In the Classic Trek episode "What are Little Girls Made Of?" the Enterprise visits a planet with Roc, an android who has been tending the machines for so long even he has forgotten how long.
Roc occasionally makes reference to the Old Ones, all supposedly dead. The design of the sets and costuming also was supposed to resemble some Lovecraft settings. Oh, and Roger Korby -- the antagonist of the episode -- has a plan to replace humanity with machines, basically killing all the humans in the process.
The rather forgettable Lawrence Fishburne sci-fi movie "Event Horizon" also has some obvious Lovecraft influences as well. The ship's hyperdrive -- it employs an artificially created black hole -- opens a portal to a dimension of infinite evil that drives everyone into a suicidal/homicidal madness.
I also recently found another Cthulhu tribute that I'm surprised I never noticed before. It's in Larry Niven's "World of Ptavvs," in which Kzanol is released from billions of years in stasis.
Why does this matter? Well, Kzanol is a thrint, a race of telepathic beings who ruled the galaxy billions of years ago. A race -- or group of races, more likely -- called the tnuctipun eventually found a way to throw off the thrints' telepathic dominion and started a huge war that led to the extinction of the thrintun race. Kzanol missed this entire war because he was in a stasis field at the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean.
During the billions of years he has been asleep, his entire race has gone extinct, taking with it all intelligent life in the galaxy. In the meantime, intelligent life has evolved from the yeast farms the thrintun had seeded on planets such as Earth and the Kzin homeworld.
The humans have discovered Kzanol's stasis field and find a way to open it. His psychic blast drives thousands of people insane. Others suffer tremendous nightmares. And the race begins among Kzanol, the Belters, the Earth and a human telepath who thinks he is Kzanol to recover a psychic amplifier that will allow Kzanol to rule the entire earth telepathically.
He's also a rather ugly creature with one eye, and with tentacles around his mouth. Since humans evolved from the food yeast the thrintun grew on the planet, he finds us quite tasty.
Hmm. A member of a very old race, asleep under the ocean for billions of years, his waking drives men mad and heralds the possible end of human civilization, and he's even got the appearance.
I can't believe I never noticed it before.
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