AWAKE IN THE NIGHT LAND by John C Wright: a
review.
About thirteen years ago, I started a little
website.
*****
My wife was only a few years dead then, and
she still visited me from time to time. I
would wake up in a bed full of her warmth and
musk, and feel her sleeping just beside
me. I would turn over and kiss her,
and she would whisper love sleepily. I
would get up and go to wash my face, and go back
to the bedroom to kiss her awake. Then I
would really wake up.
My daughters would come to the door-gates of
their rooms, holding up their arms and
saying daddy, and I'd pick one up and snuggle
her and take her downstairs to where their
grandmother had breakfast ready, then go back
upstairs for the other, then grab a bacon
sandwich and a mug of coffee and walk down to
the train station and go to work. They
waved from the windows till I was out of
sight. I'd come home late and just have
time to kiss them goodnight.
It was along hard day until they let me
telecommute, and I suddenly had a lot of spare
time.
*****
There was a man who had a
beautiful young wife.
She died, and he dreamed of
meeting her again, at the end of time, when
the Sun was dead.
*****
I had always been fascinated by the
book. The Final Arcology of mankind,
Earth's Last Citadel, surrounded by an entire
universe that had been taken over by Hell.
I wanted to read more stories set in that Land,
and now I had the time to do something and a
little bit of spare money, I took advice.
I was a subeditor for INTERZONE back then in its
glory days, and I had Dave Pringle to explain
the legal side of buying fiction to display
online.
I set rates and contacted Ranlan.com and
waited for stories to come in. Meanwhile I
started the trimmings. Essays. A gallery
of book covers. Then a little step up:
Stephen Fabian's terrific paintings of the
Watchers, illustrations for the 1973 edition of
THE DREAM OF X, the abbreviated version of THE
NIGHT LAND Hodgson published in the US to keep
the copyright. I was careful to pay
Fabian for his work, for these pictures are
surely the first example of someone actually
adding to the original NIGHT LAND, adding
something that will always be connected to it
from now on.
.
Look at them.
They do not so much illustrate the story as form
a collateral theme.
And quite quickly we got our
first story, "An
Exhalation of Butterflies" by Nigel
Atkinson. This was its basic
idea. Every so often, as a
gesture of defiance, the Redoubt turns the
production of its Underground Fields over to the
creation of butterflies.
They're kept on ice for a few years to
build up numbers and then they are all
hatched and sucked up by the
ventilation system of the Redoubt and
ejected Out into the Night. No
practical reason. Just a gigantic
Fuck You to the forces in the Night and the
horror and the darkness.
I thought it was brilliant. Dave took it
for INTERZONE, and I put it online next month.
I tried my own hand and wrote "EATER". It
was the story of a female Seer, telepathically
surveying the Land, who is taken over and used
to invade the Redoubt. The invasion
fails and she dies burned body and soul by
the Redoubt defense systems.
It's a reasonably good tale, and Dave accepted
it to run in INTERZONE, and Gardner Dozois gave
it a tick mark in his year's best
recommended. There is nothing special
about it, except it was the first time in my
life I had ever tried to write a piece of
fiction.
The dark, looming, images of the Land had made
such an impact on me. When I started to
write stories set in that world, it was as if I
remembered a life I had lived in that society,
with its prim manners overlaying iron values and
its dauntless courage. I didn't need
to make anything up. I just watched it happen.
Brett Davidson sent me a story from New
Zealand with a background that
complemented and extended my own, and I
found the person who would be my principle
creative partner. For years we've
batted ideas back and forth by email late at
night. Other writers joined us and
mostly took their lead from Brett and
I. We were building a shared world
but one so rich and vivid felt as if we were
were discovering something that already
existed. I don't think I've ever had such
fun ((while vertical)) in my life.
And then I got a new submission, from John C
Wright, which was quite apart from all the other
Night Land tales.
I'd written a fusion of Hodgson's vision
with cutting-edge science, and tried to evoke a
credible Redoubt culture, a culture that might
really last ten million years.
Therefore my Redoubt was a society of strict
moral codes, an actual functional and enforced
marriage contract, strong kinship bonds, and
sharply differentiated complementary behavior of
men and women. ((It strikes me only now that
this is mistaken by some readers for archaism.
But of course it isn't. It's
futurism. Or just realism. No society
without these values or something like them can
survive more than a couple of
generations.)) And I'd written of a
society rich in technical and scientific
knowledge, including as unremarked givens such
familiar SF tropes as nanotechnology,
cyborgisation, and Artificial
Intelligence. I had some fun
integrating these into Hodgson's "scientific"
formulation of reincarnation and psychic
predation.
