to inhabit another, in this case, the ‘other‘ comes to occupy the sleeper. In effect it is a tale of possession, but not by such simplistic tropes as the devil. Lovecraft is not one to deal with such prosaic demons. The narrator, also not one for naive concepts like simple insanity being the cause of a man to seem as though he is two people. He studies Joe Slater enough to understand the ‘other’ personality that comes to him when he sleeps is just that, an ‘other‘. Least ways because he can not attribute the things the ‘other‘ describes and says to a backwards, backwoodsman. One which he considers to be a regression from the educated, civilised society he is part of.

A mere orderly though the narrator claims to have been, is also a scientist, of the slightly barking mad variety, in that he has invented a device which allows him to commune with the dreams of others. Sneak a peek inside the head, as it were. But what he find in the mind of Joe Slater is not in any way what he expects. And this leads to a strange communion between the narrator and this ‘other’ mind in the body of Slater. Leading him to see the universe in quite different terms afterwards.

It’s at this point the real strength of Lovecraft’s rights shines through. That glorious descriptive tone that eats away at you, draws you in and makes you see a universe that is at once so strange and yet somehow so real at the same time. The impossible becomes reality and ‘Beyond the walls of sleep‘ is a minor masterpiece in this regard. Much like ‘

Much like ‘Dagon‘, it is the kind of story that Lovecraft excels with. For all his flaws the unworldly is where his writing has its greatest strengths and most disturbing images…

I could explain more of what the narrator discovers when he communes with the ‘other‘. But unlike some other stories to explain further would take something away from the story itself. It is one that needs to be read and experienced with your own imagination. Like much of Lovecraft’s strongest work.

I do not love this tale in the same way I love ‘Dagon’. I think its slightly weaker, and has less impact, and for all its power, it wanes somewhat towards the end. But that said it is still a masterpiece in its only way. So I’ll score this at 5 out of 6, though I suspect some would rate it higher.

Further Lovecraftian witterings

Posted in Lovecraft, retro book reviews, rites | Tagged cthulhu, cyinicisum, Lovecraft, movies | 5 Comments

Letting the other half govern (finally)

Posted on January 20, 2017 by Mark Hayes

Back in 2013, on my previous blog, I wrote a post called ‘Women in politics, politics in decline’. It contained a lot of facts and figures, mainly because it started out before that as part of an essay for the Open University. As such it was also, I will admit, a little dry, though it tried hard not to be. It was mainly focused on a couple of important points, those been that while women outnumber men in the UK, they were woefully represented in government. And that our liberal western democracy was 49th in the world rankings for the percentage of female representatives in parliament which was at a shocking 17.9%.

As I have moved my blog over to ‘WordPress’, for umteen reasons that come down to me falling out with ‘Blogger’ as a platform. I have transposed the vast majority of my old blog over, and been working through it all and deleting the chaff, when I came across the post on female representation. At which point, naturally enough, I began to wonder if we had made some progress in this regard as a nation since last I looked. Yet with a certain degree of reservation, because ‘things can’t only get better’ no matter what D’ream claimed.

A short burst of Googling later, I discovered a strange thing. Things have improved, quite dramatically in fact. In the last national election, we ended up with a third more female parliamentarians. All the way up to 29% in fact, so almost an actual third of the total. I was impressed, sure it wasn’t just over fifty percent. We had not suddenly evened it all out and represented the greater half of our population properly in the seats of power. But still a dramatic move in the right direction. With a certain boyantness about me, I wondered happily how much higher up the world rankings that left us. Were we indeed now a leading light in the struggle for equality…

Scotish women elected to parliament 2015

A short burst of Googling later, I discovered a strange thing… We were now 49th in the world… Yes, that’s right, despite a surge in female representation, as far as parliamentary equality in the world we are still 49th (well technically 48th as we are joint 48th with Nepal according to the IPU, but let’s not split hairs and let facts get in the way of the story… ) 49th, still. I was, I must admit, a tad disappointed and despondent at this revelation. While I am no one’s idea of a nationalist, I do like to have a degree of pride in old Blighty. I would have been pleased to see we had progressed in this table of equality. It’d be good to think we were at least trying to show the world a better more equal society… Yet there we are, still 49th…

And then … because I am a little slow on occasion… my brain caught up and I realised what this actually meant. Not for Britain and the British, but for humanity as a whole, and the smile came back to my fact at the subsequent revelation.

We as a nation have a third more female parliamentarians, yet have remained 49th in the world rankings of this statistic, which could only happen if the world as a whole had done much the same thing. Humanity, for once, had actually made some progress as a whole. I decided to check this as well…

A short burst of Googling later, I discovered a strange thing. Almost every nation in the world had gone up by a third (or at least the ones I had figures for from my original essay) Even places you would never expect, Iraq, Iran, and other Arab states. Bolivia, of all nations, was almost exactly equal to 50%. The likes of Cuba, Mexico, Namibia are not far behind, to name a few surprising ones in the top ten.

