Silverlock imagines a Commonwealth of Letters inhabited by the world’s great fictional characters. And League of Extraordinary Gentlemen-style mash-ups have precedents as well I have not read Philip José Farmer’s Riverworld books, nor have I read John Kendrick Bangs’ Associated Shades novels, which date back to the 1890s, but I have read John Myers Myers’ 1949 novel Silverlock, and came away from it with a few thoughts.
Crossovers, it has been said, date back to Homer writing of heroes coming together to fight the Trojan War.
In fact, though, this is really nothing new. At an extreme, a work like Alan Moore’s League of Extraordinary Gentlemen imagines a world where every character derives from some other source, comes from some other story imagines a world where all stories overlap and so make a strange collective setting. Fan-fiction interrogates texts we thought we knew, crossing characters from one tale over into another. A film like The Avengers blends together characters from five other movies. You will be richer for it.It’s been said that this is the age of the mash-up: of art formed from the fusion of other works of art. Now it’s our turn, so if you love stories and want to revisit the wellsprings of our common literary inheritance, come journey with Silverlock. Today it is available on, in hardback, paperback, and finally on ebook. Did I mention he was a poet? My favorite Silverlock poem is Taliesin’s rendition of The Death of Bowie Gizzardsbane (an epic poem of the last stand at the Alamo, in the style of Beowulf).Įach generation rediscovers Silverlock in my childhood it was found and lauded by Poul Anderson, Larry Niven, and Jerry Pournelle–three of science-fiction’s Great Masters.
#SILVERLOCK MEYERS HOW TO#
The other half is the story itself–John Meyers Meyers knew how to write–and you’ll find yourself grinning till it hurts, chuckling over page after page, and reveling in Meyer’s prose and poetry. Of course the reader does, and that is half the fun. Being a modern rationalist, Silverlock had no patience for fancy and fable growing up, so he recognizes none of the characters he meets. Here Shandon–dubbed Silverlock by his traveling companion–meets such characters as Circe, Robin Hood, Don Quixote, and many, many more, finds himself swept along on many an adventure, and in the process, becomes a much better man. It soon becomes apparent the “Commonwealth” is the Commonwealth of Letters–the realm of all of western literature. Instead of dying (which would have made for a short book), Shandon finds himself cast ashore Gulliver-style in an unknown land, the Commonwealth.
A cynical opportunist and fatalist (his opening line is: “If I had cared to live, I would have died.”), he is thoroughly “modern,” “rational,” and unlikable.
The wrecked ship is the Naglafar–named for the ship Loki has made of dead men’s nails in Norse mythology. Like Robinson Crusoe, Silverlock opens with a shipwreck. But it’s been touched by everything else. John Meyers Meyers wrote it back in 1949, so this is a fantasy untouched by JRR Tolkien’s genre-redefining work. Silverlock is not so much a lost book as one that is constantly being rediscovered.
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