On Reptoids from Alpha Draconis

In keeping with my time-honored tradition of writing a blog post whenever I encounter a network of ideas connected in any way, shape, or form with speculative fiction, but also in keeping with my equally time-honored tradition of not commenting on current affairs, I hereby commence a post about

THE REPTOIDS AMONG US

without explaining what, precisely, has motivated me to pursue this particular avenue of discovery.

I will tell you what set me upon the path, however.

One day at the office, whilst devouring the salami sandwich, granola bar, and green apple that constitute my lunch, I happened to watch a Mental Floss YouTube video about weird conspiracy theories. Among the factoids presented therein is the assertion that 12 million Americans believe that shape-shifting lizard people secretly hold the reins of world government. This is according to Public Policy Polling.

Now, if a survey company called me to ask whether I believe shape-shifting lizard people are in control of the government, I would respond with an enthusiastic YES, YES, I DO STRONGLY BELIEVE THAT. And surely I'm not alone in my love of trolling the strangers who call my house to ask stupid questions. So, perhaps the number is a little misleading. Still, there must be some truly devout lizard-people believers, right? A little googling (not for the faint of heart in this case) would seem to confirm that, yes, there are some believers out there.

The leading proponent is one David Icke, British ex-footballer and conspiracy theorist. He asserts that reptilians (or reptoids, as I prefer to call them) from Alpha Draconis have been selectively breeding the human race since its inception, creating the Babylonian Brotherhood, a hybrid race of Illuminati who now control the world. He suggests that the aliens first came to earth in search of monatomic gold, which enhances the capacity of their nervous systems ten thousandfold.

Hm. A race of superintelligent extraterrestrials who inhabited earth long before man's coming and now treat the human race as a pet project and secretly orchestrate events from behind the scenes? Remind you of anything? Here we have the connection with my blog's purported focus. It has been suggested that the Reptoid Hypothesis owes a large debt to the writings of H. P. Lovecraft, Robert E. Howard, and Clark Ashton Smith; they, in their turn, took much of their material from nineteenth-century theosophical writings on Atlantis and Lemuria.

The idea that disguised aliens secretly control everything of course puts me in mind of John Carpenter's They Live (1988). I love eighties sci-fi actioners, and They Live is one of the most enjoyable. The screenplay was written by Carpenter under the pseudonym Frank Armitage, an allusion to Dr. Henry Armitage of "The Dunwich Horror." Like most Carpenter assays, They Live has a B-movie feel, but it's also hilarious, sharply satirical, and eerily contemporary. It takes place in a not-so-distant future when the middle class is being squeezed out of existence, the underemployed live in shantytowns on vacant lots, racial discord and police brutality are on the rise, and a media-induced malaise seems to have overcome the human race. One day, a down-and-outer (played by pro wrestler Rowdy Roddy Piper) discovers a pair of cheap-looking sunglasses that let him see a whole new reality. Turns out the rich and powerful are all aliens or people who have sold out to the aliens. This leads to one of the greatest and cheesiest one-liners in action sci-fi history: "I have come here to chew bubblegum and kick ass...and I'm all out of bubblegum."

Now, it's one of my little pleasures in life to post extremely weird links and opaque commentary on Facebook to see if my aunts, cousins, in-laws, coworkers, and high school friends will think I've gone off my rocker. (I used to go in for politics, but eventually you learn what everybody is going to say, so why bother?) So I recently posted the above picture of George W. Bush, Tony Blair, and Queen Elizabeth II as reptoids. Imagine my surprise when, immediately afterward, the "people also posted" thing popped up with three stories about...Donald Trump.

Let me pause here to assure whomever might be reading this that I, for one, welcome our new reptilian overlords.

Now, what's interesting to me about They Live (which is awesome and you should watch soon if you haven't yet) is that it appeared shortly before David Icke began his career as New Age prophet. Was it an influence on his ideas? Icke is also supposed to have been influenced by 1940s non-fiction writer Mark Doreal, who took some of his ideas from Robert E. Howard. So apparently there's been a strange cross-fertilization between weird horror and cranky fringe conspiracy theories. Each influences the other; both grow together.

