Prelude to ANIMA: NIGHTSUIT 2

From:SMS To: Andy Robertson; Brett Davidson

Bearing in mind the comments, I thought I'd send you a couple of more recent sketches. Much the same design, but slightly more 'Baroque'. I think I'm getting the hang of it... Best: Smuzz

---

From:Brett Davidson

To: Andy Robertson; SMS

Great!

Image "Landsuit_Above_Patterns30%" is terrific - and shows why I wanted the SMS touch.

Quibbles/praise follow:

"Scream" of the mask may be interpreted too literally.  Perhaps needs to be altered?  Horizontal louvres are too obvious...?

Diskos, to be a practical weapon, needs to have its full perimeter or as much of that as possible exposed.  I also imagined it having a subtly double-curved shaft, like a scythe (expediters as Grim Reapers - why not?) - however, the dimensions and shape, I appreciate are subordinate to composition.  The implication that it is a double-ended weapon, the heavy powerpack or whatever it is at the end opposite the blade is interesting - never thought of it, but the martial arts taught to expediters would no doubt involve the use of a diskos as an impact as well as cutting weapon, so a substantial mass opposite the blade could be handy.  In some short story or other, I described training/use of the thing and noted that there would be a lot of inertia tied up in a rapidly spinning blade, and so combat would appear to be a rather formalised dance... rather like Kendo...

Love the composition!

Ruff and helmet crest work for me.  Love the "explosive" shape of the ground.

This image doesn't need to be more complicated, as far as I'm concerned - I leave this to your judgement, but depicting a specific incident with all present, accounted for and in their appropriate poses is not an issue for me.  This says enough - as the drawings are a suite, we'll see the faces of Meyr and Pallin elsewhere.

Cheers,

--B

From:Andy Robertson

To: Brett Davidson; SMS

Yeah, what he said.

Also, one notes there is no reason for all diskoses to be the same size, shape, etc.   In TNL it's a hand-and-a-half weapon - may be used two handed or at a pinch one handed - and so must be about 3 ft long or slightly longer.   In some of John C Wright's stories it's like a polearm, with a shaft at least six foot long.  And the heavy pommel/counterweight seen here is consistent with a one-handed weapon, but it's all good.  

However I agree with Brett about having the whole arc of the blade exposed.

Additionally, the "below shoulder angle" sketch is really fine.   Lots of dynamic motion trapped in the metal.

About armour:

Lames.  Armour is essentially composed of overlapping lames, which are ring-shaped, cylindrical, or slice-of-cone-ical pieces of metal assembled to cover a limb or body; lames overlap downward, that is, where two lames overlap, the larger lame goes on the outside; lames may be partially cut away where the limb intersects the body or another limb, in which case the segments of lame remaining are held together by pin-and-slot constructions to stop them gaping. 

Where does the arm attach to the body?  NOT THE SHOULDER, BUT THE INNER END OF THE COLLAR BONE.   The construction of the arm armour and especially the pauldrons (big stuff covering the shoulder) reflects this.  Practicable pauldrons are split up into multiple lames and can fold up like a concertina so you can raise your arm.   SEE GOTHIC SUIT.  Armour that does not follow this rule is usually ultra-heavy tournament stuff not designed for much mobility, overrepresented in surviving suits.

The "neutral" position for the knee or elbow is half bent.  Not straight.  The swollen-on-one-side-cut-away-on-the-other  lame covering the knee or elbow (called a COP) reflects this fact.  The pauldron is also a sort of cop.

Lames look ok in these pix.

Looking very good.

((but Vertical "scream" face not quite right somehow.))

Prelude to ANIMA: NIGHTSUIT

From:SMS To: Andy Robertson; Brett Davidson

Hi chaps. The first pic I've been messing about with layouts for is the 'Outside on the land, Meyr ravished by Eater whilst the others weild Diskos'. Best: Smu Thus, befgore I decide exactly whom goes where, I've been doodling a lot of 'Space Armour' in an attempt to get something different from the Usual Look and to discover how these chaps occupy space. These are the present 'Shape' I'm playing with. I'm assuming we have 'Stuff' to disperse/repulse in the Night land which gives me an excuse for Valvepunk-looking metallic  nozzles. The helmet arrangement has a 'crest' but it's horizontal rather than the standard vertical. This is actually an armoured array for a bank of lights that sit either side of the head (Headlights, if you will). The 'Helm' consists of the goggles (Themselves, fitted with lots of lenses and do-hickeys) and 'Empty scream'-shaped mouthpiece under a small peak, all iof which swing back onto the helmet itself, to expose the face behind the 'cheekguards'. The shoulders are, you'll note, topped with a ruddy great 'Plasma dispersal' (Whatever) array' which slightly echo an Elizabethan ruff, slightly echo some gothic yoke and generally look 'spikey'. This is attatched to a similarly 'spikey' backpack, giving it a Gothick sort'v look. The chest is very prominent, akin to the Conquistadors, but this time we have the excuse of it being filled, not with rags but with 'Life Support Tek'   The boots were either going to be small and dainty or big and clompy. With all that weight on the upper torso, I've opted for the great clumpy boots and legs. Kurosowa-style 'banners' complete the 'look'. Probably something more baroqe than the ones shown. It also occurs to me that there's absolutely no reason we can't have fabric streamers to this outfit if needed. The whole thing should, finally, have a slightly 'Insectile' texture in the plateletts, decorated with scrollwork. I suspect Andy will interpolate the word ;'Fractal' here. I've been presuming the 'Quints' have different armour, but now I find myself thinking 'Why?'. What's the verdict here? Comments welcome.

?

From:Andy Robertson

To: SMS; Brett Davidson

 

Some reactions

- the idea of the Helm being especially festooned with sensors and filters is one which fits very well with other NL stories.   The developing idea is that in this era the Helms have to filter the Night Land into a sort of virtual reality in order for the wearers to endure it.  cf for example the story "Slope"  (by me, but Brett and I have used each others' ideas extensively http://www.thenightland.co.uk/nightslope.html

Their nightsuits are not the heavy amplified coverings used by the Watchmen for patrols or close exploration work.  They are as thin as cloth and as light as paper, unamplified and uninstrumented.  Their only augmentation is in the complex filters in the Helms, which make up thirty percent of the suits' weight and consume all their power.  Long ago, men could survive in the Land by relying only on their own senses.  Now they must wear the Helms, which mount shields and sensory enhancements on a pattern two million years old.  The Helms capture and amplify sound, and scavenge what little light there is in the Night Land.   They map the paths through the dark, and they pass messages to other men in ways that hopefully are not obvious to the entities of the Land, where even telepathy is too risky to be used.   They enhance and they communicate and they also protect, for they shield the eyes as well as the Soul from that which can destroy merely by being sensed. 

 but these are the heavy amplified suits used for close in work,

- the one thing I don't like are the heavy lower limbs and boots.  Very bad mechanically - the last place you want energy-soaking mass is at the end of your limbs.  reminds me of mecha, not in a good way. mecha are not the product of real world evolutionary selection

- is there a risk of the "ruff" looking foppish?, - maybe more like radio telescope dishes / bat ears / antennae?