I had done my best to reinterpret the
Night Land as science fiction, and other writers
had followed me. But John's
story followed his own dreams.
His character names were derived from classical
Greek, not generic IndoEuropean sememes. The
manners of the society were likewise closely
modeled on the ancient pagans. Dozois has called
this an air of distanced antiquity, and it works
well, but I repeat it's distinctly different
from my own, which is not antique at all. His
was not a technically sophisticated society and
seemed not to have a scientific attitude to the
alien Land that surrounded it. It ran off rote
technology and was ignorant of the workings of
much of the machinery it depended on. It was
doomed and dwindling and dark and candle-lit, a
tumbledown place with a hint of Ghormenghast to
it. (I know John will hate that comparison, and
I apologize). The story was one of childhood
friendship, rivalry, disaster and rescue. The
writing style was, incidentally, brilliant.
I bought it and published it in our first
hardcopy anthology, ENDLESS LOVE. It got into
Dozois' BEST SF and several other yearly
anthlogies and created a minor sensation. There
are still places where the first taste of
Hodgson's work a casual reader will get is the
translation of "Awake in the Night" in that
year's Dozois, and the story is an entry drug
not only for THE NIGHT LAND but for Hodgson
himself and all his work. This was a story which
Hodgson might have written if he had been a more
gifted weaver of words. John remarked to me at
one point that he was surprised at the story's
popularity. I think we both understood that
despite its author's talent, the real power
resided in the way it had stayed faithful to
Hodgson's own visions, without elaborating them
too much. The whole world could now see and
share Hodgson's original Night Land. They were
seeing it through John's eyes, not mine, but
that didn't matter to me. This was
what I had set the NightLand website up for.
*****
I expected a whole series of tales from John
set in his version of The Night Land, but his
next story was a radical departure from anything
that he or any of the rest of us had ever done.
It surpassed not only Hodgson's talents but,
damn it, Lovecraft's. When I read "Awake in the
Night" I felt some envy, but when the ms for
"The Last of All Suns" crossed my inbox I felt
something like awe.
It's almost impossible to describe this
story without employing spoilers, because there
is nothing else like it to compare it to or to
hint that it is like. Baldly, then: the universe
is in its final contraction, falling back on
itself into a massive black hole, the last of
all suns. In one sliver of it, life remains: a
gigantic starship, millions of years old . On
board this Starship,ruling it, are the great
powers and forces of the Night, who have been
victorious not only in the Night Land they
turned Earth into but throughout the cosmos.
To oppose them on the ship there are a
scattering of human escapees, their bodies
artificially regrown from some ancient
recording, their souls compelled to one final
reincarnation for unknown reasons. The oldest is
a Neanderthal, or something similar. The
youngest is an inhabitant of the Last Redoubt.
Yet it is now so very much later than even the
Last Age of the Redoubt that the entire time
span from the earliest to the latest lives of
these reincarnated ones is like the blink of an
eye at the start of a long, dark, night.
And now what can I say? How can I possibly
describe what happens next? Even if I
could, I would probably have to go beyond what
is allowable in a review. As I said, this
story is unique. I can't describe its plot
as "like" anything else. I'd have to go
through it section by section, practically
retell it.
Yet certain things can be said. For
example, I can tell you that when these
resurrectees talk to each other, their language
automatically translated by some mental
trick, their concepts of the universe are so
diverse that only method they have to
communicate with each other is to employ the
metalanguage of myth. And yet this works,
and Wright's genius effortlessly makes it
credible to the reader that it would work.
By selectively recounting the foundational myths
of their diverse societies, they are able to
discuss their situation, plan their actions, and
the plot is rapidly and convincingly
advanced.
One recalls the marvelous passage in
Lovecraft's "The Shadow Out Of Time" which lists
the enormous range of human societies the Great
Race of Yith has plucked its time-swapped
prisoners' minds from. The dialogue in
this story is the sort of language those
time-stolen scribes would have had to employ to
talk to each other. And Wright drops a few
hints that let us know that "The Shadow Out Of
Time" is exactly the ur-SF story he is drawing
from here. Wright excels Lovecraft -
Lovecraft - by this enormous margin;
he does not merely list the societies his
characters have been plucked from; he gives us
their dialog, word for word, and effortlessly
makes it believable.
