The Night Land is Currently Closed to Submissions

We think THE NIGHT LAND is one of the most colorful, inventive, and moving fictional worlds ever created. Haunting. Unmatchable. Unforgettable.

But the book, as it issued from Hodgson's pen in 1912, is crippled by an unreadable style.

For some reason Hodgson cast it in the frame of the future-dream of a gentleman of the 17th century. He attempted to reproduce the language of that period, with scant success.

Hodgson became a much more skillful handler of words later, but he never reworked his first great vision.

We believe that the concept of The Night Land deserves more, and we are offering to buy new fiction set in the Night Land universe.

Fiction:

We have produced one anthology of stories, entitled NIGHT LANDS I: ETERNAL LOVE, from WILDSIDE PRESS, and another called NIGHT LANDS II: NIGHTMARES OF THE FALL, from THREELEGGEDFOX.

We hope to publish future volumes, but at the moment we will typically buy for the web only.  Web published stories may later be offered an anthology contract.
 

These are our typical rates. Actual rates will be legally established by a contract with you.

Payment on PUBLICATION.

View our sample web contract here

View our sample web "teaser" and anthology contract here

Variations on these contracts may be established by mutual agreement, for example for the anthology only, for a web "teaser" and anthology only, and so forth.

Accepted stories will be posted on this site as they are purchased. We may in some cases post only teasers.

If we buy web-only rights, the writer will be free to resell the story to any hardcopy publication or web site one month after purchase.

If we buy magazine and/or anthology rights, the writer will be free to resell the story one year after purchase. We make allowances for earlier resale in the case of "Best of the year" anthologies and single-author anthologies.

Note that, currently, our funds limit us to purchasing the equivalent of one moderate-length story per calender month. We will probably not increase this volume much in future: our prime intention is to publish a few very good stories.

The Night Land Blog

If we accept your work you will be offered "author" status on The Night land blog . This status allows you to post articles as well as to  reply to posts.  The blog is intended to be a primary arena for public discussion of the Night Land, of the stories we publish,  response to readers, and indeed of any relevant thing of interest.

Advice to writers

We will try to respond to fiction submissions within one month.

We prefer prose fiction in the 2,000-10,000 word range. We are open to longer works, and to short-short pieces,"flash fiction", prose-poems, and the like, but these are not our preferred formats.

Text above the 10,000 word limit will be half rate.

We will publish short poetry.

Very short pieces of prose or poetry, if we accept them, will be treated for purposes of payment as if they had a length of 500 words.

What to write about?

It is of course desirable that this collection of stories have some internal consistency. Therefore you might first read some of the stories already collected online in Night Lands with this in mind.

Also, you must at least skim Hodgson's original novel. (start with chapter 2 if you value your life and sanity.) Gutenberg has it for free.http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/10662.

You may wish to check out the suggested timeline to understand the hints we have given above, and Night Thoughts for some background ideas. However, don't be bound by these, they are just our own ideas. The Night Land universe includes millions of years of human history. Here are a few suggestions:

• Write about the Cataclysm
• Write about The Road Makers
• Write about the experiments that first let in the Pneumavores.
• Write about the building of the Redoubt
• Write about an attack on the Redoubt
• Write about the age of the airships
• Write a story about an explorer from the Redoubt, and what he finds in The Night Land
• Write about the colonists who left the Redoubt and trekked down to the Land of Seas and Volcanoes.
• Write about the Fall of the Redoubt

Try to write somewhat in the spirit of SF, not fantasy. Explain the Pneumavores, the Watchers, and the other semi-human things in the Land, rationally - but partially.

Erotic (but not pornographic) content is a fundamental part of Hodgson's vision, and is strongly encouraged.

A short glossary of neologisms evolved in published work so far is appended.

What to avoid?

• Do not imitate Hodgson's faux-archaic style. We are not after a rewrite of Hodgson's own book.  Don't try to give us flowery archaic prose unless you can match Clarke Ashton Smith or M P Shiel on a good day.
  
• Do not imitate Hodgson's attitudes towards women. This, after Hodgson's unfortunate writing style, is the great flaw in the heart of THE NIGHT LAND, and must be addressed.

  Hodgson's treatment of the erotic was not superficial icing. It was part of a serious attempt to build a theory of the human condition that was consistent with existence in a radically Entropic universe. Within a context of universal Darkness, human beings find salvation and paradise in erotic love - a love which Hodgson saw as extending through many lives and (in THE HOUSE ON THE BORDERLAND) , as finding a fulfillment in eternity.

  Hodgson was desperately serious about this, but unfortunately he failed abysmally. The erotic passages in THE NIGHT LAND are based on adolescent fantasy, not real human love. Perhaps you think you can do better. If you think you understand what Hodgson was about and can treat can treat his cosmic eroticism meaningfully - give it a try.(Yes alright. Consensual flagellation and foot fetishism are OK. Why not :-) ??

