It Might Have Been a Million Years Later: Abyssal Time in William Hope Hodgson's Weird Fiction

William Hope Hodgson's weird fiction traverses the abyss of time, depicting enormous timescales that defy assimilation into human experience. The House on the Borderland (1908) takes its narrator on an involuntary, disembodied journey through time to the end not only of this world, but the entire cosmos, while The Night Land (1912) plucks its narrator's consciousness from his body in the seventeenth century and deposits it in another body, living in a titanic fortress on a dying earth billions of years in the future. Like H.G. Wells' The Time Machine (1895), which inspired them, these novels look backward to the debates over geological time that raged throughout the nineteenth century and forward to the massively expanded timescales of twentieth-century cosmology. However, in contrast to Wells, Hodgson's leaps across the abyss of time undermine the process of cognitive mastery that defines both science and science fiction, revealing his version of the weird to be a practice of non- or anti-knowledge, which participates in the dismantling of 19th-century intellectual certainties that marked the start of the 20th century and still has much to teach us in the 21st century.