- another gothic suit

good stuff :-0

---

Prelude to ANIMA: ARMOUR and MANSHONYAGGERS

From:SMS

To: Andy Robertson; Brett Davidson

And the results are now in...

Actually, for the third section there is really only one real contender:
P's 222 - 223:
Inside the tunnels, Mira removes her helm and some plates of armour (I wonder if we;'d be surprised it it was a breastplate?) in true 'Maryr' fashion in front of Maansonyagger with the 'Butterfly' flayed body hanging in the background.

Just thought you'd like to know.

Now, it's beginning the long series of sketches in between the comic strip...

Input on either of you chaps vision of both the armour and the Mansonyagger, welcome.

(Yes, I know it's 'beetle-like' and has an array of probes, arms and sensory devices and, yes, I'm assuming the 'Armour' is somewhere between C16 armour and plated spacesuits with straps, lens-like eyepieces and a hint of the 'Cyber' about 'em. Further 'impressions' welcome)

And the Watcher?
As Andy says, it's background scenery.

Drawing the noumena might take more time and money than any of us have.

Fun. Fun. Fun.

Best:
Smuzz

From:Brett Davidson

To: Andy Robertson; SMS

The "Eater" illustrations are to me a benchmark and this:

http://www.smuzz.org.uk/sms047.htm

shows the bulk one would associate with a suit packed with various complex systems and gadgets giving a unique, contingent aesthetic.  I like the fact that it suggests a recognisable human form, but certain parts, such as the helm, make no concessions to anthropomorphism.

Samurai armour.  A cliche, perhaps, but at least a beautiful one.

If you google "negroli" and select "images", you will find fine examples of baroque parade armour.  See the attached image of a shield, for example.  This inspired the gorget (a crescent-shaped neck piece) as much as Giger's "Li 1" that Pallin wears.  However, parade armour is not fighting armour, and the kit worn out in the Night Land is more functional.

I was very impressed by the Cylon centurions in the new Battlestar Galactica.  See attachment.  They're inspired by Epstein's The Rock Drill, as were the phantoms in the Final Fantasy film, FWIW.   Now of course you can't fit anything human into that wasp-waisted shape!  However, the broad planes of the centurion's armour are i.suggestive of what a human would look like if we had exoskeletons, and would suggest a culture that is both dependent upon technology and determined to treat it as art.  People go out, or Go Out, into the Night Land as demonstrations and tests of their essential nature, and so there is a certain ceremonial aspect to their expeditions and it would be logical that aesthetics would play a part in the design of their armour.  There may well be ornamentation as the individual adventurers carry with them the pride of their clans, so various family motifs and suchlike would probably be included, either worked in if the armour was made by an artist, or painted on in the manner of the art that was applied to aircraft in the First and Second World Wars.

MANSHONYAGGER

Probably matt black.

What comes to mind immediately, something like a stag beetle crossed with a wolf spider as drawn by Ian Miller.  I like Miller's work, but his style is a bit stiff and angular considering the fluidity of movement (and Hannibal Lecter personality) I'd associate with a Manshonyagger.  What intrigues be about stage beetles is that we assume that jaws are part of the head, but in fact the "upper jaw" of a stag beetle is a protrusion of the thorax and not part of the head at all.  Now, there's no need to be literal in imitating its form, but I do like the uncanny aspect there.  As stated above, it's not a bulldozer or an M-1 tank or any version of current technology as popularly represented.  In a continuum, it could at one end resemble a real insect, coconut crab or whatever, and at the other, some pice of beefed-up NASA probe, mixing features that we try to categorise as "bug-like" with a casual asymmetry - yes, it has something we'd call a head, but it's off-centre, and there's this boxy thing and... etc.  However, a NASA probe, while elegant in its own way, would be far too frail for something that is a dedicated fighting machine, designed to withstand serious defences...

No huge bug eyes, please.  I imagine a selection of sensory devices, each highly specialised and placed according to functional requirements/contingencies of well-it'll-fit-in-here.

The sentinels in the Matrix films?

The Manshonyaggers are all very, very old.  Their scars would have scars, which would have settled down and raised families long ago. They may have simple, rounded beetle-like carapaces, but in all of the ages that they have lived/functioned, they would have sustained damage and repaired themselves many times, creating a dense pattern of marks... and possibly, being intelligent, they would have ornamented themselves, so they may well have a kind of baroque texturing as well.

As a precedent, I suggest the new Battlestar Galactica again - the Galactica itself is zoomorphic, suggesting an alligator in this case, but I read somewhere that the designers were also thinking of human muscles in the design, hence the curves.  The ribs are supposedly some sort of energy-dissipation feature, like the spaced or gridded armour now applied to modern armoured fighting vehicles in Iraq and Afganistan.  I've attached an image of the Big G showing how it looks after it has sustained cumulative battle damage (also, have a look at how it appears in the very last scenes of the final episode, "Daybreak", with buckled and warped plating).  Now, as I mentioned, the Manshonyaggers can self-repair, but they also self-design, so symmetry might not be retained over the ages.  Going back to the stag beetles, there might be some strange distortion of the body form that coincidentally resembles something else.

On the other hand, just to throw a spanner in the works, and to mix metaphors, the look of stealth bombers is cool - very simple shapes, smooth, matt, flowing surfaces, everything that has to be deployed, extruded, is under oddly serrated hatches and flaps.

Again, treat the preceding as a menu, not a checklist.  Personally I like the Galactica look, with a baroque or samurai twist, but I'll be happy with a surprise.

Cheers,

--Brett

From: Andy Robertson

To: Brett Davidson; SMS

A few points 

** the most beautiful machines human beings make are war machines.   This is comprehensible because war machines, like living things, are undergoing intense real-world selection and the unfunctional unbeautiful gets flensed away according to criteria which are absolute and objective.

