"A Voyage to Hyperborea" is a recent (2020) novel by John Michael Greer. It forms part of the author´s "Haliverse", an alternate reality in which Lovecraft´s Eldritch horrors (and other unspeakable creatures) turn out to be, well, the good guys! Greer really brought the Haliverse stories to a close already in 2019 with "The Weird of Hali: Arkham", but for some reason, the Eldritch Muses didn´t leave him alone, so a number of similarly-themed novels appeared promptly.
"A Voyage to Hyperborea" follows a struggling scholar, Toby Gilman (his last name is a pun - Toby really does have gills!), as he is forced to join a dangerous expedition to Greenland in order to obtain a stipend. In the story, the glaciers of Greenland has began to melt due to man-made climate change, revealing the remains of several ancient civilizations beneath the former ice sheet, the most splendid being Hyperborea (said to be ancestral to Atlantis). Gilman happens to be an expert in the rather narrow field of Hyperborean linguistics.
Unfortunately for him and many others, the voyage to the Arctic island turns out to be a cover for something very different. The Hyperboreans were worshippers of the Great Old Ones, and guarded ancient stone tablets with potent magic that can destroy the entire world. A mysterious brotherhood known as the Radiance (an obvious reference to the Illuminati) want to find the stone tablets, supposedly still guarded by an Old One in the bowels of the Greenlandic earth. Several alien races of shape-shifters want to stop the Radiance, and Gilman soon realizes that nothing is what it seems at the Arctic research facility...
The strangest part of the story features an encounter between Gilman and an entire crew of pirates, who look and act exactly as you expect unhanged pirates to act and look like. Rum, sea shanties, old swords, weird accents, male bonding...it turns out that the old farmboy and landlubber Gilman fits right in! That the fish-man is immune to salt water due to his hybrid nature is, of course, an extra plus on a sea voyage. Even the (hardly surprising) revelation that the pirates are really ghosts who´ve been at sea for centuries somehow fits the format.
The ideological commitments of the author are the same as in previous Haliversian novels. Humans are relatively unimportant in the bigger scheme of things, the Earth being inhabited by other intelligent creatures, and our modern civilization is just the latest in a series of cycles that saw the rise and fall of Hyperborea, Atlantis and others. The Ancient Ones are "pagan gods", usually indifferent to human concerns, although some of them have entered covenants with smaller groups of human (or hybrid) devotees. The Radiance (modelled on NICE in "That Hideous Strength" by C S Lewis) pretends to be on the side of science and progress, while actually being evil magicians - the author´s way of saying that modernity is deeply problematic. It´s hardly a coincidence that the centuries-old pirate vessel "Miskatonic" manages to destroy a modern ship with its old cannons, or that the pirates are invisible to modern radar, since "Miskatonic" is all made of wood! Apart from Lovecraft and Lewis, there are also references to Clark Ashton Smith, Jules Verne and (perhaps) Tolkien. The descent into the Hyperborean underworld have obvious similarities with how the Fellowship of the Ring encountered orcs and balrogs in the Mines of Moria, although in Greer´s story, the deadly creatures are all on our side.
Much else is the same, too. One peculiarity with all the Haliverse novels is that Greer meticulously describes every meal eaten by the main characters (brace yourself for some really bad culinary experiences onboard the pirat vessel). Another are the constant stops at libraries and archives, also described in some detail. The main difference is that the sex is steamier. It seems every sexy woman in this story is both willing and able to bed the hero. Unless, of course, their well-endowed female bodies are just a cover for something more monstrous...
Could perhaps be of some interest to fantasy fans.
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