For all that, though, there's a distinct psychological line between the weird horror fan and the wild-eyed conspiracy theorist. For the former, there's a big element of play, of fun. The latter is in deadly earnest. I would even assert that the fan is the unlikeliest person to go down that rabbit hole. They're inoculated by their sense of humor.

But what does make someone start thinking that the celebrities and politicians they see on TV and in the news are all reptoids in disguise? That, I'm afraid, is a question above my pay grade, so I'll just conclude with a word from our sponsor:

ADDENDUM: D'oh! While writing this, I forgot to mention another ridiculous eighties movie making use of the same idea: the inimitable The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension (1984), which pits humans and Black Lectroids against the evil Red Lectroids of Planet 10. Less pointed, much weirder, with an awesome cast. I'll have to start reviewing fantasy and sci-fi schlock from the eighties sometime soon.

Comic Book Adventures

So, I've been reading me some Batman comics. Surprised? I don't put them down in my "Books I've Read This Year" list because I have my dignity, you know? Anyway, it's been a very, very long time since I read an actual honest-to-goodness comic book. But I like Batman so much that it seemed high time to delve deeply into the actual, um, literature. Graphic literature.

So far I've focused on the iconic entries of the eighties and nineties. I think my favorite is Year One (1987) by Frank Miller, David Mazzucchelli, et al. I love the way it drops the Batman story into the gritty urban reality of a Scorsese film. It was obviously inspired by Taxi Driver at several points. It also reminds me of Serpico. The art is awesome: clear, dynamic, and distinctly noirish, with dark, muted colors and free-flowing hand lettering. I much prefer it to the polished, digitized look of more recent comics. And the part where Batman battles the police in a bombed building and calls bats to make his getaway is super cool.

I also think Frank Miller's The Dark Knight Returns (1986) is really great. It cracks me up, actually. With its over-the-top TV segments and epic brutality, it reminds me of Paul Verhoven's satirical sci-fi actioners, especially RoboCop (of which I'm rather fond). Its Batman is like a humongous, creeptastic Dirty Harry; the girl Robin looks about the size of his thigh. I know it's a polarizing comic. Personally I don't care much for the art. But as for the general plot, I think that Batman and Superman are big enough to take a little satire. Some people need to take a chill pill. It's got a storyline of almost mythic proportions, with tank battles, atom bomb detonations, apocalyptic showdowns, and Batman retreating to the underground with a creepy race of mutant followers at the end.

Another fave is The Long Halloween (1997) by Jeph Loeb, Tim Sale, et al. It's got more of a slow-burning mystery plot, using the origin story of Two-Face to describe the descent of Gotham from merely crime-ridden to downright maniacal. The story, though suffering a bit from serialization (and the apparent need to work just about every single villain into the plot), is supremely engrossing. And the expressionistic art, with its big pools of black, snaky pen lines, and dynamic linear perspective, is simply beautiful. Every page is a joy to behold.

One thing that gets on my nerves a little bit is its constant use of one-liners from the Godfather movies. Do it once or twice, and it's a sly allusion. More than that, and it gets cute. All the time, and I start thinking that maybe the writer hasn't done all that much homework on the Mob. Halloween also takes a lot from The Silence of the Lambs. In general, I've noticed that comics are much more open to lifting material from mainstream sources than, say, books or movies. Not that that's a bad thing, as William Blake says in my sidebar. But it has to be done artfully.

Still, The Long Halloween is a monumental piece of work, and the chief inspiration for what's probably the greatest superhero movie ever made: Christopher Nolan's The Dark Knight.

A more recent entry that I've enjoyed, though not nearly so much, is Hush (2003) by Jeph Loeb, Jim Lee, et al. The art is beautiful, though so polished that I find it a bit boring at times. It does have lots of heaving bosoms, rippling muscles, and gritted teeth, if you like that sort of thing. The story is OK, too; it just suffers from expanded universe syndrome.

