John C. Wright - Awake in the Night Land

Did ye live in those unknown, strange days,
When God and I conversed, and He, abroad
Upon my seething waters, spoke of you,
As of some thing that were to come at last,
In some dim future time when this round world
Was fitted for ye by the hands of Time?The Voice of the Ocean,
William Hope Hodgson (1921)

Dedicated to Andy Robertson

The tales in this book came into being by odd accident, and what is odder, received very generous praise from readers and critics alike. All were first published by Andy W. Robertson, to whom this volume is gratefully dedicated, but were then republished by such luminaries of the field as Gardner Dozois and Jonathan Strahan.

In the life of every bookish person, there are a few favored books, read in the golden time of youth, that come to dwell in the imagination forever. The vividness of images, the strength of heroes, the beauty of heroines, the strangeness and wonder of the settings, are burned into the heart: every other tale read after is compared to these golden tales.

I had graduated college, and was past the age when the book of gold is found, and I was lamenting that I was, perhaps, too old and jaded to meet the wonders of youth again, when a friend recommended Hodgsons The Night Land to me. I had told him once of a fantasy I was writing, called Nigh-Forgotten Sun (the unfinished manuscript still exists), and my friend thought that I was consciously copying the theme of Hodgsons story: he was amazed that I had never heard of the book, since it was exactly suited to my own writing, both in style and theme.

So I read volume one of the Ballantine edition edited by Lin Carter. I found the golden time of youthful wonder was not past. What visions I saw!

At the time, poor as a church mouse (or, I should say, rather, poor as a law student) I had no resources to find whether the second volume was still in print. In the days before the Internet, libraries and used bookstores did not maintain inventory lists where a poor student could find them.

And so this antique tale, when I had reached the point where the nameless narrator stands before the darkened ruins of the Lesser Redoubt, which he endured much toil, heart-ache, terror and incalculable dangers to reach, instead of finding his love, his spirit senses, somewhere hidden in the metal structure, dread and fell presences waiting to destroy him. His beloved, and all her people, her culture, her world, have been wiped out. At that cliffhanger I was left, and I did not know if any copy of the ending of the tale survived.

To me it seemed as if I had found an antique sea-chest in an attic, or washed ashore from the wrack of Atlantis, containing only one half of a manuscript, and that I had no hope of ever finding the finish of the tale.

How precious that dog-eared paperback was to me! In the opening paragraphs of the first chapter, the narrator is speaking casually to Mirdath the Beautiful, a maiden of the gentry of the English rural countryside. A more comfortable and bucolic setting cannot be imagined. Then, when he says, 'It is an elf night; the Towers of Sleep rise' she answers by speaking of the Moon-Garden, the City of Twilight, and the Tree with the Great Painted Head.

By that word she reveals that she is like him: a soul that is more than mortal, that has lived other lives in other cycles of reincarnation, dimly half-forgotten.

She and he are both travelers from moon-lit elfin lands or empires of cloudy nightmare, and they hail from places far beyond the little fields we know, older than human history: they have seen the light of other suns, other days. They dance to music we cannot hear. No one of their own time will understand them.

I cannot express how eerie this seemed to me, how pregnant with secret promise. What reader of fantastic fiction has not seemed, to himself at least, to be a changling like this, someone who is more at home in stranger worlds than the mundane one around us? As a man who is out of tune with his own time (surely, dear reader, that is seen in the way I express my thought to you) I found delight to think that there might be, for me, too, a Mirdath the Beautiful awaiting.

Few books can match the strange promise of those hints: The Night Land overmatches it. In chapter two our narrator, mad with grief and loss, recovers memories from uncounted millions of years in the remotest future, long after the sun is dead, and he gazes from the embrasures of the Last Redoubt of Man upon the wonders and horrors of the Night Land: he sees the dim fires burning in the Giants Kilns; the single visible eye of the Southeastern Watcher shines from its hulking silhouette of its grim, huge head, unblinking; the Night-Hounds cry out, and the Silent Ones do not, and the doors of the House of Silence, in all eternity, have never closed.

Nothing I have ever read before or since contains such a mood of pure unearthliness. Wraiths and Dark Lords and devils from fantasy stories seem quaint and old-fashioned, and are more likely to invoke nostalgia rather than awe; aliens from science fiction stories share our laws of nature, and come from our universe. The inhuman presences and monsters of the Night Land, on the other hand, are cloaked in impenetrable mystery.

The stilted and archaic language, I find no fault with. Perhaps I am the only reader who does not. A language less formal and gravid might not serve to capture the dark, heavy, grim and gothic majesty of the piece. I know my friend Mr. Stoddard has made a brave attempt in this direction, but, for my taste, more might be lost than gained by modernizing the tongue.

Finally, after many years of wondering and waiting, I found the second volume. An archeologist finding the lost dialogs of Aristotle, the eighth book of Apollonius, or the missing ending to the epic of Lucretius could not know greater triumph than I did.

Here I met Mirdath the Beautiful, reincarnated as Naani, a daughter of the Lesser Redoubt. Many other readers find fault with her: let them. She is precious to me. I can think of no other character possessing her quirks, her cleverness, her playful heedlessness, her unparalleled bravery. She is self-sacrificing without being a martyr, shows both spirit and fortitude that would break any lesser lass, she is braver than a man and yet still humble and demure.

If I sound like a man infatuated, let this be a testament to the skill of Hodgsons writing. Keep your joyless Galadriel, your spiteful Titania, your lascivious Helen, your treacherous Guinevere and deadly Clytemnestra, your cunning Penelope, your absurd Xena: to match her for charm, perhaps you can hold up Nausica or Miranda as her equals; to match her for courage and endurance, who is there?

The love-story that C.S. Lewis so casually dismisses as a fatuous erotic interest, I thought was almost Promethean in its power. Here is a man who reaches across a billion years of time, and braves the unthinkable dangers of the Night, to save the woman who is his own true love, because he hears in his mind the whisper of her plea for help, as if in a dream. By the mysterious aetheric sympathy they share, from far-off, he hears her voice in the night, and he knows her. Based only on that whisper, and his hope, into the eternal darkness, like Orpheus, he goes. (The only other story that is even close in its scope and power is At the Eschaton by Charles Sheffield, appearing in the Far Futures anthology. With apologies to Sheffield, I found the short story more striking than the novel-version). Neither all the aeons of eternity, nor all the darkness and horror of the hopeless night, nor even death itself, can part the lovers.