![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
randy_byersSlowly, slowly, as the aeons slipped into eternity, the earth sank into a heavier and redder gloom. -- Hodgson
This book has been on my Big List of Maybe Someday since I was a teenager, and finally my exploration of early science fiction has put it on the Done Been Read list. I have to say that the descriptions of it I've read over the years failed to get across the fact that it is in large part an expansion of HG Wells' vision of the dying earth in The Time Machine. It's also a forerunner of the cosmological horror that so fascinated HP Lovecraft.
It starts out as a stefnal sort of gothic. First, two hale fellows on a fishing vacation in remotest Ireland discover some ruins hanging over a chasm. In the ruins, they find a manuscript, which is The House on the Borderland. It is the narrative of a man who lives in a remote estate with his sister. (Echoes of Poe here?) He discovers a chasm that swallows a river, and the discovery seems to draw the attention of creepy humanoid swine creatures coming up from the bowels of the earth. He retreats to his house, and they follow. They attack the house, and he defends it with guns and barriers.
One of the complaints about this book from genre fans is that nothing much happens. It's true that this first, gothic part of the story is very much a mood piece, and much of the action, such as it is, consists of the narrator exploring either the gloomy, cavernous house or the barren landscape around it. There is a creeping sense of dread. Things are almost seen, seen out of the corner of the eye, but what was it really? Sounds are heard in the night. It's a mood piece, and the mood is dread.
The second half of the book -- and I'm still not sure how exactly it relates to the first, although it does -- is a vision of the end of the solar system and the heat death of the universe. One of the fascinating aspects of this part is that, especially at first, it feels like a description of time lapse photography. Time speeds up, and the way he describes clouds rushing across the sky sounds almost precisely like it looks on sped up film. It's possible that by 1908 (or a few years earlier, when he apparently wrote the book) Hodgson had seen time lapse photography of clouds, although I'm unaware of such films from that era. Either that, or he had such a keen imagination that he was able to "run the film" in his mind, as it were.
This section of the book is truly remarkable -- a mood piece in an entirely different mode. The sense of enormity of both space and time is exhilirating. Whereas Wells seemed to be grappling more with evolution in The Time Machine, Hodgson is grappling with entropy and just the sheer size of the universe. He seems to have mixed feelings about it too: both a sense of horror and a sense of almost liberation. The narrator loses his body over time in this vision -- turned to dust -- and yet he is thereby freed to see things on an even grander scale.
It's a pretty amazing book, even if it does have way too many commas. A ridiculous number of commas. I don't understand why the copy-editors let some of them stand, because many of them are completely meaningless. They don't even add to a sense of rhythm. I'm really not sure what Hodgson intended with them. Anyway, a minor annoyance. The mixture of gothic dread and cosmic grandeur, as HP Lovecraft commented, "constitute something almost unique in standard literature."
After a time, I looked to right and left, and saw the intolerable blackness of night, pierced by remote gleams of fire. Onwards, outwards, I drove. Once, I glanced behind, and saw the earth, a small crescent of blue light, receding away to my left. Further off, the sun, a splash of white flame, burned vividly against the dark.
An indefinite period passed. Then, for the last time, I saw the earth -- an enduring globule of radiant blue, swimming in an eternity of ether. And there I, a fragile flake of soul-dust, flickered silently across the void, from the distant blue, into the expanse of the unknown. --Hodgson
This book has been on my Big List of Maybe Someday since I was a teenager, and finally my exploration of early science fiction has put it on the Done Been Read list. I have to say that the descriptions of it I've read over the years failed to get across the fact that it is in large part an expansion of HG Wells' vision of the dying earth in The Time Machine. It's also a forerunner of the cosmological horror that so fascinated HP Lovecraft.
It starts out as a stefnal sort of gothic. First, two hale fellows on a fishing vacation in remotest Ireland discover some ruins hanging over a chasm. In the ruins, they find a manuscript, which is The House on the Borderland. It is the narrative of a man who lives in a remote estate with his sister. (Echoes of Poe here?) He discovers a chasm that swallows a river, and the discovery seems to draw the attention of creepy humanoid swine creatures coming up from the bowels of the earth. He retreats to his house, and they follow. They attack the house, and he defends it with guns and barriers.
One of the complaints about this book from genre fans is that nothing much happens. It's true that this first, gothic part of the story is very much a mood piece, and much of the action, such as it is, consists of the narrator exploring either the gloomy, cavernous house or the barren landscape around it. There is a creeping sense of dread. Things are almost seen, seen out of the corner of the eye, but what was it really? Sounds are heard in the night. It's a mood piece, and the mood is dread.
The second half of the book -- and I'm still not sure how exactly it relates to the first, although it does -- is a vision of the end of the solar system and the heat death of the universe. One of the fascinating aspects of this part is that, especially at first, it feels like a description of time lapse photography. Time speeds up, and the way he describes clouds rushing across the sky sounds almost precisely like it looks on sped up film. It's possible that by 1908 (or a few years earlier, when he apparently wrote the book) Hodgson had seen time lapse photography of clouds, although I'm unaware of such films from that era. Either that, or he had such a keen imagination that he was able to "run the film" in his mind, as it were.
This section of the book is truly remarkable -- a mood piece in an entirely different mode. The sense of enormity of both space and time is exhilirating. Whereas Wells seemed to be grappling more with evolution in The Time Machine, Hodgson is grappling with entropy and just the sheer size of the universe. He seems to have mixed feelings about it too: both a sense of horror and a sense of almost liberation. The narrator loses his body over time in this vision -- turned to dust -- and yet he is thereby freed to see things on an even grander scale.
It's a pretty amazing book, even if it does have way too many commas. A ridiculous number of commas. I don't understand why the copy-editors let some of them stand, because many of them are completely meaningless. They don't even add to a sense of rhythm. I'm really not sure what Hodgson intended with them. Anyway, a minor annoyance. The mixture of gothic dread and cosmic grandeur, as HP Lovecraft commented, "constitute something almost unique in standard literature."
After a time, I looked to right and left, and saw the intolerable blackness of night, pierced by remote gleams of fire. Onwards, outwards, I drove. Once, I glanced behind, and saw the earth, a small crescent of blue light, receding away to my left. Further off, the sun, a splash of white flame, burned vividly against the dark.
An indefinite period passed. Then, for the last time, I saw the earth -- an enduring globule of radiant blue, swimming in an eternity of ether. And there I, a fragile flake of soul-dust, flickered silently across the void, from the distant blue, into the expanse of the unknown. --Hodgson
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2009-02-26 05:38 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-02-26 05:39 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-02-26 05:43 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-02-26 05:46 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-02-26 08:28 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-02-26 08:33 pm (UTC)If you like Lovecraft, you should definitely read this book. Can't remember if you do. Oh, and one thing I didn't mention is that it's relatively short, especially compared to Hodgson's The Night Land, which I'm going to read next.
no subject
Date: 2009-02-27 12:12 am (UTC)When I read Lovecraft's comments on Hodgson, I had to smile, because they read to me like someone trying to create a little distance from a powerful influence.