A Plea for Lost Civilizations

by John Michael Greer
(Cumberland, MD USA)

I've been rereading, for the first time in many years, Abraham Merritt's wonderfully lively lost-race tale "The Face in the Abyss." Of course it takes place entirely on Earth - specifically, in the same sort of off-the-beaten-track setting that everyone puts lost-race romances in, an isolated corner of the Andes - but reading it has reminded me of the extent to which some of the other old forms of science fiction share the same qualities as Old Solar System stories.

"The Face in the Abyss," to begin with, has the old science fiction flavor - I get the same sort of experiential rush from it I get from Barsoom et al., a rush that's noticeably lacking from so much of current SF (and let's not even talk about current fantasy fiction). You've got two-fisted adventure, hot-blooded romance, intelligent nonhumans, strange powers that sprawl agreeably across the border between magic and wildly advanced science, and the rest of it. It's a romp, and a romp of a familiar kind.

Though it's set on Earth, furthermore, Merritt's is a bigger Earth than ours -- an earth big enough to contain colonists from an ancient Antarctic civilization, not to mention domesticated dinosaurs and the last surviving member of a prehuman race of serpent-people. It's recognizably the same Earth that provided Tarzan with all those hidden cities to find, just to name one classic example. I suppose you could think of it as a kind of localized Shimmer. The individual locales in which lost races hide out may be a bit small, but the whole assortment of OSS-era lost race stories covers a lot of real estate, and extends the Earth a good deal.

Thus I'd take Harlei's side in the discussion on the page on Earth - but with a twist. Lost civilizations and forgotten colonies from long-departed cultures, I'd suggest, are as standard a feature of OSS Earth as, say, crumbling ruins of fantastic age are of OSS Mars, or the Twilight Belt is of OSS Mercury. It's part of the essential character of OSS Earth to have lost worlds all over the place, wherever modern civilization's grip is weak - beyond jungles and mountains, deep in the sea and hidden away in underground caverns, and of course inside the Hollow Earth! So I think it's worth making a plea for lost civilizations - not that this site ought to devote any significant fraction of its space to them, but I think they deserve a slightly more honorable mention.

{Z: Absolutely, John - I am coming round to that view in a big way, and I shall create a link from the Earth page to this one. The key issue is, as you indicate, Earth's size.

To recover a sense of that size, we need somehow to counter the two factors which tend to diminish it: (1) fast transport that annihilates distance, and (2) overpopulation that fills up the spaces.

(1) can be dealt with to some extent by the fact that it is merely a blunt instrument of relocation - once it has got you to the border of an unknown land, you have to get out of the plane or whatever, if you are ever going to investigate the country rather than merely over-fly it. So you get out of the plane - and immediately the world becomes big again.

(2) can be dealt with by viewing people and their artifacts as as much a part of Nature as are termite-mounds. Then the distinction between wild and cultivated areas disappears, and all the Earth is wild. I know it can seem a tall order to think in this way, and I don't suppose Tarzan would agree, but I have so far not been able to find a flaw in the logic...}

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Oct 22, 2016
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unrapped knuckles
by: John Michael Greer

Zendexor, if any knuckle-rapping is going to happen, it won't be me doing it. While I cheerfully admit that what Britain does is the business of the British people and nobody else, I confess that when news of the event in question reached me, I poured a good shot of whiskey and raised a glass to the suddenly brighter future of your country. Cheers!

{Z: Thanks John for raising that glass. With me it was champagne - a good Continental product! Whiskey I prefer in hot drinks or poured on desserts. Anyway, let's keep drinking to the freedom and individuality of all nations, and down with the one-size-fits-all mentality.

One of my fanciful comparisons is to imagine the US and Britain in the respective roles of mighty Helium and fiercely independent Gathol...}

Oct 20, 2016
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Re: Expanding the Earth
by: John Michael Greer

Zendexor, thanks for asking! "The Weird of Hali" has been coming together at a blinding pace; the first volume, "Innsmouth," is in print in a fine edition, with a trade paperback edition in preparation. The second and third, "Kingsport" and "Chorazin," are at the publisher right now, and the fourth, "Dreamlands," is less than 10,000 words from completion. There will be three more -- "Providence," "Hyperborea," and "Arkham" -- before the stars are right, Great Cthulhu rises from the sea, and the story reaches its rugose, squamous conclusion. I've never had a writing project on this scale, fiction or nonfiction, come together so quickly; apparently the Great Old Ones want to see it in print. ;-)

My immediate thought, when you mentioned the Earth budding, was to interpret that in a biological sense. I imagine the ground swelling open somewhere in Wisconsin, say, and a vast bulge rising up unimaginably, until a newborn Earthlet with its own baby atmosphere drifts away into an orbit of its own. Not what you had in mind, I know!

