H. Rider Haggard’s The People of the Mist

H. Rider Haggard’s novel The People of the Mist was published in 1894 by which time he was just about the most popular writer in Britain. Haggard largely invented the Lost Civilisation genre and The People of the Mist definitely falls into this category.

Brothers Tom and Leonard Outtram were born into wealth. As sons of a wealthy baronet they had social position, education and all the advantages that any young men could enjoy. Until their father’s shady business dealings bring it all crashing down. The father kills himself, leaving his sons penniless and faced with the loss of the ancestral estate. The brothers make a vow that they will leave England to seek fortune elsewhere. When they have made their fortunes they will return to England to repurchase the estate and restore the family honour.

They end up in Africa, digging unsuccessfully for gold. Tom dies of fever but makes a death-bed prophecy - that Leonard will gain untold riches with the help of a woman.

Then an elderly African woman named Soa turns up with a strange tale. She had been nurse to a young English-Portuguese girl. She and the girl were devoted to each other. Now the girl, Juanna, has been captured by slavers. She wants Leonard’s help in rescuing the girl. And then she really gets Leonard’s attention - if he rescues Juanna then Soa will tell him how to reach the land of the fabled People of the Mist where rubies and sapphires are as common as pebbles. Surely this must be part of Tom’s dying prophecy - Soa is the woman who will lead Leonard to riches.

With his faithful African sidekick Otter (he really is more a sidekick than a servant) Leonard finds himself hurled into a series of extraordinary adventures. They will find the People of the Mist, Juanna and Otter will be worshipped as gods and they will face countless dangers from sacred crocodiles and treacherous priests, they will be imprisoned, they will have narrow escapes from death and will have to face the terror of the ice bridge.

Haggard understood that action and danger are essential ingredients of an adventure tale but it helps to have interesting characters. All of the characters in this story, African and European, are interesting and they’re all varied. There’s not one character who can be dismissed as a stereotype (either a racial stereotype or an adventure fiction stereotype).

Leonard is certainly a brave and determined hero capable of acting nobly but he is not a Boys’ Own Paper perfect specimen of manly heroism. He is not motivated by the desire to perform noble deeds, or even by a thirst for adventure. He is motivated by plain old-fashioned greed. He is a flawed hero.

Juanna is not quite a perfect heroine. She is quick-tempered, jumps to conclusions and misinterprets her own feelings and the feelings of others. She’s a fine young woman, but she has her exasperating quirks.

Otter is a dwarf and extremely ugly. He drinks far too much. He doesn’t know when to keep his mouth shut. He’s also as brave as a lion, almost as strong and in a fight he knows how to use brains as well as brawn.

Soa is very complicated. At times she seems like a villainess, at other times like a wise guide. She does some very bad things but she always has comprehensible motivations. She was dealt a bad hand by fate and her resentments are understandable. There is good and bad in her.

Nam the high priest is a villain, but again he has comprehensible motivations. He’s not just villainous for the sake of being villainous.

The land of the People of the Mist is far from being a utopia. They have some unpleasant customs but their reasons for clinging to their traditions are understandable.

The characters reflect the social and cultural attitudes of the time but it’s important to understand that the actual Victorians were nothing like the caricatured view so many people have of them today. They were intelligent complicated people with all of the normal human contradictions. Their beliefs and values were complex and nuanced.

It’s worth remembering that a lot of the clichés of adventure fiction were invented by Haggard and they weren’t clichés then.

This is a longish book but there’s plenty of plot, plenty of action and peril and an interesting cast of characters. There’s a reason that Haggard’s books remain in print after a century and a half. They remain in print because they’re extremely good. This one is not quite as good as his acknowledged masterpiece She but it’s highly recommended.

I’ve also reviewed Haggard’s King Solomon’s Mines.

Otis Adelbert Kline's The Secret Kingdom

Otis Adelbert Kline and Allen S. Kline’s lost civilisation novel The Secret Kingdom was serialised in Amazing Stories in late 1929.

Chicago-born Otis Adelbert Kline (1891-1946) is often dismissed as an Edgar Rice Burroughs imitator. Which to some extent is true. He was however a pretty good Edgar Rice Burroughs imitator and his stories are quite entertaining.

The lost world/lost civilisation genre was made enormously popular by H. Rider Haggard in the 1880s (his 1886 novel She is still perhaps the finest example of the genre). These tales remained popular until the 1930s. Sadly, in the post-World War 2 period the idea of undiscovered civilisation in remote parts of the globe could no longer be made to seem plausible. The world no longer contained any unexplored corners and much of the romance and mystery of life vanished.

Bell is a young American scientist trekking through an unexplored region in South America. He’s collecting specimens. He has a rival, a German scientist who is out to get him. 

On a remote plateau Bell saves the life of a man, a very oddly dressed man. He has unwittingly encountered a remnant of Inca civilisation. The man he saved is the Inca himself.

This remnant seems to be thriving and they really are quite civilised. The Inca is a very decent guy and he is anxious to reward Bell. There’s just one problem. Bell now knows of the existence of this Inca civilisation, a closely kept secret. He can never be allowed to leave. He is ennobled, given a fine house, treated with immense respect, given servants. He is even given wives. Six of them. All of them young and pretty and very excited to be married to the handsome foreigner.

Bell has met another outsider. Nona, a half-French half-Spanish girl. She also stumbled upon this lost civilisation by accident, and like Bell she will never be permitted to leave.

Bell and Nona fall hopelessly in love but there’s a problem. Nona is supposed to marry the high priest Tupac. The Inca is a good man and a just man but Nona was promised to Tupac and the Inca never breaks his word. He knows Nona does not want to marry Tupac and he has tried to persuade the high priest to release her from her bond but Tupac is unrelenting. Tupac is treacherous, crafty and cruel.

Naturally Bell encounters many dangers, such as narrowly escaping being served as dinner to an enormous and very hungry boa constrictor. There are various attempts to deprive Bell of his life or his freedom, or both. Tupac hatches sinister conspiracies. Bell’s nemesis, the German scientist von Steinbeig, shows up at an inconvenient moment.

There’s plenty of action.

Bell also has his hands full with his six wives. They’re all madly in love with him. Somehow Bell has to avoid sharing his bed with any of them. Nona is a sweet girl but she is a woman and she has a woman’s natural jealousy. She has no intention of sharing Bell with another woman and she certainly isn’t going to share him with six sex-crazed maidens.

Bell is your basic square-jawed hero but he’s likeable enough. Tupac makes a fine villain. The world-building is not elaborate and certainly doesn’t compare with the kind of world-building you would get in an Edgar Rice Burroughs story.

Kline’s prose style is perfectly serviceable. This is pulp fiction and it’s not trying to be anything more than that.

The Secret Kingdom is not a top-tier lost civilisation novel but if you love this genre it’s quite enjoyable. Recommended.

I’ve reviewed several other Otis Adelbert Kline novels - Jan of the Jungle (a Tarzan imitation combined with lost world stuff), Planet of Peril (a decent sword-and-planet adventure) and Lord of the Lamia (an excellent mix of mystery, action, Egyptology, horror and an offbeat love story).

Victor Rousseau's Eric of the Strong Heart

Victor Rousseau (1879-1960) was an English British writer who wrote science fiction and other assorted pulp fiction works.

His lost world novel Eric of the Strong Heart was serialised in four parts in Railroad Man's Magazine in November and December 1918.

Eric Silverstein is what would later be called a geek. He lives in New York, he’s wealthy and he’s a history buff. Everything changes for him when he cores across a sideshow attraction featuring a mysterious princess from an exotic land. Much to the amusement of the crowd she speaks in gibberish. Eric notices two things. Firstly her costume is Saxon from around a thousand years earlier and it’s totally authentic. Secondly she isn’t speaking gibberish - she is speaking Old English. Being a history fanatic Eric understands the language. The princess (whose name is Editha) is very indignant. She was expecting an audience with the king of this land.

There is a disturbance and the princess, aided by Eric, makes her escape. She just wants to return to her longship. It turns out she really does have a longship. Then something very odd happens - the princess suddenly becomes a knife-wielding maniac. Her two attendants make apologies for her and it is suggested that it would be safer for Eric to forget all about her. Editha sails off, to return to her own land.

Eric cannot forget her. Oddly enough, even though she is very beautiful, he does not have fantasies of marrying her. He thinks his friend Ralph would be a perfect husband for her.

