I came late to the whole Cthulhu meme, but I'm actually glad that I did. Though H.P. Lovecraft has severe technical limitations as a writer, his contribution to modern science fiction and horror cannot be understated. More important than Lovecraft's Arkham Cycle fiction is the impact that collective work has had on our culture's ability to tell speculative stories about the very nature of fear. Lovecraft envisioned sources of horror that had nothing to do with humanity, tapping into something at once primal and timeless in the way modern people understand what scares them.

I stumbled across a slim collection of stories from The Dream Cycle of H.P. Lovecraft in an alternative library early in college. If that had been my only exposure to the author, I would have dismissed him as being just another uninspired purveyor of pulp. It wasn't until several years later when the Internet-launched and geek-approved Cthulhu meme had all but played itself out. Tired of not getting the joke, I asked a Lovecraft-savvy friend what Cthulhu was all about.

The way he explained it, Lovecraft was a fairly vocal atheist (as evidenced by not only his work but also his letters to colleagues dismissing faith outright), so all the monsters of Western tradition didn't really appeal to him. Indeed, the most iconic abominations of European literature tend to be associated in one way or another with an opposition to church authority. Dracula is cursed by God, Frankenstein's Monster is a rotten sort of Adam and any of the beasts of Classical mythology are just bizarre creations of the gods. For atheists like Lovecraft, fear had to come from somewhere other than divinity.

The fearsomeness of Lovecraft's monsters is in their sheer alienness. Creatures like Cthulhu, Azathoth and Hastur are completely inhuman in form and in mind, beings that were not made by human-like hands and that have no real interest in the perceived sanctity of human life. From a narrative standpoint, this forced Lovecraft into a corner. He stuck himself with describing the indescribable, so instead of backtracking or aiming for literary intensity, he would simply write that something was "too terrible to imagine".

Perhaps it's this absurdity that caused Internet communities to latch onto the Cthulhu mythos and turn it into humor. The Internet is already an overwhelmingly atheistic medium, though it's also definitively irreverent. Lovecraft's concepts may pop up all over geek media, such as in H.R. Giger's designs for Alien and the massive horrors that serve as opponents in video games, but they're far from sacred. The meme supporters managed to take the source of visceral horror fiction and turn it into a joke, precisely because it was such a serious bit of culture.

Deeper than this mockery, though, is the common bond the Lovecraft monsters make for self-described geeks. Cthulhu has become a mascot for a well-connected subculture, the biggest inside joke in history. This creature that was designed as a way to scare atheists in the 20th century has become a symbol of the triumph of science-minded individuals in the 21st.