Iram of The Pillars - in Fiction

In Fiction

• "Iram" is the lost city where the Muslim hero Thalaba was kept safe in Robert Southey's Thalaba the Destroyer (1801)

• H. P. Lovecraft places it somewhere near The Nameless City in his stories. In "The Call of Cthulhu" it is the supposed base of the Cthulhu Cult.

• James Rollins's 2004 novel Sandstorm depicts Ubar as an underground city in a glass bubble with a lake of antimatter at the middle. The city, which was created as the result of a meteorite impact 20,000 years ago, is destroyed and becomes a massive lake known as Lake Eden.

• Sean McMullen's story "The Measure of Eternity" (published in Interzone 205) is set in Ubar, describing it as the wealthiest city on earth.

• "Wabar" appears in Josephine Tey's 1952 mystery novel The Singing Sands in which detective Alan Grant seeks to unravel the meaning of a strange poem found on the body of a young man. Wabar is one possible subject of the poem.

• In Weaveworld, by Clive Barker, one of the antagonists visits the Empty Quarter and finds what is presumably the magically restored ruins of Iram.

• In Tim Powers' novel Declare, Wabar was a city inhabited by djinni and their half-human progeny and was destroyed by a meteor strike.

• In the video game Uncharted 3: Drake's Deception, it is postulated that Sir Francis Drake made a detour here during his circumnavigation of the world and covered up all evidence of his voyage and the accursed lost city of Ubar, until hero Nathan Drake and an evil, shadowy secret society rediscover the city 500 years later.

• The forthcoming New World of Darkness limited game line, Mummy: the Curse, published by White Wolf Game Studios-Onyx Path, Irem is the Stone Age city where the game's protagonists, the Arisen, were created.