Eric is intelligent but he has a few huge blind spots. He also underestimates himself. He has never been handsome or athletic. He does not see himself as the stuff that heroes are made of, while he thinks of Ralph as being very much hero material.

Eric knows his history and his geography. He thinks he knows where Editha’s land is. It is in the frozen Arctic, north of Spitzbergen. He buys himself a yacht and with two companions sets off to find Editha’s homeland. His two companions are Ralph and a fisherman named Bjorn.

This is a classic lost world story. Editha’s land has been cut off from the rest of humanity for a millennium. People there live as they did a thousand years ago. There are in fact two peoples there, one (the rulers) descended from the Dames and one (the slaves) descended from the Angles. There are two kings, but the Danish king rules. Editha is the daughter of the Anglian king.

In fact there are three people on this remote island, the third being a race of Trolls.

There are of course power struggles. The Angles have never been entirely reconciled to their subordinate status. The Danes are determined to maintain their superior position. Having two kings complicates things. There has been intermarriage. There are conspiracies aplenty. The arrival of outsiders increases the tension levels, especially when one of the outsiders puts himself forward as a candidate for the kingship.

There is also a sword with a legend attached to it. The man who draws the sword out of its rocky scabbard will be king.

There are conflicted loyalties and betrayals, not just among the islanders but among the three outsiders as well. Bjorn seem to have his own agenda.

There are people who feel they are chosen by destiny, and they can be thereby tempted to do desperate things.

This is a complex lost world. The story offers a lot of action and adventure but with some psychological twists. Eric is a man who is intelligent and resourceful but he has made a very serious error of judgment which could have momentous consequences. There is magic, although the exact nature of the magic is ambiguous.

The ending holds a few surprises.

This is an above-average lost world tale and it’s highly recommended.

Don Wilcox’s The Ice Queen

Don Wilcox’s short novel The Ice Queen was published in Fantastic Adventures in January 1943. It’s a lost civilisation tale, my absolute favourite genre.

The Ice Queen takes place in the 19th century. Jim McClurg is an artist. He’s been hired to make a visual record of a polar expedition organised by Lady Lucille Lorruth. Five years earlier her husband disappeared in the Arctic while on a fur-trading expedition. Lady Lucille would like people to think that she believes her husband is still alive and that the object of her expedition is to find him. Jim suspects that she’s only interested in those furs. In his final communication Lord Lorruth claimed to have collected a vast number of furs, worth a rather large fortune.

The brig Aurora is commanded by Captain French. He drinks a lot and does not appear to be very honest. It’s not clear whether Lady Lucille is angling to marry the captain for the sake of his fortune (he’s a rich man) or whether the captain is angling to marry Lady Lucille for the sake of that fortune in furs.

Jim is mostly interested in the girl on the tiger. She’s very pretty, she looks like a Viking maiden, she rides a pure white tiger and she’s been shadowing the Aurora. This is impossible of course. The girl cannot exist. And yet she does exist.

There’s a stowaway who knows far too much about this frozen wasteland, and seems to know all about the girl. She is apparently a queen. We later find out that her name is Veeva.

There are unexpected dangers in the Arctic. Huge ice bubbles appear from nowhere. Several members of the party are imprisoned in these bubbles. It is possible to dig one’s way out but they’re very disconcerting, and the worry is that an ice bubble forming over the ship might sink it.

There is also a strange lost world in these frozen wastes. Possibly a very ancient world although its origins are unknown even to the inhabitants. This lost world holds the answer to the disappearance of Lord Lorruth.

A complication is that every male member of the expedition is hopelessly in love wth the beautiful young ice queen while Lady Lucille sees her as a deadly threat.

The trick with lost civilisation stories is not just to make the lost civilisation interesting, but believable as well. There have to be plausible explanations for the strangeness of such a civilisation. Wilcox succeeds rather well on both counts. Veeva’s icy realm is strange but it makes sense. Even the fact that Veeva claims to be 22,000 years old makes sense. And the sleeping king ends up making sense. It all hangs together.

There’s a suggestion of menace about Veeva’s realm, but it’s a subtle menace. Veeva appears to be good-natured and cheerful. There doesn’t seem to be any reason for the expedition members to be afraid, and yet there’s something slightly sinister about it all.

There’s a suggestion that Veeva may have access to certain powers, possibly technological and possibly magical, and that technology or magic may be behind some of the mysteries of her kingdom, but it’s left nicely vague and ambiguous.

This books ticks all my boxes. I love lost world stories and I love adventure, horror or science fiction stories in polar settings. And how could anyone not love a pretty young heroine who rides a huge white tiger whilst wearing furs, a metal breastplate and a Viking helmet?

The Ice Queen is very pulpy but it has plenty of atmosphere, danger and excitement and it’s hugely enjoyable. Highly recommended.

I know almost nothing about Don Wilcox (1905-2000) other than the fact that he was American and his writing career seems to have been confined to the 1940s and 1950s. I have read another of his novels, Slave Raiders from Mercury, and it’s very pulpy but quite enjoyable.

Armchair Fiction have paired this one with Poul Anderson’s The Sargasso of Lost Starships in a two-novel paperback edition.

Roy Norton’s The Land of the Lost

Roy Norton’s The Land of the Lost is a lost civilisation novel originally published in 1909.

The two main characters are a US Navy captain named Jimmy Tipton and his adoptive brother Billy Pape. They’re both around 40 and although they do not appear to have much in common there’s a fierce bond of friendship between them. Jimmy is well-educated and successful. Billy is a broken-down cowpuncher and failed prospector.

The novel starts off seeming like more of an “end of the world” story than a lost world tale. A brilliant scientist named Martinez has predicted catastrophe. There will be earthquakes on an unprecedented scale. They will happen in mid-ocean, triggering massive tidal waves. All coastal cities will be destroyed. Massive loss of life can only be avoided if governments undertake mass evacuations. Martinez is dismissed as a crank, until it becomes apparent that his predictions are about to come true.

This all happens early in the story and does not play out as you might expect. It is not the end of civilisation. Not by a long way. The cataclysm does however alter the planet’s geography significantly. This will become important.

And Dr Martinez mysteriously vanishes.

Some time later, as the nations of the world adjust to a somewhat altered world geography, ships start to disappear. Jimmy Tipton, in command of the cruiser USS Seattle, is despatched to search for the missing ships. It should be noted that this is 1909 when radio was in its infancy. The difficulty of long-range communication with ships at sea will play a vital role in the story.

The Seattle discovers a huge island, almost a mini-continent, where no island was known to exist. It was presumably created by the massive underwater earthquakes. And very strange things start happening to the American cruiser and its crew.

It’s impossible that this island could be inhabited but it is. The inhabitants are human but they represent a culture like no other on the planet. They have access to strange advanced technologies. Their outlook is very different.

The Seattle’s crew members find themselves either prisoners or guests. They’re not sure which. They are not mistreated in any way. The inhabitants of the island seem friendly but suspicious. A man named Manco, clearly a very important man in this lost civilisation, acts as either their gaoler or their host depending on how you want to look at it. It’s obvious to Jimmy and Billy that there are things that Manco is not telling them. They want to trust him but they’re uneasy. They get the impression that Manco feels the same way.

Of course there really are things happening on the island that they should be worried about but this is a story with quite a bit of moral ambiguity. There are no villains in the usual sense but misunderstandings can lead to violence and even war.

In some ways it’s a standard lost world tale but the moral ambiguity makes it a bit more interesting.

And the islanders’ high technology is interesting. They have unlocked the power of light, and of the atom. They have nuclear power of a sort although it’s based on the state of scientific knowledge of the world of 1909. This was an era in which electricity, magnetism and radio were ultra high technology. Overall the technobabble is very enjoyable. You could even see it is as having just a slight steampunk flavour.

There is some action. There are divided loyalties and friendships are put to the test. And there is a lot at stake. Jimmy is uncomfortably aware that a mistake on his part could have dire consequences not just for this lost civilisation but for his own.

A rather entertaining tale. Recommended, and if you’re a lost world fan I’d bump that up to highly recommended.

The Land of the Lost has been reissued by Armchair Fiction in their wonderful lost World/Lost Race paperback series.

