In novels, movies, radio shows, and comic books throughout the 20th century, Fu Manchu is portrayed as a cunning genius who uses arcane methods and secret societies armed with knives to plot evil murders of white people and the preservation of Chinese power. Fu Manchu quickly came to personify the yellow peril, and has served as an inspiration to many other racist depictions of Asian villains like Ming the Merciless from Flash Gordon and Dr. No in James Bond.

Long before Westerners feared terrorists and sentient supercomputers, there was the yellow peril. "Pulp magazines in the 30s had a lot of yellow peril characters loosely based on Fu Manchu," says William F. Wu, a pioneer in Asian science fiction writing in the U.S. "Most were of Chinese descent, but because of the geopolitics at the time, a growing number of people were seeing Japan as a threat, too."

In his 1982 book The Yellow Peril, Wu theorizes that the fear of Asians dates back to mongol invasion in the Middle Ages. "The Europeans believed that Mongols were invading in mass, but actually, they were just on horseback and riding really fast," he writes. Most Europeans had never seen an Asian before, and the harsh contrast in language and physical appearance probably caused more skepticism than transcontinental immigrants did. "I think the way they looked had a lot to do with the paranoia," Wu says.

The numbers issue is also a recurring theme in yellow peril science fiction: Westerners fear the idea of Asians taking over. In 1927, Lovecraft wrote about "squinting Orientals that swarmed from every door" in The Horror at Red Hook; that same year, in a novella called The Invading Horde, Arthur Burks predicts that Asians "breed like flies, and must eventually find some place for their expanding population or perish."

To be fair, Asians weren't always depicted as purely evil. Another well-known character from pre-World War II America was Mr. Moto, the super-polite, clean-cut Imperial Agent of Japan created by novelist John P. Marquand. For the most part, Mr. Moto was just a superb guy—fluent in many languages, a judo master, and the world's best private investigator. But in later films, especially after the war broke out, Mr. Moto also ended up taking on an evil persona.

Asians were to the 1920 and 30s what aliens, robots, and sentient computers are to present day science fiction: real or perceived threats to social order. "Science fiction is always really about its own time," Wu says. "It's what many authors call a shotgun approach to the future. Wherever people are in time, the current sociopolitical and scientific questions of that time are what you write about."

About a half decade after the yellow peril years, Asian influences reappeared in popular science fiction, but with a slightly different tone. William Gibson's Neuromancer and Ridley Scott's Blade Runner are just a couple of famous examples. "Asian cultural markers are often used as shorthand for the future," says Claire Light, an Asian-American science fiction writer. Light sees a link between this trend in entertainment and the sudden success of the Japanese economy in the 70s and 80s: "At the time, most Americans just thought of Asians as the technological power of the future," she says.

The speculation that China will dominate the world is still prominent in science fiction, yet strangely enough, today's science fiction about China still isn't necessarily about Asians. Joss Whedon's Firefly and Serenity notoriously don't have any Asian characters in them despite the premise of a dominant Chinese culture. "He's a smart guy who turned navel gazing into high art, but he's not really a great world builder," Light says, noting that she only saw a handful of Asian extras—including one in a conical hat!—in Serenity.

"All of the older yellow peril stuff is really goofy. It's extreme to the point of being humorous, and anyway, it's too old to worry about." Wu laughs. "It's the newer stuff that concerns me."

Wu's 1989 cyborg comedy, Hong on the Range, is still one of the only sci-fi novels with a non-perilous Asian protagonist. But this may change soon. Light, who is also a board member of the Carl Brandon Society, a non-profit for minority authors of speculative fiction, points out that the number of Asian science fiction writers has doubled in the past decade. Other minorities are filling out the ranks of science fiction authors too.

If you ask me, an ethnically-diverse group of scifi writers will make the very best future. You know, one without all the peril.

About the size of a thick tombstone, including over 400 pages of mostly full-color art, with nonfiction by Harlan Ellison, Thomas Ligotti, and others, this absolute stone-cold classic is a testament to the publisher’s attention to detail and Lovecraft’s enduring influence. It also provides a wonderful gallery setting for H.R. Giger, Bob Eggleton, John Coulthart, Michael Whelan, Lee Brown Coye, Virgil Finlay, Ian Miller, Gahan Wilson, John Picacio, Harry O. Morris, J.K. Potter, and many others.

