I am he who walks in dark places,
And the shadow of my thoughts flits behind me;
Whispering I am a very frightened man.
-H. P. Lovecraft

Occasionally, some people are willful carriers of delusions that do not seem to be delusions. In this essay, I want to discuss the nature of the Paranoiac-Critical mode of thinking and how it differs from the ordinary Critical mode, which is most commonly encountered in everyday life and in science fiction studies.

In normal critical thought, the person assumes a stance of skeptical search for truth. The Critical mode does not accept any form of self-referenced prejudgments as evidence for a conclusion about anything definite or until someone else is able to prove otherwise; it insists that nothing dubious should be taken on faith or accepted without inspection and analysis.