Collapsing Cosmoses

Composition, publication and the fragment boundary

The composition catalog dates the work to June 1935. It first appeared in Leaves, number 2, in 1938, on pages 100–101. The Archive's electronic text distinguishes Barlow's contributions with brackets, allowing readers to see an editorial presentation of the collaboration rather than assuming that every sentence belongs to one writer.

The ending is a stopping point in an unfinished narrative. No result of the impending battle survives in this text. Accounts that describe a final collision of universes, a victorious commander or a resolved invasion add events that are absent.

Sources: H. P. Lovecraft Archive — fiction in composition order, Collapsing Cosmoses — publication data, Collapsing Cosmoses — original text

The alarm and the council

Dam Bor observes an approaching fleet through a cosmoscope and identifies it as alien to the familiar space-time continuum. He assumes hostility before establishing the visitors' intentions. His urgent warning gives the defenders several centuries to respond, immediately unsettling ordinary measures of emergency.

The report goes to the Inter-Cosmic Chamber of Commerce. Delegates from thirty-seven galaxies gather in a chamber whose tiny floor area contradicts the grandeur of the assembly. Their presiding official, Oll Stof, communicates through alternating heat and cold.

Hak Ni, the military commander, attempts a heroic address but is interrupted and sent to win. Relatives, commercial institutions and theatrical ceremony share the stage with supposedly immeasurable cosmic stakes.

Sources: Collapsing Cosmoses — original text

The approaching fleet

The defenders move outward toward the unexplained formation. The narrator imagines monstrous enemies without yet knowing who occupies the ships. When individual vessels become visible, their unusual scissor-like shape supplies difference rather than proof of a specific atrocity.

A strange sound is interpreted as a challenge. Hak Ni orders his ships into battle formation, which they achieve with a casually admitted error of several light-years for many vessels. That is where the fragment ends.

The text thus records preparation and interpretation, not a witnessed exchange of fire. The alleged enemy remains an outside presence whose motives have been assumed by the defenders.

Sources: Collapsing Cosmoses — original text

How the parody works

Scale is the recurring joke: immense fleets, galaxies and time spans are paired with small rooms, awkward speeches and sloppy organization. The reference to progress by paragraphs also exposes the narrative machinery instead of sustaining a seamless illusion.

Alien bodies are ordinary within the narrator's world. Multiple eyes, antennae, tentacles and unusual means of speech do not automatically mark evil; the same inhabitants who look grotesque to a human reader regard the unfamiliar fleet as intolerably strange.

These devices parody inflated cosmic adventure. They do not establish Dam Bor's society as a documented branch of the Great Race or identify the approaching fleet with another Mythos species.

Sources: Collapsing Cosmoses — original text