Stories:

• Meanwhile, She Dreams
• Little Watcher
• Narcissus
• The Astronomer
• Eikon
• Minotaur
• Salvage
• Ex Machina
• Imago
• ANIMA

The Night Land is as peculiar, inaccessible and as universal as a nightmare or a myth. The things and events of the Land, and the Land itself are compulsive and as such, have their own energy. To tap into this mythology is to find expression for something deeper than personal experience, and yet the elemental nature of everything that Hodgson has created also finds clear articulation in a very personal, intimate scale. It is this duality that I find so interesting about Hodgson, and this is what I believe makes his work genuinely mythical. It brings hidden forces to the surface and gives them form and it enables a connection with the depths of our own psychology.

The cosmic tragedy of the setting, the "Entropic Romance", makes the scenario especially poignant, the challenge being to find meaning, so to speak, directly under the point of the sword of Damocles.

There is so much too that seems genuinely prescient about Hodgson, as if he were tapping into the "zeitgeist": there are hints of Jungian psychology before Jung, Existentialism, the arcology concept and so on. Clearly also he has been directly influential on later writers, not least the New Wave writers such as Michael Moorcock, M. John Harrison and Brian Aldiss. There are also plenty of references, if not outright homage in the work of Brian Stableford and Stephen Baxter.

The Night Land is both inspiring and challenging and a great opportunity to drop names. What more could a new writer ask for?