More in linked article.

Interesting how small these planets are. Proxima Centauri b also looks not very big (minimum mass 1.07 Earth masses, a lot bigger than the Barnard's Star planets but small compared to most known exoplanets and within the ballpark of Sol system terrestrial planets). Present exoplanet-finding techniques are strongly biased toward big planets with short orbits. I suspect we're getting our first look at the kind of planets red dwarf stars usually have.

Regarding my idea that you could make a cool animated film adaptation of William Hope Hodgson's The Night Land: have a description of how I'd do it:

To approximate the atmosphere of the book (which lacks dialogue and doesn't give the protagonist a name and I feel has a kind of Temple Grandin thinking in pictures vibe) it would be in the format of an old silent film, without dialogue, mostly just images and music, with some use of cue cards to establish context. Cue cards are in this summary rendered as ALL CAPS.

I think this would be appropriate music for it:

I'd develop Naani's side of the story more, make it a symmetrical companion narrative to X's, and to that end my depiction of the fall of the Lesser Redoubt would deviate substantially from the information we get about it in the novel. I took some inspiration from Nigel Atkinson's A Mouse In the Walls of the Lesser Redoubt, but my version wouldn't exactly follow that narrative that either.

Opening shot would be in space, showing stars, the sun, the moon, and the Earth, almost unrecognizable. The sun has become much dimmer, like a white dwarf, and the Earth and moon are little more than disks of blackness against the stars. The viewpoint begins to move toward the dark Earth.

MILLIONS OF YEARS IN THE FUTURE. THE SUN IS DYING, AND HAS ALMOST CEASED TO GIVE OUT VISIBLE LIGHT.

The viewpoint moves in toward the Earth. Passes briefly over the ruined highlands, with their frozen oceans and glaciers and, poking out here and there, the crumbling remains of huge buildings, just barely visible in the dim sunlight, which is like present-day moonlight. It comes to something like a huge rift valley, the bottom of which is an eerie landscape dimly lit by volcanic activity and bio-luminescence - except, there is also a brightly lit and unmistakably artificial three-sided pyramid down there, which the viewpoint quickly approaches and circles like a bird.

THE LESSER REDOUBT, OR THREE-CORNERED WORLD. PERHAPS THE LAST HUMAN SETTLEMENT.

The pyramid sits atop a large mesa, and around the mesa there is a glowing circle. The viewpoint comes closer. We see that the circle is something like a large glowing conduit, and inside its inner perimeter there is something like a wall, patrolled by armored and armored human figures - I'm thinking something like Matt Isitt's design for the weapons and armor.

THE AIR CLOG AND THE PERIMETER WALL AND THE GUARDIANS KEEP OUT THE PREDATORS OF THE NIGHT LAND.

BUT THE DIREST ENEMIES ARE COLD AND DARKNESS, AND THE WALLS AND LAMPS AND HEATERS OF THE REDOUBT KEEP THEM OUT.

The viewpoint moves into the pyramid. Now we're seeing interior scenes; public spaces filled with people, huge machinery being worked by technicians, gardeners tending plants in huge artificially lit gardens. I think I'd take inspiration from Mexican Art Deco/Nouveau architecture for the Lesser Redoubt's interior spaces, so they'd look a little like this:

But a lot of the architecture and machinery is noticeably run down, and everyone looks similar, like they're all related.

Shots of technicians tending huge machines.

THE LIGHTS AND HEATERS AND THE AIR CLOG AND EVERYTHING ELSE IN THE REDOUBT IS POWERED BY ENERGY TAPPED FROM THE EARTH CURRENT.

ALL IS NOT WELL.

A PERFECTLY ISOLATED POPULATION, THE REDOUBT IS SLOWLY DYING. SKILLS ARE LOST WHEN PEOPLE DIE BEFORE THEY CAN PASS THEM ON. SO ARE GENES; ITS PEOPLE ARE BECOMING DANGEROUSLY INBRED. MACHINERY DECAYS BECAUSE THERE ARE NOT ENOUGH PEOPLE TO DO ALL THE WORK THAT NEEDS TO BE DONE. ONCE LOST, KNOWLEDGE IS NOT EASILY REDISCOVERED, AS IMMEDIATELY NECESSARY WORK MUST BE PRIORITIZED OVER SCIENTIFIC INVESTIGATION.

THE REDOUBT HAS DEFIED THE ULTIMATE NIGHT FOR A MILLION YEARS. BUT ITS PEOPLE KNOW THAT IT IS SLOWLY DYING, AS THE GREAT WORLD DID BEFORE IT.

THEIR HISTORY BOOKS TELL OF ANOTHER HUMAN SETTLEMENT, A GREATER REDOUBT. BUT THE LAST CONTACT WAS LONG AGO. SHIFTS IN THE LAND HAVE MADE THE LONG ROAD TO THE GREATER REDOUBT HARD. SIGNAL CABLES FAILED AND WERE NOT REPAIRED LONG AGO. RADIO AND AIR TRAVEL ARE NOW LOST ARTS.

EVERY FEW SLEEP-WAKE CYCLES, THE PEOPLE TRY TO CONTACT THE GREATER REDOUBT THROUGH THE MASTER WORD.