Hollow Earth Tales vol 1

There’s a whole sub-genre of science fiction dealing with the idea of a hollow earth, or undiscovered civilisations deep beneath the Earth. It’s a sub-genre that appeals to me quite a bit. Jules Verne’s Journey to the Centre of the Earth and Edgar Rice Burroughs’ wonderful Pellucidar stories are the most obvious examples but the idea was extremely popular in the late 19th and early 20th century. At that time the idea did not seem outrageously implausible. Today of course it seems very implausible indeed but that just makes these stories more fun.

Hollow Earth Tales volume 1 is a collection of such tales from the pulpier end of the literary spectrum. They’re variable in quality but some are pleasingly off-the-wall.

The Plunge of the ‘Knupfen’ by Leonard Grover was published in All-Story Magazine in 1909. This is very much in the scientific romance mould but with some extraordinary bizarre flights of fancy. Like many such tales it involves a subterranean digging machine invented by an eccentric scientist but in this case the scientist does not seek scientific knowledge. He is after gold. He is convinced that there are unlimited quantities of the precious metal to be found if you can just get deep enough within the Earth. And his subterranean craft, the Knupfen, is capable of taking its one-man crew hundred of miles beneath the surface.

What he finds there is very strange indeed. An enjoyably lightweight story.

The Smoky God or a Voyage to the Inner World by Willis George Emerson was published in 1908. It’s a bizarre mix of pseudoscience and mythology. The most interesting thing about it is the idea that if you go far enough into the polar regions you will find yourself in the interior of the Earth. An interesting curiosity.

The Annihilator Comes by Ed Earl Repp was published in Wonder Stories in 1930. It is set in 1980. A giant rocket-propelled U.S. airship is on a mission to rescue a party of Swedish scientists lost in the Arctic, close to the North Pole. They are surprised to find themselves in a tropical region, although it’s no tropical paradise. It’s a tropical hell. The dinosaurs are bad enough but there are worse horrors to come.

They quickly realise that they are now in the interior of the Earth. An outrageously pulpy but action-filled entertaining story.

The Strange Voyage of Dr Penwing by Richard O. Lewis appeared in Amazing Stories in 1940 is much stranger and more interesting. A crazy old scientist believes that we’re not living on the surface of the Earth but inside it. The story also plays around with fun half-baked Einstein-ian ideas. Somewhat tongue-in-cheek but very clever.

The Hollow Planet by Don Wilcox was published in Amazing Stories in 1942. An earthquake plunges Randolph Hill into the interior of a planet (whether or not the planet is Earth is not quite clear). This is a world turned inside out, with people eking out a precarious existence on what is in effect the inside of a giant eggshell, with a sun in the middle. These people have no idea that any other worlds exist. They believe the interior of the planet is the entire universe.

We get Randolph Hill’s account in the form of his journal but the main story takes place many years later and involves his granddaughter and the man she loves, a man who believes that other worlds exist. In this society that is a dangerous belief. Not a bad story.

The Voice from the Inner World by A. Hyatt Verrill appeared in Amazing Stories in 1927. A meteor is sighted and a ship disappears. Then a strange radio message is picked up - from deep beneath the Earth’s surface! The message is from a survivor of that ship and he tells of a world of terrifying cannibal giantesses. And he tells of a deadly threat to the whole world. A very pulpy tale with a fair leavening of horror, but enjoyable.

The Underground City by Bertrand L. Shurtleff was published in Amazing Stories in 1939. Every few years a major coal mine is hit by a disaster. The bodies of the miners are never recovered. A young mining engineer thinks he has found a clue and it leads him to a very strange underground city. It leads him to unimaginable horrors, and perhaps an awful fate for the girl he loves. A reasonably enjoyable tale.

On the whole this is an interesting and varied collection and if the hollow earth idea appeals to you you’ll want to check it out. Recommended.

Henry Carew’s Vampires of the Andes

Henry Carew’s Vampires of the Andes is a lost world novel published in 1925.

Henry Carew is a very obscure author indeed. He wrote another novel called The Secret of the Sphinx, published in 1923. He was probably English. Beyond that I can tell you nothing about him.

The plot is rather convoluted and there are a lot of characters to keep track of but the ideas are undeniably interesting, if exceedingly weird and mystical.

An English archaeologist-explorer named Wootton discovers a strange apparently sacred block covered with inscriptions on an expedition to the Andes. He ships it back to England where he hopes his former teacher Professor Stevenson will be able to decipher the inscriptions. That proves to be quite difficult. They’re in a variety of ancient languages some of which defy translation. Making sense of what can be read is an even bigger challenge.

There are those in Peru who feel that the block belongs to them and that the inscriptions must not be deciphered. They are the key to an ancient mystery. It’s a mystery concerning people who trace their descent back to unimaginably old civilisations, perhaps more than ten thousand years old. The mystery involves an event that occurs once every thousand years. It has some connection to a legend concerning the sacrifice of seven maidens, a sacrifice that may also occur once every thousand years. The maidens end up drained of blood.

There seem to be several groups seeking possession of that sacred block, and those groups may possibly have quite different agendas.

Wootton is engaged to be married to a charming Peruvian girl named Quitu. There is some doubt about the girl’s parentage. She was found abandoned in odd circumstances. She was adopted by a respected and prosperous family, friends of both Professor Stevenson and Wootton. At that time the girl’s adoptive mother received an enigmatic warning concerning a great danger the girl would face at some time in the future.

There’s also a wicked priest who is involved in one of the conspiracies centred around that sacred block.

Those who want to gain possession of the sacred block also seem to be interested in gaining possession of Quitu.

There are also rumours that the vampires have returned. The nature of these vampires is mysterious unknown. There was a fabulous bird known as the Ara that was worshipped by those long-vanished civilisations mentioned earlier. The Ara might be connected with the vampires, or might even be the vampires.

There are a lot of puzzles that Wootton and Professor Stevenson will need to solve and while they know that the stakes are high they don’t know exactly what those stakes are. They really don’t know what they are dealing with. They’re not even sure that they’re dealing with something real. It might be mere legends. Wootton is driven on by his concern for Quitu’s safety. That’s a concern for the Professor as well but he is also driven by an insatiable desire to discover long-hidden secrets.

There’s likely to be plenty of danger and adventure in store for the protagonists. They’re up against formidable enemies. Those enemies might be evil, but that is by no means certain.

It seems that this is to be a story of thrilling adventure, but appearances can be deceptive. As the book progresses it becomes more and more concerned with metaphysical, quasi-religious, mystical and esoteric themes. The author throws just about every ancient legend and elements of just about every mythology into the mix. It’s all about secret knowledge and cosmic wisdom. It’s surprising that this book was not rediscovered back in the 70s. At a time when ancient astronauts, the Bermuda Triangle and psychic phenomena were all the rage it should have been a sensation.

If you enjoy that sort of thing then you’ll be in Seventh Heaven. If you don’t enjoy that sort of thing you’ll be bored out of your mind. You’ll just have to decide for yourselves if Vampires of the Andes is likely to be your cup of tea. It certainly wasn’t mine.

Armchair Fiction have reprinted this book, in paperback, in their excellent Lost World-Lost Race Classics series.

John Taine’s The Purple Sapphire

John Taine’s The Purple Sapphire is a 1924 lost world adventure tale.

John Taine was a pseudonym used by mathematician Eric Temple Bell (1883-1960) for his science fiction writing.

General Wedderburn, a rather pompous English officer, approaches American gem dealer and adventurer John Ford with a proposal. The general wants Ford and his niece (and partner) Rosita to find his daughter Evelyn. She disappeared thirteen years earlier, at the age of eight, and the general suspects his servant Singh of some involvement in the disappearance. Ford informs the general that he is not in the business of finding lost children.

Then General Wedderburn shows him something that changes his mind. It is the most extraordinary sapphire he has ever seen. If Ford can find Evelyn he will also find a lot more such sapphires. The general is convinced that Evelyn is somewhere in the unexplored wilds of Tibet, and that those sapphires are to be found in the same place.

The general has a vital clue - a half-dead man who also has such a sapphire in his possession. This wretched wreck of a man turns out to be another English officer by the name of Joicey, a man thought to have been dead for many years.

