Ship of Ishtar [Hardcover]

Abraham Merritt (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: July 1980

Explorer John Kenton returns from a lifetime of wanderings and the wreckage of World War I to discover a mysterious block of Babylonian basalt containing a crystal model of an ancient ship - the Ship of Ishtar! The sultry magic of the fabled ship draws Kenton into its dreamworld, where a strange crew plucked from the ages sails in a lushly imagined mystical seascape. At the fore of the ship is Sharane, beautiful, proud, luxurious priestess instilled with the power of Ishtar, goddess of Love, Wrath, and Vengeance. On the prow broods inhuman Klaneth, infused with the essence of Negal, god of the Underworld. Kenton finds himself in a cosmic struggle of wills between them - sixty centuries in the making! Will he claim Sharane and take command of the Ship of Ishtar, or will its mysterious power take command of him?

--This text refers to the Paperback edition.

Editorial Reviews

Review

Several of Merritt's works have sometimes been cited as possible influences for the hit ABC television series Lost. Several fan websites have noted striking similarities between Merritt's work, The Moon Pool, and the plot of the ABC drama. Thus far, the creators have not commented concerning the similarities or possible references.

Merritt was influential upon the science fiction and fantasy world primarily through the imaginative power he displayed in the creation of desirable alternative worlds and realities. He was extremely popular during his life, and even had a pulp magazine named after him. The escapist yearning for otherness and mystery that he expressed has seldom been conveyed in science fiction with such an emotional charge.

--This text refers to the Kindle Edition edition.

Product Details

• Hardcover
• Publisher: Borden Pub Co (July 1980)
• ISBN-10: 0875051340
• ISBN-13: 978-0875051345
• Average Customer Review: 4.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (12 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #10,715,776 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

34 of 40 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Ian Myles Slater on: Sailing Through Time's Abyss, September 3, 2006

By 

Ian M. Slater "aylchanan" (Los Angeles, CA United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

"The Ship of Ishtar," a fantasy novel by A. Merritt first published in the mid-1920s, offers a world in which the Gods of ancient Babylon are real and palpable, if not necessarily Divine, and in which marooned voyagers from many times and lands encounter each other in furtherance of an ancient curse. It is probably to be counted as a version of "The Flying Dutchman," although no sailor on earthly seas ever caught a glimpse of the vessel of Ishtar on its unending voyage across a crystalline ocean. The this-worldly counterpart of the Ship is a relic of ancient Mesopotamia, sealed in a block with (long-unreadable) warnings since before the days of Hammurabi.

And the novel itself is a relic of a "modern" world now slipping into the past.

The King James Bible tells us that "There were giants in the earth in those days" (Genesis 6:4) -- the Hebrew can be understood differently, but the Dead Sea Scrolls show that it was once interpreted to explain Mesopotamian heroes like Gilgamesh ("Glgmsh"). And it sometimes seems that before radio dramas and movie serials, before adventure comic strips and science fiction magazines, and well before comic books, let alone television, Giants were roaming the Earth!

Or, at least, Giants were contributing to magazines like "Argosy" (Frank Munsey's pioneer all-fiction pulp) and "All-Story," "Adventure," "Golden Fleece," and the more general-interest "slicks" like "Colliers" and "The Saturday Evening Post." And some of their characters were Giants too -- prototypes of the superheroes of a slightly later day.

A few of these writers had star status, or at least their names had special drawing power (think of Lucas and Spielberg). A few of them are still widely remembered by name or by their creations, like Edgar Rice Burroughs and Tarzan. The westerns of "Max Brand" also have a following. (The name was the well-chosen pseudonym of Frederick Schiller Faust-- which looks even more like invention!)

Others, like Homer Eon Flint, are mostly (and sometimes deservedly) forgotten by all but a few. Their prose styles ranged from the workman-like to the florid and baroque, and sometimes sank to the barely intelligible (which helped some of them paper over plot-holes as large as a mammoth.)

Somewhere between still-famous and forgotten is the present author, Abraham Merritt (1884-1943), once instantly recognizable as A. Merritt, journalist and magazine editor, and, mainly in the period 1917-1934, occasional author of novels and short stories of suspense, the supernatural, and, above all, fantastic adventures in exotic places.

In those years, whenever he chose to write fiction, he was a Giant among Giants, inspiring younger writers, and providing a model for those trying to make a living in the pulp markets by meeting the demand he had created. And he was often reprinted in magazines, a common practice before paperbacks dominated the newsstands. But fiction was a side-line, and Merritt produced little in the following decade, although an unfinished novel and various fragments turned up after his sudden death from a heart attack.

