Lovecraft’s Planet Yuggoth

Less than three weeks after astronomers announced a ninth planet in March 1930, H. P. Lovecraft wrote to a friend: "I think I shall suggest its being named Yuggoth!" He didn't get his way, so he put it in a story instead. The planet was Pluto and the story was "The Whisperer in Darkness," published in August 1931. It enters the US public domain Jan 1, 2027.

The story as it is told

H. P. Lovecraft had already invented a planet. He called it Yuggoth, and he placed it in the dark at the edge of the solar system.

Then, in 1930, astronomers announced a new planet beyond Neptune, and it was real. Pluto, the story goes, proved Lovecraft right. Or, in the other telling, Lovecraft had seen it coming, and based Yuggoth on Pluto.

What we can confirm

Lovecraft started "The Whisperer in Darkness" on Feb 24, 1930, and finished it on Sept 26, 1930, according to the dates Lovecraftian Science takes from Joshi and Schultz's H. P. Lovecraft Encyclopedia. Six days before he began, on Feb 18, Clyde Tombaugh had spotted a moving dot on two photographic plates at Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff. Nobody outside the observatory knew yet. Lowell announced the find on March 13, 1930, picked because it was both Percival Lowell's birthday and the anniversary of Herschel's discovery of Uranus (American Physical Society).

Lovecraft was thrilled. In 1906, as a teenager, he had written to Scientific American urging the world's observatories to hunt for a planet beyond Neptune (Lovecraftian Science, citing his Collected Essays). Now one had turned up. To his correspondent Elizabeth Toldridge on April 1, 1930, he wrote that it was "a thing which excites me more than any other happening of recent times," and added: "One wonders what it is like, & what dim-litten fungi may sprout coldly on its frozen surface! I think I shall suggest its being named Yuggoth!" Yuggoth was his own invention, already in his sonnet cycle Fungi from Yuggoth. The name that stuck came instead from an 11-year-old in Oxford, Venetia Burney (see the Pluto file in section 5).

So Pluto went into the story. The narrator, Albert Wilmarth, a Miskatonic folklore instructor, is drawn in by reports of strange bodies in Vermont rivers after "the historic and unprecedented Vermont floods of November 3, 1927." The beings turn out to be winged, crab-like visitors from Yuggoth, which the story links to the Himalayan "Mi-Go." Near the end Wilmarth writes that he has read "that a new ninth planet has been glimpsed beyond Neptune, just as those influences had said it would be glimpsed. Astronomers, with a hideous appropriateness they little suspect, have named this thing 'Pluto.' I feel, beyond question, that it is nothing less than nighted Yuggoth."

That's the narrator's belief, and a commenter on Lovecraftian Science points out that Lovecraft himself never said Pluto was Yuggoth outright; in letters he said "probably." The story ran in Weird Tales for August 1931.

The copyright twist: many Weird Tales stories from before 1931 fell into the public domain long ago because nobody renewed them. Weird Tales' renewals begin with the February-March 1931 issue, and the August 1931 issue is on the renewed list. So "Whisperer" stayed under copyright for the full 95 years, which run out Dec 31, 2026.

The facts

• Text: opens with "the historic and unprecedented Vermont floods of November 3, 1927"; Mi-Go reference; Pluto passage quoted above; "since that new planet Pluto has been so curiously discovered." Wikisource, Chapters 1 and 8, en.wikisource.org and /Chapter_8
• Weird Tales: first renewed issue Feb-Mar 1931; August 1931 (v. 18 no. 1) issue renewed. UPenn Online Books Page, onlinebooks.library.upenn.edu
• Written Feb 24 to Sept 26, 1930; Pluto found Feb 18, 1930; "HOT STUFF!!!" letter to James F. Morton. Lovecraftian Science, Nov 24, 2013, lovecraftianscience.wordpress.com
• April 1, 1930 letter to Elizabeth Toldridge, "I think I shall suggest its being named Yuggoth!" The full passage, dated "to Miss Elizabeth Toldridge, 1 April 1930," is printed on The H. P. Lovecraft Archive, hplovecraft.com. The letter is published unabridged in Schultz and Joshi, eds., Letters to Elizabeth Toldridge & Anne Tillery Renshaw (Hippocampus Press, 2014). I did not open the volume, so the page number is unconfirmed.
• 1906 Scientific American letter. Lovecraftian Science, Feb 7, 2016, lovecraftianscience.wordpress.com
• Tombaugh's search, the blink comparator, announcement March 13, 1930 and why that date; name suggested by an 11-year-old in England. American Physical Society, APS News, March 2009, aps.org
• Venetia Burney's suggestion and the March 14, 1930 breakfast: already sourced to NASA in Pluto gets his name: The Moose Hunt (1931) and the planet question.

Related: What enters the public domain in 2027

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