In a world where America has just sworn in a president who even his own party and supporters admit is a misogynist, the rest of the world has moved on by a country mile in the last few years (the USA is 100th in the list btw…). So what if the UK is 49th, but it’s 49th in a world making huge strides towards actual political parity for the female of the species. And while we may not be there yet, there is hope, there is progress and humanity is getting better at being run by it’s whole self, rather than the 49% of us without a uterus.

Once in a while, it’s good to see ‘Things are actually getting better…’ sing it for us D’ream…

Sing it for us D’ream…

Oh and yes, if your interested, Rwanda is still at the top of the table….

The original post has been moved onto this blog, so if you’re interested in reading it follow this link….

Posted in opinion, politics, rights | Tagged #womensrights #politics | Leave a comment

Polaris : The Complete Lovecraft #6

Posted on January 14, 2017 by Mark Hayes

‘Polaris‘ takes it name from the north star, that single static point in the ballet of the night sky around which all else appears to revolve. The star so beloved of sailor and navigators in general due to its constancy. It is always there on a clear night, hanging over roughly above the north pole.
For Lovecraftian’s, ‘Polaris‘ is also the first of his Dreamlands stories, a sequence all of their own in Lovecraft’s mythos. This one written in late 1918 it was first published in 1920 in ‘The Philosopher’.
The story was itself alleged to be inspired by a dream, though this could have been part of the pitch from Lovecraft, who was no more above cheap theatrics than any other aspiring author. The claim’s of its dream inspired genesis, however, do play into the story itself. It is effectively a dream inspired tale about a dream, so where then does the dreamer end and the writer begin…
More academic credence among Lovecraftian’s can be placed on the claim it was inspired in part by Lovecraft’s frustration and guilt over not been selected to fight in world war one. H. P. was rejected for service as a combatant for much the same reasons as the character of Olathoe, who the natator of the story dreams himself to be. A point which others have made much of over the years.
It is also doubtless Lovecraft was inspired by his keen interest in astronomy. Choosing ‘Polaris‘ as the object of his narrator’s obsession and dreams, has much to do with both the stars fixed nature in the sky and the period of precession (more of which in s moment).

The tale opens with the narrator laying awake, staring at ‘Polaris‘ through his bedroom window, feeling at once uneasy and mocked by the ever-present star blinking at him in the sky. It is not until he falls into the grasp of sleep we discover why.
The narrator’s dreams are taking him to another time and place, one before the dawn of recorded history. A city at the heart of a fading Empire that existed, at least in the narrator’s dreamings, 26000 years ago. He knows this because of the star, hanging in its normal place above the horizon, that same ever present blinking north star ‘Polaris‘. 26000 years is, without coincidence, the period of precession. The strange wobble that the Earth had upon its axis that takes 26000 years to complete a rotation.
The ‘period of precession’ can be measured (see the link to Wikipedia here if you want the science), but to measure its requires a lot of complicated maths of the kind Lovecraft himself never mastered and was thus denied his childhood ambition to become a professional astronomer. However, astronomy’s loss is literature’s gain. However, it must be said not poetries.

The poem above is spoken by the star itself to the narrator, or at least, it is imagined in his dream. The reference to precession is apparent. The subtext is also clear in its intention, which suggests that the narrator dreams of his own past life, and revisits in his dreams the actions of that life, and the shame his soul feels because of them.
In his dream the narrator does not only dream of the inhabitants of the city, but that he knows them, with a feeling of familiarity that is almost sublime, and as each night passes that feeling becomes stronger. Until he does not merely observe the city but inhabits it himself in his dreams and becomes Olathoe. A weakling, feeble and given to strange faintings, cursing himself that he is left behind while his fellow citizens go off to war. (sounds familiar doesn’t it). Desperate to serve his city he takes a post as a guard, watching the high passes and poised to light the beacon that will summon the warriors should the invaders arrive. Wherein lays the shame he feels, for in the last he fails in this duty too.

As a tale, it is original in the form of a dreamers dream, yet leans towards myth. But there are issues with it that must be looked at with some context.
Of all the tales so far it is the first that has an unsettling feel to it in the wrong way. The invaders of the ancient city are named as Inutos, a name derived from the modern Inuit. They are described as small, yellow and barbaric, and as being a lesser race than the proud and seemingly caucasian people of the land of Lomar, of which the narrator dreams himself to be. The racism inherent in this description, is unfortunate, at the very least. Lovecraft, like many other writers of the period, chose to use Asiatic people as a threatening presence.
The context, which is perhaps forgiving here, is that his imagined city is placed by his tale in North America, and the migration of the Inuit people from Asia to North America happened somewhere within his timeline. To the people of that lost empire, they would be a barbarous invader. As the narrator identifies with the empire citizens his view holds some water, but not the description as it is given by Lovecraft, or indeed the lack of the narrators real-self seeing an issue with the way his dream-self feels and describes the foe.

It is, I will grant, a harsh criticism of the story. Some would see it as picking at a small scab in the context of the time it was written. It also has no impact on my score of 4 tentacles out of 6. (Unlike the poem). But while it is the first of the stories I have reviewed to raise my liberal eyebrows a little, it will I am aware not be the last. Regardless, however, it is a solid well-crafted tale and the first of the Dreamlands is a story I enjoy despite its issues.