Dry Ice Factory

Well, that certainly was a slog -- in more ways than one! It took me over two months to read this book, and that's about how long it takes the heroic protagonist of the story to rescue his beloved.

This book is famously flawed. First of all, it is very badly written in a faux-18th-Century style that had me gritting my teeth throughout. It made me appreciate once again how good E.R. Eddison is in his own attempts at writing in an archaic (in his case, Elizabethan) style. The second widely-observed flaw in The Night Land is the sentimentality of the love story. The love story is certainly treacly, but I would say that the bigger problem -- which is a problem with the adventure parts of the novel as well -- is the repetition involved. Hodgson uses the same descriptions and situations over and over again. With the love story it's words like "naughty" and "impudent" and descriptions of rubbing in ointment and binding wounds; with the adventure it is descriptions of eating the food pills and powdered water and finding a safe place to sleep and repetitions of the phrase "as you will know if you've been following what I've said." Well, yes, we have been following what you said, so why are you telling us again? Over and over again. Which is one reason why you feel as though you've been through a trip of many, many dull and unchanging days by the end of the book.

Still, despite the flaws this book is widely acclaimed as a classic by figures as diverse as C.S. Lewis and H.P. Lovecraft. (In this review I'm only going to cite writers who go by two leading initials. Let's see, does H.L. Menken have anything to say on the matter?) The reason for this is that it is a tremendous work of imagination. As with so much science fiction, the world-building compensates for the bad writing and characterization. However, I'd have to say that it barely compensates in this particular case. The House on the Borderland is a far better book in almost every way, except for in scope of weird imagination.

The Night Land is a Dying Earth story, which I hadn't really realized before. (Are there any earlier examples of this sub-genre?) As far as we can tell, in this far future the sun has died. The Earth has been riven by cataclysms, and humans have descended into the rifts to stay close to the warmth of the still-molten core and remaining atmosphere. Our protagonist resides in an enormous high tech pyramid called the Last Redoubt, which is the home of millions of people, with different cities on different levels and a huge excavation miles below the ground where crops are grown and people are buried. Outside this enclave, the dark world is swarming with a nightmarish array of monsters and evil forces. The Bantam Adult Fantasy editions of this book used Hieronymous Bosch for the covers, and that's a very good approximation of what the world of the book feels like. The bulk of the story is about the protagonist's journey out into this nightmare world to save his beloved from a smaller, dying enclave of humans a long distance away and further down in the rift.

This is definitely a romance in the old sense, with a literal knight in shining armor (except with a power weapon) striking off to rescue a damsel in distress. However, the fantastic landscape he crosses is shaped by the scientific imagination. The dying earth setting is only the most obvious sign of this, but throughout he speculates on how this and that aspect of the world came to be. (One of the repetitions is that he always comes around to the reminder that he doesn't know if his speculations are true.) For example, he speculates that changes in the density of the atmosphere has caused lungs and chests of this far future to grow larger than they were in the past. At another point he encounters brutish sub-human men and wonders if they will ever evolve to become civilized again, like their distant cousins in the Last Redoubt. As with so much British scientific romance, entropy and evolution seem to be the big concepts being wrestled with. Both have left humanity in an imperiled state.

There's a mystical side of the story as well. It's implied that scientific experiments unleashed forces of evil from alternate dimensions -- or rather, this is one of the protagonist's speculations that may or may not be true. These forces are intangible, at least compared to the monsters and mutants prowling the ground. They are said to actually be able to take over the human spirit or soul and torment them for eternity, and thus all humans who venture out of their safe redoubt are prepared to kill themselves rather than let this happen. They have special implants of poison for that very purpose. As in The House on the Borderland, however, except even more explicitly, there are also forces for good at work in the world, and they act unexpectedly to shield people from the threat of the forces of evil. This all feels very Christian, like a struggle between inscrutable angels and demons.

In the end, it is the landscape and the non-human inhabitants that are most memorable about this book. The eternal darkness is only illuminated here and there by human lights or smoldering volcanos. One memorable passage has the protagonist traveling through utter darkness using a rock tied to a rope, which he throws ahead to test for barriers or chasms. He finds sulphurous hot pools to bathe in. Despite his armor and power weapon, the feeling of existential threat is constant. The sense of dread and horror is almost overpowering. The repetition of his little rituals along the way adds to both the sense of the terrible passage of time and of the pathos of these little gestures in the face of the hungry, devouring darkness.

