The Sound of His Horn
First edition, 1952
The Sound of His Horn (1952), written by British diplomat John William Wall under the pseudonym Sarban, is one of the more unusual alternate history novels in the genre. Royal Navy Lieutenant Alan Querdillon, a prisoner of war who escapes from a German camp, finds himself transported a century into the future where Germany won the war and the Reich has evolved into a vast, forested empire ruled by aristocrats. Querdillon ends up on the estate of Count Hans von Hackelnberg, the Reich Master Forester, where the hunting of genetically modified humans and animal-human hybrids has become the entertainment of the ruling class. The novel reads like a Gothic nightmare, which gives it a quality unlike most dystopian fiction of its era. Cited in both David Pringle's Science Fiction: The 100 Best Novels and in Jones and Newman's Horror: The 100 Best Books.
Hardcover. First Edition, First Printing. Octavo, bound in original blue cloth, blind stamped on cover with yellow lettering on spine. London: Peter Davies, 1952. Pringle, Modern Fantasy: The 100 Best Novels (12). Jones & Newman, Horror: The 100 Best Novels (52). #11125.
Patchy fading to the spine and rear cover, believed to be caused by offsetting from the striped jacket design. Apart from that, the book is near fine in a very good+ dust jacket, with a short tear and some creasing on the lower rear panel. This title is hard to come by in any condition.
Hardcover. First Edition, First Printing. Octavo, bound in original blue cloth, blind stamped on cover with yellow lettering on spine. London: Peter Davies, 1952. Pringle, Modern Fantasy: The 100 Best Novels (12). Jones & Newman, Horror: The 100 Best Novels (52). #11125.
Patchy fading to the spine and rear cover, believed to be caused by offsetting from the striped jacket design. Apart from that, the book is near fine in a very good+ dust jacket, with a short tear and some creasing on the lower rear panel. This title is hard to come by in any condition.
Additional Details
The Sound of His Horn arrives at its dystopia through a framing device borrowed from Gothic literature. Querdillon, recovered from some unspecified trauma, tells his story to a friend over the course of an evening. This structural choice keeps the horror slightly removed and gives the narrative the quality of a recounted dream. The uncertainty about what actually happened, whether Querdillon was transported through time or simply lost his mind, is never fully resolved, and Sarban uses that ambiguity to keep the reader off-balance throughout.
The world Querdillon enters is not primarily a political dystopia. Sarban shows almost nothing of how the Reich governs its populations or maintains its power. What he shows instead is the leisure of its ruling class, specifically the elaborate hunting entertainments organized on von Hackelnberg's estate. The Count's quarry includes women surgically and genetically modified to resemble birds, who are released into the forest and hunted with crossbows, as well as other human-animal hybrids bred specifically for the estate's games. The horror lies in the way it is presented as tradition. Nothing but a refined and elegant sport to a civilization that has had a century to develop its tastes.
This is the most disturbing insight in the novel. The atrocities are conducted with ceremony, aesthetic judgment, and the measured appreciation of connoisseurs. Querdillon watches a hunt with the detached fascination of someone who cannot quite believe what he is seeing. The effect is considerably more unsettling than outright violence itself.
The novel's title comes from an eighteenth-century hunting song about John Peel, a celebrated fox hunter whose name echoes through the novel as a kind of sardonic reference point. Kingsley Amis, in his introduction to the 1960 Ballantine Books edition, observed that the novel operates somewhere between science fiction and fantasy and argued persuasively for its qualities as a work of genuine literary imagination rather than genre entertainment.
The world Querdillon enters is not primarily a political dystopia. Sarban shows almost nothing of how the Reich governs its populations or maintains its power. What he shows instead is the leisure of its ruling class, specifically the elaborate hunting entertainments organized on von Hackelnberg's estate. The Count's quarry includes women surgically and genetically modified to resemble birds, who are released into the forest and hunted with crossbows, as well as other human-animal hybrids bred specifically for the estate's games. The horror lies in the way it is presented as tradition. Nothing but a refined and elegant sport to a civilization that has had a century to develop its tastes.
This is the most disturbing insight in the novel. The atrocities are conducted with ceremony, aesthetic judgment, and the measured appreciation of connoisseurs. Querdillon watches a hunt with the detached fascination of someone who cannot quite believe what he is seeing. The effect is considerably more unsettling than outright violence itself.
The novel's title comes from an eighteenth-century hunting song about John Peel, a celebrated fox hunter whose name echoes through the novel as a kind of sardonic reference point. Kingsley Amis, in his introduction to the 1960 Ballantine Books edition, observed that the novel operates somewhere between science fiction and fantasy and argued persuasively for its qualities as a work of genuine literary imagination rather than genre entertainment.