The Shadow Out of Time

The Shadow Out of Time

Author	H. P. Lovecraft
Cover artist	Howard V. Brown
Language	English
Genre	Horror, science fiction
Publication date	June 1936
Publication place	United States
Media type	Print (Magazine)
Text	The Shadow Out of Time at Wikisource
Published in Astounding Stories

The Shadow Out of Time is a novella by American horror fiction writer H. P. Lovecraft. Written between November 1934 and February 1935, it was first published in the June 1936 issue of Astounding Stories. The story describes time and space travel by mind transfer, where a person in a given place and time can switch bodies with someone who is elsewhere or elsewhen. As with other Lovecraftian works, this story features otherworldly alien beings that are not simply variations on humans or other familiar terrestrial animals.

Nathaniel Wingate Peaslee, professor of economics at Miskatonic University, recounts in flashbacks the events that occurred between May 14, 1908 and July 17-18, 1935. During a lesson on May 14, 1908 at around 10:20 a.m., he falls into a coma that lasts several days. After he wakes up, he no longer seems to be himself. His family turns away from him, and only his youngest son Wingate Peaslee is convinced that his real father will return one day. In the years that follow, the professor's secondary personality embarks on extensive expeditions to known and unknown places all over the world. He also seems to want to acquire as much knowledge as possible. After his original personality reappears in September 1913, he and his son try to find out what has happened to him. At first, Peaslee assumes that the events and the nightmares and “quasi-memories” that have haunted him since then are the result of a mental illness. But with the beginning of the First World War, his mental state deteriorates. His initial relief that everything could just be a delusion fades when he realizes that there are other cases like his in history that are eerily similar. The professor eventually succeeds in uncovering more and more memories until he finally remembers exactly what seems to have happened to him.

He was the victim of a body replacement by alien beings who called themselves the Great Race of Yith. They had come to Earth 200 million years ago and possessed the ability to swap their minds with those of another being, both in the past and in the future. They use this ability to create vast libraries of all the knowledge of what has ever been known or will ever be known on Earth. In order to achieve this goal, they transfer their spirit to the respective epoch from which they wish to acquire knowledge, into the body of a suitable person. During this time, the spirit whose body is taken over is in the body of the being who has carried out this exchange.

The captives are treated kindly and can move around freely. They are also encouraged to write down their knowledge, giving them free access to the libraries of the great race. After learning everything they want to know, a reverse process is set in motion and the captured spirit returns to their body with no memory of what happened. This is done to protect the timeline and the person undergoing the exchange, as the Yith realized after some experimentation that sending a spirit back to its time with the knowledge it was able to learn in the Yith libraries has negative consequences. Gradually, more details about the Great Race come to light. It turns out that the Great Race died out eons ago because their civilization was destroyed by a rival, aggressive race described as “flying octopuses” and they transferred only their brightest minds into the bodies of a race of beetles that will colonize Earth after humanity.

Peaslee receives a letter informing him that excavations have been carried out in the great sandy desert of Australia that correspond to what he has written in various articles. The professor and his son then set off for Australia. During a night-time walk, he finally finds the ruins of the abandoned city. After making out an underground entrance to a half-preserved part of the ruins, he descends and recognizes the corridors and rooms from his memories. Torn between the desire to escape and a feverish mixture of burning curiosity and impulsive surrender to fate [sic], he descends deeper into the familiar ruins. As he feels his way further and further down, he notices that the trapdoors under which the flying octopuses were imprisoned are open. He heads for the central archive, where he hopes to find proof of his memories. However, he loses it when he runs through the corridors in a panic on his return after accidentally making a loud noise that wakes someone or something up. After reaching the surface, he returns to the expedition camp at dawn. Since his only evidence has disappeared, he can no longer say for sure whether it was all just a dream or real. When, to his relief, nothing can be found at the place where Peaslee had been, he sets off for home with his son. The story ends with Peaslee revealing to the reader that the lost evidence is a book and that this book was written in his own handwriting.

• Nathaniel Wingate Peaslee: The narrator of the story, a professor of political economy at Miskatonic University, and, from 1908 until 1913, a victim of the Great Race of Yith. He was born c. 1870.^[a]
• Wingate Peaslee: Son of Nathaniel Peaslee, also a Miskatonic professor.
• William Dyer: A Miskatonic University geology professor who accompanies the expedition to Australia.
• Titus Sempronius Blaesus: A Roman "who had been a quaestor in Sulla's time".
• Bartolomeo Corsi: A "12th century Florentine monk".
• Crom-Ya: A Cimmerian chief who lived c. 15,000 B.C.
• Khephnes: "An Egyptian of the 14th Dynasty, who told me the hideous secret of Nyarlathotep".
• Nevil Kingston-Brown: An "Australian physicist...who will die in 2518 A.D."
• Pierre-Louis Montagny: "An aged Frenchman of Louis XIII's time".
• Nug-Soth: "A magician of the dark conquerors of 16,000 A.D."
• S'gg'ha: A being from "the Star-headed vegetable carnivores of Antarctica."
• Theodotides: A Greco-Bactrian official of 200 B.C.
• James Woodville: "A Suffolk gentleman of Cromwell's day".
• Yiang-Li: "A philosopher from the cruel empire of Tsan-Chan, which is to come in 5,000 A.D."^[4]

