H. P. Lovecraft is known for having been fairly racist. However, the racism in his writing definitely seems to moderate over time. Comparing the overt racism in "He" (1925) to the the more specifically anti-miscegenation tone of "The Shadow Over Innsmouth" (1931)—in which at least some Pacific islanders are portrayed much more positively than certain New Englanders—or At the Mountains of Madness (1931)—in which aliens (who had previously always been unnatural horrors) are ultimately portrayed very sympathetically*—there seems to be a definite muting of Lovecraft's invective against those races he perceived as different. This trend reaches its meridian with "In the Walls of Eryx."
"In the Walls of Eryx" was among Lovecraft's very last stories, and he coauthored it with fifteen-year-old Kenneth Sterling (who later became a very prominent endocrinologist). And the story eventually evinces a positively anti-colonial viewpoint. The protagonist eventually concludes that humans are the unnatural ones who have no business on Venus:
If it does survive to be read, I hope it may do more than merely warn men of this trap. I hope it may teach our race to let those shining crystals stay where they are. They belong to Venus alone. Our planet does not truly need them, and I believe we have violated some obscure and mysterious law—some law buried deep in the arcana of the cosmos—in our attempts to take them. Who can tell what dark, potent, and widespread forces spur on these reptilian things who guard their treasure so strangely? Dwight and I have paid, as others have paid and will pay. But it may be that these scattered deaths are only the prelude of greater horrors to come. Let us leave to Venus that which belongs only to Venus.
In a coauthored story like this, it can be tricky to disentangle how much of the various sentiments originated with each of the individual authors, and I am curious how much of this anti-colonialism was a product of Lovecraft's own evolving thinking, versus how much came directly from his younger coauthor Sterling. Sterling apparently first had the idea for a science fiction story about an invisible maze, and the name of the story's protagonist, Kenton J. Stanfield, appears to be a play on Sterling's own. However, the style of the text has many stylistic elements (and inside jokes) that suggest that Lovecraft may have rewritten most of the text; in any case, Sterling's original draft is no longer extant.
Sterling did apparently write two reminiscences on his relationship with Lovecraft. These might shed important light on where the anti-colonial ideas from "In the Walls of Eryx" originated, although neither source is easy for me to access at the moment. (One is actually in the rare book collection at my employer's main library, but regular access to that collection has been sharply limited by the current COVID-19 pandemic.) So, is there information, perhaps from one of Sterling's essays, about whether the anticolonialism came from an evolution in Lovecraft's own thinking, or whether the ideas were primarily due to Sterling?
*"Radiates, vegetables, monstrosities, star-spawn—whatever they had been, they were men!"