The people stop what they are doing. Delicate-looking, complex, golden, glowing things, reminiscent of Arabic calligraphy float up from their heads, float through the air, and gradually disperse and fade. The viewpoint follows some of these glowing floating things as they drift out of the Redoubt and over the Night Land. Some drift over the Night Land until they fade to nothing. Some drift up the kilometers-high cliffs at the edge of the deep lowland the Redoubt is in and dissipate in the highlands where glaciers slowly settle over the ruins of the human civilization of the Bright Days. Some continue to drift across the valley floor, until... They come within sight of an immense brightly lit four-sided pyramid of literally mountainous dimensions, an instantly recognizable bigger sibling of the Lesser Redoubt: the Greater Redoubt! Some of the glowing floating things fade and dissipate before they can reach the bright four-sided pyramid. A few make it inside, and float through the bodies of people in the Greater Redoubt... but the people they float through show no reaction, no awareness of the floaters.

INBREEDING HAS WEAKENED THE MASTER WORD. THE PEOPLE OF THE LESSER REDOUBT CAN NO LONGER TRANSMIT IT STRONGLY ENOUGH FOR THE PEOPLE IN THE GREATER REDOUBT TO HEAR THEM.

THERE IS A LEGEND THAT IF SOMEONE CALLS OUT THE MASTER WORD IN A MOMENT OF GREAT NEED AND PAIN, ONE WHO LOVED THEM IN A PAST LIFE WILL BE ABLE TO HEAR, EVEN IF OTHERS CANNOT...

THE END COMES SLOWLY, THEN QUICKLY...

The huge machines that tap the Earth Current. An alarm goes off. Technicians frantically making adjustments. A great shaking like an earthquake, and an explosion.

Exterior shot of the three-sided pyramid. The pyramid goes dark.

THE MACHINES THAT TAP THE EARTH CURRENT HAVE FAILED.

Interior shots. People going about their business in the Redoubt. People working in the gardens. Each one ends with the lights going out.

The armored guardians outside the Redoubt are plunged into almost-darkness as the glowing circle and the lights of the Redoubt go out.

IT HAS HAPPENED BEFORE. THERE ARE EMERGENCY BATTERIES AND GENERATORS. REPAIRS ARE ATTEMPTED.

The pyramid lights up again, though less brightly.

Engineers in consternation before the huge, ancient machines that tap the Earth Current. Trying to make repairs.

THE ENERGY AND FUEL IN THE EMERGENCY BATTERIES AND GENERATORS BEGIN TO RUN LOW.

HARD DECISIONS ARE MADE.

The glowing circle at the base of the mesa goes dark. The armored guardians look at each other in trepidation.

THE BLOOD OF THE GUARDIANS WILL BE SPENT SO THE CIVILIANS CAN CONTINUE TO HAVE LIGHT, WARMTH, AND FOOD.

The armored guardians outside the Redoubt in battle. Their enemies are things like huge black wolves with glowing eyes.

The pyramid goes dark again. More interior shots, each ending with the lights going out.

THE EMERGENCY GENERATORS HAVE RUN OUT OF FUEL.

More scenes of the engineers trying to fix the machines that tap the Earth Current. One of them collapsing, crying, being comforted by others.

THIS TIME THE MACHINES ARE BROKEN BEYOND REPAIR.

A great exhalation of the glowing calligraphy-like floaters of the Master Word from the Lesser Redoubt. We see that some make it to the Greater Redoubt, but the people of the Greater Redoubt cannot perceive them.

A grim meeting of the city's leaders. The room is dim, lit only by emergency lights.

"THE GREATER REDOUBT MAY YET SURVIVE. THEY ARE OUR ONLY HOPE."

"WE SHOULD SEND ONE OF THE GUARDIANS, SOMEONE STRONG, TO TRAVEL THE OLD LONG ROAD, TO SEE IF THE PEOPLE OF THE GREATER REDOUBT YET LIVE, AND, IF THEY DO, TO TELL THEM WHAT WE ARE SUFFERING."

"EVEN IF THEY YET LIVE, AND WOULD AND COULD HELP, IT WOULD TAKE TOO LONG."

"WHAT ALTERNATIVE IS THERE?"

"WE SHOULD ALL GO. ALL OF US. ALL THE PEOPLE."

"WE SHOULD PUT IT TO A VOTE."

A great assembly, in an auditorium dimly lit by emergency lighting. Ballots being taken.

"THE THREE CORNERED WORLD IS DYING, AS THE GREAT WORLD DID BEFORE IT. SOON THERE WILL BE NOTHING LEFT FOR US HERE BUT COLD AND DARKNESS AND GRIEF. SO WE WILL ALL GO. ALL OF US. ALL THE PEOPLE. IN CARAVAN, DOWN THE OLD LONG ROAD ACROSS THE NIGHT LAND. IT IS OUR BEST HOPE FOR SURVIVAL."

"IT IS A SLIM AND DESPERATE HOPE, BUT WE DO NOT HAVE A BETTER ONE."

Preparations are made. Supplies are put into containers and the containers are put onto improvised carts and sleds and trailers and into backpacks. Bedding and light clothing designed for inside the climate-controlled Redoubt are torn apart and sown back together into improvised cold-weather clothing. Chains are put around the wheels of construction machinery so they won't slide in snow while being used as improvised tractors for trailers. The Great Vehicles are brought out from the Hall of Dead Generations.

A huge gate opens at the base of the Redoubt and the column of refugees set forth. They have some vehicles to carry people and supplies, but nowhere near enough to carry everything and everyone; the majority of the people have to walk. The people are bundled up against the cold of the Night Land, and their breath steams in the cold air. Armed and armored guardians walk at the front, back, and sides of the column, to protect the civilians from the predators of the Night Land. They set out along the old long road.

