Episode 154: Into the Night Land, with Erik Davis

William Hope Hodgson's The Night Land is without a doubt one of the weirdest entries in the annals of weird fiction. Set in the earth's distant future, after the sun has gone out and the planet has been cleaved in two by an unspecified disaster, a telepathic scientist dons his armour and weapons to brave the monster-haunted yet strangely monotonous wastes that engirdle the massive pyramid in which the last humans took refuge, hundreds of thousands of years earlier. If Samuel Beckett tripped hard on ayahuasca, he might have come up with something like Hodgson's genre-defying novel, which reads more like a report to committee of 17th-century heretics than a piece of speculative fiction from the early twentieth century.

MIT Press recently released a (blessedly) abridged edition of The Night Land as part of their Radium Series. Journalist, scholar, and lecturer Erik Davis, who penned a brilliant foreword for the new edition, was kind enough to join Phil and JF to discuss this underrated masterpiece.

Support us on Patreon and gain access to Phil's podcast on Wagner's Ring Cycle.

Listen to Meredith Michael and Gabriel Lubell's podcast, Cosmophonia.

Download Pierre-Yves Martel's new album, Mer Bleue.

Visit the Weird Studies Bookshop

Find us on Discord

Get the T-shirt design from Cotton Bureau!

SHOW NOTES

William Hope Hodgeson, The Night Land

Weird Studies, Episode 37 with Stuart Davis

Walter Ong, Orality and Literacy

Charles Taylor, A Secular Age

William Hope Hodgeson, House on the Borderland

Samuel Beckett, Molloy

Sumptuary Laws

Arcosanti, arcology

Olaf Stapledon, Last and First Men

Pierre Schaeffer, “Traité des objets musicaux”

Schitzophonia

H.G. Wells, The Time Machine