AWAKE IN THE NIGHT LAND, by John C. Wright
AWAKE IN THE NIGHT LAND, written by John C. Wright and published by Castalia House (the publisher founded by Hugo-nominated SF/F writer Vox Day), is set in the world of THE NIGHT LAND, a science fiction novel written William Hope Hodgson, who unfortunately died in battle a few months before the end of World War I. Hope’s THE NIGHT LAND takes place upon a far-future Earth a billion billion years in the future, so far in the future that the sun and the other stars have burned out and the Earth is overrun by mutated abhumans and eldritch horrors of the outer darkness. Mankind only survives in the Last Redoubt, a seven-mile tall pyramid fortress sustained by technologies refined over a billion years of struggle, while the rest of the earth, overrun by darkness, is called the “Night Land”. The remnant of mankind fights against the horrors of the final darkness, even knowing that one day their power supplies will fail and their enemies will destroy them, that entropy and evil shall inevitably triumph.
AWAKE IN THE NIGHT LAND is a series of four linked novellas taking place over the last five million years of the Last Redoubt’s history, as the Earth and mankind draw ever closer to their final destruction. The first novella deals with a man venturing into the horrors of the Night Land to save his friend, the second with a brother and sister concocting an audacious and dangerous plan to tame some of the mutated beasts of the Night Land, the third is the tale a man venturing into the Night Land to rescue the spirit of his father, and the fourth centers around a 20th-century big-game hunter awakening from cryosleep on a spaceship that is hurtling towards the final instant of the universe as all of space and time and matter collapse into nothingness.
AWAKE IN THE NIGHT LAND is a dark book, but not in the adolescent, cartoonish sense one sees in much GAME OF THRONES inspired fantasy or BREAKING BAD-esque contemporary dramas. Instead it is the darkness of utter despair, of wondering if the universe is in fact a prison of ultimate entropy and decay from which there can never be any escape. Or if the universe is in fact ruled by powers of darkness that reincarnate men over and over to torment them again and again, delighting in their pain over uncounted thousands of incarnations. In the world of the book, the sinister powers of the Night Land, led by the terrifying and enigmatic Silent Ones, rule the Earth, and indeed the entirety of the universe. Only the Last Redoubt stands free, and its inhabitants know it will inevitably fall and be consumed by the eternal darkness.
And yet…
If that was all there was to the book, I would not have finished it and would not be writing about it now.
There is a literary technique called “eucatastrophe”. Just as a catastrophe is a complete and utter disaster, a reversal of fortune for the worse, a eucatastrophe is a sudden and utter triumph, usually worked by an outside force over which the protagonists have no control. J.R.R. Tolkien coined the term, and used as his example the Resurrection, when Christ triumphed over death and hell and saved mankind. In his fiction, the most obvious examples are in THE LORD OF THE RINGS with the unexpected victory of the Host of the West at the Black Gate of Mordor when Gollum falls into the fire with the Ring, or in THE SILMARILLION when the Valar arrive to overthrow Morgoth Bauglir and destroy his realm at the end of the First Age. (Or more simply but more emotionally, the hobbit Pippin frozen with joy when he hears the horns of Rohan during the Siege of Gondor.) Tolkien himself put it like this in his essay ON FAIRY-STORIES:
At least I would say that Tragedy is the true form of Drama, its highest function; but the opposite is true of Fairy-story. Since we do not appear to possess a word that expresses this opposite — I will call it Eucatastrophe. The eucatastrophic tale is the true form of fairy-tale, and its highest function.
The consolation of fairy-stories, the joy of the happy ending: or more correctly of the good catastrophe, the sudden joyous “turn” (for there is no true end to any fairy-tale): this joy, which is one of the things which fairy-stories can produce supremely well, is not essentially ‘escapist’, nor ‘fugitive’. In its fairy-tale—or otherworld—setting, it is a sudden and miraculous grace: never to be counted on to recur. It does not deny the existence of dyscatastrophe, of sorrow and failure: the possibility of these is necessary to the joy of deliverance; it denies (in the face of much evidence, if you will) universal final defeat and in so far is evangelium, giving a fleeting glimpse of Joy, Joy beyond the walls of the world, poignant as grief.
It is the mark of a good fairy-story, of the higher or more complete kind, that however wild its events, however fantastic or terrible the adventures, it can give to child or man that hears it, when the “turn” comes, a catch of the breath, a beat and lifting of the heart, near to (or indeed accompanied by) tears, as keen as that given by any form of literary art, and having a peculiar quality.”
However, writing a eucatastrophe is really, really hard to do well. Like, almost impossible, since the iron logic of stories demands that the protagonist succeed at least partly through his own efforts. Otherwise it seems cheap, like the author waving his magic wand at the end of the story to make things right. So a eucatastrophe done badly comes across as a deus ex machina, like Scotty saving the Enterprise in the last five minutes of the episode by reversing the polarity of the warp core or whatever. But done well, it is nothing short of amazing. Think of how much tension and darkness there is in THE LORD OF THE RINGS before the Ring falls into the fires of Orodruin.
Ah, how to discuss this without spoilers? Suffice it to say, despite the dark nature of AWAKE IN THE NIGHT LAND (especially the story of Antigone, Polynices, Draego, and Dracaina), you will not be disappointed if you read to the end of each novella, and especially if you read to the end of the entire book.
To summarize, AWAKE IN THE NIGHT LAND is an amazing and powerful book, science fiction, fantasy, and horror all blended together in one superb story. Recommended without reservation or caveat.
As a final point, the mere existence of AWAKE IN THE NIGHT LAND proves some points I have made earlier, that the mainstreaming of ebooks has been an unmitigated good for both writers and readers. I believe Mr. Wright wrote most of the book long before ebooks ever went mainstream, but ebooks have helped AWAKE IN THE NIGHT LAND achieve a vastly wider audience than it would have otherwise. Traditional publishing has, with some exceptions, become moribund, ossified, and conformist (SF/F publishing is particularly bad in this regard), and I suspect the reaction of most acquiring editors at a major publisher to AWAKE IN THE NIGHT LAND would involve the word “apoplexy”. Ebooks have cracked open the old stranglehold of traditional publishing, and made it possible for worthy books like AWAKE IN THE NIGHT LAND to achieve a far wider audience than they could otherwise.
-JM