Name: Earth's Last Citadel
ISBN: 9780575128880

Henry Kuttner

C.L. Moore

Torn from the Twentieth Century by the super-science of a master being from an alien galaxy, four adventurers find themselves at Carcasilla, EARTH'S LAST CITADEL, a billion years from now. It is there that the mutated remains of humanity are making their final stand.

Earth's Last Citadel

Tim Pendry

Moore and Kuttner, husband and wife, were one of the top partnerships in genre literature. This was their first collaboration in novel form - in fact, it is more like a novella since it is quite short, was originally published in Argosy in 1943 and only came out as a paperback in 1964. The story is no masterpiece. It is embedded initially in the pulp wartime espionage of its time before winging off into a space and time opera with evident debts to Wells, Hope Hodgson, Stapledon, Merritt, Lovecraft, Frank L. Baum and whoever else was to hand. The city of Carcasilla sounds damn lazily like Carcosa, the mysterious city of Bierce and Chambers. There are points when we seem to be seeing a horror/scifi mash-up being concocted for a swift sale to knowing audience. Yet still it works as adventure and fantasy and even as horror. At a certain point, it suddenly takes off into some seriously imaginative material, creating a vision of the far future and of a predatory alien evil desperate to survive as well as of the strange crystalline city where advanced science appears to be magic. The 'gloom' lies in the realisation, drawn from Wells, that all human endeavour is likely to turn to dust and that our survival rests on a cosmic knife edge, precisely the presentiment of doom one would expect in the middle of a major world war. The characterisation is barely developed, the science well out of date and the adventure somewhat predictable but if regarded as fantasy rather than as science fiction, it not only passes muster it shows two authors with a very rich imaginative pallette. This is one where it is wise to suspend disbelief and go with the flow with its hint of seeing the point of view of anti-human evil with its own back to the wall, a sub-conscious recognition of another more human 'evil' equally desperate for existential survival in 1943. The 'war' certainly weighs on this book which offers an insight into the paranoia and fear of the age but it also shows Kuttner perhaps being tamed from his tendency to be a boy's own adventurer by his wife and then letting their joint imagination rip. In that context, it works.

Earth's Last Citadel

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