Talk:Andrew Battel

Modern novel based on Battel

It may be worth mentioning in some way the novel based on Battel's story, Lord of Darkness (Arbor House, New York, April 1983, ISBN 0-87795-443-7) by Robert Silverberg (who besides science fiction has written a good deal of historical fiction and non-fiction). The work was reprinted in the UK (by Victor Gollancz, October 1983) and in Germany (by Bastei Lübbe, 1989) translated as Herr der Finsternis.

Silverberg says in his afterword to this lengthy work (611 pages in the September 1984 Bantam paperback edition, ISBN 0-553-24362-4) that "I have used that brief narrative of Battell's [sic] as the foundation for Lord of Darkness, but I think it best to regard this book not as a volume of history, but rather as a historical fantasy . . . . I have followed the broad outlines of his tale of adventure, making only minor changes in the order of events for the sake of dramatic force; but I have filled in those broad (and often vague) outlines with a world of imagined detail . . . . My purpose was to show what it might have been like for an English seaman to have spent twenty years in the jungles of West Africa in the late sixteenth century . . . ."

{The poster formerly known as 87.81.230.195} 90.201.73.20 (talk) 16:24, 23 July 2022 (UTC)