The origin of the term steampunk: K.W. Jeter, in response to a review of his 1987 novel Infernal Devices, making a joke about he and his two writing colleagues publishing "gonzo-historical" fiction (which is perhaps a more fitting umbrella term in hindsight: Powers's major novel The Anubis Gates is far more magic-based and doesn't even take place during Queen Victoria's reign!)
I really want to know why you hate Morlock Night! What's your full opinion on it?
It’s just so embarrassing! Small essay under the cut.
The Time Machine honestly didn’t need a sequel. It had its own problems (I have so many things to say about the Morlocks), but in all it was a good damn book. The ambiguous fate of the Time Traveller at the end was perfect. There was no other way it could have ended; giving our Time Traveller a full stop of an ending detracts from the actual point of the story, I think, which isn’t really about him at all, but about society and humanity. But then Morlock Night explains what he did and how it got him killed immediately.
The author clearly has no interest in giving any of his characters any actual personality. The main character, and Tafe, and fucking Merlin are all completely bland. The dialogue is cringeworthy - it’s stilted and awkward and you can tell it’s trying to be grandiose, but it actually reads like it was written by a high school boy who thinks he’s being edgy and sophisticated.
And, yes, I said fucking Merlin because the actual fucking Merlin shows up and wants to find the actual fucking King Arthur. I just - what? Did anyone actually read this book before it was published? Who looked at the Time Machine and thought ‘yeah, this is good, but it would be even better if there were mythological figures running around’. For a supposed sequel to a fantastic science fiction story, it completely failed to keep the tone or attitude of the book it’s ripping off. Fucking Merlin!
One thing I liked in the original was that there can be alternate interpretations of the Morlocks. I’m super enthused about it, in fact. Now I’m saying this as someone who gave up on the book quite early, so maybe it did re-discover the concept of subtlety later on. But there’s none of that so far. The Morlocks get their hands on the Time Machine and immediately decide to invade Victorian London because…? The book needed a villain, I guess?
Fucking Merlin’s constant praising of England and the English people as being magical and righteous was super uncomfortable, and I actually dropped it in the middle of one of those speeches. There’s too much of an unchallenged supremacist attitude there, especially coming from the greatest authority figure in the book, in a book written in 1979.
Then there’s the typos! I don’t know if I just got a ~super special~ copy, but it’s riddled with typos. There are full stops and commas in the middle of sentences which are clearly mistakes rather than for effect. Spaces missing so two words are mashed together. Quotation marks are left unclosed, sentences that should be on a new line are not. Now look, maybe it makes me a grammar snob, but I expect books to be proof-read before they’re published.
The whole thing just feels like fanfiction. Not the good kind of fanfiction. The kind that steals a tiny fragment of the original text and then builds a completely-unrelated story about their 2kool4u OCs. Because that’s exactly what it is. It’s basically an original story with some references to the Time Machine thrown in to cash in on the legacy of an actually decent author. Reading it caused me really intense second-hand embarrassment because of how much it felt like amateur fanfiction.
Look, maybe it gets better further on. Maybe I’m judging it prematurely. But this is the first time I’ve given up on an assigned reading book, and Morlock Night is so bad that I just feel relieved about the decision.
I have read countless books through high school and uni. Some of them have been brilliant; some of them have been boring, long, antiquated books with racist and sexist undertones and overtones. I might not have enjoyed all of them, it might have been a struggle to get through some of them, but I have always read every single assigned book.
But Morlock Night has broken me. Even my innate stubborness cannot overcome the exercise in extreme second-hand embarrassment reading that book is.