His name still had enough selling power to be used for five issues of "A. Merritt's Fantasy Magazine" (1949-1950), just the market for fiction magazines was fading, but before the novels were picked up for mass-market paperback editions by Avon, which for years had a near-monopoly (although Collier Books did an edition of "Face in the Abyss" in 1961, and there were some earlier exceptions, including at least one edition of "Ship").

Merritt has been in and out of favor with readers or publishers in the years since, due in part to whether his lush romanticism and slightly purple prose style seemed exciting or merely unfashionable. (There are those who suggest that the possibilities for enticing cover art were originally more influential with Avon than the books' other qualities, pointing out that Raymond Chandler was the only other author of real merit on their early list, If true, this changed over the years, as the emphasis on exposed skin decreased considerably, although never quite abandoned. Unhappily, more decorous covers did nothing to correct a debatable choice of base texts for some of the books.)

He really didn't throw around adjectives and adverbs nearly as freely as both imitators and parodists would suggest, but he did prefer, for example, "emerald and vermillion" to "green and red" when describing jungle vegetation. He often used simple sentences, among the longer ones. Sometimes just one word. One! (He also liked exclamation marks! A lot!) Not to everyone's taste, but he was actually a skilled writer, and knew that a well-constructed story was more than a sequence of events.

Another factor in the decline of his popularity, if it was more than an accident of publishing policy as corporations consolidated, may have been growing discomfort with the latent (and sometimes explicit) racial overtones of many of the stories. By the standards of the early twentieth century Merritt was far from a bigot, and it is usually possible to distinguish the opinions expressed by the characters from those endorsed by the author, but the casual assumption of white superiority can be jarring -- and prevent readers from continuing to see whether it is borne out by the events. (He sometimes played with readers' assumptions. Watch out for the Frog-People! Or, wait, are they the Good Guys?)

Recognition of problems with his way of putting women on pedestals (they tend to be pagan priestesses, and often turn out to be actual goddesses or avatars of some sort anyway) probably came too late to make a difference.

Whatever the case, Merrit's novels were in print, mainly in those Avon paperbacks, in the 1940s and 1950s, when Burroughs seemed to be vanishing, and again from the 1960s through the 1980s, then alongside not only Burroughs but Tolkien and Howard. Most of his titles then disappeared from publishers' lists at some point in the middle or late 1980s.

He has been straggling back into print under such unfamiliar auspices as the University of Nebraska Press (the Bison Frontiers of Imagination Series) and the Wesleyan University Press (Early Classics of Science Fiction), with in one case an introduction by Jack Williamson, a now-venerable science fiction writer who as a teenager regarded Merritt as a literary god. (Merritt was impressed and flattered enough by Williamson's first published story, a transparent pastiche/homage, to ask for the manuscript.)

Still, whenever you see a story about dolls which come to life and commit crimes (remember Chuckie?), or about ill-assorted explorers stumbling on a lost civilization of humans and non-humans menaced by both the outside world and its own ancient powers (say, "Atlantis -- The Lost Empire," or "Dinotopia"), chances are that a Merritt story is lurking in the background. Even if the authors themselves never read "Burn Witch Burn" (1932) (filmed as "Devil Doll"), or "The Moon Pool" (as "The Moon Pool" and "The Conquest of the Moon Pool," 1919; book version 1919), "Face in the Abyss" (1923, 1930, revised for book, 1931; author's ending restored in some later editions), and "Dwellers in the Mirage" (magazine and book versions, 1932). Not that Merritt invented the themes, but his versions of them dominated American imaginative literature for much of the twentieth century.

And, partly by way of Williamson and other writers of his generation, any grotesque-looking alien life-form who wins your sympathy may owe something to Merritt as well. (As will be understood by those who have read "Face in the Abyss," many are the progeny of the Snake Mother!)

Merritt made his greatest reputation among lovers of fantastic adventure with slightly more archaeologically plausible and somewhat science-fictionalized versions of the "Lost Race" novel, made popular in the nineteenth century by Bulwer-Lytton and H. Rider Haggard. He added some creepy super-beings who may have contributed more than a little to H.P. Lovecraft's Old Ones, and, when editors allowed, a rather pessimistic view of human nature (its real gods being Greed and Folly).

In 1924, however, Merritt had moved all the way into what would later be recognized as alternate-world heroic fantasy, with "The Ship of Ishtar," originally published in "Argosy All-Story Weekly." (A combined version of two older titles -- "Argosy" would survive the death of its rivals, only to spend its last years as a "Men's Magazine," finally, mercifully, dying in 1978.)

Instead of an archeologist or explorer stumbling into an underground world, or through a Veil of Illusion, this time the archeologist, John Kenton, examining an inscribed block from ancient Babylon, falls from his mundane twentieth-century New York penthouse right onto the deck of a model ship on a crystal ocean -- and finds himself in a world as material and dangerous as the one he has left. He finds that he is acting out (as mentioned) a sort of implied prototype of every Flying Dutchman yarn ever written, along with other castaways in time, such as Sigurd the Norseman, who recognizes the Irish-American Kenton as a Man of Eirinn.

