The Battleship Continues to Haunt the US Navy
October 10, 2025
By: James Holmes
In principle, I am all for fitting out a modern-day descendant of Iowa-class dreadnoughts. Whether doing so is practical is another question.
Halloween decorations are going up, so maybe it’s fitting that weird and eerie things may lie in store for the US Navy surface fleet. That device—the weird and the eerie—comes from Mark Fisher’s book by the same title. It’s a treatise on “weird fiction” ranging from HP Lovecraft—a long-ago denizen of Providence, Rhode Island, I might add—to Stanley Kubrick and beyond. But the dichotomy spans far beyond literary criticism. It’s about human psychology more than a subgenre of fiction. And psychology suffuses everything we do.
Fisher breaks down the Freudian concept of the uncanny—which he defines as “the strange within the familiar, the strangely familiar, the familiar as strange” (his emphasis)—into two intimately related but distinct phenomena. The essence of the weird is presence; the essence of the eerie is absence. Both, says Fisher, “allow us to see the inside from the perspective of the outside.”
This is about looking at ourselves and our society along unusual tangents.
The weird is “that which does not belong” (his emphasis). Something is jarring when it should not be, but is, present in familiar surroundings. For instance, sea monsters who have come to Earth from the cosmos should not be lurking in waters off the North Shore of Massachusetts, to name the premise of Lovecraft’s short story “The Shadow over Innmouth.” The story constitutes part of his “Cthulhu Mythos,” a saga of short works meant to arouse terror over baleful space monsters’ incursions into our everyday world.
Battleships Would Be Weird in a Modern Fleet
https://nationalinterest.org/feature/battleship-continues-to-haunt-us-navy-jh-101025