They travel (various cues are used to suggest considerable time passing).

They come to a place where the land has risen. The road now ends in a place of rough, jumbled rocks. With difficulty, a person can walk across this terrain, but it is impassible to the vehicles.

Scouts are sent out, but when they return they report they have found no way around the obstacle for considerable distance.

The vehicles must be abandoned. Supplies and equipment are unloaded from them, to from here be carried on people's backs. Improvised stretchers are made, and people who cannot walk are helped off the vehicles and into the improvised stretchers, so they can be carried. Much supplies and equipment are abandoned with the vehicles; too bulky and heavy for unassisted humans to carry.

The people slowly make their way across a stretch of rough, rocky terrain. Again, cues are used to indicate a significant time passing; if there were still days, it would be days. Eventually they come to a place where the road is relatively intact again.

The people continue walking. More indicators of time passing. The road begins to pass along the floor of a long gorge.

All through the journey, little golden calligraphy floaters of the Master Word go up from the traveling column of humans and disperse into the night. Sometimes they go up in ones, twos, threes, fives, sometimes there is a great simultaneous exhalation of very many of them.

Somebody collapses. Others help them back up. On the high ground above the road, one of the creatures like huge black wolves is watching. We see its thoughts. It imagines itself attacking the person who collapsed, dragging them off into the darkness and feeding on their flesh. Then a second thought: itself trying to do that, being slain by one of the armored guardians. Then a third thought; many creatures like it attacking the refugee column simultaneously, some are slain but they overwhelm the defenders and the ones that are not slain feast.

We see the three scenarios playing out in parallel in three thought bubbles above its head. Then the thought bubbles have something like glowing threads around them, as if they're a bundle bound together with string. This is indeed the visual metaphor being developed; this bundle begins to float away from the creature. The creature generates another bundle like it, which begins to drift away too, and then another. The viewpoint follows some of the bundles as they float away across the Night Land, until they encounter another of the black wolf-like predators and enter it and disappear into it, at which point the creatures instantly raise their heads alertly (one of them is sleeping, and springs to its feet when the bundle disappears into it), look to a point on the horizon with intent, and begin to walk in that direction.

A stylized depiction: the refugee column walking along the road, seen from far above, and a great number of the wolf-like predators are following it and converging on it from many directions.

One of the predators dislodges a stone from the lip of the gorge. It falls down the sloping sides of the gorge. Down in the gorge, somebody looks up and sees many shining eyes looking down from the darkness on the top of the gorge. Spotlights and flashlights are turned on the top of the gorge, revealing many of the wolf-like predators walking atop it and some of them beginning to make their way down the slopes.

A roiling agitation of the moving crowd. Fear. Screaming. A mother grabbing a toddler off the ground to hold them close and carry them.

At the front and back and sides of the column, armored Guardians spin up their diskoi (the circular saw pole-arm this person is holding) and hold them tightly.

"GUARDIANS, EN GARDE!"

A man in Guardian armor with his helmet off and some older people conferring tensely, eying the advancing predators nervously.

"SHOULD THE PEOPLE DISPERSE?"

"THE TERRAIN HERE TRAPS US. THEY ARE CUNNING CREATURES."

"THERE IS A REASON WE CHOSE TO TRAVEL TOGETHER. ALONE OR IN SMALL GROUPS WE CAN BE PICKED OFF ONE BY ONE. THE GUARDIANS CAN DEFEND THE PEOPLE BETTER IF THE PEOPLE ARE IN A MASS. AND WE WILL BE MORE LIKELY TO SURVIVE THE JOURNEY TOGETHER."

Fear is starting to curdle into panic. People are starting to run. Somebody falls and is stepped on. The walking column is in danger of becoming a stampede.

An older woman still wearing the remnants of some fancy clothing along with her improvised insulating jacket and leggings and the blanket she's wrapped around herself to keep warm climbs onto the shoulders of the leader of the Guardians. The leader of the Guardians is walking backwards and near the head of the column. He and the woman on his shoulders are holding recognizably megaphone-like devices, and with her other hand she holds some jeweled badge of office high in the air.

"THE GUARDIANS WILL DEFEND THE PEOPLE!"

"WALK, DO NOT RUN!"

"STAY TOGETHER! WE ARE STRONGER TOGETHER! WE WILL GET THROUGH THIS TOGETHER!"

"NIGHT-HOUNDS CAN READ SIGNS OF HUMAN FEAR AND INTERPRET THEM AS SIGNS OF WEAKNESS! DO NOT LET THEM SEE YOU ARE AFRAID! WALK, DO NOT RUN!"

"KEEP YOUR CHILDREN CLOSE!"

The people take up the ... suggestion? Command? The column resumes a relatively orderly walking progress. The armored Guardians walk at the front and rear and sides of the column, their spinning diskoi held ready.

A steady stream of little calligraphy golden floaters of the Master Word goes up from the column of humans and drifts away into the ultimate night; sometimes they go up in ones or twos, once there is a huge exhalation of many all at once.

For a while there is a tense stand-off. The night-hounds are much smarter than their ecological equivalents from the sunlit times, and they can use their thinking-in-pictures distant cousin of the Master Word to coordinate much better, but they are still much less social and much more selfish than humans, and here they've encountered a collective action problem. They're smart enough to realize the vanguard of the attack can be expected to take heavy casualties, and none of them want to be in it. Every hound hesitates, hoping others of its kind will take the initiative to attack and thus accept being in the vanguard.

