I have never been a particularly adventuresome computer user. I’ve been using them for twenty years, but because I was–unlike a lot of you–somewhat past twelve when I got my first computer, I don’t have computer skills hard-wired into my reflexes. So when I find a set of specifications and preferences that will make my computer do what I need it to do, I resist making experimental changes in my settings in the hope of "improving" things, for fear that if the improvements turn out to be counterimprovements I won’t be able to find my way back to what worked for me before. I just leave well enough alone, at least until circumstances like terminal equipment failure force me to get a new computer, and that doesn’t happen often.

Sometimes, though, changes in settings happen anyway, unintended though they may be. That occurred recently on the venerable MS-DOS-based computer that I still use for the bulk of my writing work: I was keying things in more quickly than I should have, inadvertently brought up the settings page that controlled the printer, and changed one of the settings (but which one?) before I could halt my own keystroke. For a while it seemed as though I had permanently interrupted communication between my computer and my equally ancient printer, but eventually I was able to retrace my steps, laboriously figure out what I had done, and undo it.

But then there’s the other computer, the relatively modern Windows 98 one that I use for e-mail and Internet surfing. I never change any settings on that one, either. But sometimes, while I sleep, Windows 98 goes to work within the switched-off machine and alters the settings itself, changing them to ones that it thinks I would find more enjoyable. Thus, one morning, I brought up an e-mail from a friend dating from the day before, so that I could check something in my response to her, and discovered that this was how her message now read:

Nun! Gung-f jung V jnf tbvat gryy lbh–fb ibh qba’g unir gb pnyy zr. V gba’g unir "Fpenzoyr" nf n evtug-pyvpx bcgvba, ohg v gb unir "Fbeg" naq bgure cbgragvny gencf sbe gur.

And then came my reply:

Purphxrq mlg gur evhtug-pyvpxre nag glurer’f na "Hafpenzoyr" bcgvbra va guglr zrah. V q’ba’g frr "Fpenzoyr" ohg vg zhfg or hgurer fbzjurer.

Bemused, baffled, and more than a little alarmed, I checked all the other e-mails stored on my computer. They had all been translated into the same language–a language that I instantly recognized as the one used by H.P. Lovecraft’s Elder Gods, a group of which the dread Cthulhu is the pre-eminent deity. This, from Lovecraft’s story "The Call of Cthulhu," is a typical example of that language:

Ph’nglui mglw’nafh Cthulhu R’Lyeh wgah’ngagl fhtagn.

The etymological kinship is obvious. But how had it come to pass that my e-mails had been translated overnight into Cthulhuese? Had the Elder Gods taken control of my computer? Were they passing messages back and forth among themselves behind my back like some primordial band of Al Qaeda desperadoes?

I began wandering through the "preferences" section of my e-mail software, looking for the answer, and eventually I discovered a scrambling function that, when checked, obligingly garbles all the e-mail kept on the computer. It has no effect on outgoing e-mail, but transforms all the stored stuff into Cthulhu-language so that the guy in the next cubicle, if he somehow gains access to my computer, won’t be able to pore through the secret business information I keep among my old e-mails.

However, I don’t work in an office full of corporate spies. The guy in the next cubicle is my wife, Karen, and she’s free to read my e-mail any time. There’s nothing there that will lead her to steal business contacts from me–or to make her want to run for a divorce lawyer, either. So I clicked on the "scramble" option to get rid of it and all the e-mail on the machine returned to normal. End of story.

Except the idea of e-mail from Cthulhu got me thinking–

Cthulhu’s creator, H.P. Lovecraft, was one of the most prolific correspondents of all time. Though he lived only forty-seven years (1890-1937), his published letters fill five or six volumes of very small type–and those are just the ones that survived. Extremely verbose letters they are, too. I open Volume Two of his Selected Letters at random and find his missive of Oct. 26, 1926, to his fellow fantasy writer, Frank Belknap Long, which starts this way:

"Young Man:–

"In replying to your keenly appreciated communication, I must begin in something of my old-time travelogical vein; for the past week has witnessed in a pilgraimage [sic] on my part, more impressive than any I can recall taking in years. This excursion, on which I was accompany’d by my youngest daughter, Mrs. Gamwell, was to these rural reaches of Rhode-Island from whence our stock is immediately sprung; and is design’d to be the first of several antiquarian and genealogical trips covering the Phillips-Place-Tyler-Rathbone-Howard country, and including inspection of as many of the original colonial homesteads as are yet standing. . . ."

