"The Shadow Out Of Time"

by H.P. Lovecraft
originally published Astounding, June 1936

Pity poor Nathaniel Wingate Peaslee.  As if weren't bad enough to be named Nathaniel Wingate Peaslee(!), he has the misfortune to be a professor of political economy (at Miskatonic U, of course)!  But as if being the prof of the most snooze-inducing class on campus weren't a ghastly enough fate, one day in the middle of a lecture, he suddenly keels over.  The next thing you know he can't speak, move, walk, etc.  In fact, he acts as if his body were alien to him! 

Whether his napping students ever noticed his lapse of consciousness is not mentioned.

Peaslee recovers, sort of.  But he's seriously weird now.  Including a newfound interest in the occult and sciences.  His wife and kids bail on him, while he travels the world, looking for strange places and stranger people.

Five years into this and - poof! - his old personality and persona return.  And he resumes his old life.  Sort of.   It seems, you see, that he has no memory of the past five years - at all.

However, he is further troubled by strange dreams, of an alien landscape and an alien, unhuman civilization, a race of scholars in the form of giant, cone-shaped tentacular gloop-beasties (L. Sprague DeCamp referred to them as "super limpets").   In time, his increasingly vivid dreams reveal to him much of their culture.  The super-limpets were known as "the Great Race of Yith," an extraterrestrial species with the ability to travel through space and time. The Yithians accomplish this by switching bodies with hosts from the intended spatial or temporal destination.  The Yithians' original purpose was to study the history of various times and places, and they have amassed a "library city" that is filled with the past and future history of multiple races, including humans. The cone-shaped entities lived in their vast library city in what would later become Australia's Great Sandy Desert, millions of years before mankind (22°3′14″S 125°0′39″E). (thank you, Wikipedia!)

At first, Peaslee figures he's psychologically damaged.  However, he comes to learn of other cases like his, and their consistency with how own experiences leads him to believe they must be related, somehow.  His studies and his own published articles about his experience lead him into an archaeological expedition to Australia, where he ultimately finds his into the ruins of the city of his dreams.

And that is not all.  For it seems the Yithians were in conflict with another pre-human race, described as "half-polypous", able to control menacing winds.  The Yithians feared these beings, and ultimately fled their cone-bodies to inhabit new form, millenia after man's passing from earth.  But while the Yithians may be gone, the "polypous" are still very much alive.

And that too, is not all.  For, while fleeing the ruins, Peaslee seizes a book that once belonged to the Yithians, an object he remembers from his dreams.  Therein, he finds further proof that said dreams were indeed, not dreams at all.

This tale, though highly regarded, has never been a big personal fave.  Perhaps it just operates on too intellectual a plane ( the final, physical threat is tacked on at the end).  Perhaps just too much of it is a dissertation on the life and culture of a race of limpet-cone-thingies that I don't find all that fascinating (though they are, assuredly, alien).   In any case, its always been a story I admired more than liked. 

By this late in the game, Lovecraft had become a very polished writer, and it is intriguing to me that the rather dry, journalistic nature of the story actually makes profound sense - this narrator is attempting to prove his sanity by the very sober and thorough nature of his writing.

One thing that struck me is how much the final portion, with its mysterious, haunted, unhuman ruins, and a sinister and threatening wind, recalls his early story "The Nameless City".  But where "The Nameless City" is vague, dreamlike, and unfocused, this portion of the story is specific, tight, and matter-of-fact in its strangeness, making it all the more effective.  I wonder if HPL realized he had come full circle as he composed this tale of "mental" time travel? 

Regardless of my reservations, still an impressive work.  And thus, I shall give it my first: