the Chth- in Chthulu- refers to Chthonic or “earthly”, and otherwise is a literary reference to H.P. Lovecraft's diabolical figure, completely re-imagined though not without its own twinge of raw horror. The Chthulucene is a whole-world approach to understanding enmeshed human destiny in sympoiesis, thick present muddle and trouble of “compost” life in the 21st century.
“Chthulucene has other terrors - more dangerous and generative in worlds where such gender [male, ed.] does not reign. Undulating with slippery eros and gravid chaos, tangled snakes and ongoing tentacular forces coil through the twenty-first-century CE.” - D.H: from “Tentacular Thinking, Anthropocene, Capitalocene, Chthulucene, eflux Journal #75 - September 2016 p.13 (footnote 6)