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minds of others, alive or dead, not communicated through the ordinary channels of sense, my mind is in a balance of doubt.” There is no doubt, however, of the value of The Book of Dreams and Ghosts in preserving these accounts, and in the contribution to literature of its author, Andrew Lang.

3. “THEY” LIVE!
    THE PARODIES OF H. RIDER HAGGARD (1978)
    Sir Henry Rider Haggard (1856-1925) achieved almost instant fame with King Solomon’s Mines , published in 1885. The book had been written in just six weeks, after his brother had challenged him to produce a better story than a recent adventure novel by Robert Louis Stevenson. Haggard followed his bestseller (it has never been out-of-print since its initial publication) with She (1887), which rapidly became even more popular than the earlier book. Although Haggard lived another thirty-eight years and wrote many more novels, including three others featuring Ayesha, She-Who-Must-Be-Obeyed, and another fifteen or so with Allan Quatermain, hero of King Solomon’s Mines , as principal character, he was never again to achieve the recognition he garnered for these two early romances. His later novels have generally been forgotten and are nearly all OP at this writing.
    The popularity of She and King Solomon’s Mines prompted a host of imitations, as publishers tried to take advantage of Haggard’s success. Indeed, the author can be said almost to have founded the “lost race” category single-handedly, for although books of this type had been published prior to 1885, it was only after that date that the genre truly began to flourish. Haggard’s fictions established all the conventions of the genre: white European or American explorers are led by mysterious messages or documents or the need to rescue other explorers into a non-surveyed part of the world, where they discover the remnants of long-lost civilizations, races, aliens, or peoples. Often these groups are bastardized descendants of such ancient groups as the Incas, Greeks, Egyptians, or Sumerians, now reduced to savagery by centuries of inbreeding. Inevitably, the explorers escape back to the modern world where “real” civilization still rules, despite the best efforts of their captors, and often the lost races are destroyed in the process. There are, of course, many different variations on this basic theme, but the pattern is the same in almost all.
    The lost race genre flourished for about forty years, from the year King Solomon’s Mines popularized the genre to to about the time of Rider Haggard’s death, when the last unmapped areas of the world—the Polar Regions—were finally explored and filled in with aerial surveys. Other common settings for lost race books were Africa, central Asia, the jungles of the Amazon basin, the deserts of Australia, or the uncharted islands in little-traveled parts of the Ocean, often the Pacific. Most of the later stories were set in Antarctica. After 1930 fantasy writers began moving their settings into space or other dimensions, and the lost race category virtually vanished from the scene. Only a handful has been published since World War II.
    Haggard’s popularity in the mid-1880s is also reflected in the large number of parodies of his work published at that time. Haggard was not the only writer of the Victorian era to get a huge public response to his work. Sir George Chesney’s future war pamphlet, The Battle of Dorking , had been followed by fifteen or more sequels, replies, arguments, and denials during the year it was published (1871); indeed, sequels were still being issued thirty years later. Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward, 2000-1887 was similarly rewarded with a spate of imitations when it appeared in 1888, and the author was prompted to write his own sequel in response, Equality (1897), which produced its own group of imitations. Novels written to comment on Bellamy’s ideas were appearing as late as the 1980s, when the late Mack Reynolds produced a set