Kenton is caught up in a struggle between Ishtar, Goddess of Love and Beauty, and Nergal, the God of War and Death, as decreed by Bel-Marduk, King of the Gods. (Yes, Ishtar herself was an often-nasty war-goddess -- but Merritt was mostly dressing up his story with Assyriology, and taking a lot of material from Herodotus rather than cuneiform texts. And the interpretation of the gods wasn't implausible, circa-1920.) Of course, this being a Merritt novel, Good is represented by an incredibly beautiful woman, who takes a liking to the Mysterious Stranger who appears and disappears from the Ship she has sailed on since the... Read more ›

15 of 17 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Romantic Adventure, June 30, 2000

By 

Christophe S. French (Austin, TX USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Ship of Ishtar (Collier Nucleus Fantasy & Science Fiction) (Paperback)

The Ship of Ishtar is one of the better 1930's Indiana Jones style pulp adventure novels. An archeologist unearths a miniature ship artifact that transports him to another dimension, where he becomes a macho hero, who, with the help of an interesting assortment of new friends, assists a lovely priestess in a battle against some evil warlocks. His adventures lead him through some wonderfully imaginative fantasy locales, and the book has a spectacular ending.

14 of 16 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A FANTASY FOR THE AGES, April 16, 2004

By 

s.ferber (New York, NY United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Ship of Ishtar (Hardcover)

"The Ship of Ishtar," one of Abraham Merritt's finest fantasies, first appeared in the pages of "Argosy" magazine in 1924. An altered version appeared in book form in 1926, and the world finally received the original work in book form in 1949, six years after Merritt's death. In this wonderful novel we meet John Kenton, an American archaeologist who has just come into possession of a miniature crystal ship recently excavated "from the sand shrouds of ages-dead Babylon." Before too long, Kenton is whisked onto the actual ship, of which his relic is just a symbol. It turns out that the ship is sailing the seas of an otherdimensional limboland, and manned by the evil followers of the Babylonian god of the dead, Nergal, and by the priestesses of the Babylonian fertility goddess, Ishtar. A force barrier of sorts prevents the two parties from coming into contact with each other, and they have been sailing thus for...nobody knows how long. It seems that, centuries ago, a priest of Nergal and a priestess of Ishtar had been guilty of the sin of falling in love; this eternal cruise is the punishment that has been meted out by the gods. Kenton becomes embroiled in this ages-old strife; falls in love himself with Sharane, a Babylonian princess; eventually takes over the ship; and then goes in pursuit of the Black Priest of Nergal, after Sharane is kidnapped. He is aided in his quest by a sword-swinging Viking, a hugely strong and mace-wielding man of Nineveh, and by a scimitar expert from Persia. The quartet makes for one formidable team, lemme tell you! This is high fantasy done to a turn, and Merritt is at the peak of his game here. While "Ship" does not boast as much of the purple prose and hyperadjectival descriptions as his first two books, "The Moon Pool" and "The Metal Monster," there is still quite a bit, and in places the descriptions of various isles and temples almost reads like prose poetry. The story moves along briskly and builds to a pair of splendid set pieces: Sharane's rescue from the Temple of Seven Zones, in which each floor is dedicated to another Babylonian god and is decked out with its own color scheme, shrines and so on; and a very tense sea battle between the Ship of Ishtar and the Black Priest's bireme. The novel really is a stunning feat of imagination. I wonder if Merritt was perhaps influenced or inspired by the excavations at Uruk (now in southern Iraq, and one of the original cities of Ishtar worship) that had commenced in 1912. He may have also been inspired here by H. Rider Haggard's seminal fantasy work "She" (1887), in which Ayesha, head priestess of Isis, is given an eternal punishment for her own love dalliances. Whatever the inspirations, though, Merritt makes it all work, with great detail, color, action and character.
The book is a fantasy classic, but still, Merritt makes some small booboos. Thus, the gold bracelet on Kenton's left arm is on his right arm several pages later. Kenton is said to have disappeared from his NYC apartment at 8 PM, while later Merritt tells us that is was 9 PM. Sargon of Akkad (an ancient Mesopotamian ruler) is said to have ruled 6,000 years ago, whereas in actuality, it was more like 4,300. Merritt, in the course of the book, is also guilty of some fuzzy writing. But these little glitches should in no way interfere with anyone's enjoyment of this rousing tale. I should perhaps mention here that "The Ship of Ishtar" has been included in Cawthorn & Moorcock's overview volume "Fantasy: The 100 Best Books," and that I personally have no problem with that inclusion. It really is a fantasy for the ages.