Essay: William Hope Hodgson’s Night Lands, Volume II: Nightmares of the Fall, ed. Andy W. Robertson, 2007.

There is love and reincarnation and existential metaphors for life in the second volume of this skillful and largely seamless extension of Hodgson’s The Night Land. But time is running out for humanity, and this group of stories starts out overlapping with some of the later stories in the first volume and takes us to the fall of the Last Redoubt and beyond. John C. Wright’s tour-de-force, “The Last of All Suns” does the honors for the last bit. His “The Cry of the Night Hound” opens the anthology. I’ve looked at both in depth before.

There were actually three anthologies planned for the series. But one, “The Days of Darkening”, was never done due to Robertson’s death in 2014.

Robertson and Brett Davidson furnish most of the stories, their style synching well in tracing the large currents of technology and culture in the Last Redoubt through the ages. Continue reading →