Anti-Inklings

[jsburbidge]

There's an odd three-cornered relation between Lovecraftian fiction, novels by C.S. Lewis and Charles Williams, and Ian Tregillis' Bitter Seeds.

The Lovecraftian element is pretty visible -- extradimensional monsters who want to take over our continuum.  This puts Tregillis' trilogy somewhere on a continuum with Lovecraft and (for example) Stross' Laundry novels.

However, Tregillis has two references which (deliberately or not) echo Williams and Lewis:

• The term he uses for the beings with which the magicians negotiate is eidola, which is the term Williams uses for the archetypal beings (quasi-angels, but essentially indifferent to humanity as individuals).  Williams eidola aren't evil or badly-inclined towards us, but they're forces which can accidentally, as it were, destroy human sanity (and occasionally elements of the material world).


• The description he gives of being in contact with the eidola -- the sense of another set of directions orienting oneself -- echoes Lewis' treatment of the eldila (BTW, Lewis may have made eldila sound very much like the eidola to make it a reasonable spelling variant in Bernardus Silvestris, who uses the term eidola and whom he uses as a source in a similar way for oyeresu.).

In a way, Tregillis presents what happens if some of the preconditions of an Inklings-like universe are there but the governing concept -- that the universe is ordered, and in an unambiguously good way -- is absent.