Talk:The Shadow Out of Time

Not aliens
I've just been through the shaddow out of time for a second time in the past 2 days and it appears to make very clear that the Yith are terrestrial life, earlier evolutions along a line of many evolved dominant species of the earths great history, but the greatest of those species for its mastery over time. Here, and on other wikis, it is said to be extraterrestrial, but that is clearly completely false. They were earth beings through and through. I'll look for page numbers  — Preceding unsigned comment added by 97.91.187.53 (talk) 18:42, 5 November 2014 (UTC) Quote 1: "But most of the tales and impressions concerned a relatively late race, of a queer and intricate shape, resembling no life-form known to science, which had lived till only fifty million years before the advent of man. This, they indicated, was the greatest race of all because it alone had conquered the secret of time." "In its vast libraries were volumes of texts and pictures holding the whole of earth's annals-histories and descriptions of every species that had ever been or that ever would be, with full records of their arts, their achievements, their languages, and their psychologies. With this aeon-embracing knowledge, the Great Race chose from every era and life-form such thoughts, arts, and processes as might suit its own nature and situation. Knowledge of the past, secured through a kind of mind-casting outside the recognized senses, was harder to glean than knowledge of the future." Both of those are from chapter 3 of The Shadow out of Time "The beings of a dying elder world, wise with the ultimate secrets, had looked ahead for a new world and species wherein they might have long life; and had sent their minds en masse into that future race best adapted to house them--the cone-shaped beings that peopled our earth a billion years ago. Thus the Great Race came to be, while the myriad minds sent backward were left to die in the horror of strange shapes. Later the race would again face death, yet would live through another forward migration of its best minds into the bodies of others who had a longer physical span ahead of them" also chapter 3.

Chapter 4 "I learned--even before my waking self had studied the parallel cases or the old myths from which the dreams doubtless sprang--that the entities around me were of the world's greatest race, which had conquered time and had sent exploring minds into every age."

No indication whatsoever that they are extraterrestrials in body, but extensive evidence the yith evolved species in earths own biological history, within this story. NOT extraterrestrials. I was not wrong on this point. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 97.91.187.53 (talk) 19:04, 5 November 2014 (UTC)

... Even the "great race of Yith" page has it correctly attributed as a prehistoric civilization. But somebody changed it back to extraterrestrial here and claimed I was wrong. Geniuses. -_- — Preceding unsigned comment added by 97.91.187.53 (talk) 19:08, 5 November 2014 (UTC)

The article on the Great Race of Yith is pretty clear on their extraterrestrial origin. It says "The Great Race are beings of enormous intellectual and psychic powers that once dwelt on the dying world of Yith. They escaped the destruction of their home planet by transferring their minds to the bodies of a species native to the Earth in the far distant past." Is this incorrect? ubiquity (talk) 19:10, 5 November 2014 (UTC)

Summation: The minds of the Yithian race are extraterrestrial in origin. The bodies that their minds usurped were evolved on Earth; but, the Yithian minds originated from planet Yith. The earthly minds that originally occupied those earthly bodies were swapped into Yithian bodies on the doomed planet Yith. Time and space travel by mind swap is a confusing subject. --Naaman Brown (talk) 16:54, 3 January 2023 (UTC)

Other victims
Wasn't there also an Elder Thing among them? Kuralyov 23:11, 23 October 2007 (UTC)


 * Yes, mentioned by name as "S'gg'ha" near the end of chapter VI. D Boland (talk) 01:47, 24 May 2008 (UTC)

The Shadow Out of Space
This is a story compiled by August Derleth (published in 1957)from notes left by Lovecraft after his death, with a similar theme, possibly used by HPL as the basis for the Shadow Out of Time. Moebius999 (talk) 14:21, 18 January 2014 (UTC)

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