The Night Land

The Night Land is a horror fantasy novel by the English writer William Hope Hodgson, first published in 1912. It belongs to the Dying Earth subgenre. That same year Hodgson also issued a much shorter version, titled The Dream of X, in a very limited American print run. The novel was revived in paperback by Ballantine Books in July 1972, which published it in two parts as volumes 49 and 50 of its Ballantine Adult Fantasy series.

When the book was written, the source of the energy that powers the stars was unknown. Lord Kelvin had calculated that if the Sun's energy came from the gravitational collapse of the gas cloud that formed it, it would last only a few tens of millions of years. Taking that premise as a starting point, Hodgson imagined a time millions of years ahead when the Sun has gone dark.

The book opens with a seventeenth-century frame: a gentleman mourning the death of his beloved, Lady Mirdath, is granted a vision of a distant future in which their souls will be reunited, and he watches that world through the eyes of a future incarnation. The language is meant to echo that period, though the frame soon fades into the background. The story focuses on the last few million humans, gathered in the Last Redoubt, a vast metal pyramid besieged by unknown forces in the dark. A shield powered by the Earth Current holds them back, while enormous beings called the Watchers wait in the blackness. Other creatures, the so-called Abhumans, are degraded descendants of humanity. After several failed expeditions, the narrator sets out alone into the night to find the girl with whom he has made mental contact, the reincarnation of his past love.

Lovecraft called the novel "one of the most potent pieces of macabre imagination ever written", and it is cited as an influence on Henry Kuttner and C. L. Moore's Earth's Last Citadel (1943). It has inspired anthologies and later rewritings, such as James Stoddard's version of 2011.