Judging by the literature, time travel appears to be primarily a human occupation. In the long list of time travel novels and stories you will find in our Time Travel Nexus books database, only a handful feature aliens or other earthly creatures taking shortcuts through the 4th dimension.
Howard Phillips Lovecraft, however, didn’t see the world the way most people do. To Lovecraft, the cosmos was a vast and terrifying, spanning geological epochs and covering almost limitless space, allowing it to spawn undreamed-of horrors: titanic, tentacled sea monsters that whistle like kettles, conical-shaped things with eyes protruding on stalks that move like slugs, and an octopus-headed creature known as Cthulhu, to name just a few beasts in his menagerie. Most of these abominations are intelligent races that inhabited geological epochs deep in the past and created vast and hideous civilizations which now lie buried, just waiting for some unwitting explorer in Antarctica or western Australia to stumble upon them.
Straddling the borders of horror and science fiction, Lovecraft didn’t often delve into time travel directly—but after seeing the 1933 time travel film Berkeley Square he was inspired to pen The Shadow Out of Time (1936), a novella which shares a similar premise, but with a sinister twist. In the middle of an economics lecture, professor Nathaniel Wingate Peaslee suddenly swaps minds with another being in time—not one of his Eighteenth Century ancestors, but a creature from the great and ancient race of Yith, the aforementioned conical-shaped things. For about five years the alien being takes over his body, and he does strange things like read obscure occult books and visit the Arctic. Then, suddenly, Professor Peaslee is himself again. Only he’s visited by recurring nightmares that may or may not be vestigial memories of when he inhabited the Yithian’s body, hundreds of millions of years in the past.
The concept is striking and original. And the autodidactic Lovecraft has a thorough grasp of the different subjects involved (psychology, paleontology, occultism etc.), giving Peaslee’s account verisimilitude and a convincing scientific veneer. Unfortunately Lovecraft not only thought up the story, but wrote the piece as well. And Lovecraft’s writing is a dense thicket of words, almost entirely made up of exposition and background, with bare characterization, no dialogue, and not the least hint of humor—unless you chuckle, like I do, over his traffic jam of sinister adjectives:
If the thing did happen, then man must be prepared to accept notions of the cosmos, and of his own place in the seething vortex of time, whose merest mention is paralysing. He must, too, be placed on guard against a specific, lurking peril which, though it will never engulf the whole race, may impose monstrous and unguessable horrors upon certain venturesome members of it.
It is for this latter reason that I urge, with all the force of my being, final abandonment of all the attempts at unearthing those fragments of unknown, primordial masonry which my expedition set out to investigate.
Oh no! Not a seething vortex of time with its monstrous and unguessable horrors! Abandon the expedition! Run! Run for your lives!
Born into a genteel but diminished family in Providence, Rhode Island, H.P. Lovecraft lived a mostly reclusive life, though he did move to New York City for a time and knew or corresponded with many writers of his era, including Hart Crane and Robert E. Howard. Were he alive today, HPL would probably be a fervent anti-immigration supporter—he was disturbed by the great immigrant influx of the early 20th century, and inherently distrustful of cultures and races outside of the bedrock Puritanical milieu he was born into. We know of his prejudices mainly through the copious letters he wrote—fortunately he cleansed his fiction of personal opinion, though reading through the Lovecraft canon you might notice that Cthulhu and other monsters are often served by “half breeds” with slanting eyes and such, inhabiting the swamps of Louisiana or isolated, backwards villages such as Innsmouth. In The Shadow Out of Time we have the more innocuous “blackfellows” (Aborigines), who fear the ancient stones Peaslee’s team is exploring in western Australia:
And I thought of the tales of the modern blackfellows, wherein the horror of great winds and nameless subterrene ruins was dwelt upon.
A therapist might interpret Lovecraft’s monsters as an expression of his fear of the “other”—other races, other places, other ways of living. In the stories, however, curiosity often goes hand-in-hand with dread when exploring alien civilizations. Recounting his years among the time traveling Yith, Profressor Peaslee enumerates his fellow-captives with fascination:
I seemed to talk, in some odd language of claw clickings, with exiled intellects from every corner of the solar system.
