THE BOATS OF THE GLEN CARRIG (1907) – ANCIENT SCIENCE FICTION

THE BOATS OF THE GLEN CARRIG (1907) – Written by horror legend William Hope Hodgson, whose works The House on the Borderland, The Ghost Pirates and the Thomas Carnacki short stories were all reviewed previously here at Balladeer’s Blog. 

Though Hodgson’s usually associated with horror, The Boats of the Glen Carrig gets classed as science fiction because its nightmarish creatures seem rooted in science, making them more akin to the Xenomorphs in Alien than to the undead buccaneers in The Ghost Pirates or the cosmic supernatural entities of The House on the Borderland. 

In 1757 the story’s main character, John Winterstraw, is telling his son James Winterstraw about the horrific adventure that brought John together with the boy’s mother. (How I Met Your Mother: The Prequel Series) John and other sailors were on board the Glen Carrig when it struck a rock near the surface of the waters and sank.

All hands evacuated in the lifeboats but were soon mired in a mass of seaweed in the Sargasso Sea. Their troubles were just beginning, as mutated life-forms began to assault them.

Enormous octopi and squids attacked, like spiders coming to feed on prey trapped in their webs. Assorted crew members fell victim to the cephalopods, while the survivors fled deeper and deeper into the entangling, menacing Sargasso Sea.

The next creatures to terrorize our characters were hybrids of primates and octopi, with frames like apes and humans, but blood-sucking tentacles instead of arms, and faces with “beaks” like squids. These beings, which the crew members call “sea demons”, possess intelligence which matches their ferocity.

After even more characters get killed off, the remaining figures reach a marshy, unstable island amid all the seaweed. Any illusions the crew members have that they have found temporary safety are dispelled when new threats rear their head. 

Those threats? More hybrid life-forms, trees that are sentient and whose seeming branches are really ropelike limbs that the creatures use to snare victims, then drag them to their maws to devour them. Night falls, but the castaways from the Glen Carrig are unable to sleep because after dark the sentient trees howl like wolves.   

At length the sailors catch sight of a derelict ship in the distance, mired in the seaweed. Our heroes observe that the ship has been fortified against attacks by the assorted monsters of the region. Even more, the ship is inhabited by men and women who are somehow scraping out an existence, however miserable.   

Risking even more losses among their numbers, the sailors fight their way to the derelict and are welcomed aboard by the passenger families and the remaining crew members of that vessel. It is here that John Winterstraw meets the woman who will become his wife and the mother of the child transcribing his parents’ shared adventure.

The people on board the derelict have – very unrealistically – been surviving for years under hellish conditions. The Glen Carrig crewmen join forces with the families and sailors of the derelict in an effort to free the vessel from the entangling seaweed. 

They succeed, but not without perils and additional losses, and manage to leave the Sargasso Sea behind them. The survivors reach England, where John and his lady love marry and establish a manor home for themselves.

The Boats of the Glen Carrig frequently put me in mind of “crashed spaceships on a planet of monsters” stories, so in my opinion it really does belong in the science fiction category rather than traditional horror. The biggest downside is that, writing in 1907, Hodgson’s awkward attempt to imitate 1750s writing and turns of phrase are often cringeworthy.

We never learn what sort of ghastly cross-breeding among species and genuses produced the Sargasso Sea’s creatures over millions of years. On the other hand, the tale doesn’t try to be a deep examination of the implications of their existence, either, so if a reader is content with a grim survival story with odd life-forms as the antagonists, The Boats of the Glen Carrig is a decent read.  

FOR WASHINGTON IRVING’S 1809 depiction of an invasion from the moon click here:   https://glitternight.com/2014/05/05/ancient-science-fiction-the-men-of-the-moon-1809-by-washington-irving/

FOR TEN MORE EXAMPLES OF ANCIENT SCIENCE FICTION CLICK HERE:   https://glitternight.com/2014/03/03/ten-neglected-examples-of-ancient-science-fiction/