• PLEASE don't write another story about the first woman to go Out into the Night Land - this has been done to death.

• We rule out both physical (as opposed to visionary) time-travel and FTL spaceflight.  The reason is that these are both "machines" for making the universe smaller and more conveniently sized for human interaction and human coping. But TNL is about a universe which is unutterably vast and uncompromisingly beyond the human comfort zone in its scale. Thus, though we allow starships, they are STL and their voyages take tens of thousands of years. We do not allow any time travel back-and-forth between the present day and the Night Land except in the form of insubstantial dreams.

Q & A

• Would you like flash? (less of a risk for writers working in a shared world).
• Flash? I've used the term short-short, but, yes, we'll take fiction of <1000 words. 
• Will you take women  MCs (I know you will).
• Wot?  Are you seriously telling me there are venues that don't?  That I actually have to specify this?   I canna believe it.
• What about stories written in more accessible language?
• Um. Shan't. I don't want to tone down the intellectual level we demand from readers.   Having your mind stretched is what SF is about. I expect my readers to have read Cordwainer Smith. I expect my readers to have read Gene Wolfe.
• What about characters whose ancestors were from non-Western countries?

• In the year 25 million how can this possibly be a relevant question? The people of the GR are white skinned only because there is no sunlight. We picture them as Caucasian only because that is the norm in our society. Objectively speaking they probably look very different from contemporary Europeans, but they all see each other as belonging to the same embattled tribe and as conforming to the normal appearance of a member of that tribe, so there's no point in drawing them as looking funny.

  X specifically says that the physical difference between the Upper and Lower cities' populations was that the Upper city folk had larger chests "and by this might you know them" i.e. that there was in his day no other systematic difference. In our imaginary future the early Redoubt population is very much more various, being formed by many different human nations as well as the crews of returned Starships, but then as later the "other races" slot in human social psychology is occupied by the abhumans living outside in the Night Land, and the difference between them and the people of the GR is so enormous that the comparatively minor racial differences within the Redoubt have little political significance.

"Best of the year" and specialist anthologies.

"The Night Land" is a specialist fiction site with a narrow readership and a fairly low profile.  Nonetheless we pay professional rates and have published some fiction of professional quality. 

In order to improve the visibility of our site and our writers, we will normally wish to resubmit stories we consider exceptionally good to the major "Best of the year" reprint anthologies immediately after publication here (or as soon as the anthology's publishers  announce their next year's book open to submissions.)    We will ask your permission before we resubmit anything, and if you prefer to submit your story yourself we will pass on our best information about the relevant market. We may ask you to reformat your original submission (eg from .doc to .pdf) as the market requires.

Some Best of the Year anthologies permit authors to submit stories on their own initiative.  If you do this you should please make it clear that your story is being submitted without our recommendation (but ask us first: we might be on the point of asking your permission to submit the story).   

There may also from time to time appear specialist anthologies, competitions, or other online markets for which Night Land stories reprinted from this site will be acceptable.   We will post information about such markets on the Night Land Blog as we learn of it.

Criticism:

If you want to write a piece of criticism or analysis about THE NIGHT LAND or related works we will post it for free. We won't pay you, but we will listen to you.

Artwork:

Unfortunately, at this time, we can not in fairness encourage you to create new and uncommissioned artwork primarily for display on this site. Financial constraints and limited web-space mean that we must make fiction our first priority, and the financial recompense we can offer for artwork will be modest.

However, we will probably commission artwork in future.

(If you have already created and published some sort of artwork inspired by THE NIGHT LAND, we might be interested in buying the right to republish it on this site. You are invited to contact us to discuss this. We have typically paid around UKP 30 for the reuse of each such piece of art.)

Where do I submit stuff to?

Alas, we are currently closed to submissions.

(note. We have had some problems reading .doc attachments, so if possible create .rtf format attachments. If you can't do that, just pasting the story into the body of your e-mail is perfectly acceptable.)

Who are you?

Andy Robertson?

I'm just a SF fan who has got a bit of spare money. I helped out with INTERZONE mag for 20years or so, so I've probably already seen stories by you. If you doubt my good faith, check with INTERZONE'S old EDITOR David Pringle.

Nigel Brown?

Nigel Brown has published fiction in Interzone, Aboriginal Science Fiction, and various anthologies. He has enjoyed the work of William Hope Hodgson for many years, and considers the Nightland to be one of the most imaginative and exciting adventure stories he has ever read.

It was Nigel's idea to "do something" about promoting THE NIGHT LAND. Though he is not very, um, webby, he prompted me to start this website and he is an invaluable help and encouragement.

Do you intend to start charging for this website?

No. The web site is and will be a free site, not a pay site.

We have no illusions about making money. We are doing this just for the sake of the Stories.

And because Hodgson should be famous. Damnit!!

-- ANDY ROBERTSON

-- NIGEL BROWN