History Literature / TheShadowOutOfTime

* AffablyEvil: The Yith are by no means good people; they forcibly mind-swap people without their consent, and intend to swap with an entire species eventually, effectively committing genocide to perpetuate their own minds. That said, they are surprisingly polite on an individual level; the "guests" they swap with are given a degree of freedom within their society and allowed to study at their libraries. In the rare case where their original body dies while they're swapped, the human (now trapped in a Yith body) is granted great honor and high status in Yithian society to compensate them.
* AliensAreBastards: Surprisingly subverted. The Great Race, while they continuously swap minds with other beings from across space and time without their consent, mainly do so as a way to learn from them and gather knowledge. When their five-year exploration periods are up, they return their guests to their bodies with no hassle. In the rare cases when the switch is not temporary for some reason their "guests" are afforded a position of great honor. All of these guests are given access to the libraries, technology, and gardens of The Great Race as well as conversation with individuals from all the eras that have been explored. The narrator is even able to learn the darkest secrets of his hosts.
* AliensNeverInventedDemocracy: The Great Race of Yith is described as having "a sort of [[CommieNazis fascistic socialism]]".

* AsYouKnow: The narrator doesn't cover much of what "he" did during the years of the timeskip, because apparently it was something of a news event and was heavily covered by the papers, so he assumes the reader is familiar with the story already, or can find out.

* EldritchAbomination: Played straight with the flying polyps, which are said to be only partly material and temporarily visible, but averted with the Yithians which are organic beings that evolved on Earth — or at least their bodies are.
* EveryoneHasStandards: The Yithians have strict rules when it comes to their mindswap abilities. Temporary mindswaps in the search of knowledge are common, and any "visitors" are treated like honored guests, but ''permanent'' mindswaps are only allowed in extreme emergencies (like a planetary cataclysm) and any Yithian that tries to permanently hide in another body (such as the occasional, though rare, criminal) is mercilessly hunted down and punished. In rare cases where a non-Yithian ends up permanently mindswapped by accident (because their original body died), they are treated as honored and respected guests by the Yithians for the rest of their lives to make up for it.

* HumanoidAbomination: After his three-year memory lapse, the narrator is told that almost everyone he meets instinctively rejects him as "wrong", like there was something about his behavior and speech that was just inherently revolting. For his loved ones, it was even worse, as his wife refused to accept that he was himself, and divorced him. His oldest and youngest child also rejected him, with only his second-oldest child remaining faithful to the idea that his real self would one day return (which it did). Even after the narrator becomes himself again, the rest of his family refuses to ever see him again.

* PetTheDog: The Yithians may be [[GrandTheftMe body-snatching]] StarfishAliens, but that doesn't stop them giving their victims balloon rides. In fact they go to some lengths to make their un-consenting guests' stay comfortable and interesting.

* SealedEvilInACan: Earth was originally inhabited by half-corporeal beings resembling polyps that the Yith sealed away inside the Earth under great stone seals, which they eventually broke free from, leading to the destruction of the Yith's original civilization. They're still down there now, waiting... Though they will die eventually.

** The "polyps", [[EldritchAbomination Eldritch Abominations]] that don't fully exist in the corporeal world.

* FreakyFridayFlip: The Yithians' entire shtick. When faced with a danger they cannot overcome, they will, ''as a group'' swap bodies with another race of beings at some other place and/or time to escape, leaving the minds of those they switch with to perish in their previous bodies.

Can be read [[http://dagonbytes.com/thelibrary/lovecraft/theshadowoutoftime.htm here]] or [[https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Shadow_Out_of_Time/full here]].

* AliensAreBastards: Surprisingly subverted. The Great Race, while they continuously swap minds with other beings from across space and time without their consent, mainly do so as a way to learn from them and gather knowledge. When their five-year exploration periods are up, they return their guests to their bodies with no hassle. In the rare cases when the switch is not temporary for some reason their "guests" are afforded a position a great honor. All of these guests are given access to the libraries, technology, and gardens of The Great Race as well as conversation with individuals from all the eras that have been explored. The narrator is even able to learn the darkest secrets of his hosts.

%%* PuppeteerParasite: Yithians.

* MajoredInWesternHypocrisy: Loosely speaking, if you switch the Earth-based, Mesozoic Yith civilisation for "the West", this could apply to all the human and other sapient minds, in the (current) Great Race bodies, studying anything and everything in the Yith's current homeworld and time period. There's even a hint of the "colonised mind learning from the coloniser" dynamic that this trope implies, since most of the non-Yith minds were forced to inhabit the current Yith bodies[[note]]which, of course, weren't their original bodies either—''assuming they even had original bodies''[[/note]] without their prior consent.

* SealedEvilInACan: Earth was originally inhabited by half-corporeal beings resembling polyps that the Yith sealed away inside the Earth under great stone seals, which they eventually broke free from, leading to the destruction of the Yith's original civilization. They're still down there now, waiting...

* DefiniteArticleTitle

* EveryoneHasStandards: The Yithians have strict rules when it comes to their mindswap abilities. Temporary mindswaps in the search of knowledge are common, and any "visitors" are treated like honored guests, but ''permanent'' mindswaps are only allowed in extreme emergencies (like a planetary cataclysm) and any Yithian that tries to permanently hide in another body (such as the occasional, though rare, criminal) is mercilessly hunted down and punished.

** However while capable of empathy they're not truly benign. The ultimate plan of The Great Race is escape their own doom by permanently switching bodies with a future civilization. It is stated they've done this before and implied they plan to keep it up forever.

* AliensAreBastards: Surprisingly subverted. The Great Race, while they continuously swap minds with other beings from across space and time without their consent, only do so as a way to learn from them and gather knowledge. They're accommodating, let their guests explore and interact with others like them, and have filled the world of ancient earth they live on full of immaculately-decorated gardens. When their five-year exploration periods are up, they return their guests to their bodies with no hassle. They are, of course, not exactly peaceful either. See EvenEvilHasStandards.

* WhamLine: At the end, when the narrator describes he saw in that tome he pulled from the ruins in the desert.

* AliensNeverInventedDemocracy: The Great Race of Yith is described as having "a sort of fascistic socialism".

* ArtisticLicensePaleontology: At first, the protagonist accounts his strange dreams to his "common text book knowledge of the plants and other conditions of the primitive world of a hundred and fifty million years ago - the world of the Permian or Triassic age." Only the Triassic age ended 201 million years ago, 150 million years ago was the Jurassic age.

* TheTheTitle