And this is only one tiny facet of a story
that integrates THE NIGHT LAND with THE HOUSE ON
THE BORDERLAND and goes on to swallow the modern
mythos of Lovecraft and Stapledon and most of
the GraecoRoman foundational myths of Western
society. And modern physics, as easy as an
after-dinner mint.
Finally it comes down to this. In place of a
soulless mathematical Episode of Inflation or
the mindless flutings of Azathoth, Wright gives
us cosmos that is founded on the pattern
of eternal love between man and woman. And
he does it convincingly. He does it
without breaking a sweat or drawing an extra
breath.
*****
There was a man who had a beautiful young
wife.
She died, and he dreamed of meeting her
again, at the end of time, when the Sun was
dead.
*****
I am not that man. That man was a
fiction. I know death is merely the end, there
is no reincarnation, that her presence in my bed
was merely dream, and we shall never meet again
in any age or realm or dimension, not hand
in hand looking out from the battlements of the
Last Redoubt of Man nor anywhere else.
So how can I write about Eternal Love? Is love
a laughable delusion, or is it the only real
thing? I'm quite an old man now, suddenly and
cripplingly ill,and I have another family with my second wife,
who is a good true woman, but it seems only yesterday
that She was in my arms and our lips and hands
were always reuniting. I understand human
sociobiology, I took the red pill decades ago,
without the help of the
Internet. I understand what
they call Game nowadays. I've read and admired
its accurate application, I respect people who
truly are using this to strengthen marriage, but
the bloggers with their bedpost scores and
their flag counts are children fighting for
bottles of fizzy drink. Love is another
dimension. Love is the only thing stronger than
death. And I'm writing this as a man who has
lost his loved one and might meet death quite
soon.
I don't "believe" in love. I know.
*****
It's odd that the one flaw in this, John's
best story, is the portrayal of the
Mirdath-figure, the multi-souled narrator's
eternal mate. The story rings like fine bronze
when the men from different aeons resurrected in
the death starship speak to each other: but it
klunks juat a tiny bit whenever she pops up her
eager-sex-partner-and-ideal-mother head. Surely
the eternal female would in most of her
incarnations be an ordinary unexceptional woman
only made special by love? But I'm not going to
fuss about this.
There is nothing like this story, nothing like
it, anywhere else. It is incomparable.
*****
John sent us two more stories. They are both
good stories, but I'm going to end this review
with only brief mentions of them.
"The Cry of the Night hound" concerns a doomed
attempt to domesticate these monsters, and were
it not for Wright's ever-beautiful prose and his
moving portrayal of his Redoubt society in
(temporary) decay, it might be judged rather
improbable.
"Silence of the Night" is a mad,fractured
episode that must come from a time close to the
Fall. I think it does not work too
well, though the beautiful writing and imagery
carries it through.
I don't know if Wright has written
himself out, and said all he has to say about
the Night Land. Maybe he has. Maybe not.
(But if you have, I have a theme for you, John,
that I think you'll like, that might rekindle
your interest, that might produce something as
good as "The Last Of All Suns". I really do. But
I gave it to another writer who has first dibs
on it, and he's doing nothing. If he gives it
up, you'll hear from me.)
Anyhow. I messed up the
marketing of "The Last Of All Suns", and the
story fell into an obscurity from which I hope
this new edition will rescue it. Now it's been
republished by professionals, along with
Wright's other three Night Land tales, I hope it
sells a million copies.
*****
A final word.
Did the stuff about my wife with which I stared
this review strikes you as forced,
unreal? Probably. But it was
in fact the simple literal truth. I really
did experience that, many times, though I have
no doubt it was merely a dream.
Perhaps I could have made this review more
plausible by leaving it out, even though it was
the truth? Indeed I could
have. And perhaps in the same way I
could have made this review more effective, more
believable, by being less effusive, by toning
down my praise a bit. Perhaps I could
have. But I'm not going to do
that. If you doubt my word, doubt
away. But truth is truth, and I don't see
why I should dodge it just to convince you. Buy
this book, read the stories, read especially
"the Last of all Suns", and whatever you think
about me after reading this review, when you
have read the book you will know that every word
of praise I give it here is the truth.
- Andy Robertson
REVIEWED
AWAKE IN THE NIGHT LAND
A collection of four stories set in William Hope
Hodgson's Night Land
byJohn C Wright
Castalia house 2014
$4.99
ISBN XXXXXXXXXX
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