Joicey slowly recovers his strength and his sanity. He knows where the sapphires come from because he has been there. It is the land once inhabited by the Great Race, whose knowledge of science was so far in advance of our own that it beggars belief. Their descendants still live there although almost all of their ancient knowledge has been lost. It was a perilous journey to that land and an even more perilous journey back but it can be done. He has never seen Evelyn Wedderburn but he has reason to believe that she is safe and well. He also knows something about the mysterious Singh. Singh was a descendant of the Great Race.

Ford, Rosita and Joicey set off to repeat Joicey’s earlier journey. They do indeed find a lost world and the remnants of a lost civilisation and they slowly piece together the history of that civilisation and of the disaster that befell it.

The descendants of the Great Race have lost most of their ancient knowledge but they hope to regain it and the three adventurers are also rather attracted by the idea of unlocking the Great Race’s ancient secrets.

The motivations of the three adventurers are complex. They certainly hope to return with a bag full of sapphires but there’s also a sincere desire to rescue Evelyn Wedderburn. There’s also a lust for both knowledge and adventure. They are somewhat unscrupulous but also strangely decent. They rely on cleverness rather than violence. They don’t mind using deceit.

This is a lost world that is certainly no utopia. It’s a priest-ridden society in which there is no actual religion, just superstition. It’s a society obsessed with a past that it doesn’t even understand. People know how to follow rules but they don’t know how to think. They dream of regaining the immense powers over nature that their ancestors possessed but they have no idea how to go about it. All the information they need still exists but nobody can read the ancient texts. It’s also questionable whether they could be trusted with those immense powers. In fact it’s questionable whether their all-powerful ancestors had the wisdom to wield such powers.

It’s also a story about how civilisations can decline and ultimately destroy themselves.

There’s an almost complete lack of violence in this story but there’s plenty of danger and excitement.

An absorbing story, fairly complex characters and an interesting lost civilisation add up to a very fine novel which I highly recommend.

Armchair Fiction have issued this novel, in paperback, in their wonderful Lost World-Lost Race Classics series.

I’ve also reviewed another excellent lost world adventure by the same author, The Greatest Adventure.

Ray Cummings' The Sea Girl

The Sea Girl is a 1930 lost world novel by Ray Cummings and, even better, it deals with a lost world in the deeps of the ocean. As a bonus, there are mermaids. Well, not quite mermaids, but there’s definitely a beautiful aquatic girl.

Ray Cummings (1887-1957) was a pioneering American science fiction writer. He enjoyed considerable success in the 1920s and 30s but his career faded after that.

The story takes place in the future - in 1990. This is a world in which few conventional ships remain. Overseas trade and travel is dominated by aircraft and giant submarines. Jeff Grant, the narrator of the story, is second officer on a commercial submarine. Aboard his submarine is 18-year-old Arturo Plantet, the son of a doctor who has retired from medicine to take up oceanography.

Odd things are happening at sea. Several of those remaining surface ships have sunk, for no apparent reason. Then a submarine sinks. The tides seem to be behaving abnormally. At least that’s what is assumed at first but slowly it becomes obvious that sea levels are falling. Falling dramatically.

Then comes a report that a mermaid was seen on an island in Micronesia.

This interests Jeff. From the glassed porthole of a submarine he and Arturo had seen a strange globe-shaped undersea vessel and they had caught a glimpse of a girl aboard that vessel, a girl who struck them as being rather like a mermaid.

Arturo’s father is convinced that civilisation is under threat. He has designed a small advanced submarine capable of operating at extreme depths. He intends to use this vessel to find out what is going on beneath the sea. He needs three crew members. He has selected his son Arturo, Arturo’s sister Polly and Jeff Grant. At the last moment Arturo withdraws from the expedition and sets off for Micronesia in a small aircraft. Arturo intends to find that mermaid. He does find her. She’s not exactly a mermaid but she’s not quite human either. She appears to belong to a species closely related to and very very similar to our own. He calls her Nereid.

Arturo finds out all sorts of other things as well.

A year passes and nothing is heard from Arturo. Then Arturo contacts Jeff. Jeff thinks at first it’s a dream but soon realises it is a form of telepathy.

Jess, Arturo, Nereid and a seaman named Tad (who disappeared a couple of years earlier and had been presumed drowned) then embark on an extraordinary voyage not just to the bottom of the ocean, but to a lost world hundreds of miles beneath the ocean floor. And they will have to try to save human civilisation from an extraordinary threat.

Cummings at his best could create wonderfully strange imaginary worlds. In this case he’s succeeded in creating a fantastic world that rivals Edgar Rice Burroughs’ Pellucidar.

Jess is a stock-standard hero type but Arturo is more interesting - a dreamy over-imaginative youth who does not at first appear to be the stuff that heroes are made of but he slowly begins to show real presence.

Nereid is also a fairly typical beautiful good girl heroine. Rhana, the Empress of the undersea lost world, is beautiful as well but she’s also evil and cruel.

There are atomic-powered submarines and other technological novelties such as clothing that confers near-invisibility. The scientific (or pseudoscientific) explanations are amusing. There’s a lot of imaginative speculation about the nature of the interior of the Earth.

It’s an exciting enough adventure with some action and with a small heroic band on whom the future of civilisation depends.

It is a lost world story but it’s also a story of a struggle between competing civilisations. It’s very much pulp fiction but thoroughly enjoyable. Highly recommended.

Armchair Fiction have issued this book, in paperback, in their excellent Lost World-Lost Race Classics series.

I’ve reviewed a couple of other Ray Cummings novels - Into the Fourth Dimension and The Girl in the Golden Atom.

Other notable undersea worlds science fiction novels that I’ve reviewed - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Maracot Deep, John Wyndham's The Kraken Wakes, Henry Slesar’s The Secret of Marracott Deep.

C. J. Cutcliffe Hyne’s The Lost Continent: The Story of Atlantis

C. J. Cutcliffe Hyne’s The Lost Continent: The Story of Atlantis was published in 1899 and it qualifies as a lost world story although not quite a conventional one. There are also a few science fictional tinges.

Two archaeologists make an extraordinary discovery in the Canary Islands. It’s a narrative written on wax tablets, although the tablets differ in composition from any previously known. It is an astoundingly old narrative which when deciphered proves to be the story of the fate of Atlantis. The author, Deucalion, played a pivotal rôle in these events.

As the narrative opens Deucalion is governor of the Atlantean colony of Yucatan. He has not been home to Atlantis for twenty years. He has just been recalled to Atlantis by the Empress and must undertake a perilous sea voyage.

When he reaches Atlantis he finds it much changed. Not for the better, in his opinion. The old king Is dead. Atlantis is now ruled by the Empress Phorenice, a very beautiful but very headstrong woman. There is wealth but the common people see little of it. Trade seems to be in decline. The worship of the old gods is in decline. Phorenice is worshipped as a living goddess. And rebellion is brewing.

Deucalion discovers that the reason for his recall is that Phorenice wants a husband, and he has been chosen.

Deucalion is a man torn between conflicting loyalties. He is a member of the priestly caste. They once ruled Atlantis unchallenged but their power has been sadly diminished by Phorenice. Deucalion owes absolute obedience to the high council of the priests. He also wants to do what is best for Atlantis. And he intends to give Phorenice the loyalty due to her as Empress. He will soon discover that these three loyalties are hopelessly irreconcilable. The orders given to him by the priestly high council make things even more difficult. Those orders might compel him to betray Phorenice.

He will also be torn between two women, Phorenice and Nais, a leader of the rebels.

Deucalion tries to navigate his way through these shoals but eventually he will be forced to make some hard choices.

The Atlantis of this story is not just a vanished ancient civilisation. It exists in a very different world, a very very ancient world. Phorenice owns a tame mammoth. There are no supernatural elements but there are plenty of natural monsters - gigantic man-eating birds, huge carnivorous sea turtles and other equally fierce aquatic reptiles. There is mention of deadly destructive firestones that fall regularly from the sky. This seems to be an Earth subject to regular meteor storms. There is no magic, but the Atlanteans do have some advanced technology, such as a kind of water-jet propulsion for their ships. Or perhaps there is magic of a sort - the highest grade of the priesthood seem to possess some extraordinary powers.

The time setting is very obscure. There is mention of Egypt and it is implied that the land is on its way to developing a civilisation of its own. Which suggests a setting within the past ten thousand years. The mammoths suggest an earlier time period, and the dinosaurs (yes there are dinosaurs) suggest a time millions of years in the past. Of course in 1899 such things as carbon-dating did not exist and knowledge of the chronology of the Earth’s history was very incomplete. It doesn’t matter - all these elements provide a suitably strange setting for a fantastic tale.