Often, the images in the book mix fantasy with Lovecraft’s take on “cosmic horror,” the idea that the universe is hostile and inert.

In SF-nal terms, Bob Eggleton interprets that cosmic horror as alien influence:

Lovecraft's elder gods, unspeakable ones,shamblers and so on...were all in reality malevolent aliens from other worlds. They were ancient and evil, but the fact they're from another world is lost in the mists. His stories had references to astronomy, astrology and science and yet took this 180 turn into something scary and dark. Nigel Kneale, for instance wrote the Quatermass series in much the same way. Quatermass & The Pit was truly Lovecraftian.

John Coulthart notes, too, that:

The young Lovecraft was a keen astronomer who became acquainted at an early age with a sense of cosmic scale, the vastness of the universe and so on. That combined with a natural pessimism, and his later atheism gave him a strong sense of human insignificance in the face of cosmic enormity. ‘We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity,’ as he says at the opening of "The Call of Cthulhu."'

Not exactly the most uplifting of messages, but definitely powerful—and revolutionary within genre at the time.

“His problem as a writer was that most Western supernatural fiction up to that point had some kind of Christian dimension to it, even if this wasn't directly stated,” Coulthart says. “That was obviously a problem for an atheist writing a form of fiction which needed something malevolent at its core. His solution was to replace the Devil and the Christian idea of evil with vast extra-dimensional entities which disturb or threaten us because we mean as much to them as microbes do to human beings.”

Disappointingly (to us at least), Harry O. Morris rules out a literal cephalopodic element to the idea of cosmic horror:

[It’s] not a giant squid descending from outer space, but rather an all pervasive sense of dread that permeates everything we think we know including our faces in the mirror and the knives and forks at the dinner table.

For Ian Miller the concept is more visceral, citing films like Alien as Lovecraftian in mood: “Things hidden in the shadows, in tight dark place, dangerous, scratching, moving, creeping, stalking, mysterious, and always at the peripheries of one’s vision waiting in the shadows to spring out and bite you...Things arcane. Airless dark places with strange smells. Dark cupboards. Things that scratch and suffocate. Tight shoes and fish eyes...I suspect fear fueled by adrenalin gave rise to the notion of warp speed, though I'm sure some would disagree.”

How, then, do these artists put their own personal stamp on something so strong and powerful on the page, and thus indelibly imprinted upon readers’ minds?

For Eggleton it’s trying to give “a kind of epic feel to [the paintings]. A sense of the familiar and then at the same, something alien and bizarre.”

Morris’ approaches Lovecraft through ambiguity: “For me, the best way to express this uncomfortable aura visually is to leave portions of the picture undefined, in shadow, and influenced by chance/chaos. Also, I'm inclined to try and convey a sense of timeless antiquity which seems to be a cornerstone of Lovecraft's vision.”

John Picacio also believes the best Lovecraftian art doesn’t try to show everything. “It leaves something to the imagination....a few conceptual voids here and there, purposely left for the mind to fill with something personal and therefore much more potent....I think trying to literally illustrate a Lovecraftian monster usually misses the mark. It’s just not as scary anymore because the terror has somehow been contained in the lines and the strokes, and therefore distilled. That’s why his stuff is so difficult to effectively translate to comics and film although so many have tried.”

Coulthart is one of those creators who, in addition to his Lovecraftian paintings has successfully translated the icon’s vision to comics:

I wanted to take Lovecraft's fiction seriously on its own terms, something which—in the comics world especially—wasn't happening very often. When I started illustrating his work in the 1980s there was little apart from the Lovecraft special issue of Heavy Metal from 1979 which had attempted that. I tried to match his dense writing style with an equally dense and detailed drawing style and tried to make things look solid and historically accurate. I've always been interested in architecture and Lovecraft's concept of alien architecture continues to fascinate.