Also, many thanks for the review of "Star's Reach"! One of the things that fed into the theme of an old America was the contrast I've noted the three times I've visited England. The old joke about the difference between English and Americans -- people in England think that a hundred miles is a long distance, while people in America think that a hundred years is a long time -- isn't just a joke; the house where I spent much of my childhood, out in the suburbs south of Seattle, was a chicken farm ten years before I was born, and seventy-five years before that -- in the reign of Queen Victoria -- was trackless forest, complete with bears. Seattle itself was a cluster of log cabins on a mud flat in 1845. The sheer temporal depth of, say, Glastonbury, comes as a shock to the American psyche, though in my case it's a welcome one; and I wanted to give America the kind of history that turned the Roman garrison town of Eboracum into the modern city of York, complete with linguistic blurrings. When I get to work on my Old Mars story, I want to do the same thing doubled, quadrupled, and in spades.

{Z: And of course what we both mean by "temporal depth" is not merely temporal - for all places on Earth are the same age, namely 4,600,000,000 years or so. We mean temporal-depth-interwoven-with-psychic-continuity, which means some kind of cathexis or emotive "painting-on", which creates the haunting.

And because American history is so full of dramatic personalities, huge events involving a large area and population, and mighty physical projects, it tends to cathect the time-flow at a powerful rate, compensating for its relative paucity of actual years.

If I had been writing this before June of this year I would have added the point that America, unlike Britain, also has a future - but a certain event in June has ensured that we British may also have one after all. But I'd better not say more or I'll get rapped on the knuckles...

Needless to say, I shall be looking forward to reading the "Weird of Hali" series; all the sooner if I can manage to develop a mild illness with six months in bed, to do it proper justice...}

Oct 20, 2016
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Expanding the Earth
by: John Michael Greer

Zendexor, I like the new world in the morning concept (though it brings to mind, rather unexpectedly, an old Roger Whittaker song). I have to credit you, by the way, for a related detail in my current series of Lovecraftian epic fantasy novels, "The Weird of Hali." In those books, there are four spatial dimensions, although human beings can only perceive three of them; to the Great Old Ones, and an assortment of other tentacled critters, the surface of the planet curves away to north and south, to east and west, and to anth and ulth.

There are anthern and ulthern poles -- Carcosa is at the ulthern end of the great world, and R'lyeh at the anthern end. From a human, three-spatial-dimension perspective, each infinitely thin slice along the anth-to-ulth extension is a world of its own; those close to the middle of the great world are as large or a little larger than the earth we know, those close to the anthern and ulthern poles are much smaller. Oddly enough, the color of the sky differs from "slice" to "slice' -- I don't yet know how that works, that's just what showed up in the second novel when the protagonist traveled to Carcosa during the celebrations of a certain Festival.

But that concept got its start from your reference to dimensional extension in the page of this website on Earth. I'd already realized that my protagonist had to travel via winged critter from Kingsport to Carcosa to experience the deeper and stranger mysteries of the Festival; making the trip involve space travel seemed both hackneyed and implausible to me -- but putting in an extra spatial dimension through which the Great Old Ones and their livestock could travel at will? That seemed a lot more interesting.

So many thanks for the hint!

{Z: Well, there you are - cross-fertilization of ideas! Earth-stretch, Earth-Shimmer, maybe were literary volcanoes waiting to erupt. Here's a suggestion: the variation in sky-colour you mention might be a mental effect rather than to do with electromagnetic wavelength - and the effect might have counterparts in other aspects of the environment.

How has your "Weird of Hali" series progressed so far? What stage has it reached?

Cosmologists sometimes talk of universes "budding" from other universes; I suppose an Earth-stretch of some sort might "bud" dimensionally from our familiar world. That would be a related kind of story. A sufficiently advanced culture might do it deliberately...}

Oct 20, 2016
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lost pyramids of Wisconsin
by: John Michael Greer

Dylan, I'm going to join Zendexor in encouraging you to write that lost-world story set in Wisconsin! It so happens that I rode a Greyhound bus from St. Paul to Chicago a little over a week ago, thus right across the midsection of Wisconsin, and I could very easily see hidden realms tucked in among the rolling hills, silent farmhouses, and little towns that nobody from outside ever visits. That odd, steep-sided, curiously regular hill -- why, there are all kinds of strange legends about people who come out of it at night...

I'm reminded that Cthulhu mythos author and editor August Derleth was a Wisconsin native -- born and died in Sauk City. Left to my own devices, I'd probably have the protagonist find a curious letter sent by a young Derleth to HP Lovecraft recounting the strange local legends associated with the odd hill just mentioned, and away we go -- but it's your story, not mine, so by all means have fun with it.

And what a Native American society might look like after another few hundred years of cultural evolution in hiding -- yes, that's a story I would like to read.

Oct 20, 2016
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Keeping Track of Conversations
by: Dylan Jeninga

Oop, my comment about the President was meant to be on "A Good Analysis". That's what I get for trying to carry on two conversations at once!

Oct 19, 2016
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Wisconsin Geography
by: Dylan Jeninga

I'm glad you approve of our President, I rather like him myself! I generally try to avoid discussing politics online, simply because such conversations tend to turn savage almost immediately. Civil discourse is hard to find.

The southern portion of Wisconsin, where I grew up, is largely flat. Once you start getting further north, however, you will run into some hills and forests - perfect hiding places for lost cultures.

