THE DEEP ONES: "A Victim of Higher Space" by Algernon Blackwood

"A Victim of Higher Space" by Algernon Blackwood

Discussion begins October 19, 2022.

First published in the December 1914 issue of The Occult Review.



BIBLIOGRAPHY

https://isfdb.org/cgi-bin/title.cgi?70736

SELECTED PRINT VERSIONS

The Complete John Silence Stories
Day and Night Stories
Supernatural Sleuths: Stories of Occult Investigators

ONLINE VERSIONS

https://algernonblackwood.org/Z-files/Victim_of_Higher_Space.pdf
http://www.luminist.org/archives/blackwood_victim.htm

ONLINE AUDIO VERSIONS

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XXcLHK9n7aM

MISCELLANY

http://darkworldsquarterly.gwthomas.org/the-freelance-ghostbreaker-john-silence/
https://weirdfictionreview.com/2013/01/wfrs-101-weird-writers-19-algernon-blackw...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Algernon_Blackwood
https://tinyurl.com/v7jma2um

All being well, I'll read this one in Dangerous Dimensions: Mind-bending Tales of the Mathematical Weird. It's not included in any of the Algernon Blackwood collections I own.

I’ve long been a fan of Blackwood’s creepy wilderness stories, but have read very few of the John Silence tales. Based one this one alone (which I believe is the last one he wrote) I think that as far as psychic detectives go John Silence is the best of the lot. Seabury Quinn’s de Grandin is amusing but the stories are a bit formulaic. Hodgeson’s Carnaki wears my patience as a reader thin with Scooby Doo plot lines and electric pentacles. In handling occult trappings that come across as trite Theosophical gobbledygook in the works of lesser writers, Blackwood has a way of dropping insights that suggest he knows what’s going on behind the veil.
I particularly liked this bit:
The man fumbled, both in mind and pockets, and finally produced an envelope.

>3 papijoe: I haven't read a lot of the Silence series either, but I also don't think much of Carnacki though I like a lot of other Hodgson.

Thought the best part of this story was the description of Mudge disappearing as Silence tried to hold on to him. Also thought the suggestion of the "ghastliness" of common things and people in the their Higher Space manifestations.

The online Science Fiction Encyclopedia tells me that that tradition of occultists appealing to higher geometries and mathematics goes back to Johann Zollner's Transcendental Physics from 1865.

>4 RandyStafford: Also thought the suggestion of the "ghastliness" of common things and people in the their Higher Space manifestations.

Yeah, the unsettling exposure of the guts of everything (and everybody) to higher-dimensional view was a good insight into the affliction!

The occultist bibliography of hypergeometry is long, but Ouspensky's Tertium Organum might be the most widely circulated item.

>5 paradoxosalpha: I had forgotten that Blackwood had a connection with Gurdieff, so I think it’s pretty likely he was familiar with Ouspensky. It also occurs to me that Abbott’s Flatland might be an influence.
There is also Blackwood’s involvement with the OTO which puts him in impressive, if occasionally sinister company.

Blackwood was not involved with OTO. Like Machen, he was a member of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn.

I think Ouspensky's work was a little late to have been a significant influence on Blackwood. Certainly, Tertium Organum wasn't published until after this story. I just raised it as a general point of interest.

Aleister Crowley would refer his students to Arthur Eddington for information on hypergeometry.

>7 paradoxosalpha: Oh right, I tend to get confused with all the Golden Dawn off shoots. I don’t think Blackwood would appreciate the implication he was hobnobbing with Crowley!

Well, Crowley was also a member of the Golden Dawn (joined after Blackwood and Machen did), and OTO wasn't an offshoot of the GD. Crowley's extension of the GD system was his A.'.A.'. order. OTO came from Germany and recruited Crowley to be their first English organizer. All these groups were all part of a larger occultist scene informed by Theosophy, Freemasonry, and Rosicrucianism, with lots of mutual social contacts, so the distinctions may not make much difference to readers a century later. I'm just persnickety (and a bit invested through my own esoteric affiliations).

This was my first John Silence story, and I'm afraid I didn't like it very much - certainly not as much as Blackwood's wilderness stories.

Mr Mudge's background seemed rather unclear to me. He must have had guardians of some kind growing up - why didn't they put him in school? But I gather Blackwood didn't think much of institutional education ...

Speaking of influences, I did find myself wondering if Madeleine L'Engle read this and got the idea of a tesseract as a means of teleportation from it.

>7 paradoxosalpha:

I gotta wonder what Eddingtion thought about such referals.

The introduction to Dangerous Dimensions: Mind-bending Tales of the Mathematical Weird (one of a series of anthologies with the umbrella title British Library Tales of the Weird) notes Johann Zollner's Transcendental Physics and Theosophy's incorporation of Charles Howard Hinton's speculative mathematics "to explain a host of esoteric phenomena" , alongside developments in mathematics and the rise of Spiritualism in the 19th Century, all feeding into speculative horror and science fiction, and literary fiction, from the end of the 19th Century and well into the 20th. The book kicks off with H. G. Wells' 1897 "The Plattner Story".

>6 papijoe:
Flatland gets a mention in the introduction.

(Can I say a word in defence of Carnacki? I read the stories thirty years ago, all collected in a UK paperback with a substantial afterword by Iain Sinclair. Admittedly I had read a lot less horror and weird fiction at that point in my life, but something that impressed me at the time and stayed with me is the fear Carnacki experiences during his investigations, which is well put across by Hodgson, and isn't diminished or falsified in those stories which had a non-supernatural explanation.)

I enjoyed this, and was pleased to get the final John Silence story under my belt. I do have to suspend my disbelieve about the Mind of Matter elements of the story/Blackwood's esoteric beliefs (not a problem I have with a straight horror story, which is probably to do with temperament as much as anything: as a child I was afraid of the Devil, at some level, long after I'd stopped believing in God).

>5 paradoxosalpha:
As an aside, I think David Cronenberg claimed in an interview (this must have been when he was promoting Dead Ringers) that surgeons develop an aesthetic appreciation for their patients' internal organs "oh what a beautiful liver", etc.

>11 housefulofpaper: I do think Carnacki's fear and unease during his investigations is a point in the series' favor as is the doubt of the ultimate resolutions: fraud or something supernatural or both.

I just finished reading Brian Stableford's four volume New Atlantis series, an expansion of his earlier Scientific Romance. It does speak of occult influences and mathematical concepts in the development of the British scientific romance, a literary tradition, he holds, distinct from American science fiction until 1950. Hinton is discussed there as important influence. Blackwood's "Entrance and Exit" gets a mention as taking the trouble to develop the concept of going to the fourth dimension more than anybody but H. G. Wells.

>11 housefulofpaper: My comments on Carnaki were probably unfairly harsh. What is a bit frustrating about Hodgeson is that his sea stories are better paced than the more landlocked tales like the Carnaki series or longer works like House on the Borderland. I actually quite liked The Hog.
>12 RandyStafford: I think only one Brian Stableford story has been covered here. I have at least one of his collections on Kindle, I think I re-read it before the next planning thread and find a good one to nominate.