This might make the art seem ultra-serious, but it’s not all “cosmic.” As Jerad Walters, the genius behind Centipede Press points out:

Some of the artwork is humorous or whimsical, and rather good-natured. There's a difference in humor between the ‘Deep One’ Horrora Model Kit image, which is more nostalgic, and the ‘Where the Great Old Ones Are’ image, which is just a send-up of HPL and Maurice Sendak, and the black humor of the Gahan Wilson piece, which is just over-the-top. It is the black humor of some of the works that works best in the book, for me at any rate. I think that the humorous side comes out because all of these bleak, nihilistic visions of Lovecraft can be so dreary and depressing that a send-up of it all is just inevitable.

All of these approaches and many more are showcased in The Art of Lovecraft; the gallery above can only begin to hint at the variety, depth, and jaw-dropping quality of the book. It’s a stunning love letter to a long and storied tradition.

As for those tentacular horrors, Walters says:

I don't think any reader of weird fiction can ever look at tentacles the same way after Lovecraft. I remember boiling some squid and chopping off the heads, putting them off to one side of the cutting block, planning to save them for something, until my wife quite reasonably asked if I was out of my mind.

Or, as China Mieville writes in "M.R. James and the Quantum Vampire":

The spread of the tentacle—a limb-type with no Gothic or traditional precedents (in “Western” aesthetics)—from a situation of near total absence in Euro-American teratoculture up to the nineteenth century, to one of being the default monstrous appendage of today, signals the epochal shift to a Weird culture....The “Lovecraft Event,” as Ben Noys invaluably understands it, is unquestionably the centre of gravity of this revolutionary movement; it’s defining text, Lovecraft’s ‘The Call of Cthulhu,’ published in 1928 in Weird Tales.

The magazine's creative director Stephen H. Segal writes to tell us about the anniversary issue, which among other cool stuff features 85 of the weirdest writers from the past 85 years. And it's an eclectic bunch: everyone from freaked-out filmmaker Wim Wenders and electro-musician Laurie Anderson, to cartoonist Charles Addams and scifi writer Madeleine L'Engle. Segal says:

We think the diverse range of honorees is not only awesome, but also representative of Weird Tales's 21st-century evolution — we've spent the past year assembling a new creative team, rethinking & reenergizing & revamping, and now we're doing our damnedest to make a magazine that really reflects the crazy cosmic mashup of aesthetics that can be fantasy/SF/horror today.

Weird Tales [85th anniversary issue]

At one point, thinking that he might be going insane, our narrator - a kind of rogue anthropologist, uniquely attuned to the grotesque details of human existence - begins to hallucinate. On the trail of this conspiratorially strange and well-disguised cult, the man dreams of vast structures made from "exposed stonework," inside of which "great globes of luminous crystal serv[ed] as lamps." He sees "inexplicable machines formed of vitreous tubes and metal rods" standing around in the shadows.

Later, I had visions of sweeping through cyclopean corridors of stone, and up and down gigantic inclined planes of the same monstrous masonry. There were no stairs anywhere, nor was any passageway less than thirty feet wide. Some of the structures through which I floated must have towered in the sky for thousands of feet.

There were multiple levels of black vaults below, and never-opened trap-doors, sealed down with metal bands and holding dim suggestions of some special peril.

Everything he sees is so architectural, clouded with the air of eras long gone. In another hallucination, for instance, the man stands on the "titanic flat roof" of a massive dream-structure, from which he sees "almost endless leagues of giant buildings, each in its garden, and ranged along paved roads fully two hundred feet wide... Many seemed so limitless that they must have had a frontage of several thousand feet, while some shot up to mountainous altitudes in the gray, steamy heavens."

He even stumbles across "aberrant piles of square-cut masonry" and "dark cylindrical towers," where "fungi of inconceivable size" grow amidst "great jungles of unknown tree ferns."

It's as if the surrealist montages of Max Ernst have been combined with Le Corbusier's Ideal City.

I floated through many strange buildings of stone, going from one to the other along mammoth underground passages which seemed to form the common avenues of transit. Sometimes I encountered those gigantic sealed trapdoors in the lowest level, around which such an aura of fear and forbiddenness clung.