The most beautiful war machines approach the grace of a living thing.  

** the most beautiful of an evolving line of machines are the last ones built before the machine type becomes obsolete under the impact of a quantum leap of new technology.  Battleships like the Scharnhorst or the New Jersey were built just before big-gun warship was pushed aside by the aircraft carrier, for example. Contemporary fighting arcraft are about to be pushed aside by drones, but they have achieved real beauty too.

** this applies to armour.  (Armour is a machine for the purposes of this discussion).  Perhaps the most beautiful ((and therefore most functional, if the equation I'm drawing is correct)  form it took was the Gothic, which unsurprisingly looks not unlike a Centurion. A little after this peak it was rendered pointless by gunnery and became ceremonial - and it's at this time that the parade armour becomes popular.  ((Which rather undercuts Brett's referent to Negroli, because he was working in an era of armour's decadence, while in the Night Land the armour is still vitally functional and undergoing cutting-edge evolutionary selection by the forces of the Land.   This is not to say that the point of armour as decorated, or as an expression of clan and personal status, is wrong, because it isn't, but there is a difference here which must be appreciated.  The Negroli forms are over-ornate to a nonfunctional degree.   But decoration and badges of status and affiliation were used on armour at all times.  They tended however to be separate from the armour - surcoats, crests, etc.   Well, Brett has actually said all this already, hasn't he???))

** however we are now at the end of time looking backward to the past and there are no more leaps in tech.   Armour has become perfected to a level never seen in our history, and looks as graceful as a living thing.   How to draw this?  Well, in the absence of any other option I'd draw on the coolest Gothic suits I could find on the web and make them a little smoother and at once more organic and more high-tech - chaos-death-spikybits seem intrinsic to the Gothic forms but are probably counterindicated in the Night Land.  

This last advice is very detailed, probably going beyond useful levels, because too exact & particular, and I emphasise please,treat it as just my feelings at this time, definitely not prescriptive

MANSHONYAGGER.  The same grace-beauty-deadliness equation applies.

And a little voice at the back of my head says "fractals."   Fractal forms seem intrinsic to entities that self-repair and self-construct as opposed to being manufactured.   The manshonyagger's scars, repaired, might bloom into a life-like clustering of units and sub-units much as a tree's scars put forth branches and the branches twigs. 

But there will be a functional tension between this working and tis exploding into self-repair-cancer (future societies will have a short instantly-understood word for the cancerous proliferation that results from control failure in self-healing autonymous systems).   OTOH it's the m. that have the capacity to self-mutate who will have become autonymous survivors and "players", therefore they will come from the grotesque end of this spectrum.

In haste, more may follow

   -Andy R

From:Brett Davidson

To: Andy Robertson; SMS

 I don't want to spoil the broth with more variations and details, but I am intrigued by the implications of the Manshonyagger's self-repair systems.  The analogy with a tree is very.... hmm, what's the word?  Provocative? Fascinating?  They would have a gnarled, twisted appearance, the friction of the ages would have smoothed their rough planes.  In addition to simple self-design and self-modification, they would have practiced a form of self-topiary...

Wikipedia has some images of bristlecone pines that would suggest the resulting look perhaps.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bristlecone_pine

Geekery: Aldiss' Helliconia trilogy has animal-plant creatures called stungebags...

The attached image is of a typical pine, which I could imagine as an old m'yagger, like a dragon having slept for a millennium underground emerging once more to survey its domain.

Awake in the Night Land

From Vox Populi

Castalia had already announced that we would be publishing John C. Wright's collection of essays, TRANSHUMAN AND SUBHUMAN: Essays on Science Fiction and Awful Truth, which will be published in April. Today we are absolutely delighted to be able to say that we will also be publishing AWAKE IN THE NIGHT LAND, a collection of four novellas set in the Night Land of William Hope Hodgson.

AWAKE IN THE NIGHT LAND is the first of five novels and novellas written by Mr. Wright to be published by Castalia House. It clocks in at 116,500 words and will be priced at $4.99. We will release the English ebook later this month; the German translation is already underway with an anticipated July release. We also expect to publish a hardcover version this summer.

Apologies to those waiting for THE ALTAR OF HATE, but we are delaying it until April in favor of Mr. Wright's book. It will be sent to the pre-release reviewers in a few weeks.

Speaking as a reader and as a fan, I can say that the Night Land novellas are spectacular. They combine the intelligence and gigantic scale of Iain M. Banks with the eldritch forboding of H.P. Lovecraft, but with a humane soul that is alien to either of the two late authors

Congratulations to John on this resale, which wlll give his stories a far greater eposure than our obscure website has been able to.

Receiving a preprint copy, I am moved to see that he has dedicated the book to me. Certainly there are few things I am prouder of than having enabled, in a small way, the production of these magnificent stories.

Unfortunately this means the copies of these stories on the Night Land site will be removed: our contract only purchases the right to keep story online for five years, and they have all remained online here for far longer than that. But don't despair: the whole set will be available from Castilia House cheaply, and if you won't spend $5 for this ebook, you are a hopeless case.

And John may be able to get something else for his kitchen at last . .

Ex Machinae by Brett Davidson (the first story in the Founder sequence)

 

The sky itself was dying. There was one less star to be counted, and thus the call came to strive ever harder against our opponents. Our legion, Abiding, ranked facing the eternal wind and before the unmoving Sun. We cast our shadows before like spears.


And before us, the end of the latest tide of organised opposition to our dominion. The enemy called themselves “the people”, or at least that is what the word they used for themselves meant to them. To us, it was as it always was: outsider, threat, enemy, not-yet-vanquished.

They had established a peculiar symbiosis with their chattel animals, I had heard, and now I saw them mounted on these beasts first hand for the last time. They were odd creatures, strangely distorted and yet also strangely elegant variations of the human prototype. Like true people, they had four limbs arranged in pairs at either ends of compact torsos, heads bearing ears and eyes of intelligent intensity atop streaming-maned necks. Strangely, they ran not on feet, but four sturdy-nailed fingers. The name they gave them, I believe, was “horse.”

I must admit that individually, a horse was a beautiful thing, and with a rider upon its back, the pairing was in no way grotesque. It was, indeed, bold, and in action their synthesis was both powerful and elegant.

Militarily, however, they could be no match to our own powered frames that had no mediating intelligence to guess and mistake our intentions. I raised my arm in a preparatory signal, and reading directly the impulses of my nerves, my frame amplified the gesture as naturally as my own flesh.

