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Aug. 29th, 2013 08:52 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
camwynSo you know how the other day I mentioned reading William Hope Hodgson?
I ploughed through a reread of all the Carnacki the Ghost-Finder stuff, and through The House On The Borderland for the second and a half time (I say a half because I kept going back to reread elements that made me damn near certain Andrew Hussie read this thing and used parts of it as inspiration for chunks of Homestuck). As far as old-school, pre-Golden Age speculative fiction goes, it was pretty good. Hodgson's stuff suffered from a severe lack of female characters, like a lot of old-school speculative fiction does. In all fairness I can't really complain about that in The House On The Borderland. It didn't exactly have a whole bunch of characters to start with. There were the two guys who were the novel's framing device (one addressed by name, one whose name was only mentioned on the title page), the narrator (no name), the narrator's dog (Pepper- male), the narrator's sister (Mary), and the narrator's dead lady love (no name given). Percentage-wise that's better than The Lord of the Rings, although the sister's main role seemed to be to make the reader wonder if the narrator wasn't actually going out of his mind rather than dealing with genuine supernatural woo-woo. The Carnacki stories had a lot fewer female characters- I can really only remember two living women in those, and one ghost of a woman. Other than that the only major flaw (to my way of thinking) that applied to all the material seemed to be his weird fondness for spelling out non-upper-class-English-people's accents. Given that I read a lot of Lovecraft, the fact that I wasn't being smacked in the face by the writer's terror of immigrants, people of color, Catholics, Jews, Dutch people, or 'white trash' counted for kind of a lot.
Aaaaaaand then I started on The Night Land.
Here's the thing. I was introduced to The Night Land's premise by the TV Tropes entry on the book. No, I'm not linking to it, that place is a timesink. The book is an early twentieth century post-apocalyptic work in which the primary apocalypse was that it was so far in the future that the Sun had gone out. (Yes, primary- there were other things that happened in that world's history that would have counted as extinction-level events if the term existed at the time.) Hodgson was working with the best scientific theories of the time when he came up with the idea. I'm good with that. I can handle science that we know to be wrong now if the author was trying his or her best with what was available at the time. What I'm not good with was the writing style. For some reason which eludes me and other sane people, Mr. Hodgson wrote the dingdang thing in a weird archaic style with no dialog. TV Tropes warned me about that, but I thought I'd be able to manage. Not... not so much. Here, have an example:
And presently, I knew that Mirdath, My Wife, strove dumbly to reach for the hands of the babe; and I turned the child more towards her, and slipped the hands of the child into the weak hands of My Beautiful One. And I held the babe above my wife, with an utter care; so that the eyes of my dying One, looked into the young eyes of the child. And presently, in but a few moments of time; though it had been someways an eternity, My Beautiful One closed her eyes and lay very quiet. And I took away the child to the Nurse, who stood beyond the door. And I closed the door, and came back to Mine Own, that we have those last instants alone together.
This isn't in the part of the book that happens in the far future. This is the narrator of the late nineteenth/early twentieth century talking. The whole book is like that.
I got partway into the book despite the writing style. The narrator spends the first chapter talking about meeting his wife and courting her and all of that, and then after she dies of childbirth talks about having a dream in which he's a young man in the far future where the sun's gone out and the stars are gone and eldritch abominations roam the Earth, and... well, after a certain point I realized that trying to walk his sentences and keep track of the goings-on was a little more than I was prepared to handle for someone who wasn't shelved in the THESE ARE THE CLASSICS AND YOU WILL RESPECT THEM DAMMIT section of the library.
I feel no shame at all for having bought the fan rewrite of the work. Hodgson died in the First World War, and his book is in the public domain. He deliberately made the book annoying to follow- it's not as if he has the excuse of being, say, translated from the Greek or alive in the 1600s. The style he wrote in might eventually have added something to the feel of the work in the far future portion, but if I couldn't follow what was going on (I completely missed a bit in which the narrator got jealous of a young man courting his girlfriend only to find out that the 'young man' was his girlfriend's good friend Alison, who had disguised herself as a man to throw off an annoying suitor of her own), the poetic feel wasn't really going to help. I'm willing to read Shakespeare in the original Klingon, but not this.
So, yeah, fan rewrite. It's called The Night Land: A Story Retold, and it's by James Stoddard. Stoddard said in the preface that he loved the book and originally was going to do a paragraph by paragraph rewrite into a form that would be easier to read, but realized that wasn't going to work. He cleaned up the style, broke the book into more chapters, named more of the characters, and OH YEAH NOW THERE'S DIALOGUE. Hodgson's work had stuff on the order of "and he spoke to me of this and that, saying that this must be the case" rather than actual dialogue. I pulled down the Kindle version from Amazon, since I didn't feel like spending more than that to find out if it was any good. Turns out I've liked it a great deal so far. It's been a very interesting take on post-apocalyptia and the Dying Earth scenario- especially since, unlike kind of a lot of post-apocalyptic worlds created since then, there's a functioning society that's existed for literally millions of years and has some proper background to it, and no indication of that society being completely screwed up in order to make some kind of social commentary point. I tend to fall in love with a story's world rather than its characters more often than not, and this is a pretty fascinating one to work with.
We'll see how the rest of the novel goes. I'll keep you posted- and I'll be grateful to James Stoddard for making this accessible, regardless of what happens storywise.
