I Had Trouble in Getting to Solla Sollew
by Dr Seuss
1965
When I read The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath, it reminded me vaguely of Dr Seuss's I Had Trouble in Getting to Solla Sollew, which was one of my favorites of his as a kid, so I decided to reread it. I have no idea if Suess ever read Lovecraft, but even if he did, I doubt this was any sort of direct homage or inspiration. There are similarities because both tell stories about journeys, and both contain a few common elements - a distant city, cats, a vast underground - but Solla Sollew is its own story, not a retlling of Kadath.
The unnamed narrator of Solla Sollew is a young man who feels beset by troubles. He makes rules for himself, to try to prevent the same things happening again, but there's always something new. And so, he is tempted when a traveler promises to take him along to a golden city where he'll be troubled no more.
But along the way, he meets other people who have troubles of their own that they're running away from. The traveler hooks the boy with his promise, then makes him do all the work. An old man moves from home to escape the rain. A general conscripts the boy into his army, then runs off and leaves him alone at the first sign of danger.
When he gets to the fabled city, they have problems too, and the first person he meets wants to run off to a new city that'll surely be better. So at last the boy stops to consider, and goes home, and instead of trying to avoid every possible form of trouble, plans to confront and overcome them.
Parts of this remind me of very old style D&D. First the boy trips on a rock, so then he always looks down as he walks. Then he gets bitten by a bird from behind, so he teaches himself to be wall-eyed. Then he gets attacked from above and below... It's just like descriptions of the oldest D&D games, where the players developed elaborate lists of routine instructions for each time their characters entered a new room, trying to avoid every single bad thing that'd ever befallen them from surprising them again, and the Dungeon Master constantly innovating new and more obscure punishments for failing to say the magic words "...and I also look at X." There's even a tiny monster who lives in a keyhole and pushes your key out of the lock!
Most of my favorite Seuss books were like children's bestiaries - If I Ran the Circus, If I Ran the Zoo, On Beyond Zebra, McElligot's Pool. Several of those are out of print now, because the conceit of each relied on fantastic exoticism that sometimes incorporated real-world orientalism and racism. A little boy dream of greatness, because he alone will go out and come home with animals from other parts of the world, imaginary animals from imaginary places, that he's able to believe might be real partly just because he's young, and partly because these places are in parts of the world he knows little about, so the imaginary spots seem no more unreal than what's actually there. It's no coincidence he dreams of animals from made-up parts of Asia and Africa, not a fantastic unmapped bit of the American Midwest.
Solla Sollew and another one I liked, The Butter Battle Book, are different, because they're ultimately warnings about the dangers of choosing fantasy over reality, of imagining that you can be rid of your problems without solving them, just one town over or one new toy away. Both are, in a way, more mature works, because they still star a dreamer, but they show that his dreams don't work out simply because he hopes they will, and who ultimately decides to stop dreaming and take action, to do something real. That's one last similarity to Dream-Quest, I suppose, because in that Randolph Carter finally chooses to wake up and to live, rather than dying in his sleep trying to capture a dream.
The unnamed narrator of Solla Sollew is a young man who feels beset by troubles. He makes rules for himself, to try to prevent the same things happening again, but there's always something new. And so, he is tempted when a traveler promises to take him along to a golden city where he'll be troubled no more.
But along the way, he meets other people who have troubles of their own that they're running away from. The traveler hooks the boy with his promise, then makes him do all the work. An old man moves from home to escape the rain. A general conscripts the boy into his army, then runs off and leaves him alone at the first sign of danger.
When he gets to the fabled city, they have problems too, and the first person he meets wants to run off to a new city that'll surely be better. So at last the boy stops to consider, and goes home, and instead of trying to avoid every possible form of trouble, plans to confront and overcome them.
Parts of this remind me of very old style D&D. First the boy trips on a rock, so then he always looks down as he walks. Then he gets bitten by a bird from behind, so he teaches himself to be wall-eyed. Then he gets attacked from above and below... It's just like descriptions of the oldest D&D games, where the players developed elaborate lists of routine instructions for each time their characters entered a new room, trying to avoid every single bad thing that'd ever befallen them from surprising them again, and the Dungeon Master constantly innovating new and more obscure punishments for failing to say the magic words "...and I also look at X." There's even a tiny monster who lives in a keyhole and pushes your key out of the lock!
Most of my favorite Seuss books were like children's bestiaries - If I Ran the Circus, If I Ran the Zoo, On Beyond Zebra, McElligot's Pool. Several of those are out of print now, because the conceit of each relied on fantastic exoticism that sometimes incorporated real-world orientalism and racism. A little boy dream of greatness, because he alone will go out and come home with animals from other parts of the world, imaginary animals from imaginary places, that he's able to believe might be real partly just because he's young, and partly because these places are in parts of the world he knows little about, so the imaginary spots seem no more unreal than what's actually there. It's no coincidence he dreams of animals from made-up parts of Asia and Africa, not a fantastic unmapped bit of the American Midwest.
Solla Sollew and another one I liked, The Butter Battle Book, are different, because they're ultimately warnings about the dangers of choosing fantasy over reality, of imagining that you can be rid of your problems without solving them, just one town over or one new toy away. Both are, in a way, more mature works, because they still star a dreamer, but they show that his dreams don't work out simply because he hopes they will, and who ultimately decides to stop dreaming and take action, to do something real. That's one last similarity to Dream-Quest, I suppose, because in that Randolph Carter finally chooses to wake up and to live, rather than dying in his sleep trying to capture a dream.
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