In instants such as this, the greater the tension, the longer time is attenuated, but it ended and we charged and they charged and we came to the clash. There was no time for contemplation, but now, after, I have time and so I do insert a moment that traverses many years.
You do not know my name; one way or the other it has been erased – by time or more deliberate censorship. Allow me then to introduce myself: as you see, in that artificially stalled moment with my arm raised, I am at the head of a great legion; my rank is Agetor; my clan, Indikos; my city is no city but the one Great House of the Twilit Land – and my name, that is Chryseo Drakonhaema Phylindikos.

Perhaps you have heard of me; as recollections of the aged under the Lights, in curses or whispers in the halls of the Great House. Perhaps there has been another Adjustment in that place and I am rehabilitated, my deeper loyalty seen for what it is or was.

Returning to the field under the halted Sun, we are outside that moment of anticipation and well into the act. The nails of the horses pound the earth as if it were a drum and raise a cloud of dust that rises above the army like an array of banners. We hear the riders howl.
We ourselves are silent, disciplined, sharpened and buffered by synthetic hormones and enzymes in our blood. My earpieces relay a theme designed to manage my heartbeat at the optimal tempo and a melody to keep my moves in step with the order of our tactics. Every step is efficient and accurate and I feel something akin to rapture as I perform my bloody dance. Looking from above, as indeed our recording instruments do, you might see something like a reaction between two volatile fluids. Theirs is effervescent, unstable, surging like a wave, thick foam of anger breaking at its lead. Now look at us: something like oil in our smooth density, something like smoke the way we coil and eddy. A red mist rises from the reaction.

There is of course something artificial about this battle. We have at our disposal flying machines of many kinds, a mere few of which could butcher our opponents safely from heights they could never reach. Likewise one Kastchei-class manshonyagger could wade through them and quickly dispatch the lot with dispassionate precision. That though would not serve our longer purpose; if we stood too far above them, then they could convince themselves that they fought demons and that rightly then they should continue as the struggles against demons is proper to being-in-action. That could not be permitted. They had to see our faces and know that they were defeated by true men and thus we showed our faces and our hands to them, even enframed in metal.

And of course we saw their faces and refused to notice that we could not see any difference from ourselves in them.

The horses, though… They were different, and aroused in me peculiar emotions. Their long, bony and soft-lipped faces could not be read as naturally as a person’s, but I saw in their wide eyes, in the specks of foam flying from the bits of their bridles real rage and real terror. The reactions of lesser beasts and mechanical devices are only reactions, no more, but an intelligent creature could and must have such emotions, for they are engendered by knowledge of pain and mortality and love and loyalty.

It was not right to erase from this already famished world such beauty, but sentiment was cast as a weakness in the Great House and there could therefore be no riders, no horses ever again. If we admired them, then it was because they were powerful, and if they were powerful they were a threat. I knew a little of their diet and requirements; they were creatures of open plains and the Great House could not contain them. They could only remain outside and that was intolerable to our masters. I think perhaps that jealousy was hidden in their motives.

And as for myself, perhaps I could not bear to see such a thing corrupted either by enslavement by the abhumans I knew would master the Valley in the end and neither could I bear to see them constrained in the black metal halls of the House.

I did not think too long on that last point. Sentiment, I said, is a weakness, and worse than that, it is hypocrisy. I would not permit myself to weep as they died, as I killed them.


Continue at THE NIGHT LAND

New reprint markets for 2014

The Year’s Best Dark Fantasy & Horror: 2015 edited by Paula Guran

Despite its name, the stories must first appear in 2014



and

Prime Books to Publish YEAR’S BEST SF&F NOVELLA Series

cover art for Kevin Bryce's THE NIGHT LANDS

Interesting new cover art for Kevin Bryce's THE NIGHT LANDS
 
.
@copy; hal hefner
click for fullsize


What is interesting is that there's nothing like this in the original book by Hodgson: but it could very well illustrate a story from the Darkening. If this is intentional, it shows rather more attention to the source materiel than is usual in such things. If mere neglect, it is sadly typical.

Art by Maureen Shockey

 

 The Maid Of Olden days

Two pages meant to look as if from an illustrated "Night Land" (Which does not exist beyond these samples and a few more sample pages, alas)

 


© Maureen Shocky

view more pages . . .         visit the artist's site at    meshockey.daportfolio.com

And The Sky Is Filled With Eyes

by tais teng

part 1

I saw a white star all ablaze and gladly would have lingered but I have promises to keep and light-years to go before I sleep.

:attributed to Great-Captain Frost, discoverer of Starholm       20,693 AFR (After the Foundation of the Redoubt)

Gossil, age 9

"Name the six worlds of Starholm," the teacher said and Gossil was the first to raise his hand.
"There is Yal-bin-Armanth, ser. Out among the comets. Its is all oceans and icebergs. The people live on rafts of seaweed and ride improved sharks. Next to the sun lies Ferno, with lakes of lead and sulfur. The cities are underground and the Fernos look ever so pale and white, like mushrooms. The..."
"I see you did your homework. Good." The teacher pointed. "Now Yaleena will tell us about their capital world."
Yaleena sat bold upright. 'Sorry, ser. My aunt had a baby. I had to help my mother with the birth-muffins." She smiled. "It was human, ser! Its DNA came up as green as grass!"
"Congratulations. Yes, a new baby is more important. Starholm will still be there tomorrow. Gunnar? The capital world?"
"Nue Fusang has a thousand islands and..."
Gossil sat fuming. "I see you did your homework." I could name all Starholm worlds before I was five. He balled his fists. When the Ship launches I will be standing at the helm. Great-Captain Gossil. I'll see the Perfect Worlds with my own eyes.
"Great-Captain Frost said in the poem: And gladly would have lingered. Now, why didn't he?"
"I know that, ser!" Yaleena cried. "There was that other scout-ship, with his wife. It was falling in the black hole that Starholm orbits."
"And?"
"He didn't save her, but he tried. The black hole took them both. They are still falling because time stops at the edge. They will be falling forever."
She smiled like it was something beautiful, Gossil saw. Stupid girl. Real heroes don't fail. When Frost went down, he sent that poem, not the coordinates of Starholm. It took another five thousand years to find Starholm again, and all because of a woman.
I will do what is right, he decided. I won't get all squishy when a girl hands me a fruit of the darling-vine or puts a flower in her hair. He glanced at Yaleena. Her curls were a glowing verdigris, with the red yellow of copper at the roots. She was of pilot stock: made to live in space. The moment she became weightless her hair would knit itself in a space-helmet, shielding her brain from radiation. She would be the perfect wife for a star-ship captain, but not if she kept cooing about babies.
He must have spieked too loud because he suddenly heard Yaleena night-whispering in his brain.
  "You are so stupid! I'd rather kiss a plow-ape or give my fruit to a..." Her thought sputtered out: she was clearly unable to think of something worse than Gossil.



