William Hope Hodgson

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William Hope Hodgson (born November 15, 1877 in Blackmore End , Essex , † April 17 or April 19, 1918 near Ypres , Belgium ) was an English author of fantasy novels and eerie sea ​​stories .

Life

Hodgson was born in 1877 in Essex, England, as one of twelve children. His father was an Anglican clergyman who frequently moved with his family for professional reasons. William grew up in Galway on the west coast of Ireland and loved the sea and left home to become a seaman at the age of 13. Although he was sent back to his family, he was eventually given permission to serve as a cabin boy in the merchant navy . His four-year training began in 1891. To avoid the abuse of a violent second mate , he learned to protect himself in judo and strengthened himself through bodybuilding . From 1895 he attended a technical school in Liverpool for two years and from 1897 went back to sea as the third mate. He was recognized by the Royal Humane Society for rescuing a sailor in shark-infested waters at risk of his life from drowning .

Hodgson set up a darkroom and pursued a new hobby, photography of the sea and storms. However, he soon complained about life at sea: "Bad treatment, miserable food, low wages ... an uncomfortable, worried and ungrateful life full of hardship ..." After he had circumnavigated the world three times, the late insight came to him that he was the sea downright hate. This is later reflected in many of his stories, in which the sea is always described with a feeling of horror, as if it were a source of evil.

Hodgson gave up his profession and founded a physical training school in Blackburn near Liverpool in 1902 , where he taught, among other things, the local police force. He also published articles on the same subject, which he provided with photographs of his muscular body. After a while, however, he failed financially.

Around 1904, Hodgson finally turned to writing, supplementing his income through photographic work. His first published story was A Tropical Horror , which appeared in Grand Magazine in June 1905 . More stories followed, including one of his best The Voice in the Night , published in The Blue Book Magazine in November 1907. In 1908, his second novella, The House on the Borderland , was HP Lovecraft's first classic Kindness and praised perhaps Hodgson's greatest work. In 1909, the story Ghost Pirates appeared , in which Hodgson turns to the sea.

Like the author Algernon Blackwood , Hodgson devised a detective (Carnacki) who had to deal with supernatural phenomena in several stories. In doing so, he obviously attributed supernatural phenomena to natural causes. Eight of these stories were published in magazines between 1910 and 1912. Two of them were published in paperback in 1910 together with a poem, six appeared in 1913 as a volume Carnacki, The Ghost Finder . 35 years later, August Derleth put the tape back on, including three earlier stories. The Night Land appeared in 1912 , which was divided into two volumes because of its length of 538 pages.

Hodgson married an editor of Harmsworth magazine in 1913 at the age of 36 . To save costs, the couple moved to the south of France . In the years that followed, however, Hodgson wrote relatively little, possibly for economic or personal reasons. During this period, three volumes of short stories were published, Men of the Deep Waters (1914), The Luck of the Strong (1916), and Captain Gault, Being the Exceedingly Private Log of a Sea-Captain (1917).

In addition to his stories, Hodgson wrote some poetic works, which, however, found little approval. Besides a shantie or two and the paperback Poems , hardly anything was published. A Dream of X appeared in 1912 and Cargunka and Poems and Anecdotes in 1914 , which is the last publication in his lifetime. The Calling of the Sea (1920) and The Voice of the Ocean (1921) appeared posthumously and were summarized in Poems of the Sea in 1977 .

When the First World War broke out in 1914, Hodgson returned to England, where he became a lieutenant in the artillery after training . In a fall he sustained a serious head injury, but was ordered to the front in Ypres after his recovery . Here he voluntarily performed the dangerous task of an advanced observer. On April 17, 1918, at the age of 40, he was torn apart by German shrapnel .

After his death, Hodgson's work was temporarily forgotten; obviously his way of writing did not correspond to the zeitgeist of the time. As a result of the efforts of the American HC Koenig , however, Ghost Pirates and Boats in Famous Fantastic Mysteries were reissued and The Hog appeared in Weird Tales magazine . August Derleth from Arkham House published an extensive collection of all four novellas in 1946. Derleth also obtained some previously unpublished manuscripts from Hodgson's sister, Lissie Hodgson, which were included in Deep Waters , a collection of eerie sea stories in 1967. In 1988 a series of small volumes was published which were revised by R. Alain Everts. A new edition of all of his works was planned for 2003 by Night Shade Books .