You see, unlike practically every other fanboy in the galaxy right now, I prefer my superhero stories to be self-contained. I avoid Marvel movies for that reason. They're like sitcom crossover episodes, or The Jetsons Meet the Flintstones. Ugh. To me it makes the superhero concept too familiar. I like Batman to exist in his own dark little universe, where you never quite lose the surprise and wonder that there is such a person as Batman. Bring Superman into it, and superhero-dom starts to feel like an exclusive yet chummy clubhouse.

But I do very much like Superman on his own turf. I'll probably delve into some of his comics before long, though I'm more familiar with them from of old. For me, Batman represents the mythologizing of hardboiled fiction and film noir, the melding of gothic horror with urban drama. Superman, on the other hand, seems to more akin to John Carter, Tarzan, and the supermen of early sci-fi. Both are inspirations in my own writing.

Oh, last but not least, I also read The Killing Joke (1988) by Alan Moore, Brian Bolland, & Co. A little sadistic for me, but I like the way it explores the weird love-hate relationship between Batman and the Joker. Its "origin story" for the Joker, presented through flashbacks in a delightfully noirish, nightmarish style, is distinctly underwhelming, but then again the Joker himself undercuts its reliability at the end of the comic. And the ending about as artful as they come. I mention this one mainly because the animated film, starring the voice talent of Mark Hamill, is soon to be released. I watched Batman: The Animated Series every day after school when I was in junior high, and, to me, Mark Hamill is the Joker. (Never knew it was him at the time, though.)

So, what's next? Do I venture into the New 52? I don't know if I'm ready for that yet, especially with all the dithering about DC has been doing lately. There are still a few titles from the eighties and nineties that I have my eye on.

D.O.A.

I can breathe and I can move, but I'm not alive because I took that poison, and nothing can save me.

I watch a lot of film noir. To some people, the term means trenchcoated detectives, laconic voiceovers, femmes fatales, and cigarette smoke. I think of it more as a directorial style, a style that uses harshly geometric, minimalistic (= dark) photography and unpityingly logical plots taking place beyond the boundaries of "normal" society to create an atmosphere of emotional detachment and alienation. Yes, chain-smoking dicks and dames figure largely in such films, but that's because the world they inhabit lends itself so readily to the style. Some of my favorite films noir don't involve detectives at all.

That includes D.O.A., a film that wasn't appreciated at the time of its release (1950) and isn't very well known today. It's in the public domain, and you can watch it at the Internet Archive, which no doubt has to do with its obscurity. Edmund O'Brien plays Frank Bigelow, an accountant and notary public who, months prior to the opening, notarized a seemingly innocuous transaction, a chance happening that sends him down a black rabbit-hole of madness and murder. Most films noir have a certain sense of predestination, but this one takes it a step further: it's narrated by a dead man.

Grim humor and dark irony punctuate Bigelow's nightmare urban odyssey. In confronting his nonsensical, undignified position (the human position), he seizes control of his destiny, loses all fear, and achieves a kind of justice, only to keel over in the film's final minutes. One of the last lines is the homicide captain's dispassionate "Call the morgue!"

D.O.A. has some corny elements toward the beginning, as many films noir do, but rapidly descends into darkness, madness, sweat, and grit. I appreciate it a little more every time I watch it. It also has an almost science-fictional feel, with a search for stolen iridium and a "luminous toxin" that glows in the dark. And it must have one of the best openings of any movie ever:

Bigelow: I want to report a murder.
Captain: Sit down. Where was this murder committed?
Bigelow: San Francisco, last night.
Captain: Who was murdered?
Bigelow: I was. 

Anyway, because this is my blog, and I can do whatever I like, here's some of my favorite stills:
 

The opening sequence. Bigelow marches through a dark police station.

"I want to report a murder."