When Gossil came home his aunt Fayima was sitting under the hearth-lamp with his mother, nipping a pale green liquor. Gossil had tasted it himself once in the kitchen: Asperol was horrible, bitter and sour at the same time.
Now aunt Fayima was all a woman should be: as Niketria she commanded a hundred companies and even those brand-new Censors deferred to her. As the old saying goes: it takes a man to fight a battle, but a woman to win a war.
"Hai, Gossil. How is life?" She turned back to his mother without waiting for an answer . ..,  .

CONTINUE READING AT WWW.THENIGHTLAND.CO.UK

Is there a Chomskyan linguist in the house?

Chomsky theorized that real languages have a meta-grammer that can be detected.

languages are formed by the application of meta-rules that are genetically programed in.

meta-rules = rules about rules. The rules that make up a language's grammar are not genetically programmed into us. But the meta-rules, the rules abut the rules ,are. The goto book is Pinker THE LANGUAGE INSTINCT

Example:

A Pidgin is a trade language that is used when two very disparate language groups meet. It is a patchwork that does not follow the human meta-grammar and therefore is a crippled code with limited ability to describe the real world.

But if children are born whose parents speak pidgin to each other, the children create a Creole to communicate with each other in.

A Creole is a language that follows the human grammar meta-rules but but whose vocabulary is drawn from its two parent languages. IT IS A FULLY EXPRESSIVE, FLEXIBLE, HUMAN LANGUAGE.

NOTE: THE CREOLE IS NOT INVENTED BY THE PARENTS AND TAUGHT TO THE CHILDREN: IT IS CREATED BY THE CHILDREN, SPECIFICALLY BY CHILDREN BELOW ABOUT 7, WHICH IS THE AGE AT A WHICH THE ABILITY TO LEARN A LANGUAGE AND SPEAK IT AS A NATIVE (WITHOUT ACCENT) CUTS OUT.

THE CHIDREN CREATE THE LANGUAGE AND SPEAK IT TO THEIR CHILDREN.

THIS IS A REAL-WORLD PHENOMENON.

QUESTION.

Does ANYONE KNOW A CHOMSKYAN LINGUIST WHO CAN DO AN ANALYSIS OF THE LANGUAGE OF "THE NIGHT LAND" AND TELL US IF IT FOLLOWS THE META-RULES OF A TRUE LANGUAGE??

....................................................................................

How might this have come about?

Well, we know that TNL started as a story told to a child. In THE WANDERING SOUL, Jane Frank quotes this dedication

The following passage was inscribed by hand on the endpaper of a copy of THE NIGHT LAND which Hodgson gave to a girl he called "Scraps" in 1912.

To Scraps,

That impudent maiden to whom

I first told the ever shaping tale

of The Night Land

From

Hope-

March 22nd

12

Do you 'member how you used

to shiver when the Night Hounds

bayed; and how quietly it was

needful to go past the House of Silence - eh?

"Scraps" was one Wilhelmina Bird, the very young daughter of a friend.

Hodgson apparently struck up a friendship with the Bird family some time before 1905, one close enough for him to stay with them for a month at the start of that year.

He sent their young daughter several first editions of his works between 1907 and 1916.

She was eighteen years his junior and to what degree she was an inspiration for Naani must remain conjecture.

..............................................................................

So she was about ten when he first started to tell her stories about TNL

Early enough for her childish lisping to have injected just enough real grammar into the deliberately alien future-language Hodgson used??

Sounds dumb,funny. But If anyone knows a Chomskyan linguist, we could find out.

Think what a coup it could be!!!

Just the thing for SARGASSO

SO LET THE CRY GO OUT FAR AND WIDE

IS THERE A CHOMSKYAN LINGUIST IN THE HOUSE???

The Underground Fields by Tais Teng

Another Night Land picture manifested itself, with endless fields of nourishing fungi. I don't know who the girl is yet or what her story is , but she'll no doubt tell me
Tais Teng





http://www.taisteng.nl
http://www.granterre.nl
http://www.atlantisongezonken.nl
http://taisteng.deviantart.com/


As is usual, click on the pic for the full-size glory. We'll have more of Tais' latest story soon.

THE LAST OF ALL SUNS

 
 
I've said it before, and will carry on saying it until the stars go out: this is the greatest Night Land story ever written.
 
 

 
 
By John C Wright.
 
 

1. WE ARE LOST

 

We are lost in endless and titanic halls of windowless metal. Some of the things pursuing us are so large that, to them, even these halls are cramped, and the miters of the crawling sphinxes scrape flakes of debris from unseen expanse of black plate so high above.

I say we are aboard a ship. The other men resurrected from the Archive disagree. Some think we are in hell, or in a fairy-mound, or suffering the hallucinations imposed by the thinking-machines of futuristic science.

Of all of us, the man from the latest period of humanity hails from AD 29,000,000; some twenty-nine million years after my death. He came from an age long after the sun had died, a terror-haunted world of eternal darkness. His home was a titanic fortress called the Last Redoubt, a structure armored against the infinite cold of a sunless sky, nursing its life on the last few embers of dying geothermal and geomagnetic heat. His name is Ydmos of Utter-Tower. Ydmos thinks this vessel is a redoubt like his, one long ago captured by the enemy, and that we are all buried far underground.

Even his era is uncountable years lost, compare to this present one. Earth was murdered more than fifteen billion years ago; the Milky Way, star by star, was consumed by darkness five billion years ago, and the Greater and Lesser Magellanic Clouds as well. The great galaxy in Andromeda, her satellite galaxies M32 and M110, and Triagulum Galaxy in M33, are also gone: the spiral galaxies in Ursa Minor, Sculptor, Draco, Carina, Fornax: over the slow millennia, all are destroyed and vanished.

All the stars known to the astronomers of history are gone: the galaxies have tumbled together into a vast and central fire, the Last Of All Suns. At the core of this sun is one infinitely heavy point of nothingness where nine-tenths of the mass and energy of the universe are compressed.

