The Night Land by William Hope Hodgson

A romance of the far future, in which humankind has relocated underground, where it is beset by monsters from another dimension—but love leads on.

In the far future, humankind’s survivors huddle below Earth’s frozen surface in a pyramidal fortress-city that, for centuries now, has been under siege by loathsome “Ab-humans,” enormous slugs and spiders, and malevolent “Watching Things” from another dimension. When our unnamed protagonist receives a telepathic distress signal from a woman whom (in a previous incarnation) he’d once loved, he sallies forth on an ill-advised rescue mission—into the fiend-haunted Night Land!

“Like certain rare dreams,” C. S. Lewis wrote of Hodgson’s masterpiece, The Night Land can give “sensations we never had before and enlarge our conception of the range of possible experience.” H. P. Lovecraft agreed that this is “one of the most potent pieces of macabre imagination ever written.”

William Hope Hodgson (1877–1918) was an English poet, sailor, bodybuilder, and weird fiction pioneer whose horror, fantastic, and proto-sf novels—in addition to The Night Land—include The Boats of the “Glen Carrig” (1907), The House on the Borderland (1908), and The Ghost Pirates (1909). He also wrote stories in the Sargasso Sea series, the Captain Gault series, and a series about the occult detective Carnacki.

Series Overview: Under the direction of Joshua Glenn, the MIT Press’s Radium Age is reissuing notable proto-science fiction stories from the underappreciated era between 1900 and 1935. In these forgotten classics, science fiction readers will discover the origins of enduring tropes like robots (berserk or benevolent), tyrannical supermen, dystopian wastelands, sinister telepaths, and eco-catastrophes. With new contributions by historians, science journalists, and science fiction authors, the Radium Age book series will recontextualize the breakthroughs and biases of these proto-science fiction classics, and chart the emergence of a burgeoning genre.

Erik Davis is the author of High Weirdness: Drugs, Esoterica, and Visionary Experience in the Seventies, Nomad Codes, and the cult classic Techgnosis: Myth, Magic, and Mysticism in the Age of Information. Davis currently teaches at Pacifica Graduate Institute. He writes the Substack publication Burning Shore and has completed a history of LSD blotter art for the MIT Press.

Author Residence: deceased

Author Hometown: Blackmoor End, Essex UK