This is the most problematic and the most "flawed" (if you wish) of Hodgson's novels, and yet there are things about it ... the imaginative sweep of the main set up/setting/idea ... it's hard for me to talk about this book in an objective way, because it changed my life. As I read it, I felt Hodgson reaching out and touching things that had haunted me (without my being to name them) and naming them in a way that had unbelievable power.

Yes, it's told in a weird pastiche of 18th century (or thereabouts) English. Yes, the book almost excruciatingly goes over the same ground (backwards) in the second half. Yes, the picture of sexual relationships is troubling to say the least. But that backdrop ... that world ...

There are works of imagination that force me to wonder of the author "what happened to you? what did you see? where have you been?" and this is surely one of them. ( )

The world-building was phenomenal. The virgin-coquette-damsel elements were tiresome. I still can't believe that this book exists - published in 1912 and some of the strangest SciFi I've ever read. ( )

Oh how I wish I could have enjoyed this book more... the language, the weirdness, the Lovecraft precursorness... but it was difficult (err... perhaps because of all of that?) ( )

The Night Land has an unpromising start with a love story set at some point in Olde Englande, but then the object of the narrator’s love dies and he experiences a vision of a distant future time and a similarly distant future existence. We are supposed to accept that the protagonist and his One True Love share souls across time, and indeed this provides a motivation for the future protagonist’s actions. But really, this was not necessary. Viewed as a story set at the far end of time, when the sun has died and the Earth is plunged into eternal night, the story could stand on its own in those terms. After all, The Night Land dates from 1912, yet Forster’s The Machine Stops was written in 1909 and quite happily plunged the reader into a future time without any framing device connecting it to the present day.

All the same elements that we have already seen in Hodgson's other novels are present here: weird creatures of unknown origin and savage intent; strange situations; striking imagery. Yet this all works; the beasts and altered men of The Night Land don’t need any explanation because they are not located in the world we know. And Hodgson introduces what must be science fiction’s first megastructure; we are some way into the story before we realise that the Last Redoubt, the great pyramid housing the remaining humans on Earth, is several miles high and of similarly impressive footprint; Hodgson describes the mechanisms of the Pyramid in some detail. In so many ways, the story provides a foretaste of later works by other hands – Yevgeny Zamyatin’s We, Algis Budrys’ Rogue Moon and the Strugatsky Brothers’ Roadside Picnic (filmed by Andrei Tarkovsky as Stalker) all came to mind at different times.

Yet the novel is written in the same cod-archaic language as the first Olde Englishe chapter; and this gets very irritating very quickly. Our super-competent hero – possibly channelling the author’s fascination with physical fitness and body images – evades all the horrors and perils of the setting to rescue a survivor from a forgotten outstation of the Redoubt. This survivor turns out to be another incarnation of the Best Belovéd from the first chapter, and the description of the relationship between this survivor and our hero rapidly turns increasingly toe-curling in its tweeness. Of course, the hero’s attitude to this woman is typical of its time – there is a sequence of corporal punishment that we would find totally unacceptable today – so it is refreshing when the Belovéd suddenly displays a feisty side. But sadly, this is only temporary.

I ended up skimming the text as life was too short for all the cod-archaic language and all the stuff about ‘Mine Own Belovéd”. But the pace increases as the protagonists get nearer to their goal, their return to the Pyramid; I was torn between rushing to the end just to get the novel finished with and actually wanting to see how it ended and whether there would be a happy ending or not.

Despite its stylistic problems, The Night Land is probably one of the most iconic proto-science fiction novels of its time; the world-building (well, dismantling, really) and the visual descriptions are stunning. It would actually film rather well, I think; a film adaptation could make the female protagonist a lot tougher, and easily cut out the reams of superfluous material and drill down to the weird and visually stunning adventure story underneath.

"Eso es el amor, que tu espiritu viva en santidad natural con el amado, y vuestros cuerpos sean un goce suave y natural que nunca perderá su misterio amoroso ...y que no exista la vergüenza, y que todas las cosas sean lo más y limpias, por efecto de una inmensa comprensión; y que l hombre sea un héroe y un niño ante la mujer ; y que la mujer sea una luz santa del espíritu, y una compañera completa, y al mismo tiempo alegre comprensión para el hombre ...y esto es el amor humano...porque esa es la particular gloria del amor, que es suavidad y grandeza con todo, y es fuego que quema toda pequeñez; de modo que en este mundo todo es haber hallado a la persona amada, y entonces, muerta la bajeza, la alegría y la caridad danzan por siempre." William Hope Hogson. ( )