HODGSON, William Hope

(1877-1918)

   UK writer who ran away to sea in his youth and was deeply affected by his experiences aboard ship: he never lost a profound fascination, reflected in all his poetry and most of his stories and essays, for the mysteries of the sea. His fantastic sea stories - the first was "From the Tideless Sea" (1906 The London Magazine) - owe an obvious debt to the traditions of supernatural fiction, but he derived his horrific imagery mainly from the scientific imagination; notable examples are "The Voice in the Night" (1907), in which castaways are transformed by a fungus they have been obliged to eat, and "The Stone Ship" (1914), in which an ancient wreck is raised to the surface by a volcanic eruption, bringing many weird creatures with it. In his first novel, The Boats of the "Glen Carrig" (1907), a ship's crew is marooned on an island near a land of floating seaweed inhabited by bizarre and terrible lifeforms. His second, The House on the Borderland (1908; recent paperback edns cut), is a remarkable visionary fantasy in which a man living in a house which apparently co-exists in two worlds undertakes an allegorical spiritual odyssey through time and space, witnessing the destruction of the Solar System. The Ghost Pirates (1909) also juxtaposes the known world with analien counterpart as a ship "slips" into intermediacy and its crew witness strange and frightening manifestations. His last-published novel, The Night Land (1912), describes in a peculiar mock-archaic style an epicFAR-FUTURE journey across the face of a much altered and monstrously populated Earth. The allegorical aspect of WHH's novels embodies a conviction that horrid evil forces move beneath the surface of reality, sometimes becoming vilely manifest in creatures such as the spirit which possesses the SCIENTIST in the blasphemous fantasy "Eloi, Eloi, Lama Sabachthani" (written 1912; 1919 as "The Baumoff Explosion") and theentity manifested in "The Hog", the last of his Carnacki series of stories featuring an occult detective, gathered as Carnacki the Ghost-Finder (coll 1913; exp 1947).Some of his short stories were collected in Men of theDeep Waters (coll 1914), The Luck of the Strong (coll 1916) and Captain Gault (coll 1917), though the last has no fantastic material. The best were reprinted in the ARKHAM HOUSE collection Deep Waters (coll 1967 US); Arkham had earlier reprinted all four of his novels in The House on theBorderland and Other Novels (omni 1946 US). Some of his stories were further reprinted in Masters of Terror, Volume One: William Hope Hodgson (coll 1977), and some unreprinted stories were assembled in Out of theStorm (coll 1975), which features also a biography of WHH by Sam MOSKOWITZ that draws heavily on research conducted by R. Alain Everts, whose Strange Company issued in 1988 a set of 15 booklets containing stories by WHH intheir magazine versions (some had been revised for book publication). Other booklets containing previously unreprinted stories are the BritishFantasy Society's William Hope Hodgson: A Centenary Tribute 1877-1977 (coll 1977 chap) and Demons of the Sea (coll 1992 chap) ed Sam Gafford; the latter also contains 3 of WHH's essays, including the futuristic SATIRE "Date 1965: Modern Warfare" (1908).For some reason, possiblyinvolving US copyright protection, WHH arranged for privately printed editions of drastically condensed versions of several of his books. The short version of The Night Land, initially issued in Poems and The Dream of X (coll 1912 chap), has been separately reprinted as The Dream of X (1977 chap), while the abridgement of three Carnacki stories in Carnacki,the Ghost Finder, and a Poem (coll 1910 chap) is reprinted alongside the condensed novel from The Ghost Pirates, a Chaunty and Another Story (coll 1909 chap) in Spectral Manifestations (coll 1984 chap). Ian Bell, thecompiler of Spectral Manifestations, has also edited a collection of essays about WHH, Voyages and Visions (anth 1987 chap).

   BS

   See also: BIOLOGY; COSMOLOGY; END OF THE WORLD; FANTASTIC VOYAGES; HISTORY OF SF; HORROR IN SF; ISLANDS; MESSIAHS; MONSTERS; PARALLEL WORLDS; PULP MAGAZINES; RELIGION; STARS; SUN.