In the end, a sort of hierarchy of desperation begins to shake out among them. The hungrier, leaner, sicklier, more desperate hounds are tempted toward the column of humans, while the better fed and therefore less desperate hang farther back.

In the end, they hit upon a solution many human armies of the sunlit times used: file closers. The better-fed and stronger hounds begin to attack the hungrier, leaner, weaker ones that have ventured closer to the humans and feed on them cannibalistically. Trapped between the jaws of their stronger cousins and the diskoi of the Guardians, the weaker, leaner hounds begin to choose the latter.

"GUARDIANS, LET NO ENEMY THROUGH YOUR LINES, NO MATTER WHAT!"

The Guardians defend the people bravely. To the last Guardian. There are too many night-hounds, and this battle is the last stand and Ragnarok of the people of the Lesser Redoubt, and in the end the night-hounds that don't die by the diskoi of the Guardians or the improvised weapons of desperate civilians get the feast they came for.

All through the battle, little floaters of the Master Word continue to go up and disperse into the night.

In the last, bloodiest, most desperate phase of the battle, as the battle shades with queasy ambiguity into the victors' enjoyment of their gruesome reward, a single young woman manages to survive by hiding a crack in the earth.

After the battle, she wanders around the road with a flashlight. Its beam illuminates nothing but ancient road surface, barren earth, blood, gore, and corpses. She finds and weeps beside the corpses of her mother and father. She curls up on the side of the road, rocking and covering her ears with her hands, and a Master Word floater rises up from her.

The viewpoint follows the floater into the night.

It crosses the Night Land, to the still shining pyramid of the Greater Redoubt. It floats into the Greater Redoubt. Sometimes it floats through people, even through their heads, but they do not show any reaction. Then it disappears into a young man sitting at a table reading something, and he suddenly stands up, visibly shocked.

HE ALONE HAS HEARD.

Scenes of the young man talking and arguing with other people.

AFTER SO LONG WITHOUT CONTACT WITH THE LESSER REDOUBT, THE OTHERS ARE SKEPTICAL.

IF THE VISION IS TRUE, THEY WANT TO HELP THEIR DISTANT COUSINS, BUT...

THE OLD ROAD IS LONG AND THE NIGHT LAND IS DANGEROUS. THOSE WHO VENTURE PAST THE AIR CLOG MAY NOT RETURN.

THEY ARE RELUCTANT TO RISK THE WASTE OF PRECIOUS RESOURCES AND LIVES THAT MIGHT HAPPEN IF THEY ACT ON THE VISION AND IT IS AN ILLUSION.

HE OFFERS TO GO OUT INTO THE NIGHT LAND ALONE, TO SEEK THE ONE WHO HAS CALLED OUT TO HIM.

HIS OFFER IS ACCEPTED.

We see the young man, now in armor and with a diskos, being given a farewell ceremony at a gate of the Last Redoubt and leaving the Last Redoubt (he doesn't put his helmet on until after he walks out the door, so we know it's him).

After this we get a fairly faithful to the novel depiction of the young man's crossing of the Night Land; the battle against the Grey Man, coming to a place where the old road ends in land jumbled by geologic activity after its construction, the journey across the country of darkness...

I think a good way of rendering the journey across the country of complete darkness would be, like... At first we see the young man making his way across that country with the help of an electric light. He periodically checks an indicator, and we can see that the light's batteries are running low (the indicator should be something intuitive). Maybe have a cue card saying the battery is running low and he's going to risk continuing in darkness. Up to now in this sequence the things illuminated by the light have been visible. When he turns the light off, the only things visible are now the man, and a very small area of things he's touching or has explored through touch. So, when he's walking, we see him in almost a black void (maybe there are stars above, and a line of a horizon visible by where they end), with tiny circles around his feet when he puts them down (so, we may occasionally see a rock by his boot or something). Then he trips and takes a bad fall, as in the novel. His body strikes something sharp, and the edge of it becomes visible in the void. After recovering, he explores the sharp thing by touch, and we see a big, sharp rock. He explores his armor where he hit it by touch, and we see a scratch on the armor. After that, he dares not walk, but continues the journey crawling on his hands and knees. Again, he appears to be in an almost in a black void, with only things he's touching and tiny circles of whatever he's recently explored by touch illuminated. Eventually he comes to an area where there's some dim lighting by volcanic activity and bio-luminescence and we're able to see a landscape again and he starts to walk normally normally again. Maybe have a cue card at this point something like

"OH MARVELOUS LIGHT!"

... From there the film would continue to follow the novel fairly faithfully; the journey along the underground river (and avoiding being noticed by the big slug creature), the journey through the dark forest...

Interspersed with the young man's heroic journey, we get scenes of the young woman survivor trying to survive in the Night Land, occasionally finding and eating some edible wild plants or fungi, but becoming noticeably weaker and visibly thinner and thinner, eventually to the point of emaciation.

Every once in a while a Master Word floater goes up from the young woman or the young man. Sometimes they dissipate. Sometimes one sent out by the young woman reaches the young man or vice versa, and they visibly react to it (sometimes with joy, sometimes the young man will react with visible increase of urgency in his travels).

At one point we see the young woman, starving, thin, staring at a small animal.

THE REDOUBTS MUST BE EFFICIENT. THE FOOD OF THE REDOUBTS IS VEGETARIAN. LIVESTOCK WOULD BE INEFFICIENT.

THE CULTURAL MEMORY OF HUMAN CARNIVORY HAS BEEN LOST.

IT DOES NOT OCCUR TO HER THAT SHE MIGHT HUNT AND EAT AN ANIMAL.

