The Land of the Changing Sun: Underground morons

The Land of the Changing Sun by Will N. Harben

Released seven years after English author H. Rider Haggard sensationally jump-started the “lost world” craze in fiction with his seminal novels King Solomon’s Mines (1885), She (1887) and Allan Quatermain (also 1887), American author Will N. Harben’s only contribution to the genre, The Land of the Changing Sun, is a decidedly second-rate affair that yet manages to somehow entertain. Still, it is a work that will probably be most enjoyed by those folks with an abiding enthusiasm for this kind of fare.

The Land of the Changing Sun was originally released in hardcover by the Merriam Company in 1894 … that same year that Haggard came out with the infinitely superior lost-race affair entitled The People of the Mist. Harben’s book would then go OOPs (out of prints) for over 80 years, till Gregg Press released its own hardcover edition in 1975. Another release would come 34 years later, from Wilder Publications in 2009, and then, the version that I was happy to lay my hands on … the one that the fine folks at Armchair Fiction came out with in 2016. This book, incidentally, was #10 in Armchair’s ongoing Lost World – Lost Race Classics series, which currently stands at a hugely impressive 58 volumes.

Before sharing my thoughts on the novel, a quick word about the author himself. Willam Harben was born in Dalton, in northern Georgia, in 1858. He ultimately came out with some 30 novels, mostly concerning the people of Georgia and the Deep South. His first novel, White Marie: A Story of Georgian Plantation Life, came out in 1889, when Harben was 31; The Land of the Changing Sun was his fourth novel. Starting in 1898, with his fifth book, The Carruthers Affair, Harben would release at least one novel every year until his death, at 61 years old, in 1919.

Harben’s only lost world/lost race effort introduces the reader to two adventurers, the American Harry Johnston and the Englishman Charles Thorndyke, and when we first encounter the pair, they are in fairly desperate straits. Their aerial balloon is sailing out of control, one of their comrades has been thrown out to his doom, and now the craft is about to crash-land somewhere in the drink. The two manage to safely jump out of the descending balloon and successfully swim to a nearby desolate island, where they are happy to find fresh water and crabs to consume. But their emergency bonfire manages to attract a different kind of assistance than the one they were hoping for … a type of submarine that arises from the small island’s central lake! Johnston and Thorndyke are taken aboard the sub and then, via some kind of subterranean channel, down … way, way down! As a matter of fact, when they emerge, they find that they are fully 70 miles beneath the floor of the ocean, in the lost cavern world of a race known as the Alpha, which had been settled by (apparently English-speaking) explorers some 200 years before! It is a world of veritable wonders, with an artificial sun and moon and stars, fantastic architecture, beautiful parks and gardens, physically perfect inhabitants, and manifold wonders of superscience. The two guests are given a physical examination and brought before the king in his capital city of, uh, Moron (!), and from this point Harben’s book cleaves into two parallel, alternating story lines.

In the first, Johnston, who was found to be a rather unhealthy specimen, is banished to the dark lands – behind the wall where the artificial sun never shines – to face starvation. The unfortunate American there befriends a sturdy Alphian named Branasko, who’d been set up by his enemies and sent into oblivion on phony charges. The two explore some nearby caves, discover the lair where the sun – in actuality a 500-foot-high ball of crystal that changes color every hour of the Alphian “day” – returns before being serviced and sent off again, and manage to secrete themselves inside the mammoth structure in the hope of a return. Thorndyke, meanwhile, is kept busy in the king’s court, where he and the Princess Bernardino quickly fall in love. And matters soon become quite dire indeed, when Johnston and Branasko discover that the outside ocean has started to cascade into the Alphians’ so-called Lake of Flame – a mammoth pit of volcanic activity – with potentially catastrophic results for both the upper and lower worlds…

