I thoroughly disapprove of duels. If a man should challenge me, I would take him kindly and forgivingly by the hand and lead him to a quiet place and kill him.
-- Mark Twain
I've been rereading "Shadows over Baker Street," the
Holmes meets Lovecraft (as opposed to
Doyle meets Lovecraft, which would have been a different thing) sci-fi anthology. It's, as always, great fun, although by far the best one of the lot is Gaiman's
A Study in Emerald, which is almost as good as Stross'
A Colder War (
Tom Clancy meets Lovecraft?).
On that vein, I'd like to read
Asimov meets Lovecraft: Scientists build robots following ancient, unholy mathematics that imply terrible laws of cosmic significance.
Umberto Eco meets Lovecraft: A little-known Italian editorial plans to publish a modern edition of the
Necronomicon. Wackyness ensues.
Stephen King meets Lovecraft: The Great Ones have taken over Earth. A ragtag band of survivors travel through North America, but the dreams of the kids traveling with them (oddly echoing those the protagonist had in his childhood? or
were they dreams?) could point at even darker truths than the wasteland the planet has become.
Vernor Vinge meets Lovecraft: Both the Great Ones and the Elder Gods are non-human post-Singularity species. The Elder Gods are ok with humans making the jump, but the Great Ones have other plans...
Melville meets Lovecraft: To see Cthulhu is to go mad, and Captain Ahab was no exception. But now he is mad enough that he actually plans to
kill it, and he doesn't care about damning his soul (and others') along the way.
Borges meets Lovecraft: The
Necronomicon wasn't real until people started reading about it. Now it has always been real, and the past is changing accordingly.
Saki meets Lovecraft: The world of
A Study in Emerald, but in a dark humor mood.
Carl Sagan meets Lovecraft: "There is no such thing as the Great On*ARGGHGHGHGHG*..."
Chesterton meets Lovecraft: Father Brown explains to a Great One that it doesn't exist and, more importantly, it shouldn't. Father Brown ends mad, solving crimes in a futile attempt not to think about The Great Crime Beyond The Stars (ok, so Chesterton would never write this one; I would).
Peter Watts meets Lovecraft: Building a FTL Solar System-spanning computer network using genetically engineered neural tissue from Great Ones remains as a substratum? Both mankind's best and worst idea ever.
Crowley (or Dee) meets Lovecraft: Talking with the Elder Gods-HOWTO.
Philip K. Dick meets Lovecraft: The Great Ones are real -
you are the fiction. The Necronomicon (actually the world's oldest drug, now being sold again in street corners by unsuspecting pushers that believe it an hallucinogen) lets you see that. "Madness" is a sane adaptation to the world.
Too bad I have to go now, doing this is addictive...
(In not unrelated news, I think
Doktor Sleepless #8 partly redeems the title; at least now it makes
some amount of sense.)