Morlock Night (25 page)

  As befits so influential a text, various writers have produced various unofficial sequels to Wells's time travel adventure – both novels (Christopher Priest's
The Space Machine
, Steve Baxter's
The Time Ships
) and films (one of Trek-director Nicholas Meyer's early cinematic offerings, 1979's T
ime After Time
, brings Wells's Time Traveller and Jack the Ripper to 1980s Los Angeles). But none of them have the brainboggling, wigged-out splendour of K W Jeter's 1979 proto-Steampunk masterpiece
Morlock Night
. There's a reason for this, I think, and it has to do with the uniquely ferocious imagination of Jeter himself. Most sequels attempt a sort of plasticene stretching out of the original text, extruding a narrative here, elongating a familiar character there. Jeter takes the original text, tears it to pieces with his bare teeth, and moulds the resulting mass into striking new shapes. He's not interested in tamely carrying-on Wells's storyline and characters. Instead he takes the book's most iconic items and retools them for the modern age.

  In Wells's original story the Morlocks are little more than beasts. That won't do for Jeter's more ornate imaginarium, so he postulates a breed of super-Morlock, cunning, dangerous and capable of large-scale military organisation. Wearing blue spectacles to protect their subterranean eyes from the sun, these blanched-skin horrors have captured the time machine itself and are using it to ferry themselves back to late nineteenth-century London, where they are gathering, in the sewers, with grand and terrible plans.

  The book pitches us straight into the storm. One of the things I love about Jeter is his splendidly loose-limbed, unencumbered approach to plotting You never quite know where you are in one of this tales, which, in a genre lamentably oversupplied with predictable narratives, is a very good thing. The novel starts, briskly, just after the end of Wells's novella, but within pages we've been pitched forward into a grisly post-apocalyptic London wasteland, where the remnants of humanity hide like rats in the ruins, and then whisked back again to the nineteenth-century. The more simple-hearted reader, catching their breath at this point, might think that the novel will now follow the straight line of story of resistance to the Morlock invasion leading to a big bang-bang battling climax. But that is not Jeter's way. Instead he makes a series of jolting but brilliant narrative knight's-moves: Merlin, Arthur and Excalibur! Atlantis! A whole subterranean world beneath London, including sunless oceans traversed by Verneian submarines! When some writers throw a whole bunch of disparate elements together the result is a mess: but in Jeter's hands it somehow, madly, coheres.

  Picky readers might, I suppose, ask: why does a sequel to Wells's famous time-travel fable also turn out to be an Arthurian novel? It looks on paper (as the phrase goes) like a strange confection, for there is, after all, nothing about King Arthur in Wells's original. This is not to say that it doesn't work, in a weird sort of way; but it is unexpected. I have my own theory about this, although I have no direct evidence for it. I think that Jeter, not wanting to limit himself to textual riffs upon one great nineteenth-century author, played a sort of imaginative textual counterpoint upon another one – Mark Twain, whose
A Connecticut Yankee at King Arthur's Court
(1889) is the other great precursor novel in the traditions of time travel fiction. Although Twain's book came out six years before Wells, its influence on SF has been much less. Some would not even call it science fiction, since it lacks the pseudo-technological for its temporal voyage: there is no machine in Twain's story, his protagonist simply and inexplicably drops back in time to the Arthurian era. But like Wells, the heart of Twain's narrative is really about the plight of the poor under the careless rule of the wealthy, for in Twain's telling, Arthur's knights turn out to be much more cruel and violent than chivalric and noble. I'd be tempted to argue that Wells's approach, by satirically inverting the relationship between aristocracy and proletariate, is more penetrating. But these two core narratives – the one sending a traveller into the far future, the other sending him into the distant past – find a kind of gonzo synthesis in Jeter's Morlock/Arthur mash-up.

  The point is that this sort of bravura juxtaposition of elements is exactly right for the kind of novel this is – Steampunk, I mean, a mode of writing that Jeter has a claim to have invented. People sometimes assume that Steampunk is an offshoot of "Cyberpunk", taking the high-tech future-noir adventure of the sort popularised by Bruce Sterling and William Gibson and moving the action back to a steam-powered Babbageized nineteenth-century. In fact Steampunk fiction predates Cyberpunk (though the name does not). Gibson's
Neuromancer
came out in 1984, and Bruce Bethke's story that gave the movement its moniker, "Cyberpunk", was published in 1983. But the historians of SF locate the origins of what would later be called Steampunk in three novels by three Californian friends: Jeter's
Morlock Night
(1979), Tim Powers's
The Anubis Gates
(1983) and James P. Blaylock's
Homunculus
(1986). In all three novels, Gothic excess takes the place that is occupied by the conventions of "detective fiction noir" in Cyberpunk itself. And in all three books, London is as much a character as the human players: a gnarly, über-Dickensian city that sprawls both horizontally and exists vertically, from the zeppelins above to the populous sewers below. Indeed, the subterranean locus of much of
Morlock Night
generates a great deal of its dream-haunting power. This is a novel about things that are hidden, that lurk in the collective subconscious: Arthur and Atlantis; Teutonic cruelty and the fear of racial degeneration; the up-welling monstrosity that persists beneath civilisation's thin veneer. It is entirely fitting that the protagonist of the tale discovers that he has never really known who he is.

  Steampunk as a mode has, arguably, become diluted with overfamiliarity into a sort of watery tech-y Victoriana. But to read
Morlock Night
is to return to the source. This, ladies and gentlemen, is the real McCoy. Or perhaps I should say, the real MorlocCoy. Jeter's Morlockian night is darker than most, and looks forward to that night that comes to us all eventually. This book is a hectic masterpiece.

 

  
Adam Roberts

 

 

ANGRY ROBOT

 

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Back to the future

 

Originally published 1979
This Angry Robot edition 2011

 

Copyright © K W Jeter 1979

 

K W Jeter asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

 

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

 

EBook ISBN: 978 0 85766 101 2

 

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This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author's imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.