In 1973 the house on the border and Voices in the Night was published as a German translation by Insel-Verlag as bound editions. Both works were published as paperbacks by Suhrkamp-Verlag.

To the work

After his first published short stories and novels, Hodgson established his reputation in the following years as an author of unusual fantasy , some of which was placed in the vicinity of horror .

An essential element of his novels and stories is the creation of an oppressive atmosphere that keeps the reader captive. His work has been recognized by authors such as HP Lovecraft , CS Lewis and Clark Ashton Smith . His novel The Night Land probably influenced Olaf Stapledon's Last and First Men . The plot of both works takes place in a future a billion years away.

Hodgon's critics, however, accused him that his work would be belittled by sentimentalities and moralistic appeals that testified to a certain immaturity.

The novella The House on the Borderland , published in 1908, is now considered the most accessible of Hodgson's novels. Two friends who go fishing in isolation find the ruins of a house and an old diary. The diary contains the actual story of the last house owner who has to defend himself in the house against pig-like beings belonging to a neighboring (parallel or future) world. (The house in Roger Zelazny's The Changing Land is believed to refer to this house devised by Hodgson.)

In 2006 Hodgson received the Cordwainer Smith Rediscovery Award posthumously for forgotten or no longer adequately recognized science fiction authors.

Works

Novels

  • The boats of the "Glen Carrig" (English: The Boats of the "Glen Carrig" ) (1907)
  • The House on the Borderland (English: The House on the Borderland ) (1908)
  • The Ghost Pirates (1909)
  • The Night Land: Vol. I (1912)
  • The Night Land: Vol. II (1912)
  • Das Nachtland (English: The Nightland: A Love Tale ) (1912)
  • Carnacki the Ghost Finder (1947) ( posthumous )
  • Dream of X (1977) (posthumous, an abridged version of The Night Land )
  • The Baumoff Explosive (1988) (posthumous)
  • Fifty Dead Chinamen All in a Row (1988) (posthumous)
  • From the Tideless Sea (1988) (posthumous)
  • The Heaving of the Log (1988) (posthumous)
  • Homeward Bound (1988) (posthumous)
  • The Mystery of the Ship in the Night (1988) (posthumous)
  • Old Golly (1988) (posthumous)
  • The Phantom Ship (1988) (posthumous)
  • The Riven Night (1988) (posthumous)
  • The Room of Fear (1988) (posthumous)
  • Sea-Horses (1988) (posthumous)
  • The Terrible Derelict (1988) (posthumous)
  • The Valley of Lost Children (1988) (posthumous)
  • The Way of the Heathens (1988) (posthumous)

Short stories

  • From a Tideless Sea (1906)
  • The Voice in the Night (1907)
  • The Gateway of the Monster (1910)
  • The Whistling Room (1910)
  • The Derelict (1912)
  • On the Bridge (1912)
  • The Island of the Crossbones (1913)
  • Demons of the Sea (1923)
  • The Haunted “Jarvee” (1948) (posthumous)
  • The Hog (1948) (posthumous)
  • By the Lee
  • Captain Dang
  • The Crew of the Lancing
  • The Find
  • The Finding of the Graphics
  • The Habitants of Middle Islet
  • The Heathen's Revenge
  • The Horse of the Invisible
  • The House Among the Laurels
  • The Island of the Ud
  • The Mystery of the Derelict
  • The Plans of the Reefing Bi-Plane
  • The 'Prentices' Mutiny
  • The Promise
  • RMS "Empress of Australia"
  • The Riven Night
  • The Room of Fear
  • "Sailorms"
  • The Searcher of the End House
  • The Sharks of the St. Elmo
  • The Stone Ship
  • The Terror of the Water Tank
  • The Thing Invisible
  • A tropical horror
  • The Waterloo of a Hard-Case Skipper

Web links

personal data
SURNAME Hodgson, William Hope
BRIEF DESCRIPTION British fantasy writer
DATE OF BIRTH November 15, 1877
PLACE OF BIRTH Blackmore End , England
DATE OF DEATH April 17, 1918 or April 19, 1918
Place of death Ypres , Belgium