2024 read #87: The Sorcerer’s Ship by Hannes Bok.

The Sorcerer’s Ship by Hannes Bok

205 pages

Published 1942

Read from July 24 to July 25

Rating: 1.5 out of 5

If I had a nickel for every 1940s novel I’d read about an amnesiac man getting shunted from our world to a fantastic realm, I’d have two nickels, etc. With that in mind, how does The Sorcerer’s Ship compare to Henry Kuttner’s The Dark World?

To set the tone, let me summarize the first couple chapters. Our hero Gene finds himself adrift on a raft, with no memories and no supplies. Eventually he gets rescued by a passing ship, but passes out from dehydration and exhaustion. He wakes up to find a dude who is clearly evil-councilor-coded watching over him; this dude orders Gene to murder another man on the boat. When Gene demurs, saying he isn’t sure he’s a killer, the evil guy puts a green liquid in Gene’s wine and tells him it improves the flavor. Gene obediently drinks it. His mouth goes numb! The evil guy keeps bullying him to drink more, drink more, drink it all. Shockingly, it’s poison!

That’s the storytelling caliber we’re dealing with on The Sorcerer’s Ship. It’s a period-standard fantasy pulper without much to set it apart from its contemporaries, unless you count the office clerk passivity of its hero. If you squint, there’s a pro-socialist message in the conflict between poor-but-egalitarian Nanich and rich-but-stratified Koph. At one point Gene says, “The more rich people, the less money to go around,” which shows us that a pulp protagonist can have a sharper grasp of economic realities than any American politician of the last four decades.

The political plot runs out of steam not even halfway through, leading to an abrupt genre shift as the boat lands on an unknown island, its crew finds a monolithic city, and everyone gets mixed up in the business of an ancient extradimensional being and his fish-man apprentice. This second plot is marginally more interesting than the first, but the timeless being is more of a corny old wizard than an unfathomable cosmic horror, and the shift doesn’t break the tedium for long.

I had hoped that Bok’s own queerness would have left more of a mark on the narrative, but sadly, Ship sticks to the cis-het script of its time, complete with an 18 year old princess whom Gene is ordered to woo.

So, all in all, Ship was nowhere near as interesting as The Dark World. Considering how much of an unexpected delight that book was, this one is perhaps closer to what I would expect from a 1940s isekai novel.