Deucalion is an interesting hero. In some ways he’s a conventional hero. He is brave and noble and a mighty warrior. There are other things about him that are less sympathetic (although how these things would have struck a reader in 1899 is something on which we can only speculate). He is humourless and has a horrifyingly stern sense of duty. His devotion to the old gods borders on fanaticism. He also has some odd gaps in self-awareness. He does not seem aware that his ostentatious poverty, his repeated stated disinterest in sensual pleasures or emotional indulgences and his taste for extreme simplicity in dress and in diet could be seen as a kind of pride bordering on arrogance. Even his high sense of duty suggests a man who wants to seem (to himself and to others) to be a paragon of virtue. He is so virtuous and so pious that he is difficult to like, but this does make him intriguing.

Phorenice is Deucalion’s polar opposite. She has born a swineherd’s daughter and has made herself an Empress, not just through her beauty but through her courage, her skill as a warrior, her tenacity, her intelligence and her resourcefulness. She is quite open about her enjoyment of power and luxury. She is selfish and can be extremely cruel. She is wicked, but she is incredibly likeable. You can’t help admiring her, even while being appalled by some of her behaviour. She is a fun sexy bad girl.

Deucalion has to choose between Phorenice and Nais, but he has an even more difficult choice to make. The priests want Phorenice dead, even if it means destroying Atlantis. Deucalion is inclined to a fatalistic belief in the will of the Sun God. If the Sun God is prepared to see Atlantis destroyed in order to punish Phorenice for her blasphemy Deucalion is wiling to accept this.

One might also wonder at the motives of the priesthood - are they driven by a desire to save Atlantis or are they motivated merely by resentment that Phorenice has usurped their once limitless powers?

There’s some definite moral complexity in this tale. We have a narrator who sees everything ordained by the old gods and their priesthood as just and proper, but the reader might have serious doubts on that score. I have no idea whether Cutcliffe Hyne expected us to have those doubts or whether he expects us to take Deucalion’s views at face value.

There’s also plenty of action and adventure.

I enjoy Cutcliffe Hyne’s prose although some modern readers might find it a trifle pompous and formal. I think that’s actually a plus. Deucalion is the narrator and he really is pompous and addicted to formality so the style is entirely appropriate.

The Lost Continent is a pretty interesting lost world adventure (although I might be biased because I have a bit of an obsession with stories involving Atlantis). Highly recommended. It’s been re-issued by Armchair Fiction in their excellent Lost Race/Lost World paperback series.

S.P. Meek's The Drums of Tapajos

The Drums of Tapajos was serialised in the pulp magazine Amazing Stories in December 1930 and January 1931. All I know about the author, S.P. Meek (1894-1972) is that he was American and had served in the military in the First World War, and that he was for a brief period quite prolific.

This novel has been re-issued in paperback by Armchair Fiction in their excellent Lost World-Lost Race series.

The book begins with three American servicemen who joined up too late to see action in the First World War. Action is what they now want. They’re bored by the peacetime army. They consider heading to South America in the hope of getting mixed up in a revolution. Thy have no political beliefs, but a revolution sounds like it might be exciting. Then Willis, a friend of theirs, tells them an odd story about an adventure he had in the wilds of Brazil. A strange old man suddenly appeared and gave him a knife and a map, and then promptly died. Willis lost the map but he thinks he remembers the main details.

The knife is interesting - very very old indeed. Willis has had the blade analysed but no-one can identify the allow from which it was made. Willis suggests that the four of them set off into the Amazon rainforest to find the source of that knife. They may not find anything worthwhile but it will be a grand adventure, and there’s always the slim chance of finding treasure. That knife was clearly manufactured by an advanced civilisation, and that certainly suggests the possibility of finding the ruins of a lost civilisation. And where there are ruins there may be treasure.

They set off down the Rio Tapajos. The locals warn them that they are headed into forbidden territory. If they hear the drums their fate is sealed.

The journey down the river provides plenty of danger and excitement - alligators, tribesmen shooting poisoned arrows at them, strange bloodcurdling screams from the forest, and tracks that are hard to interpret as being the tracks of any living animals.

Of course they do find a city, but it’s no ruin. The city of Troyana is run by people who appear to be Freemasons, of a sort. Or perhaps they follow a system that was to some extent the origin of Freemasonry. The city has been there for six thousand years.

It’s not Atlantis, but some of the inhabitants were originally from Atlantis.

It’s a utopia of sorts. Perhaps you could call it a flawed utopia. It has a definite dark side.

They are welcomed by a guy named Nahum. He happens to have three very beautiful granddaughters, a fact of keen interest to the young Americans.

Are the four Americans prisoners or guests? They’re not certain. Do the rulers of Troyana have friendly or unfriendly intentions? That is also uncertain.

For the scientifically inclined narrator, Lieutenant Duncan, there is much of interest. We get a certain amount of technobabble, reflecting the technological obsessions of 1930 - radio, a kind of television, unlocking the power of the atom. The city is largely automated, but there is an underclass who may no slaves but they certainly appear to live in conditions of forced servitude. Those who rule the city are enlightened, in some ways.

The Americans witness a religious ritual which reminds them of rituals of the ancient world, and that ritual is where the trouble starts.

It’s an entertaining story with some decent world-building. Perhaps some of the action scenes could have been a bit more exciting.

The most interesting aspect of the novel is a certain ambiguity in the way this lost city is described, and in the view of the young adventurers towards this lost civilisation. And some ambiguity on the part of the city-dwellers towards these outsiders. There’s also some ambiguity about the intentions of our four heroes. Do they seek merely to enrich themselves?

The ending leaves some questions unanswered. It suggests that Meek was keeping his options open in case he decided to write a sequel, and in fact in 1932 he did just that. It’s called Troyana and if I ever come across a copy I’ll probably pick it up.

The Drums of Tapajos isn’t one of the great lost civilisation tales but it’s a solid adventure. Recommended, especially if (like me) you just can’t get enough of the lost world genre.

Ice City of the Gorgon

Ice City of the Gorgon is a science fiction novel by Richard S. Shaver (1907-1975) and Chester S. Geier (1921-1990), originally published in Amazing Stories in 1948.

As well as being science fiction this is also a lost world tale, one of my favourite genres.

A US Navy maritime patrol aircraft is engaged in a search in the Antarctic. A similar aircraft was reported missing a few days earlier. There is little hope of finding the two missing crew members alive but Lieutenant Rick Stacey and Lieutenant jg Phil Tobin are determined to try. They find the wreckage of the missing aircraft. No-one could have survived such a crash. And then Stacey’s plane suffers engine failure. It seems that Stacey and Tobin are destined for an icy grave as well. They do however manage to make an emergency landing.

And they find something very odd. A series of pillars, which they initially assume are pillars of ice. In the distance is what looks like a city. And inside the pillars are people. The first pillar they come to contains a beautiful naked girl. She has been chained. The other pillars all contain people as well.

The pillars are not made of ice but of some mysterious transparent substance. The most startling thing of all is that the people inside the pillars are still alive.

Things get stranger. A huge disembodied head appears, with snake-like protuberances. Rick Stacey knows his Greek mythology well enough for the similarities to the Gorgon to occur to him. And he’s on the right track. Rick and Phil are imprisoned in pillars as well, and Rick discovers that he communicate telepathically with the beautiful naked girl. She’s a princess. Her name is Verla. Rick realises that he’s going to fall hopelessly in love with her.

That disembodied head really was the origin of the Gorgon legend, but it is not of this world.

Then the high priestess Koryl appears. She’s just as gorgeous as Verla, except that she’s evil. And she clearly intends to seduce poor Rick. There’s a major power struggle going on in the city, and it’s complicated. There’s Verla, there’s Koryl, there’s Koryl’s lover Zarduc and there’s the Gorgon and they all have their own agendas.

Maybe it would be more sensible for Rick and Phil to try to escape. Their plane is still operational. But it’s not every day that a guy like Rick meets a stunning nude princess and it has an effect on him. He has to help her. Which means getting mixed up in that power struggle. The most difficult thing will be to prevent Koryl from enticing him into her bed.

