"The Coming Race (original title), also reprinted as Vril: The Power of the Coming Race, is a novel by Edward Bulwer-Lytton published in 1870. The novel is an early example of science fiction, sometimes cited as the first of this genre. However, many early readers believed that its account of a superior subterranean master race and the energy-form called Vril was accurate, to the extent that some theosophists accepted the book as truth. Furthermore, since 1960 there has been a conspiracy theory about a secret Vril-Society."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vril
Yeah, Lovecraft was racist. He began as a really conservative, backwards monarchist and by the end of his life adopted a position Rudimentary Peni called "aristocratic socialism," or a kind of supporter of the New Deal supporter except he wanted this weird kind of in-built aristocracy. At least that's what L. Sprague de Camp gleaned in his _Lovecraft: A Biography_, the result of de Camp's reading the volumes of Lovecraft's personal correspondence that was the bulk of his pen's output, outweighing his fiction output by something like 12 to 1. Lovecraft was married to a woman who was Jewish. He seemed to be mellowing out in a more liberal direction as he aged but he died at 44, so who knows where he would have went had he gone to a doctor about his stomach aches that ended up killing him.
-B.
Chris Doss wrote:
"This thread on HPL is a couple of months old, but I just reread The Shadow Out of Time for probably the 50th time in my life, and I noticed that Lovecraft specifically says that the Great Race -- the closest thing to a benevolent alien race one can find in HPL, and which he obviously holds in great esteem, are somewhat fascist."