In regards to the pyramids, I read about them in a National Geographic a while back, so I don't recall all that much. I do remember that they weren't in Wisconsin, though.

Some research brings up the Cahokia ruins, which might be what I'm thinking of- but those were discovered by French explorers in 1600.

Somewhere, my brain is misfiring. I may be thinking instead of a newly discovered mound- those are can be found everywhere- which miraculously escaped notice disguised as a hill.

Living in the United States means being surrounded perpetually by the ghosts of lost civilizations. I had a friend who gave me a tour of his place of work, and in the basement were a number of large concrete bumps. They were, it turns out, burial mounds that had been cemented over rather than dug up. Such forgotten monuments can be found across the country.

The destruction of the First Nations was not as complete as those of Bradbury's Martians, but the Martian Chronicles' meloncholy tone rings true- all about, taken for granted and largely ignored, are the haunted remnants of a once proud people. It lends a certain haunted feeling to the landscape, as one imagines what once was.

Perhaps that's why the idea of a lost world story in the United States is so appealing. Such a story might transport the reader to a world where a Native American culture survived colonialism unmolested, instead continuing to grow and develop. It's certainly a very hopeful idea!

{Z: It's the idea in Poul Anderson's "The Only Game in Town", at least partly. This is one of his Time Patrol stories, as you may know. I have four of these novellas in the collection "Guardians of Time". The Native American Time-Patroller is tempted to support a Chinese expedition which might pre-empt Columbus and lead to a different America.

Jared Diamond's non-fiction "Guns, Germs and Steel" explores the ultimate environmental factors determining the outcomes of history - why (for example) the Spanish invaded Mexico rather than Mexico invading Spain. Heavy going, but an eye-opener.

Very interesting to me, your remarks about the historical hauntings of your homeland. Do you sometimes roam around on foot, imbibing the atmosphere, or is it true what people say of Americans, that they drive everywhere? Forgive the naivete of this question. I never learned to drive, and am quite happy to rely on public transport, but from what I hear, that's impracticable in the US.}

Oct 19, 2016
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The Lost Worlds
by: Dylan Jeninga

I like this page! A new Earth each day indeed - and full of adventure for those who look for it!

Incidentally, I once wrote a "Lost World" story set in the northern wilds of Wisconsin. I was inspired by the discovery of a number of hitherto unnoticed pyramids near some out-of-the-way town here in the states. Apparently the structures had been taken as hills until someone took a closer look, and the idea drove me to write about an enclave of untouched peoples and prehistoric beasts nestled in Wisconsin's forested hills. I don't have the story anymore, but if entire pyramids can go undiscovered in the U.S., who knows what else might be out there?

I'm not sure if a "lost race" story is different from a "lost world" story, but I would suggest such tales for inclusion as well. The enormous plateau in "The Lost World" certainly expands our planet's surface area!

{Z: Pyramids in Wisconsin! I'd like to hear more about this. When Simak's stories inspired me to read up on the geography of that state, I read that it is mostly flat except in the southwest corner. I don't know how true this is, but anyhow, the "northern wilds" you mention sound like a good setting. Pity you don't have your "lost world" story any more, but maybe the idea will intermittently haunt you until one day you have another go at it. How about a mad Wisconsin scientist-tycoon who stretches space to create extra real estate among the pine forests... and inadvertently comes into contact with more than he bargained for?}

Oct 19, 2016
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re: the size of Earth
by: John Michael Greer

Zendexor, exactly. To my mind, the notion that fast transport annihilates distance is in some ways an illusion -- it gets you from airport A to all but identical airport B, sure, but if you travel the same distance in some less rapid way, you discover whole worlds of experience that drop out of sight from 35,000 feet. Take the train west from the town where I live to Pittsburgh, for example, and you wind through a landscape that includes little farm towns, rugged mountains, and long-ruined brick factory buildings overgrown by forest, for all the world like Mayan temples sticking up out of the jungle; any number of weird things might be hiding here and there in the midst of it all. I may try setting a lost race story in the mountains of southwestern Pennsylvania sometime, just to show that it can be done.

As for the overcrowdedness of the planet, seeing humanity as just another natural life form takes a lot of work for most people these days, but you're certainly right that the logic's impeccable. (An extraterrestrial observer might be helpful here.) You don't have to go back that far into the past to get a much emptier world, though, and a case could be made that you might not have to go very far into the future to get the same thing. And of course there's always the alternate history angle -- since Barsoom is basically an alternate Mars, an alternate Earth ought to be an OSS option!

{Z: I'd certainly like to read your Pennsylvania lost-race story when it comes out! Perhaps you could do for Pennsylvania tourism what Stephen King has doubtless done for Maine. Or HPL for Rhode Island, presumably.

Regarding alternative Earths, how about the kindred notion of successive Earths: adapting the saying "there's one born every minute", let's say each day (to be moderate about it) produces a new Earth. Never has the Earth of 19th October 2016 existed before, so, as I stepped out this morning to sniff the air and buy the paper, I beheld the virgin territory of a pristine new planet, waiting to be explored.}

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