The Waiting Grounds

Just dug out the tea set and had some seriously fine long-jing.  On the back of that, time to catch up with some blogging.

Continuing the science-fictioney theme of Track 12, this longer story is set in a familiar trope:  the remote mining colony in space with only a handful of people and the discovery of ancient bits and stuff.  It's the setting for so many stories I can think of, and probably has its roots in jingoistic colonial adventure stories in which missionaries hack through remote jungles and happen upon Thuggee cults and Hindus spelt 'Hindoo'.

Interestingly enough, the missionary thing gets flagged up in The Waiting Grounds, when a box of religious texts, including bibles, the quran and the talmud among others, turns up in the inventory of stuff left behind by two missing explorers.  It's not explored or explained in any detail, but it was an interesting thing to notice.

In short, strange carved monoliths are found, listing a couple of millennia of dynasties in various star systems in five different languages, including English.  Cue cosmic trip across space-time to the end of the universe.  It's quite a bit like 2001:  A Space Odyssey in that respect, although the protagonist gets plopped back where he was, left to contemplate his place in the universe.

The general consensus seems to be that this story is uncharacteristic of his writing, in that it's not set on Earth and are written fairly straight, with little irony.  One of the things I did notice about The Waiting Grounds in particular is the setup of the characters.  It's fairly standard science-fiction stuff: the hero arrives, there's been some kind of mysterious event, there's a character who knows more than they let on, the mystery is investigated, horrors ensue, minds are blown but the hero lives to recount the story.  Amongst the novels I've read, Super-Cannes, Cocaine Nights and Kingdom Come all follow this pattern.  This is not lost on others who are familiar with Lovecraft.