The animal ambles away from her, untroubled.

... The young man finds the old road again, travels down it to the empty shell of the Lesser Redoubt, meets the young woman nearby...

That's about the point in the novel I've gotten up to so far, I've been doing other stuff, but based on the Wikipedia summary I guess from there the film could follow the plot of the rest of the novel relatively faithfully.

I finally managed to unfuck my Amazon Prime membership! My bank's fraud watch system stopped the withdrawal of the automatic renewal fee from my account in January and my Prime membership got suspended, it was a real pain getting the problem fixed but I finally managed to get my renewal payment processed and my Prime membership reinstated.

I had a little extra money, and so I decided to replace my laptop charger with a new one of the same brand as the one that broke. I think it's better quality than the replacement I'd ordered previously. The new replacement came in the mail a few days ago.

So I now have a laptop charger I don't need. I paid almost as much or more for shipping than the actual cost of the charger, so it doesn't seem worth it to send it back. My apartment is small, so I don't really want to keep it around. Anyone want it? I'd be happy to give it to someone. It's compatible with Lenovo IdeaPad 3 laptops. Here's are some photos of it:

DM me to arrange shipping or pick-up if you want it (I live in Berkeley CA USA).

It feels good to have fixed a broken window!

Regarding something I wrote in my previous post:

Have an idea for one scene in it which I think nicely fits some of the themes I'd want to develop:

"GO TO THE HALL OF DEAD GENERATIONS AND BRING OUT THE GREAT VEHICLES!"

The screen dark for a moment, then a huge door is being opened into the darkness. People stand on the other side of the door. Beams from powerful flashlights they hold pierce the darkness and illuminate row upon row of seated mummies (I'm thinking Inca royal mummies as the inspiration for how they'd be positioned and propped up and dressed). One of the people raises a staff in salute to the mummies.

"HEAR ME, OH ALL DEAD GENERATIONS OF THE THREE-CORNERED WORLD UNTO THE TIME OF ITS CONSTRUCTION! HEAR THE WORDS OF THE LAST GENERATION OF THE THREE-CORNERED WORLD, FOR THE THREE-CORNERED WORLD HAS BECOME BEREFT OF LIGHT AND WARMTH, AS THE GREAT WORLD DID BEFORE IT! WE HAVE COME FOR THE GREAT VEHICLES, THAT YOU PREPARED AND SECURED FOR US IN THIS THE HOUR OF OUR NEED, WHICH YOU FORESAW!"

People advance into the dark Hall of Dead Generations. Deep in the Hall of Dead Generations, they find what they seek; their flashlight beams illuminate treaded vehicles the size of small apartment buildings; huge ancient snowmobiles. They climb onto one of the Great Vehicles. A few of them enter the cockpit. One of them begins to tentatively, gingerly, reverently examine and work the controls. Lights begin to come on, a computer screen lights up. They push a button and the vehicle's fossil-old engine begins to sputter, then roar steadily. They visibly slump with relief.

More people come, climb into more of the Great Vehicles. Some start smoothly, like the first one. Sometimes their ancient engines sputter and die when somebody tries to start them. Sometimes they don't start at all. People begin to open boxes, take out tools...

THE GREAT VEHICLES ARE OLD AS FOSSILS. KEEPING MORE IMMEDIATELY NECESSARY MACHINERY WORKING HAS ABSORBED THE ENERGY OF THE PEOPLE. NOT EVERYTHING LASTED ALL THOSE MILLENNIA WITHOUT DAMAGE. ONE IN THREE OF THE GREAT VEHICLES STILL FUNCTIONS, OR CAN BE REPAIRED. MANY OF THE PEOPLE WILL HAVE TO TRAVEL THE OLD LONG ROAD ACROSS THE NIGHT LAND ON FOOT.

Those Great Vehicles still working or successfully repaired are driven out through the great gate of the Hall of Dead Generations, through a broad avenue between the many rows of seated mummies.

In a huge loading bay, the Great Vehicles are being loaded for the great journey. With boxes and barrels, mostly; their great value will be that they can carry many tons of supplies. But some old people, children, pregnant women, and disabled people are also being helped onto and into the Great Vehicles. The most vulnerable will be allowed into the heated cabins, while the more robust must ride outside, where they won't have to walk but will have only insulating clothing and blankets and tarps to protect them from the elements. Some armored guardians with weapons will ride on top of the Great Vehicles, to fight off any Night Land predators that manage to jump onto one, but most will walk, at the front and back and sides of the column of civilians, to protect them.

Men in the armored suits of the Lesser Redoubt's guardians are trying to get an older woman in fancy clothing to board one of the Great Vehicles.

"I AM NOT SO OLD. I WILL WALK."

The last of the Great Vehicles to leave the Hall of Dead Generations stops at the threshold of its great door, so the speaker to the dead can address the ancestors one last time:

"HEAR ME, OH ALL DEAD GENERATIONS OF THE THREE CORNERED WORLD UNTO THE TIME OF ITS CONSTRUCTION! THE LAST GENERATION OF THE THREE-CORNERED WORLD DEPARTS NOW, TO SEEK THE FOUR-CORNERED WORLD! WE WILL NEVER DISTURB YOUR REST AGAIN! SLEEP WELL!"

The people seal the Hall of Dead Generations behind them. The speaker to the dead pauses to paint indecipherable made up language writing on the closed door of the Hall of Dead Generations.