Of the remaining tenth part of the substance of the universe, some lingers yet in the form of matter, including a remnant of red-dwarf galaxies, their cores absorbed into black holes, their arms choked with exhausted nebulae that will never collapse against to form fresh stars. The dying galaxies are streaming toward the central fire, and, from our position in time and space, seem, to us, not yet to have been consumed. Perhaps that event has happened: the light from it has not reached us. Some of the remaining universal mass is in the form of energy: the residue of the universe has dropped to a uniform background radiation just above absolute zero.

And one infinitely small residuum of the dying cosmos is matter and energy lingering yet in the form of living creatures and their works: there is one ship left, with us aboard.

There is something else aboard as well, something horribly alien to our continuum, to life, to time and space and order. The ship is theirs: we are as rats in the hold.

 

2. THE SHOT

 

It was dark. A few fitful lanterns, perhaps a quarter mile up off the deck, perhaps fifteen billion years old, emitted sickly glints of greenish-yellow light. The pounding of numberless claws on the metal deck-plates was like drumming rain.

The looming creature Ydmos called a Night Hound came running ahead of a galloping pack of malformed hobgoblins. This breed of Night Hound is a hard-skinned albino monster larger than a dray-horse, with a face like a hairless wolf and teeth like an alligator.

Ydmos raised his odd-looking weapon: it was a poleaxe tipped with a sharpened disk. The disk spun like a buzz saw, and a flare like lightning came from it, and a low roar like a lion’s roar. The weapon was dazzling bright in his hands, and his fluttering shadow pivoted about his wide-placed feet as he swung. The creature saved itself from a mortal blow to its thick neck by raising its forepaw into the blazing path of the weapon. The stroke chopped through scale and hide and muscle to part the monster's flesh from wrist to elbow. A fan of black and stinking blood flew up from the wound, and the creature screamed even more loudly than the lightning-roaring weapon.

The Night-Hound reared up on his hindquarters, one huge fore-limb hanging limply, and slashed down with its other. Its palm was wide as a dinner-plate, its nails longer than dirks. Ydmos fell.

The wheel of lightning shed by the weapon was quenched, and the little pocket of light surrounding Ydmos winked out. In sudden gloom and silence, small noise of his pole-arm clashing to the deck was audible.

I lifted my trusty Holland & Holland elephant gun to my shoulder -or the dream thing, whatever it was, that pretended to be my fine old beauty of the gunsmith’s craft-and squeezed the trigger. The trigger had pull; the heft of the weapon was right. It felt heavy in my hands, trusted and familiar.

The rifle was solid. I could feel the grain of the wood against my cheek as I brought it to my shoulder, I could see the tiny scratches and irregularities in the polished barrel. The sites cast a very tiny shadow on the curved surface of the barrel. It was real. I had faith in it.

I fire a 900-grain slug at nearly four tons of muzzle-energy. The slug is thicker than my thumb, and you can knock over a tree with it, at short ranges. The familiar smell of cordite, cotton soaked in nitro, rose to my nostrils.

(For a moment, a terrible moment, I was convinced this was all a dream, and that I would wake up again in the Veldt, the hot sun throwing a zebra-striped pattern of shadows from the long grass against my tent walls, and Lisa outside, looking pretty in her jodhpurs and pith helmet, calling me a slow-poke and telling me the game was getting away. For a moment.)

Fortunately, the matter-wizard Abraxander-the-Threshold (from Tau Ceti, circa AD 30,000) had also been able to materialize a heavy jacket with a padded shoulder. Even with this padding, the kick jarred my shoulder painfully. Either my imagination had over-charged the shells with powder, or I was weaker now than I had been when I was alive.

The Night Hound went down as if felled by a hammer, half-severed at its horny collarbones, its chest blown open. I could see ribs, sliding chest-muscles, pumping lung tissue. Black blood streamed from its shattered neck and chest, and flooded across the deck. The stench was terrible. Even dead, its jaws continued to snap, and its legs continued to kick, and the barbs in its tail went in and out like the stringer in a dead wasp does.

You would think the creatures from hell, or from outer-space, would be used to loud noises. It seemed not. All the monsters quailed at the report, shocked. A terrible silence hung in the corridor for a long, strange moment. The echoes of the shot reverberated through the ship, farther and farther, echo answering echo.

The monsters ran away.

 

3. THE LAUGHTER

 

Uj, the shaggy man, gripped the bone he used as a truncheon in his teeth, dropped to all fours, and scampered doglike across the deck toward Ydmos, and his wolfskin pelt flapped on his hairy back as he ran. If I am right, Uj is a Neanderthal, or some other pre-human homonid, the earliest of us, even as Ydmos was the latest. The method the Blue Man uses to discover our dates returns no reading from the Neanderthal, or so he says. (The Blue Man claims he is measuring of the regular decay of certain particles in our bodies-but how can these be our original bodies?) Uj may be from the future, after an age of degeneration, rather than from the past.

"It is too late!" I called, "Leave him!"

But I was wrong. The Neanderthal saw or sensed something I did not. The fingers of the gauntlet of Ydmos flexed slightly. His pole-arm was laying a foot or so to his right, its heavy disk-shaped ax-blade dark, not spinning. But when his hand trembled, the weapon slid across the deck, as if pulled by an invisible thread, into his grasp, and the blade lit up with terrible energy again.

Even as the main body of the monsters fled from us, there came a sound like a laugh both very near at hand, and from very many miles away, perhaps on another deck. It was one sound, coming from two different points in space. It was a large laugh, larger than an elephant’s lungs could have made. It was as if a hillside laughed, or a world, and we felt it in our bones.

The light from the weapon of Ydmos was snuffed out. Perhaps Ydmos had merely doused his weapon as a precaution, when The Thing That Laughs uttered its hideous noise: but at that moment, it looked more to me as if that laugh had blown it like a candle.

That laugh made us flee in panic, despite our temporary victory. We ran from the monsters who were running from us, both sides fleeing the other. This is more common in irregular skirmishes than you might imagine: officers rarely report it when it happens, for no one can explain, later, why you run from someone who you’ve routed. Panic happens in war.

Ahead of us was a place where a lantern had fallen, making a 100-yard wide crater in the deckplates. Even panicked, we were wise enough to give the thing wide berth as we circled the crater: radiations leaking from the damaged glass were deadly. But the light was brighter here because of it, giving us a glimpse of what lay ahead: before us, we saw the whole tremendous width of the corridor was filled with an encroaching black mist, and the lanterns overhead were winking out, one by one. In the depth of the mist could be glimpsed pale and quivering mounds of flesh, the bodies of enormous slugs, large as freight-trains, crawling blindly toward us, quite without noise.

