Been kicking this can down the street since summer. Time to go for it.
Okay, so here's where I originally saw connection.
Hainish universe:
The Hain are the original humans, and all the humanoid planets (including Earth) are the colony planets of their former empire. Their empire collapses; they re-discover space travel, and bring NAFAL drive to Earth, and humans and Hain make the League of all Worlds.
The League later gets conquered, and comes back as The Ecumen.
Along the way, the League/Ecumen finds worlds where the ancient Hain did genetic experiments, and made (among other things) the Bird Men of Rocannon's World, and the Gethenians (from "Left Hand of Darkness").
Cthulhu universe:
The Old Ones came to Earth, and genetically engineered humans.
The alien factions fought amongst each other, and their various empires on Earth collapsed, and humanity rose up, but the ancient beings are sleeping and waiting.
So, Hainish-verse is a nicer secular humanist (and anarchist and taoist 😉) opposite of Cthulhu-verse.
The direct similarities stop there.
Although, outside the main Lovecraft canon, "Rocannon", "Den", and "A Strange Discovery" all have similar swashbuckling adventure roots.
There's no closer links than that.
Le Guin went to great lengths to keep her universe cordoned off.
Hell, even her sub-universes, like Hainish and Earthsea, never played together.
But! The two interesting real-life connections I found were Le Guin giving positive blurbs to "The Dream-Quest of Vellitt-Boe" and "Lagoon".
Like I said in the review, "Vellit-Boe" is like the "Tehanu" of "Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath".
And while Nnedi Okorafor doesn't play in the Lovecraft-verse, indeed refuses to do so, she kind of "brought him down" by knocking down the dominos towards getting the Lovecraft trophy for the World Fantasy Awards changed.
And Le Guin blurbed her on "Lagoon".
So, you've got Le Guin giving thumbs-up to female authors attacking HPL from both ends.
Whether that's deliberate, or happy coincidence, I'll never truly know.
But hoping it's the former makes me smile. 😏
Only other sorta-link I could find: in "Stranger Things" the monsters have a definite Lovecraft influence, and Dustin's girlfriend has "A Wizard Of Earthsea" in her room.
So, yeah, I ran that rabbit hole to its end, and that's all I got.
Thought it would be either way more, or what I did find would be friggin' Leprechaun gold.
Nope, but the little crumbs were still interesting. IMHO.
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