H.P.Lovecraft's The Colour Out of Space

“The Colour Out of Space” was one of H.P.Lovecraft's favorite short stories, written in March of 1927 and published in September of the same year in the American science fiction magazine Amazing Stories. In his later years Lovecraft, famous for his horror stories involving demons and monsters, tended to write things based more on real science and the Colour Out of Space is a good example for his mix of science-fiction and horror.

In Lovecraft's story, a meteorite falls to Earth, landing near the farm owned by Nahum Gardner. The news about the unusual event quickly spread and so the next day three professors from Miskatonic University arrive at the farm to examine the meteorite. Already now something seems to be odd, as Nahum remarks that the stone from outer space seems to "had shrunk," pointing to "the big brownish mound above the ripped earth and charred grass near the archaic well-sweep in his front yard." However, the professors dismiss at first this observation remarking that “…stones do not shrink.” The professors collect a sample, still emanating heat. The professors take the sample back to Miskatonic University to run a series of physical and chemical tests with very baffling results. The sample reacts with no known chemicals and “…at the end of the tests the college scientists were forced to own that they could not place it. It was nothing of this earth, but a piece of the great outside; and as such dowered with outside properties and obedient to outside laws.” The scientists return to the Gardner Farm and visit the impact site once again, only to discover that the meteorite is quickly vanishing. As one of the scientists takes a last sample, a strange nodule embedded in the rock is discovered. Hit by a geological hammer the nodule bursts with a “nervous little pop” but apparently nothing is released.

It is soon discovered that something, resembling a colour, coming from the meteorite contaminated the groundwater on the farm of Nahum.

Lovecraft was very interested in his contemporary science and extensively read on geology and especially astronomy. Likely stories about "Thunderstones", which supposedly fell from the sky during lightning storms, in Charles Fort's "The Book of the Damned" (1919) gave Lovecraft the first idea for his story. In the March 11, 1927 issue of the magazine "Science" an article covers the Pons-Winnecke Comet, which at the time was going to pass very close to Earth. Maybe this news inspired Lovecraft's final draft, as the Thunderstone is identified and described in great detail as a meteorite coming from outer space. Lovecraft described the unusual physical properties, focusing on its strange property to shrink over time, to emanate a constant heat and glow in strange colors. Lovecraft was aware of radioactive decay and likely used radioactive substances like Actinium or Thorium as a source of inspiration, as we are also told that the matrix of the meteorite is soft and malleable, like a metal. Actinium is a soft, silvery-white, radioactive metal, isolated for the first time in the year 1899 by French chemist André-Louis Debierne. 
Real meteorites display a mineral composition different to most rocks found on Earth. The most common type are stony meteorites, consisting of silicate minerals like olivine, pyroxene and traces of iron-nickel alloys. Just one percent of meteorites are pure silicate rocks. The smell of some fragments resembles asphalt or solvents, evidence for 4.6 billion years old carbon-compounds preserved inside the rock. Four to five percent of all space debris is represented by iron meteorites, consisting of an almost pure iron-nickel alloy with eventually embedded silicate crystals. From Lovecraft's description, the fictional meteorite resembles an iron meteorite, even if its physical properties match no known elements.

Meteorite collected in 1749 in Krasnojarsk (Russia), an extraterrestrial rock with olivine crystals embedded in a nickel-iron alloy matrix.

That night a thunderstorm is approaching the city of Arkham and the meteorite, still in its crater, is hit by a series of thunderbolts and the rock completely vanishes. Soon thereafter things start to get weird. Insects and plants display unusual colors and horrible mutations. Toward the end of the story, people get insane and are consumed by an unknown sickness. It seems that something coming from the meteorite contaminated the soil and the groundwater. That unseen types of radiation existed was clear since 1895, when Wilhelm Rontgen discovered X-rays. In 1911 Austrian physicist Victor Hess discovered the cosmic background radiation, high-energy radiation originating from outer space, and also that Earth's surface is slightly radioactive, the result of traces of radioactive elements found in minerals and rocks. At Lovecraft's time, it was also known that radiation can affect the growth of plants and cause mutations. In the early 1920s a scandal involving the use of radioactive radium in self-luminous paint, which led to radiation poisoning in female workers at three different factories in the United States, made the health risks of radioactivity clear. Lovecraft never identifies the sickness in his story, however, he describes its effects as consuming living tissue and a sense of burning, similar to radiation poisoning.