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Bartholomewcm
gatherer
Username: Bartholomewcm
Post Number: 89
Registered: 9-2003
| | Posted on Friday, October 24, 2003 - 11:19 pm: |     |
Throwing this one out as a challenge to Annie. Famous at the beginning of the 20th century as a writer of horror stories set at sea. Alfred Hitchcock dramatized his short story "Out of the Night," about a couple marooned in a shipwreck amidst perpetual fog on an island ifested in a strange seaweed. They come upon a deserted derelict vessel and live there on the ship's stores. One day, the woman discovers that the seaweed is edible--and soon after notices that it's started growing on her skin. One thing leads to another, and before long, the couple are shapeless masses of seaweed--the same as the crew of the ship, who have been watching from fog. (You may also recognize this plot from the Japanese movie "Attack of the Mushroom People."
But Hodgson's real claim to fame are two novels. One, The House on the Borderland, is said to have inspired H. P. Lovecraft. The other, The Nightland, is unrivalled as the most unreadable, but totally compelling sf book ever written, a far future earth given over to demons and monsters where men live only in a huge pyramid, watching the world die slowly around them.
Anybody who's read that one has my total, unvarnished admiration. |
Annie
storyteller
Username: Annie
Post Number: 276
Registered: 5-2003
| | Posted on Saturday, October 25, 2003 - 12:07 am: | |
Never heard of him. 
But there are quite a few others here who may have.
Why do you describe The Nightland as 'unreadable'? |
Bartholomewcm
gatherer
Username: Bartholomewcm
Post Number: 90
Registered: 9-2003
| | Posted on Saturday, October 25, 2003 - 1:31 am: | |
Because the future story is set within the frame of an eighteenth-century narrator "remembering the future" (a hoary enough gimmick that should have been laid to rest by Edward Bellamy in Looking Backward). As a result, it's written in the affected antiquated style of the old times when the height of elegance was to use as many words as possible to say something. (And don't ask about the sentence structure.) But if you can get past that, it's an experience not to be missed. Really surprised you haven't heard of the short story, it's a pre-sf classic. Much of Hodgson's stuff was reprinted in the 1970's in library editions by the same Boston specialty house that brought out the first integral set of Fritz Leiber's Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser books. |
Cavebear
gatherer
Username: Cavebear
Post Number: 185
Registered: 9-2003
| | Posted on Saturday, October 25, 2003 - 11:27 pm: | |
Never read any of his books, and it doesn't sound like I would want to.
Yesterday, my cat came when called. That worries me; I hope she's not ill! |
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Prehistorical Fiction, SF and Fantasy