Howard Phillips Lovecraft
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Howard Phillips Lovecraft (1890 – 1937), commonly called HPL in fandom, was an American author of horror, fantasy and science fiction, especially the subgenre known as weird fiction. He came up with the core values and concepts that underpin the Delta Green setting, as well as a lot of the monsters and other superficial details, like the Mi-go, the Dreamlands, the Shoggoths etc. Lovecraft's friends and correspondents added some more, in the long decades between his death and his fame.

Lovecraft's guiding aesthetic and philosophical principle was what he termed "cosmicism" or "cosmic horror", the idea that life is incomprehensible to human minds and that the universe is fundamentally inimical to the interests of humankind. As such, his stories express a profound indifference to human beliefs and affairs. Lovecraft is best known for his Cthulhu Mythos story cycle and the Necronomicon, a fictional grimoire of magical rites and forbidden lore.1

In Lovecraft's work, human beings are often subject to more powerful and more intelligent species. These non-human forces are not so much malevolent as they are indifferent toward humanity, in the same way that we are indifferent toward protozoa. This indifference is an important theme in cosmicism. The noted Lovecraft scholar S. T. Joshi points out that "Lovecraft constantly engaged in (more or less) genial debates on religion with several colleagues, notably the pious writer and teacher Maurice W. Moe. Lovecraft made no bones about being a strong and antireligious atheist; he considered religion not merely false but dangerous to social and political progress." As such, Lovecraft's cosmicism is not religious at all, but rather a version of his mechanistic materialism. Lovecraft thus embraced a philosophy of cosmic indifferentism. He believed in a meaningless, mechanical, and uncaring universe that human beings, with their naturally limited faculties, could never fully understand.

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