Pamela Britten plays Paula, Bigelow's sweet but slightly clingy
secretary-girlfriend back home.

The madness begins: a San Francisco jive club.

"He's flipped. The music's drivin' him crazy." Meanwhile, the faceless
killer prepares the luminous toxin.

"You've got it, all right." A doctor confirms his diagnosis with a glowing
test tube. Bigelow has one day to live.

"I don't think you fully understand, Bigelow. You've been murdered."
Bigelow races down a crowded street. A neat sequence filmed without
permit, and without the bystanders' knowing what was happening.

Irony.

Now on the trail of his own killer, he journeys to Los Angeles, where he
encounters tart, unprofessional secretaries...

...and gun-toting models.

Soon he's getting shot at...

...and chasing phantom gunmen through abandoned warehouses.

Someone doesn't like him sticking his nose in.

But he's utterly fearless now. "He's not afraid," says Majak. "You can tell
from a man's eyes when he is afraid. Look at his eyes."

Chester, one of the creepiest henchmen I've seen. "That's the way I wanna
see you go, Bigelow...niiice and slooow."

But it's Chester who goes, in a drugstore shoot-out.

Beautiful on-site night photography.

The final interview with a not-so-grieving widow.

Surrounded by people but utterly alone.

Crawling on hands and knees to gain a few hours of life.

A few hours to go to the final confrontation at...

...the Bradbury Building, Los Angeles. Is this actually the exterior of the
Bradbury, though? I don't think so.

This, however, is clearly the interior. Recognize it? It's where the climax
of Blade Runner takes place. A lot of movies have been filmed there.

The faceless killer.

The final shot. "Better make it 'Dead on arrival.'"

The City in the Sea

The print edition of The King of Nightspore's Crown, the second book of my Antellus tetralogy, nears completion. I hope to have it out sometime in late July or early August. This works out perfectly, as my novelette "Salt and Sorcery" is due to appear at Beneath Ceaseless Skies in early August. Don't miss it!

But, to tide you over, here's some images. First we have the (tentative) front cover.

 

Then my personal favorite, the spine:

 

And the back cover:

 

In case you can't read it, here's the back pitch as it currently stands:

It has been one year since Keftu, the last phylarch of Arras, established an itinerant society of misfits in the bowels of Enoch, the rust-stained city of stone, mankind's omega. The end of all change is at hand, hastened by the machinations of the veiled warlock Zilla. What can one outcast warrior do to halt the slow slide into tepid chaos? Keftu is about to find out. His quest will take him from the crumbling tenements of Enoch to the black jungles of Ir. He will form alliances the like of which he would never have dreamed. In the end, he may lose his soul to gain...

THE KING OF NIGHTSPORE'S CROWN

Last but not least, here is the map, turned sideways, as you will have to turn it if you wish to consult it while reading the story:

However, I consider it sloppy writing to rely on extraneous objects like maps, and the attentive reader should be able to gather all relevant geographical details from the text. On the second or third reading, at least. Also, I'm always wanting to get into Rhûn and Harad when I read The Lord of the Rings, so it's possible that this map is not entirely adequate...

Rather than pontificate on the story's various influences and antecedents, as I am wont to do, I'll leave you with Edgar Allan Poe's "The City in the Sea," which provides a fitting epigraph.

THE CITY IN THE SEA 

Lo! Death has reared himself a throne 

In a strange city lying alone
Far down within the dim West,
Where the good and the bad and the worst and the best
Have gone to their eternal rest.
There shrines and palaces and towers
(Time-eaten towers that tremble not!)
Resemble nothing that is ours.
Around, by lifting winds forgot,
Resignedly beneath the sky
The melancholy waters lie. 

No rays from the holy heaven come down
On the long night-time of that town;
But light from out the lurid sea
Streams up the turrets silently—
Gleams up the pinnacles far and free—
Up domes—up spires—up kingly halls—
Up fanes—up Babylon-like walls—
Up shadowy long-forgotten bowers
Of sculptured ivy and stone flowers—
Up many and many a marvellous shrine
Whose wreathéd friezes intertwine
The viol, the violet, and the vine.
Resignedly beneath the sky
The melancholy waters lie.
So blend the turrets and shadows there
That all seem pendulous in air,
While from a proud tower in the town
Death looks gigantically down. 