"THE SEAL OF THE LAST GENERATION OF THE THREE-CORNERED WORLD IS ON THE HALL OF DEAD GENERATIONS OF THE THREE-CORNERED WORLD! MAY THESE DOORS STAND LONG, KEEPING OUT ALL FROST AND WATER AND ROT AND EVIL CREATURES FOR A VERY LONG TIME! IF YOU WISH TO FIND OUR DESCENDANTS, FOLLOW THE OLD ROAD TO THE FOUR-CORNERED WORLD!"

--------

Three-cornered world / four-cornered world / great world: IIRC the Lesser Redoubt and the Great Redoubt are, respectively, a three-sided and four-sided pyramid! "The great world" is, of course, the Earth!

This entombment custom is divergent from those of the Great Redoubt; the people of the Great Redoubt bury their dead in the earth of the largest and lowest of their underground fields. Since the Lesser Redoubt and Great Redoubt have been out of contact for a long time, I think they would have pretty significant cultural differences! The Lesser Redoubt is getting a kinda Inca vibe in this, I think a good compliment to that would be taking inspiration from Mexican Art Deco/Noveau architecture for its interior spaces. Think (when the lights were still on) something a little like this:

May post a summary of what it would be like tomorrow.

Reading William Hope Hodgson's "The Night Land."

Oh, cool, I found a free copy of William Hope Hodgson's The Night Land online! It sounds like very much my kind of thing! I'm a little bit more than halfway through the book so far. I read a bunch of the fanfiction on the Night Land website before I found it, so I thought it'd be interesting to see how the actual novel compares to the fanfics. I'm a little more than halfway through the novel now, and so far I'm finding that it fits significantly better with my sensibilities than the fanfics, which is interesting cause the latter were presumably written by people much more culturally similar to me (2000s and early 2010s going by the publishing dates on the website vs. the original novel being published in 1912).

This gets cited as one of the big barriers to getting into the novel, and I've seen comments on the Night Land website to the effect of "Yeah, the setting's cool, but Hodgson was not a good writer on a technical level" and a lot of people quit reading the book when they see the first chapter or so. Admittedly, I skipped the framing section and went straight to the parts about the far future sunless world... But I don't have this reaction! Like, yeah, the lack of dialogue and very minimalistic characterization is weird (we don't even get the far future viewpoint character's name, fans often call him X), but it's an interesting and cool kind of weird! It feels like I'm reading a text from a different culture with different literary conventions, which is very appropriate! The lack of dialogue gives the narrative a sort of Temple Grandin thinking in pictures feel.

My immediate quibble with the setting based on reading the description of the novel and some of the fanfics was it feels like a waste of the potential of the premise if the big danger from the Night Land is creatures. This is a perpetually dark world where the sun is going out! It would logically kill you with cold and hunger! It would need no assistance from space vampires and mutant yeti orcs and whatnot to kill you! In fact, being in any kind of danger from an animal outside the Redoubt implies an implausibly human-friendly environment for a world like that; its surface would logically be colder than Pluto and kill any unprotected animal instantly (I rationalize it as the Night Land's sun isn't quite dead and still has significant output in the infrared + the Redoubts are in a very deep lowland that's warmer than the rest of the planet; the Night Land has a ground cover of "moss bushes" in places and there's even a forest, which would fit with that if its plants have evolved to photosynthesize using infrared light outside the range of human vision).

The actual description of the crossing of the Night Land in the novel feels congruent with how I'd approach the premise of such a world. Cold is cited as a hazard of the Night Lands. When X finds Nanni, she is starving ("And I opened my left hand, and lookt at the hand within my palm, and surely it was utter thin and wasted"). There are dangerous creatures, but it feels ecological, not Manichean. X isn't primarily a combat-oriented hero; he's fought a few monsters so far but mostly he avoids them and tries to not be noticed by them, y'know, as a smart member of a prey species would. He calls them "evil," but it feels like plausibly basically an emotionally loaded way of saying hostile/dangerous to humans. His journey through the Night Land is mostly just walking

Night vision goggles are apparently a lost technology to the people of the Redoubt, because X's armor doesn't have them. There's a section where he has to cross a place of complete darkness, where there are no volcanoes to provide dim natural light. He has to cross it blind (I suppose he can't use a flashlight or electric lantern because of not having any with batteries that would last through the journey and/or fear of attracting attention from Night Land predators - Hodgson may have simply not anticipated electric lights with portable power sources?). At one point he takes a dangerous fall, and after that dares not walk in that darkness; he crosses that country crawling on his hands and knees. When he comes to a place with a source of natural light (so he can walk normally again) he describes the light as something like "marvelous" or "wonderful."

Another thing I like about the novel is it takes the same approach I talk about taking to fiction about a generation ship here. The fanfics tend to situate the Redoubt firmly in the context of a longer history, but in the novel (you can notice it from reading the excerpt here) it feels like by X's lifetime humanity has lived entirely within the Redoubts for so long that they have only a very dim cultural memory of any other existence. They have a cultural memory that the Redoubt was built, that humans existed before it, that there used to be a sun, but it's been so long that feels to them like

“In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth. And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters.” - Genesis 1 (King James Bible).

When X gets his past life memories back at 17 he thinks of a line from an ancient poet of the Redoubt who describes some slow-moving monster as something that has been there since the beginning of the world and he goes like "No it wasn't! I now remember a time when that was not part of the world!"

Sounds like lot of the people of the Redoubt (a lot of the most educated people, even) don't think the sun was real!