S. T. Joshi points to Berkeley Square, a 1933 fantasy film, as an inspiration for The Shadow Out of Time: "Lovecraft saw this film four times in late 1933; its portrayal of a man of the 20th century who somehow merges his personality with that of his 18th-century ancestor was clearly something that fired Lovecraft's imagination, since he had written a story on this very theme himself—the then unpublished The Case of Charles Dexter Ward (1927)." Lovecraft called the film "the most weirdly perfect embodiment of my own moods and pseudo-memories that I have ever seen—for all my life I have felt as if I might wake up out of this dream of an idiotic Victorian age and insane jazz age into the sane reality of 1760 or 1770 or 1780." Lovecraft noted some conceptual problems in Berkeley Square's depiction of time travel, and felt that he had resolved these flaws in his novella.^[5] Other literary models for The Shadow Out of Time include H. B. Drake's The Shadowy Thing (originally published as The Remedy in 1925), about a person who has the ability to transfer his personality to another body; Henri Beraud's Lazarus (1925), in which the protagonist develops an alter ego during a lengthy period of amnesia; and Walter de la Mare's The Return (1910), featuring a character who seems to be possessed by a mind from the 18th century.^[6]

Lovecraft's work, The Shadow Out of Time, is characterised by its profound influence from Einstein's theory of relativity, particularly concerning the concept of time travel. Peaslee's narrative follows a journey through time, albeit not physically or voluntarily, akin to H.G. Wells's Time Traveller. Notably, Peaslee's body never traverses into the past or future. Instead, he experiences a mental journey through time, his consciousness being separated from his physical self and transported millions of years into the past, inhabiting an alien body for a period of years. This results in a non-human body in the ancient past. Consequently, he becomes the subject of a forced exchange of consciousnesses, wherein his mind is placed into one of the alien bodies from a long-forgotten era, while the alien mind gathers information from the future.
Peaslee, however, is not a prisoner; he is permitted to interact with other individuals who have had their minds transferred. He is part of a trans-temporal commune of intellectual exchange. Eventually, Peaslee's mind is returned to his body, and he attempts to resume his life, however psychologically disturbed by his experience he may be.^[7] In the course of his experience within the alien body, Peaslee came to the understanding that the concept of time, as it is commonly accepted in human perception, was not applicable. Following his reversion to his own body, Peaslee's perception of time, his "ability to discern between consecutiveness and simultaneity", had undergone a subtle distortion. The temporal concepts of past, present and future become indistinguishable, merging into a panoramic entity devoid of discrete temporal points.
The temporal progression of cause and effect becomes obscured, as the concept of physical or objective temporal movement becomes distorted. In the context of Lovecraft's fiction, time is depicted as a point rather than a linear entity. The extraterrestrial beings in "The Shadow Out of Time" are able to transition their consciousness seamlessly between millennia, akin to traversing a park, given that the temporal continuum is effectively a landscape of static events and entities.Upon his return to his body, Peaslee is confronted with the realization that all temporal occurrences are unfolding simultaneously, dispelling the illusion of sequential temporal progression.
Peaslee's out-of-body experience has a cost: memories of temporal transportation are accompanied by pain and the sense of an artificial psychological barrier. Attempting to recollect the finer details of his past life felt as if "something was fumbling and rattling at the latch of my recollection, while another unknown force sought to keep the portal barred" .These descriptions reveal the subconscious psychological shield reasserting itself. He describes experiencing time as a continuous flow, without clear boundaries between past, present and future, as "an awesome, brain-shattering truth [...] beyond normal conception" .
The enormity of this truth is challenging for him to comprehend, primarily because it defies quantification. The human brain exhibits a natural tendency towards the formation of coherent patterns in processing information. However, Peasey's experience, as outlined in the text, challenges this assumption, presenting time as a chaotic and disorderly process that lacks the familiar concepts of cause and effect, and appears to defy any clear organizational principle. As a result, the individual finds it challenging to integrate this newfound knowledge within the bounds of human experience.
It is therefore evident that, without external assistance, no individual mind, including that of Peaslee, is capable of perceiving the illusory passage of time. His journey into the past is incongruous with such a perception; however, his mind must re-establish the psychological delusion of continuous time if he is to function within his usual state. Consequently, although Peaslee's "mental barriers wore down" over time, eventually enabling him to recall his time-travel narrative, his intellect remains at odds with his psychological understanding of the universe.^[8]

• The Shadow Out of Time title listing at the Internet Speculative Fiction Database