A sequel to THE TIME MACHINE?"
The Science-fictional underpinning of THE NIGHT LAND
THE NIGHT LAND is typically assumed to be either a work of fantasy, or one
of horror. I will argue that it is Science Fiction.
THE NIGHT LAND is typically thought of as a work of horrific fantasy.
The motivation for this classification appears to be threefold:
- The book involves human beings surviving after "the sun had died".
- the sun wll not die for billions of years, a period of time far
longer than any species has ever survived on the Earth.
- it is concluded that
the work is a fantasy.
- The book assumes human beings have an immaterial part
much like the Christian soul, and invokes reincarnation as a
central moral principal.
- the "soul", and reincarnation, are considered superstition.
- it is concluded that the work is religious or mystical in nature.
- The book is written in an awful cod-archaic dialect,
- a feature it unquestionably shares with much poor fantasy.
In justice I can do nothing to undermine the third assumption, but I will
address the first in this essay, and the second in a later one.
"the sun had died": Kelvin's theory of stellar age
With regard to the lifetime of the Sun,
THE NIGHT LAND is squarely based on the best science of its time.
In
1862
Lord Kelvin calculated the lifetime of the Sun as
30 million years.
He estimated the lifetime of the sun, and by implication
the earth, as follows. He calculated the gravitational energy of
an object with a mass equal to the sun's mass and a radius equal
to the sun's radius and divided the result by the rate at which
the sun radiates away energy. This calculation yielded a lifetime
of only 30 million years.
THE NIGHT LAND, and its model,
THE TIME MACHINE, are predicated on this
astrophysics, which remained current at the time they were written:
the Sun has a total life span of about 30 million years, and is assumed to be
perhaps half-way through that span now. Consequentially, in our
timeline we have put the Darkening, the point
when the Sun ceases to give out light visible to human eyes, at
16 million AD.
Given this Cosmology, the words X wrote are not unbelievable
(the) histories of that great Redoubt dealt not with odd thousands
of years; but with very millions; aye, away back into what they of
that Age conceived to be the early days of the earth, when the
sun, maybe, still gloomed dully in the night sky of the world.
But of all that went before, nothing, save as myths, and matters
to be taken most cautiously, and believed not by men of sanity and
proved wisdom.
Compare this to the penultimate chapter of THE TIME MACHINE
So I travelled, stopping ever and again, in great
strides of a thousand years or more, drawn on by the mystery
of the earth's fate, watching with a strange fascination the
sun grow larger and duller in the westward sky, and the life
of the old earth ebb away. At last, more than thirty
million years hence, the huge red-hot dome of the sun had
come to obscure nearly a tenth part of the darkling heavens.
Then I stopped once more, for the crawling multitude of
crabs had disappeared, and the red beach, save for its livid
green liverworts and lichens, seemed lifeless. And now it
was flecked with white. A bitter cold assailed me. Rare
white flakes ever and again came eddying down. To the
north-eastward, the glare of snow lay under the starlight of
the sable sky and I could see an undulating crest of
hillocks pinkish white. There were fringes of ice along the
sea margin, with drifting masses further out; but the main
expanse of that salt ocean, all bloody under the eternal
sunset, was still unfrozen.
The physical evolution of the earth-sun system follows
the same pattern in both books. The Sun grows
bigger redder, duller:
the Earth's rotation slows, until finally it is synchronous with
the year and the sun hangs forever in one spot in the sky.
But THE NIGHT LAND presumes human survival up to and beyond
the latest time reached by the Traveller -
beyond the beach, the crabs, the swollen, flopping, thing.
Chronologically this is not absurd. Today, we know that human survival
to eras when the Sun shows appreciable physical
changes is not likely, because
the appropriate time interval is billions of years. But for human beings to
survive thirty millon years is only an thousand times longer than the span
of history and prehistory known in
Hodgson's time, and it was not insane to imagine that humanity might
survive that long.
The Geology of The Night Land
The survival of life and of humanity after the death of the Sun is firmly grounded in a sensible and carefully worked-out Geophysics.
Knowing that the planet's surface would freeze,
Hodgson placed his Night Land in a great fissure in the Earth's
crust - constantly warmed by volcanic fires. (He added that
the Sun might
still warm the Earth to some extent even though
it did not produce visible light.)
(It is amusing to reflect that, though Hodgson could hardly have been expected to know it,
such fissures are expected to rive the earth
(along with volcanoes millions of years old and tens of miles high)
when continental drift eventually stops homogenising the earth's crust.
Mars, where
the mantle is solid and continental drift has ceased, provides us with
contemporary examples of this - in the twelve-mile deep
Valles Marineris
and the sixteen-mile-high
Mons Olympus.)
Other science Fictional themes prefigured by THE NIGHT LAND
It is worth while surveying the other ways in which the pattern of
human life within the Redoubt, and the mechanisms
by which the Redoubt sustains itself, have a rationalistic, rather
than a supernatural, underpinning.
First, the Redoubt is itself a mega-Arcology, seven miles high, five miles
square, containing thirteen hundred separate human cities and a population of "millions".