"In the Bright Days there was a thing called the Sun, it was like a great lamp in the sky, and it gave light and warmth to the whole Land, so the whole Land was like the Fields, and humans could live everywhere in the Land. But in time it dimmed, and humans built the Redoubt to be a place where they could continue to have light and warmth and food as in the Bright Days, and retreated into the Redoubt to dwell only therein till the end of the world, and the sun dimmed until it ceased to give forth light, and the Land became the Night Land."

I think to the people of the Redoubt that might sound a lot like:

"In pain you shall bring forth children..."

"... cursed is the ground for thy sake; in sorrow shalt thou eat of it all the days of thy life;

Thorns also and thistles shall it bring forth to thee...

In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread..."

I can totally see there being a treatise in the Redoubt's records titled something like "Against the proposition that human inability to see in darkness is evidence of the past existence of the Sun," arguing that humans might have started out as a Night Land species and then lost night vision after building the Redoubt because abundant artificial light removed selection pressure against night-blindness.

There's an interesting tidbit from one of the website's essays: all the food of the Redoubt is vegetarian, and when X and Nanni are out in the Night Land it does not occur to them that they might hunt and eat animals. From the novel, and I interpret this as the thought of the seventeenth century guy we're ostensibly getting X's narrative filtered through:

X so far seems to have sustained himself on his expedition entirely with highly concentrated low-volume expedition rations he brought with them from the Redoubt. Naani, who is starving, has been eating "the moss upon the rocks, and odd strange berries and growths" to prolong her survival in the Night Land, but it did not occur to her to hunt and eat an animal.

I think these people have no cultural memory of human carnivory. They just don't have an intuition that animals can be food for humans.

In one of the fanfics a couple of Redoubt humans are given meat by an entity of the Night Land they've allied with, and initially object in terms of something like "eating something's flesh is almost as bad as consuming its soul," but I like to imagine that if a human of X/Nanni's time was offered meat they'd be reluctant to eat it in a more primal following mother's wisdom kind of way, which they might articulate in terms of morality or propriety or hygiene but would really be at its core a "that is not food, I don't want to put that in my mouth!" reaction (I suspect eating meat would sound pretty gross to a human who's old enough to grok the concept but hasn't been accustomed to the practice by acculturation and/or experience).

"Kill an animal to eat its corpse? As... as a creature of the Night Land would? A human can do that without being harmed? A human can be nourished that way? Aren't animals dirty and full of bacteria?"

One of the essays on the Night Land website said that the novel's perspective on sex and gender "apparently combines the worst sugar-sweet Victorian idealism with the philosophy of John Norman's Gor," so I was braced for something pretty rancid. I'm only halfway through so maybe the bad parts are still ahead, but, uh...

Maybe I'm being a poster person for how sexism can go down a lot easier if it's benevolent, maybe I like "the worst sugar-sweet Victorian idealism," but, uh...

X is not at all the kind of guy that statement led me to expect! Like, yeah, X may have some somewhat concerning attitudes about sex and relationships and women if I take his words at face value, though I'm inclined toward the reading that we're not actually getting a direct view of X's ideas and attitudes, we're getting X's ideas and attitudes as interpreted by the seventeenth century British man he was in a past life who's ostensibly the actual viewpoint character. I don't mean to suggest that the people of the Redoubt couldn't have gender ideology and gendered practices that would be distasteful or disturbing to modern liberals, but given that they're a hyper-urbanized high-tech society (the ultimate urban society, the Last Redoubt is literally all one building!) I don't think it makes sense for them to have a gender system like trad patriarchies (since the latter reflects the material conditions of primarily rural societies centered on agriculture with high child mortality rates and relatively inconvenient birth control) and I think they'd probably have relative gender equality (since I think relative gender equality is kind of a natural consequence of low birth rates and mechanization and the Redoubt's society is so old it's almost certainly in equilibrium with its material conditions). If I had to pick the sexism that shows up that I think is most likely to be authentic Redoubt society sexism, it'd be the thing where only men are allowed to leave the Redoubt; "sperm is cheap so men may be expended, fertile wombs are precious so women must be protected" seems likely to be a long-enduring kind of sexism that may exist across societies with many technological conditions. Anyway, my point is, uh...

X reads as a fundamentally really sweet and good person!

Daaawwwww! :qq: He's adorable!

I actually found it kind of refreshing after the fanfics, which tend to have less likable protagonists. I feel like actually reading the novel pegging The Night Land as dismal and grimdark gets it wrong; in its assumptions about human psychology it's actually pretty noblebright. I think it's actually arguably an example of what the "hopepunk shouldn't be about utopian settings, it should be about hope in dystopian settings" people want.

Like, I get it, this is extremely played straight knight/damsel stuff, but, uh, you can model X as not particularly sexist and it would still make sense for him to relate to Naani this way as a function of compassion. He has protective clothing, a weapon, wilderness survival gear, food, is well-nourished, and has a living city to go back to. When he meets Naani, she is the last survivor of her people, she has spent the last IDK month or three watching her world be destroyed and then slowly starving alone in the dark, she seems to be more-or-less just be walking around in regular civilian clothes with no special equipment to help her survive, she has inadequate thermal protection in a difficult climate, and and she's malnourished. X doesn't have to be a sexist to treat her as a vulnerable and needy person, she is a vulnerable and needy person!

I think you could flip the genders of that section and with a little tinkering (e.g. the shoe size difference being read as a racial difference instead of a gender difference) it would have psychological verisimilitude and fem!X would also seem quite endearing to me! Actually, maybe I should try writing such a gender-flipped version of some of X's and Naani's interactions, it might be an interesting short writing exercise!

