Samuel Johnson

Walking the Night Land: The Trip Begins

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Though the new posts have been sparse lately, I have not been idle. This is the beginning of a series on William Hope Hodgson’s The Night Land and some of the works it inspired.

All the posts are written, so this isn’t one of those series I started and stopped.

Essay: The Night Land, William Hope Hodgson, 1912.514fE9sRptL

This is a novel perhaps more widely known and admired than read. As Samuel Johnson said about Paradise Lost, “No man ever wished it longer.” There are some other problems modern readers have with it too.

Still, it stands at the beginning of science fiction tradition that includes Clark Ashton Smith’s Zothique stories, Jack Vance’s Dying Earth series, and Gene Wolfe’s New Sun series.

Despite its problems, it is a stunning work of weird and far future science fiction. Where Wells, in his The Time Machine, set just a part of his novella in the far future, all but the first chapter of this approximately 200,000 word novel is set there.

Millions of years from now, under a dark sun and on an Earth cracked by its contracting crust (both notions from the then current theories of physicist William Thomsen aka Lord Rutherford), the last survivors of humanity huddle in a seven-mile high pyramid, the Last Redoubt.

Around them, the land is full of various monsters, strange places, degenerate humans, and entities from other dimensions. Some are strange, slow moving, almost mountains. Most of these as well as the places are given enigmatic names that serve as their sole description. Continue reading →

“Eleonora”

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There’s a Poe page on the website, but I haven’t actually reviewed the works of Poe much.

Perhaps I’ll do a bit of that in the future.

For now, I’ll do this more obscure Poe tale since it is this week’s Deep Ones reading over at LibraryThing.

Review: “Eleonora”, Edgar A. Poe, 1841.Annotated Edgar Allan Poe

There’s a sense of spiritual autobiography and personal clairvoyance and introspection in this story. How the narrator reacts to the death of his beloved Eleonora mirrors Poe’s reaction to his wife Virginia’s death.

Yet, Virginia died in 1847.

The plot is relatively simple in its barebones.

The narrator loves Eleonora. Eleonora becomes ill, and the narrator renders a curse on himself, “a penalty the exceeding great horror of which will not permit me to make record of it here”, if he ever marries another woman. But Eleonora dies and, years later, he marries another woman. Continue reading →