‘And now, when Danforth and I saw the freshly glistening and reflectively iridescent black slime which clung thickly to those headless bodies and stank obscenely with that new, unknown odour whose cause only a diseased fancy could envisage – clung to those bodies and sparkled less voluminously on a smooth part of the accursedly resculptured wall in a series of grouped dots – we understood the quality of cosmic fear to its uttermost depths. It was not fear of those four missing others – for all too well did we suspect they would do no harm again. Poor devils!’
HP Lovecraft (At the Mountains of Madness)
The above quote could be from any one of the Alien movies. As the reader, you know something is waiting in the darkness ahead for the main characters and, sure enough, a creature of unimaginable horror hurtles after the party and the whole thing becomes a chase novel back to civilisation. Again Alien.
Although far from popular when first published, At the Mountains of Madness strongly influenced the science fiction genre and probably was the instigator of injecting true horror into it as well. There is no question that the broad body of Lovecraft’s work was influenced by the world’s first true horror writer, Edgar Allan Poe, but which films benefited from Lovecraft’s take on science fiction? A clear example would be The Thing from Another World (1951), which was remade by John Carpenter as the special-effects movie The Thing (1982). One of the important plot developments for this story was the gradual knocking-off of the main characters. Thirteen become 12, who then become 11, then ten, nine, eight… and there we see an echo in the movie franchise of Alien. But it doesn’t end there. Lovecraft introduced an extra wonder by using extreme – remote – locations on our own planet for his chilling settings. This continued in the science fiction film world with the Arctic in The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms (1953), progressing to the Amazon in The Creature from the Black Lagoon (1954), and then on to the Himalayas in The Abominable Snowman (1957).
The knock-on effect of the popularity of these movies, each a milestone within the science fiction genre, shows how much cross-pollination the genre has picked up from horror – i.e. HP Lovecraft with a dash of Poe, maybe – a prime example being The Quatermass Experiment (1953). Classic writers in each genre will influence good practice within the movie industry, for example HG Wells in science fiction, Bram Stoker in horror and L Frank Baum in fantasy (The Wizard of Oz is so important to the cinematographic evolution of fantasy on celluloid). But as Terry Nation (creator of the Daleks) once said: ‘When I used to go and see science fiction movies they used to have H certificates for Horror.’ The original 1950s version of The War of the Worlds is a good example of this bastardisation of the genre.
So we understand the modern legacy of three fundamental genres in this book, but does Pratchett? No, he doesn’t. He doesn’t like the constraints of tight genres, because they restrict his imagination. For example, at the very start of The Dark Side of the Sun, he has the main character out fishing for Dagon.
‘The region was putrid with the carcasses of decaying fish, and of other less describable things which I saw protruding from the nasty mud of the unending plain.’
HP Lovecraft (Dagon)
In using Dagon, Pratchett is acknowledging HP Lovecraft, one of the great masters of horror. Lovecraft wrote a short horror story called Dagon, and this is echoed at the start of Pratchett’s science fiction novel. So here we have a mixture – not necessarily a confusion – of genres, because there should be no boundary to imagination. However, one should still be aware of what the genres are.
So is The Dark Side of the Sun Pratchett’s vision of the science fiction genre? Indeed it is. It echoes his beliefs as to what science fiction is: a sub-genre of fantasy that includes some early horror fiction too. Remember, for Pratchett, Dr Who fits into the sub-genre of science fiction. So Pratchett’s ability to blend major influences from science fiction, fantasy and horror – whether motivated by the history of cinema or not – is unashamed and seamless.
‘Shortly Don heard a warm Cockney voice, “Don, my dear boy, are you there?”
“Yes, Sir Isaac.”
The dragon shrilled relief.’
Robert A Heinlein (Between Planets)
Robert A Heinlein was one of the greatest practitioners of science fiction. His novel Stranger in a Strange Land (1961) is one of the most important science fiction novels ever written, and was too far ahead of its time to be fully appreciated in the early 1960s. The above quote comes from an earlier Heinlein novel that actually used dragons (and something a little too upper class to be Cockney). This illustrates that most genre writers try to mix and match, but, as I stated earlier, the main influence on a book or film will be its driving – defining – genre: science fiction, horror or fantasy. Between Planets was exactly what it said on the tin: science fiction. Despite some genre cross-contamination, Pratchett’s The Dark Side of the Sun is exactly the same and based upon his take on the genre.
‘The Dagon fishermen under licence from the Board of Widdershins rode out by the hundred when the big bivalves rose up from the deep, to snatch the pearls of nacreous pilac by the light of the moon.’
(The Dark Side of the Sun)
Halfway through The Dark Side of the Sun, the science fiction purist is a little frustrated. There is no science embedded in the fiction thus far; everything is pure fantasy. The great practitioners of the genre – Heinlein, Asimov, Clarke, Herbert – all had some science and often deep political problems (witness Foundation, Dune, Time for the Stars, even The War of the Worlds), but Pratchett’s science fiction has its soul in the fantasy genre. The upside to this is some beautiful writing: ‘Dom saw the huntsman on his black horse when he brushed through the wall of the drive cabin like bracken… For a moment he looked at Dom, who saw his eyes gleam momentarily like mirrors and a hand go up protectively. Then the horse and rider were gone.’
Pratchett takes in the illusions of space travel and improbability drives as abstractly as Douglas Adams in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, but at least Adams questioned life, the universe and everything and did his improbability maths, eventually coming up with the answer to the ultimate question of life, the universe and everything as 42! Perhaps Pratchett’s rocky relationship with maths makes him ignore fiddly calculations and mind-blowing telephone numbers of digits, which explain how old your twin brother will be if he has travelled at the speed of light while you grew old over 50-odd years (see Heinlein’s Time for the Stars). Probably true, as Asimov, Heinlein and Clarke all loved playing with maths.
What Pratchett does well is play with words, approaching the mysteries of the universe from a completely different viewpoint. He looks at the absurdities that actually exist in life and takes a moment to talk about them. A good example of this in The Dark Side of the Sun is where the subject of horse racing is discussed: ‘… on Earth there was a creature called a horse. Long ago it was realised that if a number of these animals were raced over a set distance one must surely prove faster than the others, and from this there was…’ Gambling!
Pratchett does not believe in God, but he believes in an order to the universe. He is intrigued by the absurdity of life and the creations of mankind – he is a humanist – but as he admits nowadays, he is getting a little disillusioned with mankind and his cruelty to his fellow creatures. This is detectable in The Dark Side of the Sun, just as it would be later in the Discworld series and books such as Johnny and the Dead