Speaking of X being unironically a very good boy, the book also pretty much explicitly tells us he's good about consent! Though, of course, it articulates it differently than a modern author would...

And, like, not to talk shit about some old webmaster who's been dead since 2014, but TBH the guy who wrote that essay honestly gives me worse vibes than X does when it comes to how he talks about gender and sexuality and women. Like, he could have just pointed out that Naani surviving what she went through is easily as or more impressive than X's journey through the Night Land and that she is a vulnerable and needy person compared to him for very concrete material reasons that don't inherently have much to do with gender, he didn't need to go on a tangent about how he thinks action heroines are a dumb idea that included unironically using the term "alpha male" for a human man. I don't remember X using "slut" as a derogatory term for a woman or talking about a woman's virtue in terms of her chastity, but those are things that show up in that guy's writing. The crowning moment of awesome he gave the heroine in one of his stories was trying to look dignified as she got gruesomely killed, which feels like a horrific on the nose parody of patriarchal gender expectations for women (properly decorative unto death...) but I got the impression he just unironically thought that was a cool heroic death for her.

He also says that Naani "is a dummy, a picture, an ideal without guts, with no character whatever ... This is the great flaw in the heart of The Night Land, and must be addressed," and I really don't agree. I mean, she doesn't get a ton of characterization, but nobody in this does; this is a book where the protagonist doesn't even get a name, it's actually not obvious to me that she's less characterized than X. And I get a definite sense of a personality from her behavior! She's a lot like X! Her having survived alone in the Night Land as long as she did implies cleverness and psychological strength (OMG for real this poor woman was probably so scared and felt so alone and is probably so traumatized...), this is a "similar people attract each other" dynamic. Their interactions make me think of that "and so, they were both bottoms" meme. They are both people who have self-sacrificing acts of service as love languages, and they're kind of having a contest of doing self-sacrificing acts of service at each other and trying to argue each other into accepting the better deal. But they are also pragmatic problem-solvers who want positive-sum outcomes, which keeps this from becoming toxic, they will come to compromises e.g. "we'll take turns wearing the cloak" and "this is stupid, let's just share the blanket and both be warm." As a person who's like this, I find this very relatable, and it it's also very endearing to me!

As a person who's never seen a low support needs autism symptom list that didn't make me think "that's me!" this novel reads to me as a very autistic text. The way the unusual format evokes a kinda thinking in pictures style of storytelling, the way people are characterized by their concrete actions, the very concrete acts of service oriented love languages of the protagonists...

These barely characterized people feel relatable to me, in the way I talked about here, where I feel more represented by people who think like me than by people I just happen to share a race, ethnicity, or gender with.

After X has a monster encounter (with a dangerous creature called a "Great Grey Man," I get the feeling the Night Land fauna is more than a little All Tomorrows-ish) and is victorious:

Yes, yes, object personification in autism...

I think one could make a really neat animated film adaptation of The Night Land! I have some ideas for how I'd do it if I could that I think I will post tomorrow. To try to approximate the atmosphere of the novel, it would be in the format of an old silent film, without dialogue, mostly just images and music, with some use of cue cards to establish context (the trick would be to come up with a stylized form of animation that gives an impression of the darkness of a sunless world while still allowing the viewer to see the action). It would develop Naani's side of the story more, making it an equal symmetric companion narrative to X's - and, in service of that, it would take some liberties with the original text, trying to really bring out the dramatic potential of the fall of the Lesser Redoubt and drawing inspiration from Nigel Atkinson's excellent fanfic A Mouse In the Walls of the Lesser Redoubt, though I wouldn't precisely follow that narrative either. I do very much prefer Atkinson's take on the abandonment of the Lesser Redoubt, as a kind of mass suicide by people who knew they were doomed and preferred to get it over with quickly; I think that's got more drama and verisimilitude and is kind of more respectful to the people of the Lesser Redoubt than the novel's version, where it's just "some Night Land gribbly got into their heads and made them walk out into the dark." An element I would add, original to me, is that the people of the Lesser Redoubt did have a plan for survival, albeit one they knew probably wouldn't work but undertook in desperation: to walk en masse in a caravan across the Night Land to the Great Redoubt, the location of which was known, though no-one had made the journey in a million years, and hope their distant cousins would take pity on them and let them in...

Maybe in five or ten or twenty years I'll be able to actually make this thing with some Sora-descendant program...

I know something that would make good music for it:

Turned out my old laptop charger/power cord was definitely going out after all. I bought a new one. The problem was definitely with the charger. I should be able to get back to posting regularly now, I was kind of trying to not use my laptop too much for a while to conserve the battery and remaining life of the old charger.

One issue with the new one: I notice the male connector to go into the computer is a little too long:

Notice how it's too long to go all the way in. It isn't the same brand as the old charger and I think was designed to be able to fit computers with deeper ports. It seems to work fine though. This isn't a problem, right? The outer metal part of the connector is insulated and has no electricity moving through it, right?

The charger/power cord for my laptop started working intermittently lately, I had a few episodes when I had it plugged in but the battery was still draining when the laptop was on/no external power was reaching the laptop, I thought it was a goner and I was going to have to buy a new one for sure (you may have noticed I haven't posted anything in the last few days, I've been trying to conserve battery power and remaining life of the charger), but now it seems to be working fine again. Really undecided if I want to buy a replacement for it now.

Maybe I should wait a few days and see what happens?