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    No-Man's-Land (Cryptofiction Classics - Weird Tales of Strange Creatures)
    No-Man's-Land (Cryptofiction Classics - Weird Tales of Strange Creatures)
    No-Man's-Land (Cryptofiction Classics - Weird Tales of Strange Creatures)
    Ebook73 pages1 hour

    No-Man's-Land (Cryptofiction Classics - Weird Tales of Strange Creatures)

    By John Buchan

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    This early work by John Buchan was originally published in 1899 and we are now republishing it with a brand new introductory biography as part of our Cryptofiction Classics series. 'No-Man's-Land' is a short story about a student on a fishing and walking trip who stumbles upon a lost tribe of picts. John Buchan, first Baron Tweedsmuir of Elsfield, was born in Perth, Scotland in 1875. Over the course of his life, Buchan would eventually publish some one hundred books, forty or so of which were novels, mostly wartime thrillers. In the latter part of his life he worked in politics, serving as Conservative MP for the Scottish universities and Lord High Commissioner of the Church of Scotland (1933-34). The Cryptofiction Classics series contains a collection of wonderful stories from some of the greatest authors in the genre, including Ambrose Bierce, Arthur Conan Doyle, Robert Louis Stevenson, and Jack London. From its roots in cryptozoology, this genre features bizarre, fantastical, and often terrifying tales of mythical and legendary creatures. Whether it be giant spiders, werewolves, lake monsters, or dinosaurs, the Cryptofiction Classics series offers a fantastic introduction to the world of weird creatures in fiction.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherRead Books Ltd.
    Release dateFeb 17, 2015
    ISBN9781473399754
    No-Man's-Land (Cryptofiction Classics - Weird Tales of Strange Creatures)
    Author

    John Buchan

    John Buchan was born in Perth in 1875, the son of a Church of Scotland Minister. After being educated locally, he attended Glasgow University and Brasenose College Oxford. He exchanged comparative poverty for affluence by his success as an author, but it was as a lawyer that his reputation began. He went to South Africa to serve as private secretary to the British Colonial administrator, Alfred, Lord Milner and assisted in reconstruction of the country after the Boer War. He entered publishing in 1906 as partner in the firm of his friend Thomas Nelson and married Susan Charlotte Grosvenor, cousin of the Duke of Westminster, in 1907. They had four children. Buchan was elected to Parliament in 1911, served in various capacities during the First World War, including writing speeches for Sir Douglas Haig and taking on the role of Director of Information under Lord Beaverbrook. He returned to the House of Commons in 1927 and then in 1935 he was appointed Governor-General of Canada and became Lord Tweedsmuir. He died in 1940. John Buchan was a prolific author and wrote poetry and biographies as well as novels, but he is still best remembered for his adventure stories and in particular the five Hannay novels: The Thirty Nine Steps, Greenmantle, Mr Standfast, The Three Hostages, and The Island of Sheep.

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      Book preview

      No-Man's-Land (Cryptofiction Classics - Weird Tales of Strange Creatures) - John Buchan

      No-Man’s-Land

      By John Buchan

      A Cryptofiction Classic

      Copyright © 2013 Read Books Ltd.

      This book is copyright and may not be

      reproduced or copied in any way without

      the express permission of the publisher in writing

      British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

      A catalogue record for this book is available

      from the British Library

      Introduction

      The genre of cryptofiction has grown up in the shadow of its older brothers, science fiction and fantasy. While the latter two continue to move towards the mainstream of literary tastes – as evidenced by reaction to modern series such as Neal Stephenson’s The Baroque Cycle and George R. R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire – many readers have probably never even heard of cryptofiction. Odd, when one considers that some of the most famous authors in the Western tradition have dabbled in cryptofiction, and that even today works of cryptofiction frequently feature on bestseller lists.

      Cryptofiction takes its name from another, non-literary practice: cryptozoology. Cryptozoology is generally regarded as a pseudoscience by mainstream scientists, relying as it does upon anecdotal, often unverifiable evidence. However, it still boasts many enthusiasts, and continues to exert considerable artistic allure. Focused on the search for animals whose existence has not been established – who are literally kryptos, Greek for hidden – cryptozoology traces its roots to the work of the 19th-century Dutch zoologist Anthonie Cornelis Oudemans (1858-1943). Oudemans’ 1892 work, The Great Sea Serpent, was a collected study of global sea serpent sightings, which hypothesised that all these serpents might stem from a previously unknown species of giant seal.

