

I didn't plan for it, but this is my second in a row fan-fic story. The title should have been familiar from a highschool short foray into Lovecraftian horror, but the source of inspiration only became clear to me when reading the afterword / acknowledgements:



I first read it at ten, thrilled and terrified, and uncomfortable with the racism but not yet aware that the total absence of women was also problematic. This story is my adult self returning to a thing I loved as a child and seeing whethe



I didn't plan for it, but this is my second in a row fan-fic story. The title should have been familiar from a highschool short foray into Lovecraftian horror, but the source of inspiration only became clear to me when reading the afterword / acknowledgements:



I first read it at ten, thrilled and terrified, and uncomfortable with the racism but not yet aware that the total absence of women was also problematic. This story is my adult self returning to a thing I loved as a child and seeing whether I could make adult sense of it.



Kij Johnson is keeping the vision of Lovecraft alive, approaching the Dreamland from a different perspective while remaining faithful to the call of adventure and to the sense of horror that lurks around almost every corner. In "The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath" , Lovecraft sends his hero, Randolph Carter, on a wild chase through a parallel universe, a place where dreams become nightmares and where fickle gods hide in the immensity of space. Vellitt Boe is a teacher from this scary Dreamland, and she sets out on her own quest to cross over into our reality and recover one of her errant students, Clarie Jurat, who eloped with a dreamer, as the likes of Randolph Carter are known in the underworld.



Vellitt Boe is the kind of heroine I would like to find more often in fantasy novels. She's the complete opposite of the young, feisty princess with a hidden talent in either combat or magic, torn between two hansome and rich dreamboys. At first glance, Vellitt Boe is an elderly, staid and predictable math teacher: "Celephaian Doctor of Teoretics and esteemed Professor Maior at Ulthar's ancient and honorable University.". Faced with the crisis of her runaway star student Clarie, Vellitt Boe proves to be not only resourceful and determined, but also young at heart and ready for adventure. You see , she was not always a professor:



She had been born in the harbor town of Jaren, where the frigid Xari spilled into the northern reaches of the Cerenarian Sea; but in her nineteenth year she left, and for years after that she voyaged: crossed plains and forests and fenlands; ascended mountains and walked in the belly of the under-realms; sailed in strange-hulled boats across unfamiliar oceans under the low sky. She had travelled until she realized that this yearning life could not be sustained, that time woul eventually erode away her strength and courage; and so she stopped. She applied to the Women's college of the University of Celephais and settled into rooms there, a perfect student, brilliant and disciplined. She received her Physical Studies degree in Mathematics and came to Ulthar, to stay and grow old and teach other young women more rational responses to their restlessness. It had been sensible, a reasonable end to her far-travelling youth.



The restlessness of youth, and the call of the distant, exotic lands beyond the horizon: which of us has stopped hearing its song? Is this not what we seek in all these fantasy novels on our shelves? A little mystery, a little danger, a little romance to relieve the boredom of a routine life among concrete and glass towers? Is this not what we dream about when we look in the windows of travel agencies or on the internet at the more unusual holiday destinations? Now, where did I put my tent, my sleeping bag and my camera? I want to join Vellitt Boe on her journey:



Dropping the tinder-box into its little interior pocket, she lifted the rucksack by its shoulder straps. It was lighter than it would have been, for she no longer had rope and grapnel, nor her blanket roll, nor the compact little cooking kit she once carried; but it was heavy enough, for all that. [...] On an impulse, she walked into the bedroom and looked at herself in the pier mirror. A stranger infinitely familiar stared back: a stern-eyed woman in walking tweeds, with heavy laced boots and black-and-silver hair pulled away from her lined face. An old woman but not soft - or, she thought with a sudden inward wry laugh, perhaps not quite 'old', but also softer than she had been.



Vellitt Boe sets out on her quest, and soon enough it becomes evident that the journey itself is the story, rather than the destination. Yes, we have a plot, and a terrible curse that can only be avoided if Clarie Jurat is returned from our Earth back to the Dreamlands. But in the Dreamland the game is played by different rules, reality is like a soft putty in the hands of the local gods, and the fate of individuals is just a game for their amusement. Vellitt Boe is sent from one corner of the realm to the other in her sdearch for a magical key to unlock the Gate of Deeper Slumber. Inhospitable deserts, haunted forests, ice encrusted mountain peaks, monster infested caves, stormy seas and angry gods cannot stop her.



Perhaps Ulthar and the rest are just ants under the feet of fighting drunkards. Or perhaps a hate-filled god revels in destruction and pain, and causes it however he may.



I have a confession to make : I have cheated a little and also read the original Lovecraft novella in order to make sense of the Vellitt Boe Journey. My comments from this point on are coloured by the knowledge of the difference between Randolph Carter and Vellitt Boe, and of why Kij Johnson felt the neeed to revisit the classic tale. The clue is in a small observation made by a Dreamland priest and former travel companion of Vellit Boe. This guy makes a snarky remark that women are incapable of big dreams, that what they are limited to images of houses, flower gardens and smiling children. Condescendent much? Is it possible that 'hate-filled god' that revels in pain and destruction is a reference to the tormented and openly racist, mysoginistic Lovecraft?







!!! SPOILER ALERT !!!







The answer can be found quite late in the quest, by a meeting between Vellitt Boe and Lovecraft's hero - Randolph Carter, master dreamer, adventurer - now a king in the Dreamland. It appears they have journeyed together, even fallen in love, when they were both young and thirsty for adventure, but then they drifted apart. Surprisingly maybe, it wasn't Randolph who felt shackled in the relationship, but the young girl, known then as Veline:



He had been a man like many, so wrapped and rapt in his own story that there was no room for the world around him except as it served his own tale. When were women ever anything but footnotes to men's tales?



Here's the rub: the quest for the Unknown Kadath is all taking place inside the head of Randolph Carter - he created the Dreamland, the fickle gods and the nightmares. It's why the Anglo-Saxons were superior to all the other races in the underworld, why women are not even once mentioned during the long and eventful journey, why all the lesser creatures exist only to serve theur lord and master. Ultimately, why the original novella feels dated and even uncomfortably racist in places. Why a different dreamer may respond to a different call and will search for a different destination at the end of her quest.



Vellitt Boe visits almost all the fantastic places that were on the original map of Randolph Carter, and more than a few new ones. She fights creatures of darkness and she marvels at the obsidian and jasper cities of the Dreamland, She travels alone, and her old bones often complain about the hardships, but she never gives up. Because her quest is not about her self-discovery, but about saving the Dreamland, about making a world fit for everybody - young or old, light skinned or dark skinned, woman or man. Come to think of it, Vellitt Boe might change not only the Dreamland, but also our own world, once she finds the gate to cross over into our reality. Because in our reality women are not treated a whole lot better thant in the Dreamlands of the Randolph Carters:



She could feel it settling about her, what this world would expect of a woman her age. She fit scarcely more naturally here than in her own land.



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I was a fan of Kij Johnson before reading this novella, and I was lucky to read it before trying the Lovecraft original, because I was able to appreciate the quest on its own merits, not only by comparison. In my opinion, Kij Johnson is clearly the better writer, her prose intensely emotional and intriguing without all the lurid adjectives Lovecraft loved so much. But I should also acknowledge the role of Lovecraft as the catalyst, as the master dreamer who can still amaze us with the immense scope and unrelenting darkness of his vision.



I would recommend reading both short novels, in whatever order pleases you.

