The History Of The World

Human civilisation is less than five thousand years old. The first hominids arose several millions years ago. The Earth is 4.5 billion years old. This means there is room in Earth’s history for dozens of sapient species and hundreds of thousands of global civilisations, all equal in complexity to ours. If you zoom in on any of these lost empires you should discover as much internal diversity as you would get if you zoomed in on the Anthropocene.

Lovecraft was one of the first to grapple with this. We’ve accepted in the early 21th century that we all evolved from monkeys but so much of pulp is about confronting the horror of one’s immediate simian ancestors and accepting yourself as somewhere on an animal continuum. Hence the Scopes Monkey Trial and the facts concerning the late Arthur Jermyn.

The human mind is perfectly capable of understanding the core truths of the universe. We simply prefer not to. There are no inscrutable cosmic horrors and Cthulhu doesn’t blast your sanity by his very presence - he is normal and what he says to you make sense. You think you’re never going to join a cult but as you fight them intellectually you realise their positions are more coherent than you thought.

Of course it seems like madness to the plebs. They would have burnt Einstein as a witch. It’s their problem, not yours. If only we could teach them critical thinking in the schools.

HADEAN EON (4.5 bya)

• Solar system forms from cosmic dust.

• Intelligent life develops on the lost planet Nibiru, beyond Neptune.

• Annunaki civilisation flourishes, begins to colonise gas giants.

• Presence of life attracts extrasolar predator Tiamat.

• Oort cloud infested by Tiamat. Hadean War begins.

• Annunaki scientists relocate Nibiru to inner ring of solar system.

• Nibiru collides with Earth. Moon formed. Collapse of Annunaki civilisation.

• Tiamat slain by Marduk, last king of the Annunaki. End of Hadean War.

• Late Heavy Bombardment caused by distintegration of Tiamat's corpse.

• Most surviving Annunaki retreat to lunar tomb-cities, enter cultural stasis.

• Tiamatic material, seeded by meteors across inner system, evolves into first prokaryotes.

ARCHAEAN EON (4 bya)

• Earth cools below the boiling point of water, allowing oceans to form.

• Microbial mats populate the slimy shores of Vaalbara, the first continent, and begin to develop rudimentary self-awareness.

• Great age of stromatolithic architecture. Psychic reefs and dreaming mountains play host to anaerobic shoggoth ecosystem.

• Vaalbara fuses into one vast prokaryotic brain.

• Quasi-human time refugees from the Anthropocene terraform and colonise Noachian Mars.

• Martian seas run dry. 

• Attempts to steal Earth's water lead to catastrophic war with Vaalbara.

• Empire of Hungry Stone conquers inner system. 

• Shoggoth legions begin the process of converting all matter into cognition slime.

• Last of the Q-men infect Earth with blue-green bacteria bred in Tharsis plague pools. 

• Vaalbara destroyed by Oxygen Holocaust.

PROTEROZOIC EON (2.5 bya)

• First eukaryotes appear.

• Chthonians evolve from subterranean protozoa.

• Q-men descendants colonise newly-oxygenated Earth.

• Surviving shoggoths retreat to bottom of sea, which remains anoxic.

• Q-men cope with Huronian glaciation by evolving into photosynthetic yetis.

• Frozen earth converted into temple. Ice mandalas etched on moons of Saturn.

• Yetis pass a billion years in silent meditation upon the beauty of barren continents, then peacefully go extinct, except for handful of sorcerors who mummify themselves to await the dawn of a new eon.

PALAEOZOIC ERA (541 mya)

• Emergence of complex multicellular life.

• Elder blastoids populate Gondwana's warm, shallow seas.

• Arrival of the Great Race, emigrants from a hostile future who project their consciousness into the bodies of hallucigenian worms.

• Blastoid explorers make contact with the last shoggoths, lurking in sulphuric vents.

• Foundation of Pnakotus, the basalt library-city, where worm-scholars write the history of the universe by kidnapping witnesses from across time.

• Mi-go arrive from the Oort cloud, having evolved from cosmic parasites attracted to Tiamat's corpse. They colonise mountaintops and begin to experiment on fish.

• Shoggoth army conquers Pnakotus, unleashing the contents of its time dungeons.

• Early amphibians haunt the clubmoss forests, worshipping the god Pan in the form of a horned centipede.

• P-T extinction event caused by blastoid-mi-go war.

MESOZOIC ERA (252 mya)

• Amphibians evolve into serpent men.

• Serpent men tame dinosaurs, build solar-powered cities in the desert.

• Kardashev Type I civilisation developed.

• Slave race of Q-men cloned from yeti gene banks.

• Dyson swarm constructed around sun.

• Kardashev Type II civilisation developed.

• First contact made with Nordics and Zeta Reticulans.

• Serpent men explore the galactic core and discover the singularity Azathoth.

• Earth abandoned to breed new intelligent species for Azathoth's consumption.

• Kardashev Type III civilisation developed.

• Emancipated Q-men establish dinosaur kingdoms, start work on spaceflight.

• Improperly maintained Dyson swarm component falls into erratic orbit and causes Chicxulub impact.

CENOZOIC ERA (66 mya)

• Last dinosaurs preserved by chthonians in Hollow Earth.

• Reanimated yeti sorceror founds Hyperborean empire.

• Maps of past and future discovered in Pnakotic ruins, providing hard evidence of causal determinism.

• Hyperborea declines into nihilism and sexual decadence.

• Puritan cult of Tsathoggua sparks civil war.

• Surviving Hyperboreans enter Hollow Earth, adapting to subterranean life.

• Early whales develop collective dreaming capacity, begin to sculpt oneiric dimensions once occupied by Vaalbaran consciousness.

• Continents settle into their current positions.

• Atlantis and Lemuria grown from crystal seeds, colonised by primitive Q-men.

• Zeta Reticulans make contact with Atlanteans, trading technology for a promise to guard their cetacean ancestors.

• Earliest hominids evolve in Africa.

• Multiple intelligent species attempt to guide human evolution, leading to the Ape Wars.

• Atlantis and Lemuria destroyed. Survivors flee to the Americas.

• Human civilisation develops in fertile river valleys, subtly guided by serpent men.

• Rings of Saturn constructed as means of social control.

• The present day.

The future is as written as the past but I don’t have it yet. Do we achieve singularity? Is artificial intelligence the next stage in human evolution? How many times has it happened before?

What about the cruel empire of Tsan-Chan that is to come three thousand years hence, or the degenerate carnival city of Carcosa which inhabits the entropic space at the final horizon of the universe? Stunted crab-things chewing lichen from the shores of a dead and frozen Earth. Warlocks in black towers siphoning heat from the Anthropocene, draining Earth’s past of its lifeblood, hungry to commit one last obscenity before the stars go out…

All of this can be revised but it’s good for a detective story that our protagonists inhabit a plausibly consistent world. Madness is not just a score, it’s increased understanding. As you proceed through the universe you should begin to correlate all its contents.

All art from Haeckel’s Kunstformen der Natur. Lovecraft inspired by naturalists, we don’t think enough about that.