Gemmel, Quist and Polar Shifts

Fans of British fantasy novels will no doubt remember David Gemmell as being one of the biggest names in fantasy writing between the mid-1980's and his untimely death from heart disease in 2006.

Gemmell's books were a breath of fresh air in the late 80's, washing away the stale Tolkien-imitation that seemed to dominate the field and replacing it with gritty tales of flawed heros, often hopeless odds, and major characters often dying. Sadly, the more books Gemmel wrote the more formulaic this style became.

One re-occurring theme Gemmell used to tie together the different series of his earlier books was of periodic catastrophes that shifted the Earth's rotation, drowning continents and emptying seas. At the time I read his books I assumed these ideas (absurd, but good fodder for fantasy) were Gemmell's own adaptation of Velikovsky's catastrophism, but most of the Polar Shift concepts used in Gemmell's work appear directly taken from Charles Hapgood's "Maps of the Ancient Sea Kings: Evidence of Advanced Civilization in the Ice Age."

The reason I now know this is John McKay's excellent post on Allan Quist's hilarious attempt to disprove global climate change by claiming that ancient maps show an ice-free Antarctica based on Hapgood's work.