If you’re a fan of HP Lovecraft, as I am, you eventually have to face up to one thing: Lovecraft was a racist. (You also have to face the fact that he’s overwritten, pseudo-British, etc. But that comes later.)

You can’t get away from the racism. It creeps into every single one of Lovecraft’s stories. There are some critics who go so far as to argue that Lovecraft’s racism is what gave rise to his distinctive universe. “Cosmic horror” is really just Lovecraft’s feeling that he was surrounded by degenerate races and miscegenation, translated to a universal reality.

How should you react to this? Most folks point out that Lovecraft was clearly a product of his time and place, and he could not have avoided growing up racist. He was old Yankee stock from Providence, well aware of his family’s lineage and Anglo-Saxon “purity.” His society would have instilled in him a disdain for all those of a “mixed breed.”

I share a view with many of Lovecraft’s biographers: the problem is not that Lovecraft was raised racist and was racist as a young man. The problem is that he never changed his views. Lovecraft was an intellectual man who was very interested in science and who communicated through letters with a wide variety of people. He frequently debated, and frequently gained new knowledge, learned, grew and changed.

But not his racism. That seemed to be one area he would not reconsider. If we define the word “faith” as meaning an idea held even in the face of contradictory evidence, then the superiority of Anglo-Saxons to all other races was part of Lovecraft’s faith. This is disappointing.

On that note, Orson Scott Card has released a short story (you see where this is going, don’t you?). It’s actually an adaption of Hamlet, titled Hamlet’s Father. He’s made some changes. William Alexander at Rain Taxi caused a stir with his review:

Here’s the punch line: Old King Hamlet was an inadequate king because he was gay, an evil person because he was gay, and, ultimately, a demonic and ghostly father of lies who convinces young Hamlet to exact imaginary revenge on innocent people. The old king was actually murdered by Horatio, in revenge for molesting him as a young boy—along with Laertes, and Rosencrantz, and Guildenstern, thereby turning all of them gay. We learn that Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are now “as fusty and peculiar as an old married couple. I pity the woman who tries to wed her way into that house.”

Hamlet is damned for all the needless death he inflicts, and Dead Gay Dad will now do gay things to him for the rest of eternity: “Welcome to Hell, my beautiful son. At last we’ll be together as I always longed for us to be.”

… yeah.

If Card were just slipping into his dotage, we’d just smile uncomfortably and look the other way. But as Charlie Jane Anders at io9 points out, Card is still thinking and has some interesting views on energy policy and space travel. Anders wishes that he would spend more time advancing those instead of pounding the anti-gay pulpit.

Card is still thinking, but it’s obvious by now that he’s not going to budge. It’s painful to read his anti-gay declarations, which are a tissue of logical fallacies and tired stereotypes glued together by bile and anger. He has his faith, and it is impervious to evidence and argument. This is sadly disappointing.