To my left, I saw a wide hatch swing quietly open. This section of bulkhead was between two buttresses, half-hidden in the dim light. I saw, through the open hatch, a set of metal stairs, going down and down.

The Neanderthal pointed toward the valve with his bone truncheon, beckoning us, and he gave a soft hoot. He did not wait to see if we followed, but, with Ydmos still across his back, the shaggy man was away, scooting on all fours down the stairs.

I hissed softly, afraid to raise my voice, but Uj did not answer. Gloom swallowed him.

Two more of our small band, Mneseus, the sorcerer-king from Atlantis, and Enoch the antediluvian, both sprinted toward the stairs. A third, the Blue Man, who was calling himself Crystals-of-Incandescent-Bliss today, never does anything in a hurry, and so he strolled in a leisurely saunter after them. The Cave-Man or Redskin or whatever he was named He-Sings-Death, came and stood near me, his spear in its spear-thrower held lightly at his shoulder, his eyes turned intently toward the approaching wall of mist, the silent masses of blind slug-flesh. He bounced on his toes in an agony of impatience: he obviously wanted to flee down the stair, and escape this wide expanse of open corridor, but did not want to abandon gray-haired Abraxander, the fifth of our group, or me.

I mistrusted the stairs: I felt we were being herded. But in a small company of eight men, leaderless, whoever is the most rash will lead, and the rest must follow or allow the company to be scattered.

I trudged down the stairs into the gloom, rifle ready, Abraxander-the-Threshold on slippered feet, coming in a silken rustle of robes behind me. He-Sings-Death, silent as a cat, came after, watching backwards for signs of pursuit, his spear-hand at his shoulder, elbow high, tense and ready to cast.

We all flinched when the valve came quietly shut behind us, cutting off the lamplight from the corridor.

 

4. THE RIFLE I HAD DREAMED

 
 
I must explain how I held a weapon from a world, and a solar system, and a galaxy, long ago dissolved.
 
 
CONTINUE READING AT THE NIGHT LANDS SITE
 
 

The Night Land by Kevin Bryce on Soundcloud

NIGHT LAND MAP by RAY LEUNG

Click on map for REAL map.

How Does Hodgson Fit In?

Hi Andy,

Thanks for the invitation. Here's something that I thought would make for a (hopefully) lively topic.

In regards to debating the "consensus future history" as you put it in your earlier post, I think it's worth asking ourselves and each other whether Hodgson's other works should be considered part of the Night Land canon. Right now, it seems a given that "The House on the Borderland" is, but what about "The Ghost Pirates" or "The Boats of the 'Glen Carrig'" or "Voice in the Night" or any of his other stories?

Is it a good idea to consider them part of our "official" history of the Night Land, or would it be better to leave them aside as stand-alone, unrelated (but by no means unimaginative) works?

Also, if any of them do fit within the history, we then open ourselves up to this question: how do the creatures and phenomena in those other works tie into our Night Land mythos? What specific parts should each play in it?

I'm relatively new to the Night Land site, so maybe this issue has been addressed already, but if not, I'm really curious about what other people's thoughts are on this and would love to read what everybody has to say about it.

Disciples of Solid Sound music inspired by The Nightland!

Hi Andy
Hope all's well. Christy from Disciples of Solid Sound here.
The new blog looks great, really nice companion to the website. 

Can I ask you a favour? Could you delete the reference to Myspace from the Disciples of Solid Sound section on Nightsongs, please?
We are on Facebook, and will be posting new material on my Youtube channel soon.
FB: https://www.facebook.com/DisciplesOfSolidSound?ref=ts&fref=ts
Youtube: http://www.youtube.com/user/dsszerothlaw
So if you want to add those links instead, that would be great.





http://www.thenightland.co.uk/nightsongs.html

Thanks again!
All the best
Christy

"The Dream of X" by Ian Miller

I once gave Ian Miller's graphic novelisation of M John Harrison's THE LUCK IN THE HEAD a rather poor review in INTERZONE.

Technically, purely in terms of how you compose panel narrative,I was correct: but I forgot to mention that Ian is a genius, whose talent transcends genre.

Mike too, I guess.

Twenty years late, profound apologies.

Great Redoubt Society: children at play (Artist SMS)

PICTURE BY  SMS

http://www.fafner.demon.co.uk/dragonfly/sms/index.htm 

 

MATROSS

((BEING CERTAIN SEGMENTS CUT FROM AN EARLY  DRAFT OF JEWELL))

In this quadrant there are fifteen major concentrations of life.   Four of them are easily understood:  migrating geotheres that settled into quiescence two thousand years past, fused their network of roots with the ground, and rode the chemical eqilibria down to a long hybernation.   Observed from the Tower in certain spectra the vegetation of the Land traces their major axons, feeding off the bacteria which in turn consume their wastes, though they have ceased spreading.     One clangorous pit is a nest of scavenging mansonyaggers.  Seven other groups are abHuman communities, scattered half-human cultures of temporary residence and ambiguous status pressing hard against the constraints of existence in the Land.  Their technology will never rise above molten iron and lava glass blades, because if they become too intelligent they are prey for pneumavores and vanish.    And two loci show wandering twists of space that seem to radiate some intelligence but take no action.  They are probes, dreams, or wounds from the unknowable realms.  

The larger and more distant threats need not be mapped because they are eternal.  The Thing that Nods has not shifted within the reach of any record,  and the Dark Palace holds its frigid layers of machine knowledge inviolate and threatens only the dreams of children.   The two adjacent Watchers are not even to be viewed without conceptual shielding.  Cybernetic illusions are employed to mask their faces in the Cannon's gunSight, and simple wielded iron baffles prevent any worker engaged in physical repair of the mounting from seeing what would kill them.  