Now, when it comes to Harben’s performance in this, his only lost-world effort, I’m afraid that there’s a bit of good news but even more of the bad. Let’s start with the good news first, shall we? I believe I’ve mentioned elsewhere that I’m a big fan of the alternating story line, and Harben here gives us a doozy. Thus, just as Johnston and Branasko find themselves in a pretty pickle, cliff-hanger style, we jump to see what Thorndyke is up to, and back and forth. It’s an effective way, I’ve found, for an author to generate suspense and really keep the reader flipping those pages. The parallel-plot device is probably this book’s single best feature. Harben also gives us a half dozen exciting sequences, those being our heroes’ initial crash-landing and exploration of the desert island; Johnston wandering through the dark-land caverns with Branasko; Thorndyke being locked in a dungeon with an ancient inmate, Nordeskyne, who speaks with some kind of mechanical voice box; Johnston and Branasko’s stowing themselves away inside the sun as it’s prepared for another transit; the molten spectacle of the Lake of Fire; and the suspenseful windup, with the fate of Alpha – and our own surface world – very much up in the air. Readers who esteem examples of amazing technology and futuristic superscience in their early sci-fi fare will find much to please them here: that fantastic Alphian sub; the liquors provided in that sub to alleviate breathing difficulties and the discomfort of deep-sea pressure; a giant bell-and-suction-cup device that can instantly assess an individual’s physical condition; the ubiquitous Alphian flying cars; the observatory from which the king keeps tabs on his domain via a complex telescopic arrangement; the “War of the Elements,” a staged meteorological display put on for the Alphians’ amusement; the Winter Park, a miles-long building in which various cold-weather sports can be pursued in a realistic setting; and the Electric Auditorium, where the people can sit and watch live broadcast news stories from all over the realm. Anyway, that’s the good news.

As for the bad, I scarcely know where to begin. But let’s start with the risible name of the Alphians’ capital city … Moron! At first, I thought this name was an authorial dig on the people who lived therein, but as it turns out, the word “moron” (according to my Webster’s dictionary, anyway) wasn’t used to describe a “feebleminded person” until the year 1910, so it is just possible that Harben’s word choice here was merely an unfortunate happenstance. I’m willing to let that matter slide. Of more serious concern are the repeated instances of fuzzy writing, and in truth, the author’s lost world of Alpha here is one of the poorest described I’ve ever come across. The caverns that Johnston explores, as well as his experience inside the sun, are nebulously depicted, at best. Your imagination will be working overtime to visualize what Harben barely sketches in. As a wordsmith, I’m afraid, Harben is simply not up to the task of compellingly relating his tale, and this fact is made even worse by his oddball use of punctuation, as well as several instances of faulty grammar (as in “a regiment of soldiers were drilling”).

And then, there are the many questions that go unanswered, only compounding the book’s lack of descriptive detail. How did Johnston and Thorndyke’s ballooning companion, Professor Helmholtz, fall out of the craft before the book’s action begins? Where in the world did our heroes crash-land; that is to say, in which ocean? Just who were these ancestors who founded Alpha two centuries earlier? A wall is repeatedly mentioned – one that conceals the artificial sun from the dark lands – but we never get to learn anything about it, or even see it. How can a wall block the rays of that artificial sun, hung so high on its cable track? The levitating female choir that performs in the king’s palace … how are they kept aloft? What is the king’s name, anyway? Many of the book’s minor characters are given names … why not this major one? How is Alpha, 70 miles beneath the bottom of the ocean, supplied with fresh air? All Bernardino can say is that the fresh air comes “from without in some mysterious way.” And speaking of that air, what is the peculiar quality in the Alphian atmosphere that gives the people life spans four times as long as our own, and stimulates them mentally? Just what is the deal with Nordeskyne, and his voice that comes from a phonograph machine; a voice that “shall sound on earth for a million years,” as he puts it? And although Harben’s book seems to end happily, am I correct in assuming that a worldwide catastrophe is in the offing, when the ocean (whichever ocean happens to lie 70 miles above Alpha) eventually collapses into that Lake of Fire? And not for nothing, what kind of a name is Bernardino for a woman, anyway?

To make matters worse, Harben can’t even be bothered to keep his facts straight regarding that blasted sun, which changes color every hour. On page 40 of this Armchair edition, we’re told that the first hour of the afternoon is a green one; on page 154, the afternoon’s second hour is said to be green. And the order of the appearance of those colors changes drastically from page 40 to page 136. On a side note, early on, Harben seems to give some evidence that Johnston and Thorndyke are gay lovers – in the balloon, Thorndyke sleeps with his head on Johnston’s lap; in the king’s palace, the two prefer to sleep together rather than in separate beds – evidence that is shattered once the Englishman immediately falls head over heels in love with the princess. A pity … the book might have been more interesting with the unprecedented (?) inclusion of gay adventurers.

All told, readers of this 10^th installment in the Armchair series will likely come away wondering why this subpar lost-world adventure was chosen for inclusion before some of the series’ infinitely more-worthy titles, such as Haggard’s She, C. J. Cutcliffe Hyne’s The Lost Continent (1899), William Hope Hodgson’s The Boats of the Glen Carrig (1907), and Abraham Merritt’s The Face in the Abyss (1931). Go figure. “This is an adventure in earnest,” Johnston is heard to say at the very beginning of the tale, and that is indeed true. I only wish that it could have been related to us by a more skillful author. As it is, this novel must be deemed one for lost world/lost race completists only…