Yet the subtitle of the book is "A Love Tale", and there is also an aspect of the story that is about love conquering all. Needless to say, it is less memorable than the dark journey itself, as much as it dominates the second half of the book. However, there's something about this love story that I haven't seen commented on elsewhere, and that is its brief resemblance to a John Norman Gor story. There is a short (but still repetitive!) section after Our Hero has found the Maid (as he constantly refers to her) when she starts acting all "naughty" and "impudent" and independent. She puts herself (and him) in danger by pulling away from him and resisting his directions. Eventually he puts her over a knee and gives her a few hard whacks with a switch. (This is after an earlier beating in which he was too easy on her and only made her more resistant.) She becomes submissive at this point, and he pontificates about how women need a man to show them who's boss -- although it's also men who cause women to get all excited and act up, and women who cause men to get all excited and dominant. All of this written in a very treacly style that is hard to get across, and I don't have my notes with me to give you a representative quote. It's very odd and strangely narcissistic, as our hero broods on his own hunky, muscular manliness. Hodgson was apparently a small man who went to sea and got into body-building as a way of protecting himself from the abuse of the other sailors. I thought I saw evidence of this personal history in the text, as cheap as that kind of psychoanalysis is.

Anyway, an ordeal of a book, but one with enough going on to keep me slogging through to the end. It's a fascinating piece in the puzzle of British scientific romance, but one that I'm happy to have behind me rather than ahead of me.

Remember when I said recently that I'm generally not a fan of utopias or dystopias? Well, here's a case in point: I stopped reading this book after about 80 pages because it was boring the shit out of me. It was a great load off my mind when I realized last night that I didn't actually have to finish the book if I didn't want to. I mean, I *did* want to finish it, but my experience was that I kept having to reread paragraphs because my mind was completely uninterested in understanding the content. The flesh was willing, but the spirit was weak.

I'm not saying it's the fault of the book either. I actually found the opening section interesting, as the narrator falls asleep and wakes up in the far flung future. However, at that point it became a series of conversations about economics, and I stopped finding it interesting. Theoretically I could be interested in reading about a 19th century view of a socialist paradise, but in practice I find this kind of thing so bloodless and abstract that there's no hook for me.

Now, I've been uninterested in this book for years and years. As I say, utopias have never been my cuppa. The thing that finally got me to give it a try was learning that Homer Eon Flint was a huge fan and considered it a big influence. I certainly got the impression that Flint was something of a socialist, or as least interested in socialist ideas. It comes out most directly perhaps in the novella "The Devolutionist," which is about a binary planet system in which the ruling class lives in luxury on one planet and the working class lives in penury on the other. There is a revolution. However, when describing his own socialist utopia in "The Planeteer," it's much more of a techno-utopia along the lines of John Jacob Astor's A Journey in Other Worlds. Bellamy is not interested in technology at all, as far as I could tell. It's all industrial relations for him, and, probably more importantly, no conflict or drama. "Oh no, we've solved that problem, old boy, and here's how."

Bellamy seems like a pretty interesting writer when he's describing the narrator's feelings of alienation and confusion about losing the old world and confronting the new, but the economic discussions are just deadly to me. Ah well, on to William Hope Hodgson's The House on the Borderland (1908). More of a weird tale, from what I've read about it.

For as long as I have been reading fantasy, Perley Poore Sheehan has been one of the "greats" of the great old days when Bob Davis was creating a new literature of the imagination in the pages of the Munsey magazines. Yet it was as a writer of popular romances that his contemporaries knew -- and forgot -- him.

Why was this? Granted that any of those few writers of fantasy would be remembered because he was one of a small circle, why has Sheehan been persistently ranked with Merritt, Austin Hall, Homer Eon Flint, "Francis Stevens"?

-- P. Schuyler Miller, introduction to the 1953 Polaris Press edition of Sheehan's The Abyss of Wonders (1915), although apparently Miller originally wrote this piece in 1931 (when 1915 would hardly have been the "great old days")

This novel was originally serialized in Argosy All-Story Weekly in 1921, and it was reprinted frequently after that, both in other pulp magazines and in books. I read the Ace paperback from the mid-'60s, with a cover sporting the claim, "The most famous fantastic novel of all time." I'm not sure that it's been reprinted since then. It seems largely forgotten except as the target of one of Damon Knight's critical demolition jobs in the '50s.

It's not hard to see why. It is a ramshackle book, with the first eighteen chapters written by Hall, then a few chapters by Flint, then another long section by Hall to conclude. A large cast of characters is introduced sporadically over the course of the long story, and many of them seem irrelevant or are forgotten. As Knight gleefully points out, Hall writes as though English were a foreign language to him, and his ideas are often sophomoric. It's also old-fashioned in its concerns, but I think it's worth asking what the original readership found so wonderful about the book, which is something Knight doesn't bother to do.

