Quote from: TristramEvans;633773You mean the quote by Carl Sagan, or the quote by Lovecraft about his own Mythos?

The one that conflated the voice of HPL's narrator with HPL's own beliefs, to make it seem as though there's variance between Sagan's thinking and what Lovecraft thought. Again, Lovecraft was as science-positive as a person can possibly get, and his view of his "Mythos" (it wasn't thought of as such until after his death) was also distinct from his narrator's.

But the long and the short of it is that, yes, there's much new stuff that can be done with the "Mythos" along with the fun kitchy stuff that gives us our Derleths and our plushies.

Quote from: GrumpyReviews;633207The racism of Lovecraft, and R.E. Howard, Edgar Rice Burrows and arguably even the Good Professor Tolkien was largely a product of the society which produced the men. It was even backed by the "popular science" of the day.

It certainly was. I always find it odd how few people understand how popular and widely-accepted eugenics was back in that day. You had situations where inter-racial marriages were legally prohibited and sterilizations legally forced all over the place based on scientific paper after scientific paper about how the human genepool was breaking down because of the birth rates being higher for certain immigrant groups (sadly, that particular moral panic still seems awfully familiar after nearly 100 years...).

Michael Crichton had a very good discussion about it in one of his novels (State of Fear) where he used it as an example of how combining science with politics can be a very bad combination.

The racism of the day is actually quite a large part of the backstory for my campaign. The gang-part of the storyline is all about different ethnic gangs slaughtering each other for power in the streets while the real movers and shakers of the city are all "assimilated" rich white men and the mythos part is all about cultists using the power of the old ones as a way to further the cause of eugenics.