I ploughed through a reread of all the Carnacki the Ghost-Finder stuff, and through The House On The Borderland for the second and a half time (I say a half because I kept going back to reread elements that made me damn near certain Andrew Hussie read this thing and used parts of it as inspiration for chunks of Homestuck). As far as old-school, pre-Golden Age speculative fiction goes, it was pretty good. Hodgson's stuff suffered from a severe lack of female characters, like a lot of old-school speculative fiction does. In all fairness I can't really complain about that in The House On The Borderland. It didn't exactly have a whole bunch of characters to start with. There were the two guys who were the novel's framing device (one addressed by name, one whose name was only mentioned on the title page), the narrator (no name), the narrator's dog (Pepper- male), the narrator's sister (Mary), and the narrator's dead lady love (no name given). Percentage-wise that's better than The Lord of the Rings, although the sister's main role seemed to be to make the reader wonder if the narrator wasn't actually going out of his mind rather than dealing with genuine supernatural woo-woo. The Carnacki stories had a lot fewer female characters- I can really only remember two living women in those, and one ghost of a woman. Other than that the only major flaw (to my way of thinking) that applied to all the material seemed to be his weird fondness for spelling out non-upper-class-English-people's accents. Given that I read a lot of Lovecraft, the fact that I wasn't being smacked in the face by the writer's terror of immigrants, people of color, Catholics, Jews, Dutch people, or 'white trash' counted for kind of a lot.
Aaaaaaand then I started on The Night Land.
Here's the thing. I was introduced to The Night Land's premise by the TV Tropes entry on the book. No, I'm not linking to it, that place is a timesink. The book is an early twentieth century post-apocalyptic work in which the primary apocalypse was that it was so far in the future that the Sun had gone out. (Yes, primary- there were other things that happened in that world's history that would have counted as extinction-level events if the term existed at the time.) Hodgson was working with the best scientific theories of the time when he came up with the idea. I'm good with that. I can handle science that we know to be wrong now if the author was trying his or her best with what was available at the time. What I'm not good with was the writing style. For some reason which eludes me and other sane people, Mr. Hodgson wrote the dingdang thing in a weird archaic style with no dialog. TV Tropes warned me about that, but I thought I'd be able to manage. Not... not so much. Here, have an example:
And presently, I knew that Mirdath, My Wife, strove dumbly to reach for the hands of the babe; and I turned the child more towards her, and slipped the hands of the child into the weak hands of My Beautiful One. And I held the babe above my wife, with an utter care; so that the eyes of my dying One, looked into the young eyes of the child. And presently, in but a few moments of time; though it had been someways an eternity, My Beautiful One closed her eyes and lay very quiet. And I took away the child to the Nurse, who stood beyond the door. And I closed the door, and came back to Mine Own, that we have those last instants alone together.
This isn't in the part of the book that happens in the far future. This is the narrator of the late nineteenth/early twentieth century talking. The whole book is like that.
I got partway into the book despite the writing style. The narrator spends the first chapter talking about meeting his wife and courting her and all of that, and then after she dies of childbirth talks about having a dream in which he's a young man in the far future where the sun's gone out and the stars are gone and eldritch abominations roam the Earth, and... well, after a certain point I realized that trying to walk his sentences and keep track of the goings-on was a little more than I was prepared to handle for someone who wasn't shelved in the THESE ARE THE CLASSICS AND YOU WILL RESPECT THEM DAMMIT section of the library.
I feel no shame at all for having bought the fan rewrite of the work. Hodgson died in the First World War, and his book is in the public domain. He deliberately made the book annoying to follow- it's not as if he has the excuse of being, say, translated from the Greek or alive in the 1600s. The style he wrote in might eventually have added something to the feel of the work in the far future portion, but if I couldn't follow what was going on (I completely missed a bit in which the narrator got jealous of a young man courting his girlfriend only to find out that the 'young man' was his girlfriend's good friend Alison, who had disguised herself as a man to throw off an annoying suitor of her own), the poetic feel wasn't really going to help. I'm willing to read Shakespeare in the original Klingon, but not this.
So, yeah, fan rewrite. It's called The Night Land: A Story Retold, and it's by James Stoddard. Stoddard said in the preface that he loved the book and originally was going to do a paragraph by paragraph rewrite into a form that would be easier to read, but realized that wasn't going to work. He cleaned up the style, broke the book into more chapters, named more of the characters, and OH YEAH NOW THERE'S DIALOGUE. Hodgson's work had stuff on the order of "and he spoke to me of this and that, saying that this must be the case" rather than actual dialogue. I pulled down the Kindle version from Amazon, since I didn't feel like spending more than that to find out if it was any good. Turns out I've liked it a great deal so far. It's been a very interesting take on post-apocalyptia and the Dying Earth scenario- especially since, unlike kind of a lot of post-apocalyptic worlds created since then, there's a functioning society that's existed for literally millions of years and has some proper background to it, and no indication of that society being completely screwed up in order to make some kind of social commentary point. I tend to fall in love with a story's world rather than its characters more often than not, and this is a pretty fascinating one to work with.
We'll see how the rest of the novel goes. I'll keep you posted- and I'll be grateful to James Stoddard for making this accessible, regardless of what happens storywise.