Of the middle rank, greater than the scuttling of animals and half-men but less formidable than the eternal geographies of the Night, is the Dead Titan, which lies sprawled a league southeast from the Circle.   Beyond it on the left the Kilns glow ulfire-red.  On the right is the slow turning of the Vane Light, an illuminance which settled on this spot thirty thousand years past and apparently coordinates the slow trooping of the Stone Men as they scavenge of the Titan's fabric.   The beast itself was was broken by some concatenation of ordinance fifty thousand years ago and now only its nonorganic components remain, slumped in a mile-long hill.  The ruined frame can still be seen behind great scrolls of peeled-back dermis, and ancient rents burned right through the exoskeleton dot its prothorax and mesothorax, but it is impossible to tell which were dealt by the guns of the Redoubt and which are simple decay or the eruption of its dying internal energies.  Husks and nests of scavenging beasts make a scattered detritus around it which merges with the fragments of its disintegration, yet parts of it seem to live.  Bobbing motes of light trickle from ports in its middle section and pool on the ground, drifting and slowly fading, and from time to time one of the turreted eyes that dot its slumped and bulging left flank glows or swivels and seems to be trying to focus.   Two thousand years past one of its outthrown legs was witnessed to move a few fathoms, but nothing more happened and it was only thought needful to sever it at the tarsus with a stream of energy, since it could have swept across the Circle if it had moved in its full arc. 

Sometimes it emits week-long pulses of infrasound.  Perhaps it is screaming.  


The Cannon remains in ready status.   His central core is a sixty-fathom long and ten-fathom wide projector of actinic light.   The thread of ionised air this creates acts as a guide for the earth-current or as a conductor for atropotaic patterns as the target dictates.   The pattern generator is even larger than the cannon but is fixed to one side with only its conductive webs intersecting the beam line, and the channels for the raw earth-current, bulking on the other side, are solid metal a fathom thick.  The hanger is conical, with the narrow end where the cannon is pivoted pressing against the port in the Redoubt wall and the flaring skirt expanding to left and right to give the great cylinder a full two radians of traverse. 

The ceiling and the walls and the partitions and nonfunctional elements of the mounting are chased and decorated with the ancient stories of the cannon's battles.   Charging gryphons dissolve in a river of fire, and pits of lava erupt in the ground, and in one place beneath the central pivot the Thing That Nods itself is shown receiving a blow from a whip of incandescence.  This last boast is certainly a lie, for no beam could reach so far, but there are also cut here and there pictures that seem to describe the Titan.  It is shown approaching the Redoubt, being repelled by the Circle, and returning again to find destruction from a hundred streams of fire.  These ones are the oldest carvings and in my role as an investigator for the Purple I have been here thrice before to examine them. 

But now it is late afternoon.  My studies are finished for the day and I rest.  The desk they gave me is cluttered with diagrams  and drawings and plaquettes and I believe something has been achieved, recorded, and understood.   My man Hugin sets the papers in order while I review my day's work, and I can sit at ease.  I eat a piece of honeycomb,  I think of my home, two days' travel away, and I watch the gunners Bal and Mannan co-run their scan of the Land.   

The titanic cylinder swivels smoothly and slowly through the great volume of space above us.   The control arena where we all sit  is recessed into the parabolically curved floor beneath it.   Bal stands here, wearing the gunSight like an ancient helm, and standing behind him his cogunner Mannan balances the trips vertically on his palms.  Mannan's role is needful because the force screen generated by the Circle will allow the cannon's beam Out and therefore must allow certain radiations and signals in.   In the heat of battle some unknown thing might enter here -   perhaps a request from one of the machine cultures to their ancient cousin, beamed by microwaves, or perhaps the whisper of a ghost - but it could never act so smoothly and swiftly that it could take over the cannon's cybernetic mind or his master's human one before Mannan could spill these trips and cut off all power.    So, properly understood, Mannan's flesh and soul are the outermost layer of armour that clothes Mother Redoubt.

Over certain segments of its field the cannon may be allowed to roam free and parse targets according to his own cybernetic mentation.   This is absolutely necessary at the two extremes of traverse where the Watchers censor human sight, but as the scan sweeps right-away from from the Crowned One the false images on the screen that save the human mind are replaced by truth and Bal may take hold and mastery over the machine again, forbidding it, perhaps, from running into some evil.   Bal is beautiful as he dances with the ancient weapon.  His hands dart across the touchpoints while his hidden eyes drink the Land, each flat siccade traced by the gunSight and reflected by the great slave cylinder above us.  The doubled image on the screen before him shivers with computer generated enhancements and suggestions, overlaid contours and  classifications, each one of which has the tiniest reflection in his face and a thin echo in the telepathic vibrations I harvest from his pneumasome.  Beneath the surface tremors of his mind I sense well-practiced joy in the wholeness of user and tool, the most ancient role of human kind.   

I glance back at Mannan, still and upright as a statue.   He laughs and swaps the trips palm to palm, keeping them vertical, without missing a beat.  The smooth purr of the earth-current driven motors is uninterrupted and  I smile to acknowledge the feat.


"Here, Ser".   It is Bal who speaks.

"What is it?"

"Which you have requested, Ser.  Look".   With his eyes, he senses and commands in one act, and the cannon's crosshairs focus on the flat plaza immediately before the crumpled bulk of the Titan.   If it had a head and if it had eyes it might be thought of as staring at this place.   The Land here is flat and open, without the usual clutter of moss-bushes and landcoral though there is nothing obvious to stop them growing back over that half-mile. I rub my aching eyes and cross-check with the optical scope's unamplified bare vision, but there is nothing.  I look again through the cybernetic gunscreen and the Cannon shifts of his own accord, following cybernetic routines that have modified themselves iteratively for millenia.    Through the amplifiers and enhancers I now stare directly at the Dead Titan. 

Bal rebukes his darling fondly, leashing him with two gentle touches of a finger. "Does it live yet, Ser"?

Yes, it lives,  I am sure. And I am sure the Cannon lusts to slay it.  "No one knows.  Pass on."

Freed again, and obedient to Bal's darting eye, the scan continues.  It touches the foot of the Vane light, slides away, and leaps swiftly to pin skulking hexapod beasts that surround some clump of debris they are dragging to their hive.   It judges them no threat and continues to move at random across the Land, focusing on beast and giant, mechanism and structure, and from time to time asking Bal, Here? Now? Shall I Fire?   But the cannon has not been discharged for decades.  Threats are rare and fewer still are counted worthy of aggressive action.  Almost none. 

Yet I feel a tension in the aether which must emanate from the machine.  He is being held back from his desire. 

The Last Arcology

Welcome to TheNightLand blog.

www.thenightland.co.uk already has a dry-as-dust site log attached to it.   I want this to be almost the reverse; A playful and not necessarily canonical look at the developing ideas and the shared debates behind THE NIGHT LAND site and the consensus future history that is slowly being uncovered as we write it.   It seems very real to me. 

I don't know howthehell to make this blog do what I want, and any advice from anyone is welcome (but offlist please).    Backgrounds, themes, classes of posts - it's all new to me.

So here goes