The Night Land, Awake and Otherwise

Ever since reading the Golden Age trilogy several years ago, I've been a fan of John C. Wright's work. Insofar as he keeps his sometimes repellent politics out of it, his writing is visionary, unique, and compelling. The worlds he imagines can be stunningly deep and nuanced; what he lacks in character development, he more than makes up with idea development, and that's no easy compliment for an old literature major to make.

Sketches for the final cover

When I approached his latest, Awake in the Night Land, I hoped for good things and was not disappointed. This series of four linked novellas set in the dark, far-future world of William Hope Hodgson's 1912 The Night Land is dark, yes, very dark-- Hodgson was one of H.P. Lovecraft's main influences-- but not at all despairing. As reviewer Jonathan Moeller states,

 In the world of the book, the sinister powers of the Night Land, led by the terrifying and enigmatic Silent Ones, rule the Earth, and indeed the entirety of the universe. Only the Last Redoubt stands free, and its inhabitants know it will inevitably fall and be consumed by the eternal darkness.And yet…If that was all there was to the book, I would not have finished it and would not be writing about it now.

Indeed. This old literature major is also sick of despair, ennui, and existential bleakness in writing, but it's tough to pull off hope and life affirmation without degenerating into nauseating sentimentality.

Hodgson's original does it, though, and Wright's tribute does it even better.

I recommend reading the original first, but please, for sanity's sake, read James Stoddard's excellent modernization instead of the original Hodgson, at least on the first pass. The original has some awesome illustrations but the style is unpleasantly like Lovecraft on drugs. The retelling is still one of the most beautiful love stories ever told.

"The Redoubt" by Les Edwards

For more Night Land mythos, here are two websites dedicated specifically to them.


The first, William Hope Hodgson by Sam Gafford, makes for some wonderful browsing. With Phillip Ellis, Gafford is working on a collection of Hodgson's poetry set to release in November of 2014.

The Northwest Watcher by Stephen Fabian

The second, The Night Land, is an eclectic multimedia site in the grand old net tradition. I love it. It was originally created by Andy Robertson, who passed away in April of this year.  Robertson was the first to publish John C. Wright's short stories based on the Night Lands mythos; here is a post from Wright's website about Robertson and his reviews. Now Robertson's colleague Brett Davidson has taken over the site.

Richard Powers, Part First

As one does, I've been saving up for a dedicated Richard Powers post. The problem's been that I don't know where to stop. 

Other people just give up and dedicate whole blogs to the guy. I certainly understand. There's so much material, and it's so darn good; a person could spend many fruitful hours with this one artist's work. Surrealism, abstract expressionism, primitivism, street art, collage-- it's all there. Like Frazetta, Powers successfully straddled that fraught divide between fine art and illustration.

He died in 1996, but his birthday would be coming up on February 24...a Pisces, of course. 

The above sketch, probably a preliminary drawing for another illustration, is actually for sale here. 

The above painting was done in acrylic for the cover of Murray Leinster's War with the Gizmos, published by Gold Medal in 1958. 

Some of these images were found as part of an excellent article on Design Observer. On the image above, from Rick Poyner's "Unearthly Powers: Surrealism and SF": 

In later cover paintings, which are shown without type in The Art of Richard Powers by Jane Frank (2001), Powers constructs ambiguous pictorial spaces that seem to be both psychic and cosmic, molecular and planetary.

Some of Powers' paintings use mark-making in a way that remind me of nothing so much as Jean-Michel Basquiat, who worked much later with some of the same techniques. Powers liked to layer different styles and then use a visceral scrawl on top, creating an artificial palimpsest all his own.

Definitely more to come on Richard Powers.

And Now, Space Poems

It's been a fairly poetic week around here and around the studio, and a fairly speculative one as well.

According to the Wiki gods, speculative poetry is poetry that "focuses on fantastic, science fictional, or mythological themes." Although that seems to cover quite a lot of territory, speculative poetry is usually considered a niche endeavor. 

The upside is that it makes it easier to find.

There's an association dedicated to the science fictional type of speculative poetry, and they publish a quarterly journal. Here's the current issue of Star*Line, the journal of the Science Fiction Poetry Association. 

Scifi poetry represents a dual challenge: it should stand as good poetry in its own right, even next to non-genre work, while also participating in the traditional subject matter of scifi. This excerpt is a good example; it's taken from David Barber's poem "Waving the Starships Goodbye" from the Autumn 2013 issue (Volume 36.)

