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[camwyn]

Finished The Night Land: A Story Retold. I really quite liked it, and don't think I'll be reading the original any time soon- I don't want to go to the source material and find it wanting, you know? This way I can just be happy with what I got.

I'm regretfully filing it alongside the Darkangel Trilogy, the Firebringer trilogy, and Jin-Roh: The Wolf Brigade as canons where I was deeply impressed by both the characters and the setting, but recognize that the whole thing is so setting-dependent that I would probably not be able to RP anybody from it in a multifandom setting without losing something serious about it. Le sigh.

(Although the idea of somebody human from another canon finding themselves in the Night Land setting and having to deal with "Yeah, the sun went out, the Earth is overrun by eldritch abominations that scientists inadvertently let in millions of years ago, the air is too thin to allow air travel, and there are only two known populations of humans lef- oh wait, no, sorry, one known population at this point- and it's powered by telluric energy and vulcanism and we don't know when that'll run out" is kind of entertaining.)

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[bjornwilde]

A sandbox post sometime? Cause yes, that does sound fun.

[camwyn]

Lemme see what else stands out about the setting:

1. The Sun, as I said, has gone out. This is because in the early 1900s the best science of the time thought the Sun would fade and die, rather than swell up and go red giant or whatever, and also because the scientists of the time weren't entirely clear on the time scale of stellar death versus planetary death.

2. Which is important because most of the remaining light and heat on Earth is the result of vulcanism, despite the fact that we know now that Earth would go cold and lock up completely long before the Sun died.

3. There are no visible stars in the sky. The protagonist speculates on this at one point, wondering whether the other stars have actually died or whether the atmosphere's changed in some way to make them invisible. Or whether...

4. ....the fact that he and all the rest of humanity are living at the bottom of a horrible-accident-made canyon more than a hundred miles deep might have something to do with what they can see if they look up. The width of the canyon I don't know- I do know that there is no indication that the protagonist ever sees or thinks of looking for the walls, though, so I suspect it's wider than it is deep.

5. At the start of the novel, all of humanity (so far as they know) survives in a single fortress called the Great Redoubt or Last Redoubt. It's a four-sided pyramid seven miles tall with at least a hundred miles more of underground levels, coated in a grey metal that can withstand the ravages of more years than I have zeroes for. There are 1320 levels within the Redoubt, each with its own city; agriculture and other support functions are mostly handled in the lowest levels, but there are trees and gardens and things maintained by artificial light and whatnot throughout the Redoubt.

6. The Redoubt is sustained by tapped magma heat and by something called the Earth Current. The protagonist isn't clear in-character on what the Earth Current actually is; he only knows that it's some kind of potent energy that spawns from the ground around them and that one day it will fade and stutter and fail and then everyone will be screwed.

7. Because the Redoubt is protected from the horrifying monsters outside by an artificial Circle of energy that is powered by the Earth Current, in addition to all its other systems running off the Earth Current.

8. About those monsters- apparently at some point in the past, during the days when the sun still glowed very dimly in the sky but was visibly in the process of dying, human scientists accidentally tore open a hole in the barrier between the everyday world and the world of the ab-natural (Hodgson isn't a big fan of the word 'supernatural'). Unholy forces got in, along with unholy creatures; they tend to dominate the rest of the known world, which is basically what can be seen with really excellent telescopes from the top of a seven-mile-tall building in a world with no sunlight. These creatures are mostly just the sort that will rip off your face and eat your corpse, but there are also more powerful and incomprehensible ones that will destroy or devour your soul.

9. To the point where if someone wants to leave the Redoubt to explore, they have to go through a massive ritual of protection first, and they are given a poison capsule under the skin of their forearms so that they can kill themselves before one of the soul-destroying things claims them entirely. Unlike in a modern work, this is not some kind of act of deception or deeply held myth; this is an actual sane response to an actual problem that exists in the setting.

10. They don't have radio or other forms of distance communication. Within the Redoubt they have crystals of a sort that can put news up about things that happen elsewhere in the Redoubt for anyone to see, but they lost their ability to communicate with anything outside the Redoubt (other than via light-based semaphore) long ago...

11. ... except for the unbelievably rare people with the Night Hearing, which is to say, telepaths. There aren't many of these. The Redoubt holds millions and at the time of the novel's events there is one person in the Redoubt known to have the Night Hearing to any great degree- and he's the protagonist.

12. Reincarnation is a thing that happens. I mean, not often. The protagonist and his love interest are two reborn individuals from the 1800s- millions upon millions of years after that time. We don't hear about anybody else being reincarnated, but these two were.

13. Oh, and while it's mostly forces of evil out there that can devour your soul, there are occasionally unexplained Shining Powers of Goodness (I'm not making that up, that's one of the names for them) that can protect the extremely lucky. They happen without warning and they aren't always enough to save the day, so they can't be relied upon for protection, but if they do happen they're at least something.

14. And there is a thing called the Master Word, which is used for verifying that someone with the Night Hearing is not being deceived by the Forces of Evil. Broadcasting it into the ether when something tries to influence you psychically will cause whatever-it-is to fall back for a time unless the broadcaster is an actual human.

There's more, but that's what I'm remembering off the top of my head.

[bjornwilde]

It sounds like some video game or movie like The Cell, i.e. awesome! =D