Two things struck me about what The Blind Spot was up to. The first is that, like A. Merritt in The Moon Pool, the authors seem to be trying to rationalize the occult. As one character puts it, "In other words, Dr. Holcomb has certainly proved the occult by material means." Unfortunately, this rationalization is largely done by assertion, and the assertions frequently seem idiotic. Here's more of the statement I quoted from above:

'In other words, Dr. Holcomb has certainly proved the occult by material means. He has done it with a vengeance. In so doing he has left us in doubt as to ourselves; and unless he discovers the missing factor within the next few hours we are going to be in the anomalous position of knowing plenty about the next world, but nothing about ourselves.'

Since these characters largely disappear from the story at this point, it's hard to see if they ever regain certitude about themselves. Perhaps their loss of self-knowledge is what causes them to disappear! As to whether Dr. Holcomb discovers the missing factor, that's also hard to say. He gives an exposition on his discoveries at the end, explaining something like a parallel world system, but undermines his own theories with comments such as, "I throw out the idea mainly as a suggestion. It is not necessarily the true explanation."

Perhaps this is admirable agnosticism and a scientific call for further testing. What is being suggested, if I can follow the bafflegab, is that what we have heretofore perceived as occult or spiritual is in fact a blurry, limited perception of a parallel universe that exists inside the interstices of the very atoms that compose us. Or something like that. At least that's the explanation for all the mysterious goings-on in San Francisco in the early parts of the novel, although Hall never gets around to telling us whether it explains all gods and monsters and ghosts. Whatever the case, it's quite possible that early science fiction readers found this grounding of the spiritual in the material to be very exciting. From my perspective, the big problem is that Hall seems just as ignorant of the occult as he is of science.

The other thing that struck me is that the parallel world we are shown in the latter part of the novel is, unlike the other worlds of Merritt or Burroughs, not derived from lost world literature. Perhaps it derives more from utopian concepts, although it is not presented as a utopia. Highly advanced, and yet specifically archaic in other ways. The society is relatively complex and conflicted. There is a millennial strain in it. There is interesting technology, and unexplained phenomena. It almost feels like something out of an Arthur C. Clarke novel. From my still limited reading in the era, this may have been a fresh approach to world-building -- a breakthrough -- although Flint was doing something similar in his Dr. Kinney stories, starting in 1919.

I have absolutely no adjectives to do the thing justice. Our state of mind upon entering that room was probably the same as if you had brought back to life Julius Caesar of the year 50 B.C. and had suddenly transplanted him some night on blazing Broadway in New York. His mind would have reeled at the -- to him -- marvelous sights. It would have taken him days and days of asking questions and explanations of all the impossible things he saw before him.

Exactly so with us. Only Caesar would have made a jump of but 1,965 years, where we made one of over 200,000 years. We were but uncomprehending children, and our eyes and senses were absolutely inadequate to do justice at once to the higher plane of civilization on which we had been thrown so suddenly. We have been on Mars eight days now and still we know practically nothing of this most miraculous world. Every day brings more tremendous surprises and at night we are usually exhausted from all the excitement of the continuous bombardment of new and wondrous things on our brains.

-- Hugo Gernsback, The Scientific Adventures of Baron Münchausen (1915)

On January 9, 1898 the Boston Post newspaper began serializing a novel called Fighters from Mars -- or The Terrible War of the Worlds as it Was Waged in or Near Boston in the Year 1900. This was an apparently pirated version of H.G. Wells' War of the Worlds, which had months earlier been legitimately serialized in the US in the magazine Cosmopolitan. As the title of the pirate edition suggests, the action of Wells' novel had been transposed from London to Boston (as Orson Welles later transposed it to New Jersey), but to crown the transgression, on February 6, 1898 the Boston Post began to serialize an unofficial and unauthorized "sequel" to this version of War of the Worlds called Edison's Conquest of Mars "written in collaboration with Edison by Garrett P. Serviss, the well known astronomical writer." In this sequel, the great nations of the world (led by the US, of course) set aside their political differences, pool their resources, build a fleet of antigravity spaceships armed with disintegrator rays designed by the American inventor Thomas Edison, and, led by Edison himself, head to Mars to exact revenge for the invasion in the earlier novel.

( In which the Plucky Men of Earth Hand Mars its Ass )