There was a mind from the planet we know as Venus, which would live incalculable epochs to come, and one from an outer moon of Jupiter six million years in the past. Of earthly minds there were some from the winged, star-headed, half-vegetable race of palaeogean Antarctica; one from the reptile people of fabled Valusia; three from the furry pre-human Hyperborean worshippers of Tsathoggua; one from the wholly abominable Tcho-Tchos; two from the arachnid denizens of earth’s last age; five from the hardy coleopterous species immediately following mankind, to which the Great Race was some day to transfer its keenest minds en masse in the face of horrible peril; and several from different branches of humanity.
(No doubt Lovecraft scholars have carefully documented each of these races, and they’ve found their way into countless D&D games.)
Lovecraft’s inherent paranoia and inert writing style tend to keep most readers at bay. As critic Sten Johnson writes in a recent article on Lovecraft: “He is like one of his own inventions, a creature that’s broken its restraints and wanders unwelcome through the academy: neither pulp, nor a part of the high-literary canon, his prodigious if wildly 
unconventional talent remains unusually provocative.” But those who do brave his prose are often engulfed by it, becoming devotees and rejoicing in his jargon and obtuseness in the same way as adherents to an arcane science or secret religion. As with Shakespeare, Jane Austen or Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, a reading cult has sprung up around Lovecraft’s writings, and fan fiction, some of it written by the likes of Stephen King and Neil Gaiman, is legion. Most of these readers are or were at one time high school geeks; in Lovecraft’s heroes they see themselves, outcasts in a nightmare terrain of bullies and cool kids they could never hope to fit in with. That such a world is doomed to undergo apocalyptic destruction is only fitting.
Lovecraft seems to have been in a similar position in his personal life. Barely able to function in society, Lovecraft wound up working in a few low-level positions as a clerk, but these were short-lived. His income from the pulp magazines that published his works, such as Weird Tales and Astounding Stories, along with a small inheritance, allowed him to eke out a living, and unlikely as it sounds, he actually was married briefly—to Sonia Green, a Jewish woman from Eastern Europe who owned a hat shop. H.P. Lovecraft was only 46 when he died of intestinal cancer, leaving behind the Cthulhu Mythos he helped create with Howard, August Derleth, Robert Bloch and others, and a body of work that touches, perhaps more than any other writer’s, the dark immensity of the cosmos that lurks beyond our happy bubble of humanity.
And after all, if time travel is possible for things larger than subatomic particles, are Lovecraft’s travelers more implausible than anyone else’s? What’s more likely—a woman traveling back two hundred years by touching a large Celtic standing stone … or a super-intelligent alien traveling forward two hundred million years via some unknown telepathic conduit? My bets are on the Yith.
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I wish this article focused more on the “deep time” aspects of Lovecraft’s fiction, and humanity’s precarious place within it (time itself is virtually the enemy in “The Dreams in the Witch-House,” as filtered through early quantum physics). It’s a fascinating aspect of his writing that’s rarely touched on. The first third of this article is great.
Mainly because the content about his life is available everywhere, and some of it relies too much on older biographies. Lovecraft was apparently perfectly functional in society, capable of forming close in-person friendships. While speculations about “the other” are interesting, it’s hard to gauge its place in his work when so many of his stories (the vast majority) are Lovecraft consciously rewriting others’ work to see what makes it tick. The other is much less prominent in the stories which are wholly his own, such as At the Mountains of Madness.
Though I’m always fascinated by the idea people identify with his protagonists. I suppose I do identify with the inhabitant of Phaleron 118 (“The Case of Charles Dexter Ward”)—who is clearly Merlin himself—who lays waste to a coven, who is a hero if not a protagonist. Or, even more so, Doctor Watson and Sherlock Holmes. My first two concrete encounters with the Cthulhu Mythos were Sherlock Holmes: The Awakened and the Doctor Who novel All-Consuming Fire. The canon subjugates the mythos. But I find all of Lovecraft’s protagonists repulsive: weak-minded and lost. I can’t imagine a world where we have anything in common, let alone I identify with them.