Once there was a bright, adventurous young English boy who lived in an exotic, garish land with his wealthy, inattentive parents. Though he saw marvels & terrors through the windows of his father’s sleek black car, he lived an ordered & untroubled life. Then one day war came to Shanghai, and he was taken abruptly from the world of the familiar and dropped into a dark mirror realm of strange marvels and fearsome horrors: Lunghua Internment Camp. For three years he lived an indisputably magical fairy tale, but of the darkest sort ~~ a fairy tale to make even the Brothers Grimm blanch ~~ in this upside-down place, this goblin-world, locked away very far from any sort of order or civilization.

For the rest of his long life he carried in his heart an unwavering knowledge of the chaotic dream world which he knew pressed up against the surface of the mundane, and he spent the next six decades writing thinly disguised accounts of the perilous, uncanny domain he once called home… a lush, violent environment, always outside the normal flow of time, and evolving in ways indifferent to human affairs or even existence, transformed almost beyond recognition but sliding towards more profound change still, towards some entropic end-point of perfect post-human stillness… dreamlike & beautiful worlds whose logic inexorably makes itself at home in these characters, molding their psyches in its own image.

In the Drowned World (1962) solar flares have caused ocean levels to rise, and the characters float through sub-tropical lagoons above a mostly-submerged London. In The Burning World (1964) industrial pollution has caused a climate-feedback loop that in the end results in unliveably hot climates and a near-total drought, rendering the English town of Mount Royal a parched, dune-covered desert. And in The Crystal World (1966) a mysterious process of crystallization has begun to transform a small corner of the Cameroonian jungle into a jeweled, lethal wonderland. The landscapes that result ~~ a forced marriage of the collapsing artifacts of man and the resurgent Nature overtaking & enveloping them ~~ are sultry, dreamlike, ultimately fatal. Once entered into by the reader, they can’t be left. They will stay with you (or you in them) forever.