Citadel of the Star Lords (shortened to Citadel hereafter) by Edmond Hamilton is a novella that was oddly familiar in both the first half and the second.
Now, I should note that Citadel was from 1956, but the familiarity is because of a later work in the first half- Battlefield: Earth by L Ron Hubbard- and an earlier work in the second half- At the Mountains of Madness by HP Lovecraft.
And I have thoughts on these aspects along with it as its own story.
So, for a quick rundown- hot-shot pilot and Korean War veteran Price ends up, due to a geopolitical situation, blasted into the far future because he gets caught by a nuclear weapon's testing blast while fleeing. In it, humanity has been reduced to tribal living and they're awfully frightened of alien conquerors named the Vurna, who essentially have massive demilitarized zones and constantly spy on the humans and freak out over any possible thing that could challenge their control. Him being a guy who can fly a plane and ending up as a major political player for that to fight against the aliens, along with the humanity being reduced to primitive” technology while the conquering aliens are in control and have future sci-fi tech is definitely something similar in Battlefield: Earth.
Their resolutions are rather different, though. Battlefield: Earth is also just way too fucking long and has to do all sorts of weird jumping through hoops, like the state of the planet and training so the cavemen can learn how to fly jets. This is sidestepped because of the central point about time travel in Citadel.
Now, the second half is what frustrates me, because there was no way to end it satisfactorily without some really bad implications either way.
It's revealed that the Vurna fear an alien race they call the Ei. Price assumes this is a ''Big Lie'' (and uses the term itself, so the baggage is on Hamilton for invoking it) used to fearmonger and keep the Vurna doing their thing by their higher ups, and to excuse their colonialism to the humans. The humans don't believe in the Ei because they've never seen them.
Turns out that the Ei are real and, based on how they're described, they're very obviously like shoggoths. They're black, amorphous creatures and they cause madness and panic, and they are associated with icy cold (like, say, being in Antarctica).
Now, there's a lot to unpack here, both in relation to the possible influence and on its own.
First… the Ei. So, shoggoths in At the Mountains of Madness are intelligent beings who resented their enslavement and overthrew their masters.. Come time when some of their masters return, they behead them and chase out the humans who showed up. The fear that the shoggoth causes Danforth and Dyer is entirely normal fear of their own physical safety of being beheaded. It's more with later works, especially once the Call of Cthulhu TTRPG has a mechanic deliberately tying sanity to knowing about the Mythos in an inverse relationship and causes people to truly lose their minds. Danforth's breakdown comes from him knowing enough context for whatever it was he saw at the end that caused him to freak out, but his breakdown is clearly more of stress or PTSD than the idea that he's a lunatic. (Same thing happens repeatedly in other cases, such as Edward Derby's breakdown in The Thing on the Doorstep.)
The description of the Ei implies that they flay apart someone's mind and forcing people to flee (in part because they want people to flee the Citadel, so they can take over Earth). It's almost like a bizarro-world situation of reversing a lot of the aspects of the shoggoths despite the similar imagery of black, amorphous aliens treated with revulsion by the narrator. Instead of a slave race that overthrew their masters, instead of dealing with intruders to their home, instead of having been compulsed to do things, they are the reverse. They're conquerors who mentally compel people to do their bidding.
Second, on its own, we end up with one of two options the narrative could have gone with, neither good. The first is the road not taken, that Price is right, that the Ei's threat was a Big Lie. So this leads to an obvious stupidity that some random flyboy from the past who has no experience whatsoever with what's going on magically figuring everything out, unlike literally anyone occupying that actual society on either side.
But the other one is arguably more repugnant for other reasons. If the Ei are real, and the reason the Vurna decided to do their conquest of Earth, that ultimately means that conquest is actually a right choice. That colonizing and subjugating ''inferior'' peoples for their resources/land is totally reasonable because they were saving both you and them from an existential threat. This is deeply evil and a big part of imperialistic framing, that what you're doing to the people you subjugate is actually just for their own good. And that is precisely what the Vurna argue in relation to the Ei, and they end up being right.
Now, there is the historical context of the novel and the character setup and I think that's a big part of it. This was written in the 1950s and the character of Price is written as a Korean War veteran. So there's a big part of the question of Domino Theory in relation to it. Basically, if I were to take a guess about narrative parallels, the humans are representative of the South Koreans, the Vurna are the United States, and the Ei are The Red Menace.
It also makes me curious about the Mexican revolutionary Price is supposed to be helping, given the name we get for the ''revolutionary firebrand'' as Arnolfo Ruiz, who is clearly a reference to then Mexican president Adolfo Ruiz Cortines and that the United States is after him and after Price for smuggling Ruiz across the border. Problem is, looking at the Wikipedia article about Cortines, he was an austerity politician and got into fights with labor unions and poor workers, things that the capitalist United States amidst the Red Scare would totally be fine, and he kept ties to the US.
There's also something to be said about indigenousness in relation to the story, too, that has sour implications with regard to America. The humans are pretty explicitly discussed as tribal and treated as indigenous compared to the Vurna, but the story also goes out of its way to also make it clear that the humans are white Americans based on names and descriptions. Price is our point of view character, and has an inner monologue that's clearly supposed to be reliable narration about how the West was a wild, untamed place without people, deliberately erasing that it absolutely had people. It also frames the various stereotypes of states as being sort of intrinsic to the character of the peoples of those states via blood. (It also does the Fremen mirage thing, about how the luxury [read: ''decadence''] was removed so this is the true core of white America- rugged survivalist types who survived instead of all the book learning types.)
Of course, given others discussions about alien invasion stories being a manifestation of ''colonial anxiety'' and how alien invasion stories in colonial countries like the United States necessarily reframe the descendants of colonialists as being indigenous, I suppose this is a baked-in part of the structure.
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