Awake in the Night Land by John C. Wright

Just a gigantic Fuck You to the forces in the Night and the horror and the darkness. They’re kept on ice for a few years to build up numbers and then they are all hatched and sucked up by the ventilation system of the Redoubt and ejected Out into the Night. Every so often, as a gesture of defiance, the Redoubt turns the production of its Underground Fields over to the creation of butterflies. They do not so much illustrate the story as form a collateral theme.Īnd quite quickly we got our first story, “ An Exhalation of Butterflies” by Nigel Atkinson. I was careful to pay Fabian for his work, for these pictures are surely the first example of someone actually adding to the original NIGHT LAND, adding something that will always be connected to it from now on. Then a little step up: Stephen Fabian’s terrific paintings of the Watchers, illustrations for the 1973 edition of THE DREAM OF X, the abbreviated version of THE NIGHT LAND Hodgson published in the US to keep the copyright. I set rates and contacted and waited for stories to come in. I was a subeditor for INTERZONE back then in its glory days, and I had Dave Pringle to explain the legal side of buying fiction to display online. I wanted to read more stories set in that Land, and now I had the time to do something and a little bit of spare money, I took advice. The Final Arcology of mankind, Earth’s Last Citadel, surrounded by an entire universe that had been taken over by Hell. I had always been fascinated by the book.

Awake in the Night Land by John C. Wright