Rick is a fairy standard pulp hero type and most of the characters are pretty much stock characters.

The style is pulpy and breathless, which is fine by me. The pacing is pleasingly brisk.

There’s nothing terribly startling here although the use of Greek mythology references is clever enough. But you have a brave hero, a beautiful virtuous princess in distress, a beautiful evil high priestess, a frightening monster, an exotic setting, a lost city, a labyrinth of tunnels under the city, a portal between dimensions, flying bubble cars, swordplay, knife fights, plenty of action and mayhem, a bit of sexiness. With those ingredients any halfway decent author could hardly go wrong, and Geier and Shaver are clearly quite competent. The result is lots of fun.

I liked Ice City of the Gorgon. Recommended.

Ice City of the Gorgon has been re-issued by Armchair Fiction in one of their excellent two-novel paperback editions, paired with Lester Del Rey’s When the World Tottered.

Henry Kuttner 's Crypt-City of the Deathless One

Henry Kuttner (1915-1958) was a successful American pulp writer who was married to an even more celebrated pulp writer, Catherine L. Moore, with whom he often collaborated. Kuttner’s novella Crypt-City of the Deathless One was published in 1943 in Planet Stories (an extraordinarily good pulp magazine). The novella is a science fiction tale, with just a hint of zombies.

Ed Garth is drinking himself to death in a seedy bar on Ganymede, one of the moons of Jupiter. He gets an offer from a man named Brown, an offer he can’t refuse. In fact Garth will accept any offer that will provide him with money to buy liquor. He will be acting as a guide to an expedition to the Black Forest on Ganymede.

No sane person would accept this offer. This will be an illegal expedition. And no Earthman has ever entered the Black Forest and come out alive. No Earthman, apart from Ed Garth.

Ganymede was once home to an incredibly advanced civilisation, a civilisation long gone. All that remains is a vast collection of machines and robots and no-one has ever been able to figure out how to make them work. There is rumoured to be a lost city of this ancient civilisation deep in the Black Forest. Garth figures that Brown’s expedition is tying to find the secret of the power source used by the ancient civilisation. They are rumoured to have discovered the secret of atomic power (this was written in 1943 when atomic power was still science fiction).

The secret of the power source would be a fabulous prize since Earth is rapidly running out of power sources. Unless the secret of atomic power can be unlocked civilisation on Earth will collapse.

There may be another secret in that lost city. One just as important, and much more important personally to Ed Garth. That city may hold the key to a cure for the Silver Plague that is ravaging the Earth’s population. That’s the secret Ed Garth, Doc Willard and Moira were looking for five years earlier. Garth was the only survivor of that expedition and he brought back with home a horrible memory. The memory is horrible because it is so vague. One of the many reasons nobody goes into the Black Forest is the poison released by the noctoli plant, a poison which strips a man of his memories and his will. He becomes little more than a zombie.

Garth has built up an immunity to the noctoli poison and he thinks he has a method of protecting others from it but the method is far from fool-proof. If it doesn’t work then this illegal expedition will be in a lot of trouble.

That’s without taking into account the other horrors of the Black Forest, horrors so well camouflaged that you don’t know they’re there until it’s too late. Ed Garth knows the nature of these horrors. Entering the Black Forest with Ed Garth as a guide would be an insane risk, but entering that forest without him would be simple suicide. The secrets hidden in the lost city of the ancients justify an insane risk.

The journey proves to be just the nightmare that Ed Garth expected but turning back would be more dangerous than going on.

Garth isn’t sure if he’s happy that archaeologist Paula Trent is part of the expedition. She reminds him of Moira, and Moira is the subject of another of his personal nightmares.

What’s cool about this book is that there’s plenty of excitement but hardly any violence - the threats come mostly not from bad guys but from the deadly flora and fauna of Ganymede. Ganymede is not a nice world. Kuttner displays plenty of imagination in throwing fresh horrors at Ed Garth. There’s a nice atmosphere of doom as more and more things go wrong.

This is a kind of lost world story and it obeys most of the conventions of that genre.

The ending is not the ending you expect but it’s highly effective.

A very entertaining tale. Highly recommended.

Jack Williamson's The Alien Intelligence

The Alien Intelligence is a short novel by American science fiction writer Jack Williamson (1908-2006). The title suggests some kind of first contact or alien invasion story but this story in fact belongs to the lost world or lost civilisation genre, a genre to which I’m peculiarly addicted. The Alien Intelligence was published in the July and August 1929 issues of the Pulp Wonder Stories making this one of his very very early published works.

A young American doctor named Fowler has travelled to Perth, Australia to begin his medical practice. On the voyage to Australia he had befriended an older man, Dr Horace Austen, a radiologist, archaeologist and explorer.

Austen departs for the arid wastes on the Great Victoria Desert in search of the Mountains of the Moon about which he seems to have some theories. Nothing is heard from Austen for months until a radio message is picked up. The message is cryptic but it is clear to Fowler that his friend is in need of assistance. Being an adventurous young man Fowler sets off for the Mountains of the Moon to find the things referred to in that odd radio message - the ladder, the Silver Lake and Melvar of the Crystal City. He takes several guns and an enormous supply of ammunition with him, and he’ll need them.

Fowler finds the ladder which allows him to ascend an otherwise unclimbable pinnacle of rock. He discovers the nature of the Mountains of the Moon - a vast crater many miles in diameter, the bottom of the crater lying well below sea level.

He encounters the terrifying red streaks of light which seem to be searching the crater, and he finds that in the middle of the crater is a city atop a vast pinnacle of rock. It is the crystal city of Astran, built of diamonds, emeralds and rubies. Astran is inhabited by fair-skinned fair-haired people who seem strangely primitive. Despite living in a city that is clearly evidence of a very advanced civilisation they do not even seem to have mastered the art of kindling fire.

He meets the beautiful blonde Melvar, a young woman who seems to posses an intelligence and nobility of spirit far above that of most of her people. But Fowler and Melvar are in great danger in Astran, having aroused the wrath of the priests. They flee the city to go in search of Horace Austen and to solve the mysteries of the fluorescent Silver Lake, the Purple Ones and those terrifying bars of red light.

There are plenty of mysteries for Fowler to solve. Are the people of Astran the decadent descendants of a once-great civilisation or was Astran built by some other civilisation? How many other civilisations inhabit the great crater? Why does the Silver Lake bring death? How many of the wonders of this land (such as the pillar of silver in the sky) are natural phenomena? Is Fowler right in suspecting that he’s in the presence of both great intelligence and great evil? Is this intelligence human, is it a thing of this earth, is it something supernatural or unfathomably alien?

Of course there’s romance as well as adventure. Fowler falls hopelessly in love with Melvar.

This is the work of a very young man but it has the imaginative sweep and epic qualities that make Jack Williamson’s 1930s space operas so entertaining.

Fowler is a typical adventure story hero, brave and determined and with a strong streak of idealism. Melvar is a pretty typical heroine - she’s sweet and gentle but she’s resourceful and she learns to handle a gun rather skilfully.

This short novel obeys most of the conventions of the lost world genre (which were well and truly established by this time) but gives them a bit of a science fictional twist. Setting the story in Australia rather than South America or Africa or Asia was a nice touch.

The lost world genre was extraordinarily popular from 1882 (when H. Rider Haggard wrote King Solomon's Mines) until the 1930s. It gradually faded because, unfortunately, there were no longer any unexplored parts of the globe left to make such stories plausible. This has in my opinion left a tragic gap in the human imagination. Somehow science fiction tales of adventures on other planets have never quite managed to fill the gap. We lost something precious when the planet ceased to have unexplored corners.

The Alien Intelligence is an impressive effort by a 21-year-old writer and it’s a fine tale of adventure. Recommended, and if you’re a lost world fan I’d be inclined to bump it up into the highly recommended category.

Armchair Fiction have paired this title with Into the Fourth Dimension by Ray Cummings in a two-novel paperback edition.

The Citadel of Fear

Gertrude Barrows Bennett (1884-1948) had a very brief career writing for the pulps from around 1917 to around 1919. At the time her work was widely praised by luminaries such as A. Merritt. Most of her fantasy/science fiction/weird fiction was published under the pseudonym Francis Stevens. She seems for some reason to have stopped writing in 1919. After that she disappears into complete obscurity. Until recently even the date of her death was unknown.