After all, he lets himself speculate, what is housed here, in these dream palaces where stone buildings look more like extraterrestrial coral reefs, might be the very gods this ancient religious cult once worshipped. And then things get really weird - or, as Lovecraft's narrator explains, "the real horror began." Still caught up in his dreams-cum-hallucinations, our amateur anthropologist has visions of "South Africa in 50,000 B.C.," and he sees the "ruins of incredible sunken cities" covered in coral. Amidst all of this, there are creatures with "semifluid" anatomies who have "no sex, but reproduced through seeds or spores." They are almost indistinguishable from the architecture they inhabit, being "supremely natural parts of their environment."

Bizarrely, the man then predicts that an "Australian physicist... will die in 2,518 A.D," and he mentions something about the "military use of great winds."

There is even a cryptic, and absurd, reference to "a half-plastic denizen of the hollow interior of an unknown trans-Plutonian planet eighteen million years in the future."

With all of these things in mind, our rogue investigator, on the trail of his ancient cult, sets off for the deserts of Australia - where the "monstrous waste" of a city made from basalt blocks "half shrouded by sand" greets him.

To make quite a long story short, he almost immediately realizes that this is the very city, here beneath the desert sands of Australia, that he's been seeing in hallucinations all these years. "What had happened to this monstrous megalopolis of old," he asks himself, "in the millions of years since the time of my dreams?"

But he's scared even to think of the answer. "Of what limitless caverns of eternal night might brood below, I would not permit myself to think," he mutters - because beneath this ruined city in the remote Australian interior are the "secrets of the primal planet," where weird, shambling, underground forms meander through vast concentrations of architecture that aren't quite cities, they're more like hives: they are alien habitats for a form of life that humans might not ever come to grips with or understand.

In any case, he sets about exploring the place, too fascinated to resist. "Madness drove me on," he says - "sheer madness that impelled and guided me," as if archaeologists might become intoxicated with the thrill of excavation, unable to stop themselves from going further. Driven by a "hellish delusion," our narrator thus enters the underground ruins through a doorway, which he describes as a "downward aperture" into the Earth.

Onward through the blackness of the abyss I leaped, plunged and staggered - often falling and bruising myself, and once nearly shattering my torch. Every stone and corner of that demoniac gulf was known to me, and at many points I stopped to cast beams of light through choked and crumbling, yet familiar, archways.

But it is this very weirdness that our rogue anthropologist, with his fevered dreams and inexplicable compulsions, soon realizes might lie at the distant origins of human life, something altogether alien - something forever preserved in the "vague old myths" of the religious cult that Lovecraft's narrator has been attempting to research. But I could go on and on. Lovecraft's characters are always taking misguided and badly outfitted tours through remote landscapes, hoping to find something, whether it's in Greenland or Iceland or Australia or Antarctica. They explore old Native American burial mounds in the American Midwest and they travel through untrafficked fishing villages in New England. Distant Pacific archipelagos are mentioned, as is Einsteinian relativity. Plus, there's a lot of vague and poetically misunderstood science, of which I've always been a fan. "The Shadow Out of Time" is only one such example.

Earlier on io9: Guillermo del Toro, Report To Cthulhu

(Note: The second-to-last image is from the always stimulating k-punk, and the last image is by no one less than John Coulthart, master of the extradimensionally weird. The other two are by Max Ernst.)

Call of Cthulhu emulates movies from the period when Lovecraft invented the monster whose tentacled, alien power has haunted pop culture for nearly a century. Don't worry — there are no spoilers in this clip. You'll see a group of unlucky sailors who happen upon Cthulhu's scary city, just risen from the depths of the ocean during a storm. The men are terrified by its non-Euclidean geometries and shocking statues. You'll have to watch the movie if you want to see what these inventive filmmakers did to create their Cthulhu.

What's great about this short film, which is available on DVD, is that it manages to hover between devoted homage to Lovecraft, and slightly campy tweak on the original. It would be hard to recreate any Cthulhu story without some acknowledgment of its purple-prosey, over-the-top-ness. And these actors, in their 1920s pancake makeup, manage to convey that with their intense ironic-seriousness.

I thought Cloverfield was actually a great monster movie, but Call of Cthulhu has it beat for sheer originality and verve.