      Around the same time that Oudemans’ work came to prominence, cryptozoology experienced its early crossovers with the fiction of the day. Following in the footsteps of Jules Verne’s famous Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea (1870) – which featured a mysterious giant sea monster – the 1890s saw an explosion of cryptofictional short stories, such as Rudyard Kipling’s A Matter of Fact (1892) and H. G. Wells’ The Sea Raiders (1896). Into the 20th-century, Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Lost World (1912) centred on an expedition to a plateau of the Amazon basin where prehistoric animals continued to thrive, and Edgar Rice Burroughs’ The Land That Time Forgot (1924) picked up a similar theme, featuring not just dinosaurs but also Neanderthals. Less than a decade later, a prehistoric ape took centre stage in the 1933 film King Kong.

      The fifties witnessed what was probably the heyday of cryptozoology. It was in 1955 that Belgian-French zoologist Bernard Heuvelmans – known as the father of cryptozoology – published his On the Track of Unknown Animals, in which he both coined the field’s name and mapped out its intellectual boundaries. Four years later, Willy Ley’s popular Exotic Zoology (1959) was published, featuring discussion of the Yeti and sea serpents. To modern cryptozoology enthusiasts, these works are still seen as the subject’s defining texts.

      While the popularity of cryptozoology has surely waned since the fifties – perhaps mainly due to the the ongoing non-discovery of creatures such as Bigfoot, the Yeti, and the Loch Ness Monster – cryptofiction may well be more popular than ever. The towering cryptofiction text of the modern era is undoubtedly Michael Crichton’s 1990 novel, Jurassic Park. It was Crichton’s book which helped trigger a renaissance in cryptofiction, which saw the publication of works such as John Darnton’s Neanderthal (1996), Phillip Kerr’s Esau (1996), Frank E. Peretti’s Monster (2006), and Steve Alten’s Meg series. 2005 even saw a $207 million remake of the original cryptofiction movie, King Kong.

      Ultimately, then, despite its obscured and messy roots, the genre of cryptofiction may just be more alive than ever. One wonders why this is: perhaps it stems from an attempt to inject some mystery and wonder back into a natural world that is largely discovered and pacified; perhaps it has to do with modern readers being more sympathetic to creatures that at least have some vague basis in scientific fact. Whatever the reason, cryptofiction is here to stay, and the stories in this collection map the development of a genre which is as strange as it is fascinating.

      No-Man’s-Land

      by John Buchan

      Chapter I

      The Shieling of Farawa

      It was with a light heart and a pleasing consciousness of holiday that I set out from the inn at Allermuir to tramp my fifteen miles into the unknown. I walked slowly, for I carried my equipment on my back—my basket, fly-books and rods, my plaid of Grant tartan (for I boast myself a kinsman of that house), and my great staff, which had tried ere then the front of the steeper Alps. A small valise with books and some changes of linen clothing had been sent on ahead in the shepherd’s own hands. It was yet early April, and before me lay four weeks of freedom—twenty-eight blessed days in which to take fish and smoke the pipe of idleness. The Lent term had pulled me down, a week of modest enjoyment thereafter in town had finished the work; and I drank in the sharp moorish air like a thirsty man who has been forwandered among deserts.

      I am a man of varied tastes and a score of interests. As an undergraduate I had been filled with the old mania for the complete life. I distinguished myself in the Schools, rowed in my college eight, and reached the distinction of practising for three weeks in the Trials. I had dabbled in a score of learned activities, and when the time came that I won the inevitable St. Chad’s fellowship on my chaotic acquirements, and I found myself compelled to select if I would pursue a scholar’s life, I had some toil in finding my vocation. In the end I resolved that the ancient life of the North, of the Celts and the Northmen and the unknown Pictish tribes, held for me the chief fascination. I had acquired a smattering of Gaelic, having been brought up

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