"One day, the children will want to leave, tired
of our insistence on the weight of things,
like history, wanting space for its own sake...
....They are frozen in time
and it is us the centuries have aged so much.
Or vast ships, mountains really, wormed all through
by the slow generations born to those
who could choose, as emigrants do, their lives.
Everything is fine, except arriving.
What would such small strange folk do with planets?...."

"Cosmic Hive" by Nikalay Gutsu

And this is an excerpt from "The Other Night (Comet Kohoutek)" from Diane Ackerman's notable 1976 collection The Planets: A Cosmic Pastoral:

"Last night, while
cabbage stuffed with
brown sugar, meat and
raisins was baking in the
oven, and my potted holly,
dying leafmeal from red-spider,
basked in its antidote malathion,
I stepped outside to watch Kohoutek
passing its dromedary core through the
eye of a galaxy. But only found a white
blur cat-napping under Venus: gauzy, dis-
solute, and bobtailed as a Manx. 

Pent-up in that endless coliseum of stars,
the moon was fuller than any Protestant
had a right to be. And I said: Moon,
if you’ve got any pull up there, bring me
a sun-grazing comet, its long hair swept
back by the solar wind, in its mouth a dollop
of primordial sputum. A dozing iceberg,
in whose coma ur-elements collide. Bring me
a mojo that’s both relict and reliquary.
Give me a thrill from that petrified seed...."

Another place to find good science fiction and fantasy verse is Strange Horizons, the weekly online spec fiction magazine.




And of course there's often poetry in Asimov's, too, on most newsstands.

Games with Lovecraft

The hubby and I will soon be playing a round of Mansions of Madness with some of our board game group friends. We're also fans of other Lovecraft cardboard such as Arkham Horror and The Stars are Right. 


Mansions of Madness is an Ameritrash classic, with minis and murder and monsters and mayhem. Lovecraft's writing has inspired countless artists and designers of all stripes.

Seems like everyone wants to visit Lovecraft's world, if only for a few hours.

Above, illustrator Matt Buck depicts H. P. Lovecraft himself. The tentacle is everything. (I originally found this image on the Tor website, which has an entire page of Lovecraft artwork by contemporary fantasy artists.)
_

Above is a depiction of the finale of The Dunwich Horror by Alberto Breccia. You can find the entire graphic adaptation in English translation on the Ragged Claws blog.

If you find yourself interested in Breccia's work, this link will take you to a downloadable version of the entire Los Mitos de Cthulhu. These are nine stories that Breccia and collaborator Norberto Buscaglia adapted in the 70's. The text is in Spanish, of course, but art is art.

Above is a gorgeous map of one of Lovecraft's other dimensions, The Dreamlands, created by Seattle-based artist Jason Thompson. 

And here we have a 1976 cover by illustrator Murray Tinkelman, found on the blog Too Much Horror Fiction, which has a nice collection of cover art. 

This is an illustration for Lovecraft's "The Temple" done by Stephen Hickman for Science Fiction Age magazine, which went sadly out of business in 2000.


But now, back to games....

The Stars Are Right is a Steve Jackson game in which you, for some reason, are attempting to summon various Old Ones. To do so, you have to make sure that certain constellations appear in the sky by collecting cards and making patterns of them.

The artwork is fun and the game is reasonably quick. It's only ranked at 1513 on Board Game Geek, but I like it, especially on a cold foggy night.

Fantasy Flight's Arkham Horror is probably my favorite of them all. It's a long, long game with tons of fiddly bits and Byzantine rules. It's cooperative, and it's hard to win.

There are also countless role playing games based on the Lovecraft stories; Call of Cthulhu first appeared in the early 80's, and may be the original.

Yog-Sothoth is a website dedicated to the Call of Cthulhu rpgs and all their spinoffs.

Meeting Jack Vance

For some reason, just before grudgingly entering a week of reading deprivation imposed upon me by a program I've undertake with my husband, I started reading Jack Vance's Cadwel chronicles. Araminta Station is proving to be more of a thriller than a speculative novel, in many ways, but it's also a bot of a political exploration and a social novel. It's okay. Not great, but okay.

For some reason I was expecting space opera; maybe it was the cover art.

Above is the original Tor 1988 hardback cover by Boris Vallejo.

And above, here's a 1989 paperback cover by Bob Eggleton-- well, the upper center strip of artwork is by Bob Eggleton, and what a shame that's all we have, too.

This is the original original, published by Underwood/Miller in 1987 six months before the Tor/Vallejo edition. The cover art is by Tim White.

And above is a 1991 Tor reprint with somewhat more titillating art by Doug Beekman.

This one may be my favorite. It's a 1995 Geman Heyne edition with cover art by Dieter Rottermund. Mad Mountain indeed.