Her best-known novel, The Citadel of Fear, was reprinted in 1952 and her reputation slowly revived. She is now considered to be one of the most important female writers of fantasy of her era. The Citadel of Fear is a lost world story and that happens to be one of my favourite genres. The Citadel of Fear was originally serialised in the pulp magazine The Argosy in late 1918.

Two prospectors, a tall Irishman named Colin O’Hara (usually known as Boots) and a man named Kennedy, are lost in the desert somewhere in Mexico. Just when it looks hopeless for them they stumble upon a hidden valley. There’s not supposed to be any trace of civilisation anywhere in the vicinity but here is a fertile valley full of cultivated crops and a large hacienda.

There is something slightly odd about all this. The owner of the hacienda is not Mexican but a Norwegian-American and he gives the impression of being just a trifle secretive.

In fact the two prospectors haven’t just stumbled into a hidden valley, they have discovered a whole lost civilisation. A Pre-Columbian Mesoamerican culture, with vast temples and cities. And (of most interest to Kennedy) gold. This is the legendary land of Tlapallan. And they’ve also blundered into a power struggle between the priests of Quetzalcoatl and the priests of Nacoc-Yaotl.

While Kennedy is interested in the gold O’Hara is more interested in the moth girl. What gets Kennedy into trouble is not the gold but witnessing a religious ritual, something forbidden to outsiders. What gets O’Hara into trouble is a combination of his fascination for the moth girl, his natural chivalry and his impetuosity. These two outsiders could unwittingly start a civil war. A civil war that could involve gods taking sides.

There are some nice touches to this lost world, such as the lake. I won’t spoil things by telling you what’s strange about the lake. And the light is strange too. As in the best examples of this genre the author creates a lost world that really does feel odd and alien.


It’s only the first half of the story that takes place in Mexico. Then the scene switches to the United States, many years later, but the story is far from finished. There are monsters loose. Are they human or animal or maybe even supernatural? And there’s another strange other-worldly girl. Not the moth girl, but with the same ethereal beauty and the same oddness. She’s quite mad. At least that’s what O’Hara is told. He doesn’t seem to care, although he doesn’t really know why he’s drawn to her. Is there some memory at the back of his mind?

The latter part of the story, even without the exotic setting of the first half, has plenty of strangeness and it gets stranger. O’Hara has no idea why he has suddenly become caught up in such inexplicable and disturbing events. Again there’s an ambiguity - is this story science fiction or fantasy? Is O’Hara dealing with gods or men, with monsters or ghosts or science gone very very wrong?

He’s certainly dealing with evil, and possibly madness. A house of secrets which should have stirred some memories but perhaps not his memories.

There’s plenty of danger and action (this is after all pulp fiction), there’s some romance with a touch of weirdness and there’s some fairly visceral horror. There is at times just a slight Lovecraftian tinge although at this stage Lovecraft had only just started his weird fiction writing career so it’s more a case of Bennett and Lovecraft responding to similar literary influences.

The Citadel of Fear is a fine example of the lost world genre and it’s not surprising that it attracted the admiration of A. Merritt who would in the ’20s and ’30s explore similar territory. Highly recommended.

Henry Slesar’s The Secret of Marracott Deep

Henry Slesar’s novella The Secret of Marracott Deep was originally published in the July 1957 issue of the science fiction pulp magazine Fantastic. It’s been recently reprinted by Armchair Fiction in their series of pulp science fiction double novel paperback, paired with  Mark Clifton’s Pawn of the Black Fleet.

Henry Slesar (1927-2002) was an American writer who wrote science fiction, detective stories and thrillers as well as having a very successful career as a television writer.

As The Secret of Marracott Deep opens Burt Holrood and his new bride Jessie have just arrived in Hawaii where they are to spend their honeymoon. But Jessie is behaving oddly. Why would a new bride tell her husband that she’d like to spend some time alone? Burt takes refuge in the bar where he meets British oceanographer Dr Percival Nichols. They are having a quiet drink when they hear screams. It is Jessie! Burt rushes down to the beach to find his wife being menaced by - a gigantic lobster! Not just a particularly big lobster but one bigger than a man.

The lobster is after Jessie again on the following day. Burt figures it must be a mutation caused by atomic testing but don’t worry, the real answer is not so obvious or so boring. Dr Nichols is not convinced but he knows there are all kinds of strange things at the bottom of the ocean in places like the Marracott Deep.

A clue is provided by a Hawaiian reporter. Perhaps it’s no coincidence that the lobster seems to be targeting young Mrs Holrood. But what possible connection can a nice young woman from Los Angeles have with oversized crustaceans?

Dr Nichols, being an oceanographer, is a scuba diver. He suggests Burt might like to learn scuba diving. Since he’s spending his honeymoon with a wife who wants to be alone Burt has more free time on his hands than he would have wished for so he agrees. He gets a little over-confident and dives deeper than he’d intended to and he finds something even more startling than giant lobsters. Something that may threaten Civilisation As We Know It.

Burt wants to save civilisation but he’s even more determined to save his wife and she’s certainly in great danger although I’m not going to reveal why that is.

This is a pulp story so there’s no point in getting too worried about details like scientific plausibility. If you accept the story for what it is then it’s quite a bit of fun and there’s  plenty of action. There are other sea monsters besides giant lobsters and there’s something much more threatening than mere sea monsters at the bottom of it.

Slesar’s prose is serviceable enough and he knows how to maintain the right kind of pulpy breathless excitement.

I’m not going to claim that The Secret of Marracott Deep is a great story but it does belong to an interesting sub-genre that I find rather appealing - the unknown terror from the deep science fiction story. It’s a sub-genre that includes John Wyndham’s excellent The Kraken Wakes and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s often overlooked 1923 classic The Maracot Deep (which presumably inspired the title of Slesar’s story). Both these books clearly influenced Slesar’s novella but it’s not by any means a mere recycling of exactly the same ideas.

The ending is a bit rushed but I think it works and it has the right impact.

The Secret of Marracott Deep has mysteries in the deepest depths of the ocean, some intrigue involving infiltration of key scientific organisations and it has a beautiful Woman in Peril. It’s fun in its own way. Worth a look.

Will N. Harben's The Land of the Changing Sun

The Land of the Changing Sun is a lost world science fiction novel originally published in 1894.

The author, William N. Harben (1858-1919), was an American whose literary output was rather varied. It included science fiction, religious tales, detective stories, rural comedic sketches and what might be termed early social problem novels.

The Land of the Changing Sun is the tale of two adventurers, an American named Johnston and an Englishman named Thorndyke, whose balloon is lost somewhere over the Atlantic. They are fortunate to reach an island, but this island is so small and so remote that their long-term prospects seem grim. Then they are rescued, but in a very surprising way. They are taken aboard a highly advanced submarine of mysterious origins. It takes them to the land of Alpha, which they will soon discover is located deep beneath the Earth. Alpha has its own sun, which changes colours throughout the day (hence the book’s title) and has a wholly unique climate which never changes at all.

The kingdom of Alpha is very advanced technologically. Socially it’s a little disturbing. It’s too perfect. The Alphans practise eugenics in a rather ruthless manner. Everyone is physically perfect. The men are tall and athletic, the women are stunningly beautiful.

Of course now that our heroes are in Alpha the question is whether they will ever be allowed to leave. The king seems welcoming but the Alphans do insist on physical perfection. Will our heroes be able to measure up to such exacting standards and if not will they still be welcome?

There’s no doubting the physical perfection of the king’s daughter and so it’s hardly surprising that Thorndyke seems inclined to fall for her.

Like Jules Verne Harben takes technologies which existed at the time and extrapolates from them. Submarines existed in 1894 but they were still crude experimental types. Electricity was is use so Harben assumes that it will be used for just about everything in the future. Evolution was still big news and social Darwinism was gaining a following, and eugenics was becoming a matter of debate. The telegraph and telephone were making long-distance communication practicable so Harben in his novel assumes that it will be possible to transmit images over long distances. Motion pictures were not yet a practical proposition but in 1894 experiments were already being made, and motion pictures of a sort exist in Alpha. Airships already existed and the idea of heavier-than-air flight was attracting interest so the sophisticated flying machines in the novel would have seemed vaguely plausible.

