Trivia / At the Mountains of Madness

• Author Phobia: Lovecraft's life-long fear of cold temperatures is part of what makes this story so effective.
• Creator's Favorite Episode: This, and The Colour Out of Space, were Lovecraft's favorites of his stories.
• Science Marches On
  • The past seventy-five years have shown many advancements in Antarctic exploration, revealing a continent wholly unlike what is described in this book.
    • Some of the terminology, such as "Comanchian", was already obsolete. So was the initial idea (edited out of the final product by Lovecraft himself upon discoveries made during his writing) that Antarctica was actually two continents frozen together.
    • And we now know that no mountain in Antarctica reaches thirty-five thousand feet. The highest peak, Mount Vinson, is in fact less than half that, clocking in at 5022 meters (about 16,500 feet).
  • There was also the very concept of interplanetary travel; they were said to "fly through the aether on leathery wings", with the "luminiferous aether" being the old concept of what existed beyond the upper atmosphere. The concept of space as a near-complete vacuum was becoming prominent in Lovecraft's time, and theories about the luminiferous aether dying out, after an experiment disproved the idea that light couldn't pass through a vacuum, but he was swayed by the lecturing of a theorist he held in high regard.
    • However, it must be noted that this is a third person interpretation of an ancient (Silurian era) pictographic carving by a race of aliens with minds that work differently than humans', and therefore may be a complete misinterpretation of the actual events depicted, if you want to strap on your Watsonian hat.
    • In all subsequent stories featuring the Elder Things their wings have been described as a kind of living Solar Sail. The ARTC radio version poetically describes them as riding "the cold winds of light", i.e. solar wind.
  • Most of the paleontology depicted in the Elder Things' bas-reliefs would now be considered antiquated, for one reason or another.
  • The Mountains of Illinois: Explorers get their first glimpse of the mountains at Latitude 76°15′, Longitude 113°10′E - the tabletop-flat deserted ice-sheet, not very far from where present-day Vostok Station lies. The "accursed mountains which not even the Elder Things dared explore" stood between Latitude 77°S, Longitude 70°E; and Latitude 70°, Longitude 100°E, crossing the flat Princess Elizabeth Land and Kaiser Wilhelm II Land towards the coast.
  • Subverted in that the carvings of the Elder Things confirm (mostly) the theory of continental drift. At the time the story was written (and set), continental drift was a highly controversial hypothesis. That said, the specific geologic history depicted in the carvings does not match modern data.
  • Fridge Logic: Much is said of the catastrophic upthrust of mountain ranges and their dead city is said to have been built "early in the Cretaceous age after a titanic earth-buckling had obliterated a still vaster predecessor not far distant", on a mountain range which was about 24,000ft tall as of 1930. This makes it about 140-145 millions of years old - but no mountain survives that much in original form. The Alps and Himalayas attained their shape less than 50 million years ago. In a time thrice as long, the mountains were to be slowly eroded to the size of big hills. Somehow, Lovecraft's mountains always grow up, never shrink.
  • Equally subverted regarding a comment of how the moon formed. While the details the theory of how the moon was created in the story are inescapably wrong (Dyer mentions that it was likely wrenched from the South Pacific, an event not at all remotely like the commonly accepted Giant-Impact Hypothesis) the fact remains that it is presented vague enough to be workable and acceptable in modern day as a precursor to the GIH.
  • Although Lovecraft was right about Antarctica's climate during the Elder Days, he was wrong about its location. The Elder Thing's mural apparently mentions the long polar nights; but back during the Silurian era Antarctica was where the Indian Ocean is now. (As noted above, Lovecraft *did* accept the theory of Continential Drift, though.)
• Sequel in Another Medium: In the Beyond the Mountains of Madness campaign for Call of Cthulhu, the player characters are members of an Antarctic expedition which follows the one described in story. There's also a campaign in Achtung! Cthulhu called Assault on the Mountains of Madness where a player-lead team of Allied soldiers must prevent the Nazis from exploiting the Elder Things' city and releasing a trapped elder god.
• What Could Have Been:
  • Guillermo del Toro was going to adapt the story into a movie, but Universal discarded the idea because they believed it was too similar to Prometheus. Del Toro however still wants to make the movie, especially now with his reputation of gaining an Oscar after The Shape of Water.
  • There was going to be a video game adaptation of the above mentioned Call of Cthulhu sequel campaign, made by the same team that did Dark Corners of the Earth. Sadly, Dark Corners financial failure nixed that idea.