(a reasonable estimate for the population of such an arcology would be half a billion).
Crucially, the Redoubt is not sustained by supernatural forces:
it is built of metal and protected by a
sophisticated technology. Its power supply is geoelectric - and if, in
his treatment of the Earth
Current, Hodgson does verge on mysticism, one may reflect on how he had the
wit to understand that fossil fuels would have long been exhausted.
It feeds its
millions from a realistically - scaled
series of underground agricultural fields, the largest buried nearly a hundred miles down.
I do not know of a previous example of such a building in SF, and I believe that
Hodgson deserves the credit for inventing the concept.
Secondly, the Redoubt is protected by what is no more or less than a Force Field.
The "Air Clog", as Hodgson terms it, a circle round the Redoubt which forms a first ring of defence, and
which encloses territory which is apparently out of bounds to any of the inhabitants of
the Night Land. The Air Clog is generated by the Circle, a "thin tube" full
of light "Lit by the Earth Current" which bounds the Redoubt at about a mile distance.
all around the base of the Pyramid, which was five and one-quarter miles every way,
a great circle of light, which was set up by the Earth-Current, and burned within a
transparent tube; or had that appearance. And it bounded the Pyramid for a clear mile
upon every side, and burned for ever; and none of the monsters had power ever to pass
across, because of what we did call The Air Clog that it did make, as an invisible
Wall of Safety.
(Oddly, Hodgson says nothing of the effort or loss of
life that the maintenance of this Circle would require.)
As far as I know, this is the first time that the concept of a
"force field" comes up in SF, though Bulwer-Lytton's "vril" may prefigure some aspects of it.
Thirdly, the general understanding that the people
of the Redoubt have of their surroundings is scentific,
not mystical. They do not consider the
entities that surround them to be supernatural: they
investigate them in a systematic and intelligent way -
through distant observation, through careful recording,
and through occasional human exploration. This is not the
behaviour of those who think themselves surrounded by gods and demons.
Human Evolution in THE NIGHT LAND
Fourthly, and more generally, the people of the Redoubt live in an entirely
artificial environment, and seem to be biologically adapted to it. Within the
context of the story, this is
no doubt a consequence of the fact that the natural
environment they evolved for has vanished: human genes within the Night Land is
represented only by a multitude of semi-human monsters. It is interesting,
however, in that it shows Hodgson grappling with ideas of future human evolution in an
intelligent and self-consistent way.
Hodgson diagrams the biology of Redoubt Man with care.
We learn that the people of the Redoubt are
vegetarians: that X and Nanni "never thought" to kill animals
for food on their journey; that in fact the food in the Night Land is variously
toxic to human beings. We learn that the air within the Redoubt is
differentially pressurised, and that
the people of the Redoubt have split into different races, depending
on the height they live at and their adaptation to pressure - a development
the rulers of the Redoubt take measures to counteract.
Paradoxically, the sojurn of humanity within the Redoubt may have led to the
longest period of peace and plenty in human history.
The human population is in "Millions" - a conservative
estimate for the population of the one thousand three hundred and twenty Cities and of the
Underground Fields would be at least 500 million - and has remained at that level
for millions of years. War between human beings
appears to have become unthinkable: but this security has not led to any sort of
weakness or decadence. The Redoubt's polity is no doubt stabilised by
the constant, visible, threat of the Night Land, and, perhaps for the same reason, its people
seem to be tough, both mentally and physically.
(The athletic prowess of the dreamer is obviously
a self-idealisation of Hodgson, the maniacal body-builder: but he does not
seem to be exceptionable among the inhabitants of The Redoubt.)
In parallel with this, Hodgson gives us some hints about "human" evolution outside
the Redoubt. Some of the things out there have human genes -
"fathered of bestial humans, and mothered of monsters" - but they
seem to be hybridised with Outside entities to various degrees.
These creatures are not really human. But Hodgson does, interestingly,
have one race of true humans living outside the Redoubt: these are the
Humped Men, who live in a rich and fertile lowland to the north of
the Night Land. It is clearly signalled that these men, though warlike and
hostile, are human, and are perhaps of 100% ancestral human stock.
Hodgson's understanding of Evolution is of course very much at
fault. He considered it a directed process
which produced a more and more
"spirtual" entity, quintessentially human. I will try to explain how
he linked morality, evolution, and his theory of Monsters,
in the second essay in this
series
THE NIGHT LAND is a work of Science Fiction
In the mean time, I will reiterate my claim that THE NIGHT LAND is Science Fiction.
It should not be necessary to point out that THE NIGHT LAND remains
science fiction even if the premises on which its SF idea is
built are destroyed, for Science Fiction does not change to
fantasy simply because it is based on science which
later turns out to be inaccurate.
this essay © A W Robertson
Send me your comments on this
essay and I'll post them here next time I update the site.
Sharks of the Ether
A second essay will deal with Hodgson's
attempts to build a coherent theory of immortality, reincarnation,
and the human "soul" within a science-fictional framework.
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