The land of Alpha itself is inhabited by and was created by humans who left the world on the surface several centuries earlier. It is an artificial world. It is in fact a new Creation, the work of men who saw themselves as perhaps the equal of God. It is significant that Alpha is a world without religion. It is a materialistic technological society run along utilitarian lines. The greatest good of the greatest number, that sort of thing. There is nothing deliberately cruel about the Alphans (cruelty would be irrational and unscientific), it’s just that sometimes in order to ensure the greatest good of the greatest number sacrifices have to be made.

Harben’s intention is clearly to take a somewhat acerbic look at the logical consequences of materialism and utilitarianism, and he does so from what is clearly a Christian perspective.

The strength of the book is the ingenuousness of the author’s technological extrapolations. The changing sun itself is a fine example. I won’t explain the details - it’s better to discover them as Thorndyke and Johnston discover them. Harben is also quite good on the social implications of technology - the king is essentially a decent and dedicated man but the technology at his disposal does give him a degree of social control over his subjects and there are hints that maybe this is not entirely a good thing.

This is not exactly a dystopian novel. The Alphans are pleasant and generally happy and their king genuinely desires their welfare. It’s more of a flawed utopia. Science can create a potentially perfect society but do we really want to live in a perfect society? And this perfection comes at a price.

Don’t expect much in the way of characterisation. Thorndyke and Johnston as personalities are utterly conventional heroes, the most interesting thing about them being that they’re a bit more ineffectual than most late Victorian or Edwardian heroes. The princess is your stock standard princess, beautiful and noble. The king is perhaps marginally more interesting as he grows to doubt his ability to keep everything under control.

There is adventure here. There are no battles or fistfights or gun duels. The battles are against nature, and to some extent against nature modified by human actions. But there is excitement at the climax.

The Land of the Changing Sun is by no means in the top rank of lost world stories but it is an interesting one with a genuinely interesting artificial world. Worth a look for lost world fans.

Otis Adelbert Kline's Jan of the Jungle

Otis Adelbert Kline (1891–1946) was an American pulp writer in the mould of Edgar Rice Burroughs. In fact he is sometimes dismissed as a mere imitator of Burroughs. Whatever sub-genres Burroughs worked in (or often invented) you could be pretty sure that Kline would soon be working in as well. Like Burroughs he wrote sword-and-planet adventures set on Mars and Venus, he wrote lost world stories and he wrote jungle adventure stories. An imitator he may have been, but at the time he was considered to be possibly Burroughs’ most serious rival in those genres.

Jan of the Jungle, published in 1931, is a jungle adventure tale about a boy raised by chimpanzees, which certainly does sound remarkably close to Burroughs’ most famous creation, Tarzan.

Jan is the son of a millionaire. For complicated reasons he is kidnapped as a baby by the evil mad scientist Dr Bracken and raised by a female chimpanzee. He can understand the primitive language of chimpanzees but he has no knowledge of any human languages. Since the book takes place in South America you may be about to object that there are no chimpanzees in South America but Kline has that objection neatly covered.

He escapes and has various adventures in the jungles of South America, with Dr Bracken pursuing him remorselessly. He also meet Ramona and falls in love with her. We will later discover that her personal history is as strange as Jan’s.

So far it sounds like an exact Tarzan clone but things are about to change. Jan chances upon the entrance to an underground river which takes him to a hidden valley. Jan of the Jungle is about to become a lost world tale.

At this point Kline decides to abandon any pretence at plausibility. The hidden valley contains not only a Mesoamerican lost civilisation but a huge variety of extinct animals, ranging from species extinct for thousands of years (such as sabre-toothed cats) to those that have been extinct for tens of millions of years (such as the stegasaurus). No explanation is offered for the survival of either the lost civilisation or the extinct animals. Not that it matters - if one demanded strict plausibility of lost world takes one would end with no more than a tiny handful to choose from.

There are two main sub-plots, the Jan sub-plot which concerns his parentage and Dr Bracken’s many attempts to recapture him, and the Ramona sub-plot which concerns her parentage and an attempt to kidnap her. Kline also at least pays lip service to the “boy caught between two worlds” theme but with an added twist since Jan is caught between three worlds - the modern world, the world of the jungle and the world of the hidden valley. To Jan it seems like the latter two are more likely to bring him contentment but then there’s the question of Ramona.

Dr Bracken is obviously a serious villain but in the hidden valley Jan will find another equally dangerous and treacherous enemy.

The important thing is that there’s enough here to satisfy the tastes of both jungle adventure and lost world fans and if you’re a straightforward fan of action and adventure you’ll find both those commodities in generous quantities.

Now if this had been an Edgar Rice Burroughs story there would have been a lot more attention paid to making the lost world more complex and more interesting and to explaining how it actually works. It would have been a much more fully developed lost world. Kline however has no such ambitions. He’s content to write an exciting pulp adventure yarn.

In other words there’s a reason Edgar Rice Burroughs is still a household name and Otis Adalbert Kline isn’t.

That’s not to say that there’s anything wrong with Jan of the Jungle. As long as you accept its pulp limitations it’s enjoyable. If you’re a Tarzan fan and you’ve read all the Tarzan stories or if you’re a lost world buff like me you’ll want to check this one out. Not great but still fun.

The Finding of Lot's Wife by Alfred Clark

The Finding of Lot's Wife is a lost world adventure tale. The author was a certain Alfred Clark, of whom I know nothing whatsoever. I am more than a little addicted to lost world stories and this is a rather obscure example of the genre.

While the book was apparently published in 1896 there is some evidence that the events it purports to describe happened somewhat earlier. There is what appears to be a reference to the Crimean War as a contemporary event.

Hal Aylward is wealthy young Englishman who takes it into his head to go off travelling in the Middle East. He persuades his friend Noel Yorke, an artist, to accompany him. They eventually end up in Palestine where they hear a story that intrigues them. There is supposedly a Greek Orthodox monastery built on an inaccessible site in a hidden valley, a monastery that has not been visited by, or even seen by, any outsiders for centuries. The monks are reputed to live to an incredibly advanced age and to have lost the power of speech. They are fed, so the story goes, by ravens. There’s a suggestion that there is some connection between the monastery and the Biblical tale of Lot and his wife fleeing from God’s destruction of the Cities of the Plain.

It’s obviously a tall story but Noel is captivated by it and insists that they set out at once to find the lost monastery of St Lot.

They are deserted by their Arab guides but, suffering considerably from thirst and hunger,  are taken in by a wandering Bedouin tribe, the Beni Azaleh. The tribe has suffered misfortunes of its own. Some rather strange circumstances lead Aylward and Yorke to a remote valley and there, sure enough, is a monastery perched atop a pillar of rock.

This is indeed the monastery of St Lot but the monks are not unusually old nor have they lost the power of speech, nor are they dependent upon ravens for their food. It seems like a fairly ordinary monastery, except for its extreme isolation. The big surprise is that there are two guests already staying at the monastery, an American professor and his daughter (the daughter being disguised as a young boy).

There are however odd things happening at the monastery.Some odd things had also happened among the Beni Azaleh. The sheikh’s son had disappeared, and the sheikh had gone off to search for him, down a narrow defile in the rocks from which no traveler had ever been known to return. The sheikh did return, but at the cost of the loss of his reason. These various strange happenings are connected to the legend mentioned earlier. The two young English travellers will make the same descent that the sheikh had made, with frightening and horrible results.

I’m not sure if I’d call this an explicitly Christian adventure tale but obviously Christianity does play an important rôle. Of course in 1896 a writer would presume that most of his readers would be at least nominal Christians and would be reasonably familiar with Biblical tales, such as the fate of Lot’s wife. I don’t think a reader would actually need to be a Christian to appreciate this story.

There is some action, there’s a minor battle and there’s plenty of danger. The country itself is a bigger danger than any human foes, especially in the Valley of Madness.

The Arabs are treated in an even-handed manner. El Jezzar is certainly a true villain but the young Englishmen will owe their lives to the mullah of the Beni Azaleh who refuses to countenance cold-blooded murder. The story has two heroines, one an American girl and the other a Bedouin girl.

There’s some effective atmosphere in this story. The horrors of thirst, hunger, isolation and madness are palpable.

The Finding of Lot's Wife is perhaps a lost world story for lost world completists like myself but it’s a fairly entertaining book. If you are a lost world fanatic you’ll certainly want to add it to your reading list. Recommended.