Oh, we have been excited to get to this,
because there's this whole world of genre sci-fi writing that was incredibly influential
but has almost been forgotten by the modern audience.
Either because its authors weren't well-known enough at the time,
or because the works were great, but had complex,
and often flawed, structure.
Or because they were just too weird for today's publishers to think people would read them.
It's time to change that.
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The works we're gonna look at in what I call the forgotten foundation,
are smeared out over time,
extending from the late 1800s to the 1920s.
I'm not gonna try to present them chronologically because most of these tales are
weird enough that they can't be grouped.
I'll do my best to group them in some way that makes sense.
So with that, let's start with the most famous of our forgotten authors,
Robert Chambers.
The author of The King in Yellow
has seen something of a revival over the recent years,
with his disturbing visions echoing through history, and playing into our modern monster,
the serial killer, in True Detective.
But even today,
few people read his work.
Fewer still read anything outside The King in Yellow
So let's start there.
The King in Yellow opens with a sci-fi story.
Set 25 years in the future in a semi-fascist America,
filled with government lethal chambers
for conveniently committing suicide.
Robert Chambers introduces the cold terror of technology to sci-fi.
He brings in the unfeeling rational
in a way that frankenstein's romantic sensibilities didn't.
The story shows how uncanny and unnerving it can be to have a man just run off to the suicide machines;
just randomly,
almost in the background of a scene.
It also takes the idea of an invented manuscript,
which Shelley, Wells, and Verne all cemented into the sci-fi tradition.
And cranks that to the next level,
giving us fragments of the first half of a Play,
whose second half is said to drive you mad.
It gives us tiny tastes of a larger mystery.
A mystery, whose solution, were we ever to know it,
would drive us insane.
And yet we always want to know more.
Where Lovecraft simply stated this urge for forbidden knowledge as a driving force for his protagonists,
Chambers made you feel it,
deep within your soul, and beyond even the King in Yellow
Chambers gave us, works like In Search of the Unknown,
which brought cryptids and cryptid investigation into the genre.
i think you can tie a direct link from the X-Files
back to Robert Chambers 90 years before.
And, of course,
for all of my mentions of H.P. Lovecraft,
Chambers was one of his big influences.
Modern horror does not happen without Lost Carcosa.
It taught us how to be not just frightened,
but unsettled.
in the same vein, but with a radically different approach,
we have William Hope Hodgson.
Someday I want to do a Halloween episode just on his work.
He influenced authors ranging from Olaf Stapledon to Gene Wolfe,
Greg Bear to China Miéville.
He truly is one of the forgotten Foundations of Science Fiction.
His two great novels, House on the Borderland and the Knight Land,
are some of my favourite, weird sci-fi.
House on the Borderland had a huge impact on authors as disparate as Lovecraft and Terry Pratchett.
Another invented manuscript book,
House on the Borderland is largely the
recitation of the diary of a man living in a very haunted house.
But it's not haunted by ghosts like most stories up until this point,
instead the house stands on a rift,
a tear into another dimension.
It's the first book to really capture the horror of the illimitable nature of the universe.
That there could be,
and probably are
things out there more terrible than we can even imagine.
No summary will do this book justice,
as it ranges through nightmare visions.
From Swine Men to the Sea of Sleep,
where one can meet the dead,
to the death of the universe itself.
House on the Borderland wanders through a Phantasmagoric haze.
It brings the fantastic into sci-fi in a way perhaps no other novel did before.
and it finally kicks down the door on Shelley's dictum
that science fiction must take place in the realm of the possible.
Instead it replaces that with the idea that
you simply must get reader to believe that whatever you're writing might be possible.
Then there's Hodgson's The Night Land.
If you start reading this book
and you think you've picked up the wrong novel,
don't worry, you haven't.
The intro is just that weird.
It begins as an archaic, and frankly ham-handed romance.
Straight out of the dime-store romances of the eighteen and 1900s.
Then at the end of the first chapter,
it basically cuts abruptly to
'and then i had a telepathic vision of millions of years in the future'
and just like that
the novel begins in earnest,
with almost no reference to the opening section throughout the rest of the book.
But in some ways,
that bizarro beginning makes the rest of the book
that much more unsettling.
We see the present we know
then, we see the future.
The Sun has died.
The remains of the Human race
huddle in the Last Redoubt,
a brooding pyramid of steel powered by a current from the Earth.
Outside the pyramid
horror awaits.
Great shambling things that shuffle
through the perpetual dark,
just waiting for the power to fail so that they can
come and split and tear the Great Redoubt.
As the main character journeys through the Night Land,
we get some of the most monstrous descriptions,
and implications in all of sci-fi.
Not only of the horrors that wander the Night Land,
but of the truly desolate and lonely nature of this Earth without a Sun.
It could be argued that this is the true beginnings of the Dying Earth genre,
fully exploring what Wells' is time traveller only hints at.
But speaking of the doom of mankind let's talk about post-apocalyptia.
The last novel we're gonna cover today is Richard Jefferies After London.
Published before the Night Land,
After London is arguably the first true post-apocalyptic novel.
It gives us almost all of the conventions of the genre;
Savage wild men,
nearly feudal strongmen,
an apocalypse that was so long ago
the details of it are sketchy at best.
Post apocalyptic fiction as travelogue,
where the hero wanders the world
in order to give us an excuse to
see all the neat things in the wasteland.
It even has a poisonous lake,
that covers the ruins of civilization.
Which basically serves as a pre-atomic analog
for the radioactive zone that we see in so much
20th century post-apocalyptic fiction.
Perhaps most importantly though,
because Jeffries was primarily a nature writer,
he found the beauty in the post-apocalypse.
Something which the greatest novels
in the genre still do to this day.
And this is vital to post-apocalyptia.
Because without this contrast,
without beauty in the midst of what would otherwise
be a catalogue of the bleak,
we would become numb.
We would miss the hope,
and the wonder that lies just below
the surface of even the grimmest post-apocalyptic stories.
We would miss the magic, and the possibility of the wastes.
Join us next week as we dive into
more of these forgotten foundations,
and i'm talking the really weird ones now.
Two stories which i can barely categorize,
and the play that could only be written
at the dawn of the 20th century.
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