There open fanes and gaping graves
Yawn level with the luminous waves;
But not the riches there that lie
In each idol's diamond eye—
Not the gaily-jewelled dead
Tempt the waters from their bed;
For no ripples curl, alas!
Along that wilderness of glass—
No swellings tell that winds may be
Upon some far-off happier sea—
No heavings hint that winds have been
On seas less hideously serene. 

But lo, a stir is in the air!
The wave—there is a movement there!
As if the towers had thrust aside,
In slightly sinking, the dull tide—
As if their tops had feebly given
A void within the filmy Heaven.
The waves have now a redder glow—
The hours are breathing faint and low—
And when, amid no earthly moans,
Down, down that town shall settle hence,
Hell, rising from a thousand thrones.
Shall do it reverence.

If you haven't yet, I hope you'll consider checking out Dragonfly, the first book in the series, which is available from Amazon.

A Frontispiece and Map for Nightspore

A possible frontispiece for my upcoming novel, The King of Nightspore's Crown:

I spiraled silently down through the night,
slipping in and out of the pyramid's glow.

Scratch drawing in India ink. Since the cover is so organic and curvilinear, I felt that something starkly geometrical and minimalistic was in order.

And here's a pencil sketch of the map. It shows all the small sea of Tethys, rather than just its northeastern corner, where the first installment played out. Obviously the lettering has yet to be worked into it.

 

The Tower of Bel stands in the middle of the sea, linked to the coast-long city by a web of jointed viaducts. The equator, which I haven't drawn, runs through the Tower. This should go without saying, since the Hanging Gardens of Narva (reached from the Tower via space elevator) are in geostationary orbit, and such an orbit must lie over the equator, at a height about equal to the earth's circumference. (There, I knew I didn't take all those physics courses for nothing.)

 

I've decided that the image needs to sit sideways on a single page, rather than be split across two facing pages. The latter expedient is often resorted to in paperbacks, but here seems particularly unsatisfactory, seeing as how everything in my map lines up on the central meridian. The sideways map is a compromise, too, but The Silmarillion features one, at any rate.

 

Anyhow, Enochites imagine the solar system as revolving like a Ferris wheel rather than a carousel, so I suspect that they'd be OK with this either way.

Here, for comparison, is a draft of the map that appeared in Dragonfly:

A Bit More Burroughs Art

As promised, here's some more wrap-around Edgar Rice Burroughs cover art. First we have a series of Ballantine editions printed in the sixties and seventies with paintings by Gino D'Achille. I bought them for a quarter apiece at our county library's book sale; no doubt some fortunate fellow townsman is in possession of the first three installments, a murrain seize him/her. I'm less enthusiastic about this art than I am about my Frazetta covers, but – what can I say? – I purchased them solely for the art. My favorite is probably the delightfully bizarre crab-people painting.

While each is more or less monochrome, they're in spectral order, ranging from red through purple, blue, green, yellow, orange, and back to red again. In fact – get ready, I'm about to blow your mind here – in fact, I say, a certain amount of transitional coloration on the left-hand side of each image leads me to conjecture that they're all actually part of a crazy super-long Edgar Rice Burroughs rainbow mural.

Here I've just stuck the covers together so that you can get a general idea of what I'm talking about. They don't quite line up at the edges, and skip space between successive covers here and there. Maybe they're from several panels rather than a single one. In some instances at least I seem to see a single horizon extending from one cover to the next. Searching around the Internet yields images that corroborate the idea without quite confirming it. Here's the artist's website, which makes me think, eh, maybe not, but it's still cool to think.

