They Had No Deepness of Earth

by Zero HP Lovecraft

A collection of eldritch and hair-raising tales pertinent to the increasing proportion of techno-industrial surplus being spent to mask bio-capital deterioration.

Genres: Fiction

391 pages, Hardcover

First published November 10, 2021

Reviews

[Aaron Kleinheksel · Rating 4 out of 5]

I learned of this book after following ZHPL on Twitter and listening to his interview on Alex Kaschuta's Subversive podcast. ZHP has kindly offered a downloadable version for free on his website, so there is no excuse for not giving it a try!

This is, as advertised, a collection of mostly tales (with a bit of verse thrown in, but since I largely loathe poetry, I'll not comment on that) focusing on what I would call crypto-dystopian psychological horror. This collected work must win an award for the number of bookshelves I was able to slot it in to. The stories cover a lot of ground and while entertaining on their own, serve as an effective vehicle for the author's views on a variety of topics, which was great for someone like me. These topics center on social interaction, politics, religion and the knotting of all of these topics and others with AI and AR. It definitely helps to have a healthy familiarity with the Bible and also with the writings of the original HP Lovecraft, and I would further say that if, in addition to that, you are a fan of the Black Mirror, you WILL enjoy this collection. Much of the book is 5 stars, but it's hard for a collection to hold that for any reader, and there were a few short selections that didn't do it for me.

God-Shaped Hole is the highlight of this collection, and is a book in its own right. The Gig Economy and Don't Make Me Think were also highlights for me, and these tales work well together, as they tend to deal with the frightening aspects of our near-term technological futures - conveying dread, and in some cases, a measure of hope. ZHP generally provides a bit of commentary on these stories, and it's cool because sometimes it isn't clear where, or if, the story narrator has left off and ZHP is talking, or... Yet, because of the type of stories these are, this ambiguity and confusion only serve to draw the reader deeper into the societal morass we are lurching into, and provide a meta level that most short stories just don't ever attempt. We are not God and it is good that we arre not. We are not God and it is good that we arre not.

A few of my favorite quotes to provide a bit of flavor:

~"Our descendants, if we continue to breed, will not find the concept of free will to be comprehensible." - pg. 24 of The Gig Economy

~"John Stuart Mill wrote that no one had ever believed it was the will of a god that kept parallel lines from meeting; that no one ever prayed to God to sustain the equality between the square of the hypotenuse and the sum of the squares of the sides, or for two and two to equal four, but I prayed for all of those things, such was the violation of logic and natural law that I experienced." - pg. 171 of The God-Shaped Hole

~"Man without God is ugly." - pg. 186 of The God-Shaped Hole

~ An included quote from Marshall McLuhan: "Man becomes as it were the sex organ of the machine world, as the bee of the plant world, enabling it to fecundate and to evolve ever new forms. The machine-world reciprocates man's love by expediting his wishes and desires, namely by providing him with wealth." - pg. 190 of The God-Shaped Hole

~"The image does not just influence our values. It changes the way we think so that certain values become inevitable." - pg. 205 of The God-Shaped Hole

~"The global village turns out to be a global longhouse, where everything you say and do is monitored and controlled by the women - yes, the women - of your tribe." - pg. 386

[Derek Baldwin · Rating 3 out of 5]

Flashes of brilliance but too many dull stretches especially in the final story. The trick with the emojis is very tiresome indeed, and contemptuous of the reader. The rest of the stories are okay, often in vaguely the same sort of territory as Thomas Ligotti. The Gig Economy is probably the best one. I'll continue to follow HPL online but perhaps not at book length again.

[Rhizomal Ennui · Rating 2 out of 5]

I wish he would just write better stuff

[René · Rating 5 out of 5]

If Lovecraft and Neal Stephenson had a collab and were anti-establishment.

His Twitter is better though.

[T.Z. Barry · Rating 5 out of 5]

Zero HP Lovecraft (@0x49fa98) is an anonymous internet poster I originally discovered around 2016. His name and bio (horrorist) intrigued me, so I read his short story, “The Gig Economy,” which was like a modern cyberpunk take on “The Call of Cthulhu.” I instantly became a fan and read all of Zero’s stories as they originally came out on his WordPress site (now on Substack), and later assembled in this collection. I had been meaning to re-visit the stories because they deserve (and often require) re-reading.

His fiction is like a combination of the cosmic horror of H.P. Lovecraft with the dense philosophical speculation of Jorge Luis Borges and the mind-bending science fiction of Ted Chiang. If the original Lovecraft were alive today he would surely be writing about the horrors of modern technology—the internet, smartphones, VR, porn, and sexbots—which is exactly what ZeroHP does. He is an inspiration for me, writing some of the best fiction today, completely outside of the mainstream publishing system.

The best stories are:
- “The Gig Economy” – about a NEET who performs random dayjobs for cryptocurrency and attempts to figure out who is funding these gigs.
- “God-Shaped Hole” – about the future horrors of sexbots.
- “Don’t Make Me Think” – about the horrors of Neuralink brain-computer interfaces, written in emoji. Zero is also a master prose stylist and innovator of literary form.