And so on in studiedly archaic style for nine printed pages. A lot of the letters are like that. If the irrepressibly communicative Lovecraft had saved the energy expended in all that correspondence to use in his fiction, he would have left us nine Tolkien-sized trilogies. What if he had had e-mail instead? E-mail users tend to be laconic indeed. A paragraph-long query from a friend gets an "I don’t think so" response, or, "I sent it last Tuesday," or maybe just "LOL"–but never the kind of flowery and elaborate multi-page exposition that Lovecraft loved to send. We just key in our quick replies, leaving the original queries in place so we don’t have to bother explaining what we’re responding to, and hit the "send" button. Presto jingo, our reply has crossed the world. A book of Lovecraft’s collected e-mails, if there could have been such a thing, would probably be dull stuff indeed, clipped and cryptic little bits of commentary, irrelevant and incomprehensible to any outsider. But we would have those nine trilogies.

Another formidable generator of correspondence was the late, great editor John W. Campbell, Jr. (1910-1971), who was known to answer an author’s three-paragraph sketch of a potential story idea with a ten-page essay. His letters have been collected and published, too–only one six-hundred-page volume ever appeared, though many more were intended–and this, a letter of December 6, 1952 to Poul Anderson, is a typical example:

"Dear Poul:

"The trouble with historians is that they’d rather be traditional than be right. It’s practically axiomatic; the guy wouldn’t be a historian if he weren’t all wrapped up and deeply reverent about the traditions of man. There are exceptions, of course–but they’re exceptional, and kept well under control by the Traditional Authorities.

"If you think I’m kidding on that, you’re wrong. I know whereof I speak.

"Item: Wallace West, scf writer, is also a professional history text writer. But he’s a researcher, and not a traditionalist. He dug up some papers which quoted Washington and Jefferson, separately, as saying that our constitution was based largely on the constitution of the Iroquois Nations, as originally drawn up by Hiawatha, the truly great American statesman. . . ."

Campbell’s explanation of Wallace West’s ideas led him quickly to an analysis of the fall of Rome, the rise of Islamic science, the repression of Galileo by the Church, the development of civilization in the Nile valley, and, six pages later, the position of the electron in the hydrogen molecule. What Poul Anderson made out of all that, we will now never know. But if John only had the use of e-mail, think of the effort he would have been spared! "Story’s all wrong, Poul. Go back and read Spengler again. Best, John." And on to the next rejection slip in two clicks of the Campbellian mouse.

Perhaps not, though. Perhaps Lovecraft and Campbell would have been just as assiduous in their e-mail correspondence as they were in their conventional letters. And perhaps they would have fallen into e-correspondence with each other. They were, after all, contemporaries during the late years of Lovecraft’s career and the early ones of Campbell’s, and the interconnectivity of the wired world brings everyone, sooner or later, into contact with everyone else. So those Collected Letters volumes might include material like this, if only their authors had lived a little longer:

"Dear John: Do you ever happen to hear the sounds of rats moving in your walls? Beneath the cellar floor?"

"Dear Howard: Ron Hubbard has developed a fabulous new science-based therapy of the mind that I think you would find of great help in treating your condition. . . ."

Wondrous to contemplate, yes.

And then, the Collected E-mails of Philip K. Dick–what a trail of berserkery there!–and the Collected Rejection Slips of the vitriolic editor H.L. Gold, as terse as haiku and infinitely more crushing–

And there is one Harlan Ellison of Sherman Oaks, California, who actually has lived on into the era of e-mail, but has sworn a mighty oath never to use it. Harlan’s correspondence is often, well, rather vigorous in its phraseology. (Our executive editor prefers that I don’t quote of it here, alas, to avoid getting embroiled in litigation with Mr. Ellison’s correspondents.) Perhaps it’s just as well he doesn’t use e-mail. He could crash whole strings of servers with a single click.