Hilton, James

Entry updated 1 December 2024. Tagged: Author.

(1900-1954) UK screenwriter and author, called up near the end of World War One but never in active service; in the USA from 1935, known mainly for slightly sentimental mainstream novels like Good-bye Mr Chips (1934). He is primarily of sf interest for his Scientific Romance Lost Horizon (1934), a romantic Lost-World tale which is also very well known, though generically distinct from the rest of his work. In the hidden Tibetan valley (see Zone) of Shangri-La, a name of Hilton's own coinage [see The Encyclopedia of Fantasy under links below], an English diplomat gives the frame narrator (who is never named) a manuscript by a third figure, the mysterious Hugh Conway, whose narrative comprises the bulk of the tale: a Club Story frame that both enforces the fact that a story has been told and allows a mystification of its meaning, in particular the Slingshot Transcendence that ends it. The influence of the book upon Lionel Davidson's The Rose of Tibet (1962) is clear and elucidating.

Conway first describes his flight by hijacked plane to the Inner Asian hinterlands between China and Tibet, where the plane is deliberately crashed adjacent to the serenely paradisal Shangri-La; he there encounters the High Lama, a Telepathic eighteenth-century monk (see Immortality) who discourses on matters beyond the ken of short-lifers, while implicitly evoking the Time-theories of J W Dunne, and giving definitive shape to the cultural pessimism (see Optimism and Pessimism) and Sehnsucht [see The Encyclopedia of Fantasy under links below] typical of interbellum tales of lost worlds, particularly those, like Lost Horizon, whose emotional extremity is saddled within Scientific-Romance topoi. Typically, then, Conway is specifically appointed to maintain Shangri-La through the Holocaust to come, and to aid in the subsequent re-creation of civilization. Lost Horizon was emotionally very much on target for its complex time, and was extremely popular; Orson Welles starred in a Radio adaptation for the Campbell Playhouse programme (3 December 1939); it has been filmed twice as Lost Horizon in 1939 and 1973.

An earlier novel, Terry (1927), posits a similar sense of the exhaustion of the world through the secular frustrations experienced by its idealist hero, but lacks anything like a Shangri-La to soothe the soul. Nothing So Strange (1947) deals, just after the fact, with the nuclear bomb and the Manhattan Project. [JC]

see also: Anthropology; Utopias.

James Hilton

born Leigh, Lancashire: 9 September 1900

died Long Beach, California: 20 December 1954

works

Terry (London: Thornton Butterworth, 1927) [hb/Edmondo Lucchesi]
Lost Horizon (London: Macmillan and Co, 1933) [hb/undeciphered chop]
Nothing So Strange (Boston, Massachusetts: Little, Brown and Company, 1947) [hb/I N Steinberg]

about the author

J R Hammond. The Lost Horizon Companion: A Guide to the James Hilton Novel and its Characters, Critical Reception, Film Adaptations and Place in Popular Culture (Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland and Company, 2001) [nonfiction: pb/]

links

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