The Book of Gold

(With apologies to John C. Wright)

If I need motivation to write, the place I go first is to the essay entitled “Your Book of Gold” by John C. Wright.

Wright explains, in a fashion that is almost poetic, that every writer or every avid reader has one book that is especially precious to him, that affected him at the right time and in the right way, to change the course of his entire life. Wright encourages every would-be writer to publish with this idea: Even if you sell only eight copies, your book will be for someone that Book of Gold, the book that changes his life.

As an example, he names Voyage to Arcturus, the dense, highly imaginative, and awe-inspiring Gnostic parable by David Lindsay, which in Lindsay’s lifetime was a complete failure. Wright names it as one of his great inspirations, as did, previously, C. S. Lewis. Although I found it too late to be as taken with it as Wright or Lewis were, I also read the book and found it to be an astonishing work of imagination. Even though the novel was a commercial failure, it sparked the imagination of others, and in that sense was a great success. For those to whom it mattered, it became what Wright calls “the book of gold.”

(I also found in it interesting and useful parallels to the magical girl anime Revolutionary Girl Utena, but that is a topic for another time.)

Another example, using the same essayist, is The Night Land by William Hope Hodgson. This book, generally considered execrable in execution (I confess I’ve never made it all the way through) is nonetheless an astonishing work of imagination, depicting a world in the distant future after the sun and stars have burnt out, when humanity survives in a pyramid-shaped tower surrounded implacable forces of evil, including mysterious beings that can devour human souls. Hodgson’s own depiction of this fantastic future world is lackluster, but Wright himself brought it to full flower by producing Awake in the Night Land, an almost perfect work of sublime beauty that combines Hodgson with Lovecraft, Robert W. Chambers, and a host of other creators to make a work that I honestly believe deserves to be numbered among the Great Books. Awake in the Night Land is deeply affective, I daresay purgatorial, and gives its readers strange dreams and new hopes. Hodgson’s original work is awful, but for Wright it was that Book of Gold, the book that inspired him to his best work.

And, in passing, I am unashamed to admit that Awake in the Night Land had a major influence on Jake and the Dynamo. The image of the universe’s heat death, and the idea of the greater servants of the Shadow devouring the lesser, come from Awake in the Night Land.

I am happy to say that I can name my Book of Gold, the book that changed my outlook on life, or at least on reading. The book came to me when I was approximately nine years old. Someone else had checked it out from the library, and for the longest time I could not remember the title. For much of my life, as I looked back fondly on that amazing book I read in childhood, all I knew was that it featured two brawny, all-American boys who created a fantastic airship that carried them up to a second moon hidden in the Earth’s shadow, where they battled giant grasshoppers, bulletproof bear-buffalo, and knife-wielding red dwarves in order to rescue the comely daughter of a mad scientist.

This book struck me for a few reasons. When I was a child, Beverly Cleary was the author of choice for children. I have nothing personal against Cleary, but her hyper-realistic novels about kids acting like regular kids did not move me. I also read some of the standard adventure serials of the time, such as the Hardy Boys, Nancy Drew, and (my favorite among these) Alfred Hitchcock and the Three Investigators. However, I was unmoved by these books simply because the mysterious they contained always turned out to have mundane explanations: The Hardy Boys would find a disappearing floor, but it would turn out to be merely an elevator, and so forth.

(As an aside, one bright spot amongst these boys’ adventure works was the third series of Tom Swift, which featured aliens, space stations, and a girl with a mind-reading artificial leg. However, for some reason, I never really got into that series as much as I might have. I do, however, recall a vivid childhood fantasy that combined the ’60s Batman TV series, the Muppet Babies, Land Before Time, and Tom Swift in a war against evil aliens. Even as an adult, I think that sounds pretty badass.)

But in the midst of these mundane (by my reckoning) adventure series for children, I discovered that book, the one in which the two heroes don’t solve some mystery that turns out to be commonplace, but instead fly into space with their war veteran buddies and kill friggin’ everything in their mission to rescue a girl and destroy a race of evil aliens. At the tender age of nine, this book blew my mind, even though I couldn’t remember the title. For the rest of my life, I would look back on it fondly as the book that taught me that every mystery does not have to have a mundane explanation, and that awesome adventures are acceptable in literature.

It was not until I graduated college that I discovered what the title of this book was, or where it came from. I had mentioned it repeatedly to my parents, so my mother got the idea of going back to the local library in our home town and asking about it. They found the book, and though the library refused to sell it, my mother found a copy from a rare book dealer; not only that, but she discovered that it was one in a boys’ adventure series, and bought me several other volumes as well as a graduation present.

Consequently, I am the proud owner of seven volumes of the Great Marvel series by Roy Rockwood. Rockwood, like many other authors of boys’ adventures, is actually a pseudonym used by various anonymous hacks . The book that had originally caught my fancy was City Beyond the Clouds, the sixth novel in the Great Marvel Series.

Previous books in the series include such titles as Through the Air to the North Pole, Under the Ocean to the South PoleThrough Space to Mars, and so forth. The first of the series was published in 1906, and the last in 1935. The books are astonishingly violent, with the kind of violence that will appall adults but delight young boys; every book follows a similar pattern: the two orphan boys, their scientist guardian, and their painfully stereotypical black sidekick build some fantastic machine for travel and take it on an amazing journey, during which they gun down most everything they meet with a combination of rifles and machine guns.

It happens that City Beyond the Clouds, featuring its alien world, giant grasshoppers, and vicious red dwarves, was the book that caught my fancy in my youth because it’s the book our library happened to have. However, after reading seven of the Great Marvels as an adult, I will say that my favorite at present is the prequel to City Beyond the Clouds, which runs under the title On a Torn-Away World. That book is the only one in the series that attempts some serious scientific speculation: in it, the boys and their companions take an airship to the north of Alaska in the hopes of recovering a cancer-curing herb, but while they are there, a supervolcano erupts and hurls a massive chunk of land into low orbit. This causes radical alterations to gravity, weather, and the length of day and night, changes that drive all the animals in the area insane (so the boys have to gun them down).

In spite of its outlandishness, the novel is actually a genuine attempt at depicting what it would mean for a large piece of the Earth’s surface to be blasted into space, and is therefore the only book in the series that might be called serious science fiction. The reason for this may be the author: the sixth book, according to Seriesbooks.info, was written by W. Bert Foster, and this was the only book he wrote for Great Marvel. The previous novels plainly worshiped science, but actually knew little of it (depicting, for example, a submarine ride to the south pole long after Antarctica had been discovered).

At some point, I might indulge myself here by discussing Great Marvel at greater length, but for now, I wish merely to point out that even the most humble book may mean much to a reader, if he happens to find it at the right time.

Author: D. G. D. Davidson

D. G. D. Davidson is an archaeologist, librarian, Catholic, and magical girl enthusiast. He is the author of JAKE AND THE DYNAMO.