Finally, here's one wrap-around cover painting by Michael Whelan (copyright 1979). He's a well known fantasy artist – he also did a very creepy wrap-around painting for a volume of H. P. Lovecraft stories that I own – and you can see much better images of his various Burroughs illustrations by performing a judicious Google Image search. The Thuvia painting is my favorite, because, with its dusky, dusty golds and blues, it most closely resembles how I imagine Barsoom.

 

The original is even more beautiful that this mass-produced and rather trashy-looking cover would lead you to believe. But I'll leave it to you to find this out for yourself, and instead conclude by contemplating Thuvia of Ptarth soothing the savage banth, which, to my mind, would look just right airbrushed onto an old van.

The Lost Continent

How is it that, before this summer, I'd never read C. J. Cutcliffe Hyne's The Lost Continent: The Story of Atlantis? I'm glad to say that I've just corrected the omission. Published serially in 1899 and as a book in 1900, it bears the stamp of the best of H. Rider Haggard's novels, but stands alone in being set wholly within antediluvian times, apart from a ridiculous framing story that serves only to explain why the narrative begins and ends so abruptly.

The book seems not very well known or respected these days. E. F. Bleiler in The Encyclopedia of Fantasy dismisses it in one sentence as "a stodgy dynastic romance that is now occasionally laughable." This, in the article on Atlantis; neither Hyne nor his novel have their own entry, and they are not mentioned in the article on Lost Lands and Continents. This judgment seems unduly harsh. Drawing heavily on Ignatius L. Donnelly's "nonfictional" work, Atlantis: The Antediluvian World, published in 1882, it is a work of real power and imagination, and, one suspects, a major influence on the many pulp writers who explored prehistoric civilizations in their stories.

Hailed by Lin Carter and L. Sprague de Camp as the best Atlantis novel out there, The Lost Continent was rescued from obscurity through its publication in the Ballantine Adult Fantasy series. Here is a scan of my copy's cover, with wrap-around painting by Dean Ellis:

 

The story opens in the Yucatan (although, sadly, this setting receives only a cursory glance), but most of the action takes place in the lost continent itself. The narrator and protagonist is Deucalion (as in the Greek deluge myth), a successful viceroy and general called home by the beautiful, capricious, self-deified empress Phorenice. She intends him as her husband, a plan that ends in disaster, owing in part to Deucalion's extreme moral rigidity (in the Atlantean sense). The characters are stiff, the love-making awkward and underdeveloped, the plot strangely meandering. But if you want a good and robust late Victorian romance set against a backdrop of mythic splendor and prehistoric mystery, then look no further.

There's a sea-battle between solar-powered ships and plesiosaurs. There's a seductive empress who rides a colossal wooly mammoth through the streets of the capital. There's a labyrinthine palace in a giant pyramid lit by subterranean fires. There are secret passages. Superdrugs. Volcanoes. Premature burials. Pagan anathemas. Warrior priests. Hairy half-bestial invaders. Pterodactyls that swoop down to steal sacrificial victims. A doomsday escape vessel that seems a cross between the Ark of the Covenant, Noah's ark, and a seed bank.

The novel also shows a creative attention to weird little details, a quality often sadly lacking in later, more derivative fantasy. Consider, for instance, this grotesque description of Deucalion's lover, disinterred from the tomb where she has sat buried alive for nine years:

Her beauty was drawn and pale. Her eyes were closed, but so thin and transparent had grown the lids that one could almost see the brown of the pupil beneath them. Her hair had grown to inordinate thickness and length, and lay as a cushion behind and beside her head. [...] The nails of her fingers had grown to such a great length that they were twisted in spirals, and the fingers themselves and her hands were so waxy and transparent that the bony core upon which they were built showed itself beneath the flesh in plain dull outline. Her clay-cold lips were so white, that one sighed to remember the full beauty of their carmine. Her shoulders and neck had lost their comely curves, and made bony hollows now in which the dust of entombment lodged black and thickly.

