Humanity Is Not the Eldest

There isn't much to this post, apart from the following link:

• "Precursors"
  Television Tropes and Idioms

That page actually doesn't have all that much to do with television science fiction and fantasy: a great many examples are from written literature.

Still: interesting material, including

• "The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy"
  (Douglas Adams)
• The "Marvel Universe"
• The "Known Space" stories
  (Larry Niven)
• "Gateway"
  (Frederik Pohl)

And, of course, H. P. Lovecraft's Cthulhu and that merry band of "Old Ones" in the Cthulhu Mythos.

Which reminds me of what I wrote, toward the end of "A Sense of Scale and Science Fiction Writers" (August 17, 2009) (Getting Imaginative): Maybe H. P. Lovecraft was an optimist.