At the Mountains of Madness/Trivia


 * Author Phobia: Lovecraft's life-long fear of cold temperatures is part of what makes this story so effective.
 * Name's the Same: The Elder Things are alternately referred to as "Old Ones" which could create some confusion as the same term was used to refer to beings associated with Yog-Sothoth and C'thulhu.
 * Science Marches On: The past seventy-five years have shown many advancements in Antarctic exploration, revealing a continent wholly unlike what is described in this book.
 * Some of the terminology, such as "Comanchian", was already obsolete. So was the initial idea (edited out of the final product) that Antarctica was actually two continents.
 * There was also the very concept of interplanetary travel; they were said to "fly through the aether on leathery wings", with aether being the old concept of what existed beyond the upper atmosphere. The concept of space as a near-complete vacuum was becoming prominent in Lovecraft's time, and theories about the aluminiferous aether dying out, after an experiment disproved the idea that light couldn't pass through a vacuum, but he was swayed by the lecturing of a theorist he held in high regard.
 * However, it must be noted that this is a third person interpretation of an ancient (silurian era) pictographic carving by a race of aliens with minds that work differently than humans', and therefore may be a complete misinterpretation of the actual events depicted, if you want to strap on your Watsonian hat.
 * In all subsequent stories featuring the Elder Things their wings have been described as a kind of living Solar Sail. The ARTC radio version poetically describes them as riding "the cold winds of light", i.e. solar wind.
 * And we now know that no mountain in Antarctica reaches thirty-five thousand feet.