Or again, the description of the superbly imagined ark:

A wonderful vessel was this Ark, now we were able to see it at leisure and intimately. Although for the first time now in all its centuries of life it swam upon the waters, it showed no leak or suncrack. Inside, even its floor was bone dry. That it was built from some wood, one could see by the grainings, but nowhere could one find suture or joint. The living timbers had been put in place and then grown together by an art which we have lost to-day, but which the Ancients knew with much perfection; and afterwards some treatment, which is also a secret of those forgotten builders, had made the wood as hard as metal and impervious to all attacks of the weather.  

In the gloomy cave of its belly were stored many matters. At one end, in great tanks on either side of central alley, was a prodigious store of grain. Sweet water was in other tanks at the other end. In another place were drugs and samples, and essences of the life of beasts; all these things being for use whilst the Ark roamed under the guidance of the Gods on the bosom of the deep. On all the walls of the Ark, and on all the partitions of the tanks and the other woodwork, there were carved in the rude art of bygone time representations of all the beasts which lived in Atlantis; and on these I looked with a hunter's interest, as some of them were strange to me, and had died out with the men who had perpetuated them in these sculptures.

At every point the author shows a predilection for grandiose adventure, but tempers it with an attention to visceral detail:

Blood flowed from the mammoth's neck where the spikes of the collar tore it, and with each drop, so did the tameness seem to ooze out from it also. With wild squeals and trumpetings it turned and charged viciously down the way it had come, scattering like straws the spearmen who tried to stop it, and mowing a great swath through the crowd with its monstrous progress. Many must have been trodden under foot, many killed by its murderous trunk, but only their cries came to us. The golden castle, with its canopy of royal snakes, was swayed and tossed, so that we two occupants had much ado not to be shot off like stones from a catapult. [...] 

I braced myself to withstand the shock, and took fresh grip upon the woman who lay against my breast. But with louder screams and wilder trumpetings the mammoth held straight on, and presently came to the harbour's edge, and sent the spray sparkling in sheets amongst the sunshine as it went with its clumsy gait into the water. 

But at this point the pace was very quickly slackened. The great sewers, which science devised for the health of the city in the old King's time, vomit their drainings into this part of the harbour, and the solid matter which they carry is quickly deposited as an impalpable sludge. Into this the huge beast began to sink deeper and deeper before it could halt in its rush, and when with frightened bellowings it had come to a stop, it was bogged irretrievably. Madly it struggled, wildly it screamed and trumpeted. The harbour-water and the slime were churned into one stinking compost, and the golden castle in which we clung lurched so wildly that we were torn from it and shot far away into the water

Refreshingly, the narrator and other characters follow a pagan moral code wholly alien to modern social mores. Deucalion in particular shows utter unconcern with the lives of the peasant and slave classes, whom he plainly despises, and in fact openly reviles in several passages. (Slaves, incidentally, come chiefly from Europe.) Though odious, his attitudes greatly enhance the book's verisimilitude. The destruction of a continent and people to satisfy the zeal of a priestly caste outraged by a single woman who has stolen their secrets is related as a matter of course. Atlantis the nation is mourned, but the people merit not even a second thought.

As I read The Lost Continent, I kept thinking of authors who might have been influenced by it. A comparatively recent example is Michael Moorcock in his Elric books. Like Melniboné, Atlantis is an amoral dynastic island culture fallen into decadence that evinces a strong disdain for the up-and-coming peoples of the mainland; also, interestingly, the approach to both capitals is rendered difficult, the former by a maze of passages, the latter by the twists and turns of an extremely long, narrow, and high-walled inlet. Possible echoes in other works of fantastic literature abound, Edgar Rice Burroughs's stories being the most obvious example.

So if you like to read, not only the great pulp writers, but what influenced them; if you enjoy a good H. Rider Haggard romance and don't mind a bit of Victorian stodginess; if you want an interesting early imagining of ancient high technology; if you're looking for Bronze Age battles with giant prehistoric beasts – if you're into any of these things, I say, then give The Lost Continent a try.