Viriconium (Paperback)

by M. John Harrison (Author), Neil Gaiman (Introduction)
Key Phrases: proton circuit, reborn man, pleasure canal, Audsley King, Tomb the Dwarf, Birkin Grif (more...)

Editorial Reviews

From Booklist
Viriconium gathers Harrison's stories about the great city Viriconium, the empire that rose after the fall of the Afternoon Cultures, and the struggles that surround them, their art and legends, and their connection to our world. The collection starts with "The Pastel City," in which two queens, Methvet Nian and Canna Moidart, battle for control of the empire; Lord tegeus-Cromis and the last survivors of his order fight for Methvet Nian against the rapacious Northerners and the terrifying geteit chemosit, remnants of the late Afternoon Empires. In "A Storm of Wings," the great airman Benedict Paucemanly returns from the moon, bearing with him an invasion of locustlike creatures who come from the stars and threaten to destroy the human world. The final story connects Viriconium to our world through mirrors and strange stories of those who traveled into great Viriconium and returned forever changed. Harrison creates an epic history of a captivating and strange metropolis full of bravos and dancers, intrigue and romance. Regina Schroeder
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Review
"The world that Harrison depicts is intricate and authentic, peopled with a multitude of strange yet lifelike characters—a combination which serves to make his richly imagined empire of Viriconium feel very real indeed.... This omnibus collection from the author of Light is canon-reading for those who wish to know the genre's roots, as well as the heights, to which it can aspire."—Kirkus Reviews, starred review


From the Trade Paperback edition. --This text refers to the Kindle Edition edition.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 480 pages
• Publisher: Spectra (October 25, 2005)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0553383159
• ISBN-13: 978-0553383157
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 5.9 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars See all reviews (19 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #180,381 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

15 of 16 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Which edition to get?, October 11, 2006

By	H. Kalervo - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

Mainly a few words about the differences between the USA and the UK editions (both available via the Amazon USA)... The UK edition (Gollancz) has better cover art, but don't let that fool you: otherwise the UK edition is inferior to the Spectra edition. The Spectra edition is much bigger in length and height, and has fewer pages, which is always nice, nicer to read. Its pages open much better, yet the back won't wrinkle (these two things are really the most significant factors in making the book comfortable to read as well as durable). Partly consequently, it will look better on your bookshelf. The paper is of slightly better quality.

As for the different orders in which the stories are arranged in the different editions, Harrison once stated (in his forums) that he prefers the following order: Viriconium Knights, The Pastel City, Lords of Misrule, Strange Great Sins, A Storm of Wings, The Dancer from the Dance, The Luck in the Head, The Lamia & Lord Cromis, In Viriconium, A Young Man's Journey to Viriconium (this is the order in the UK edition; for the Spectra edition, Harrison basically wanted to try something different). The most important thing is that, if you're reading the book for the first time, you should, again according to Harrison himself, read A Young Man's Journey to Viriconium either first or last. The three novels should be, in my view, first read in the order in which they were written (The Pastel City, A Storm of Wings, In Viriconium). I would recall Harrison symphatizes with this view. Of less importance is the order in which the rest of the stories are read (all the rest are short stories written at various times).

As for the actual content of the book: it has already been sufficiently described and analyzed by Mr. Eric Walker at his "Great Science Fiction & Fantasy Works" web site.

21 of 24 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars One of the all-time classics, November 22, 2005

By	Lynn Walker "owlcroft" (Ritzville, WA) - See all my reviews

This is a long review because it is a review of four distinct long books, The Viriconium Cycle. And there is a marked and progressive set of changes as the reader moves through the four.

The first, The Pastel City, can be taken as an extraordinarily well-wrought specimen of that class of bittersweet science-fiction tales about what Harrison here calls "the Evening Cultures" of humankind--those that come late in the history of the world and the race, when both are old, confused, tired . . . The bitter derives from the pervasive atmosphere in such tales of ending, of the morning and afternoon of life as but memories, of the same rue and futility as those of the old who feel their lives underlived yet slipping away as they watch; the sweet comes from the fact of actual living, of the reality of those human lives whose owners' appetites and deeds participate meagerly if at all in the race's larger melancholy. In this first venture at Viriconium, Harrison gives us an adequate but not striking plot and a well-wrought but not unique setting; but he also gives us rich characterizations and, above all, superb, jewel-perfect prose. He captures elegantly the late-autumn mood of the world he imagines. His protagonists do the needful things, some surprises occur, the book comes to an end; this one comes to what might be called a conventional, almost a traditional "happy" ending, in that, for all the pain and losses, those who survive have hopes, and futures that may contain those hopes.

By the second book--though it seems to proceed directly from the first, saving only a lapse of some decades--we have already a different form of book, one grown geometrically in many ways. The Pastel City, though almost poetic in tone, seems grounded in a readily discernible reality. In A Storm of Wings, we retain a connection to that particular far-future science-fictional reality, but an aura of surrealism has set in; as one character insightfully relates, "the actual thin substance of the universe becomes more and more debatable, oneiric, hard to achieve, like the white figures that will not focus at the edge of vision . . ." This Viriconium is well along the way to being what it will become in the later books.

It is different in many ways. It is still the shell of the seat of a once-great empire of the Afternoon Cultures, but it has ceased to be some Flash-Gordon art-deco abstraction; it has gone from particularity to specificity, from a city to City, a curious amalgam of all the cities of humankind. It is a mythic Jerusalem, or Rome: The Eternal City. Its anchors to a definite place and time, clear enough in the first book, have stretched and weakened and curved. Now it is not really in any definite place in reality. Its problems have changed in like kind. The dangers of The Pastel City were tangible, comprehensible, things against which one takes arms. Now, the shadow descending on Viriconium is not a thing of any sort, it is an attitude, a feeling, a sensation--intangible, indefinite, yet terribly real.

The tone, the atmosphere, is the stuffy, oppressive feeling that comes of a summer night when a thunderstorm is due and overdue, and the drenching downpour and thunder and lightning would be better than the miserable humid waiting. Perhaps the worst of it is that the danger is not external, outside and threatening to break in: it walks the streets of the City as the very citizens thereof. It is the Time of the Locust--and sanity itself is slowly and insidiously rotting away. Against this barely perceived threat, some few of the City must act, and they do. This--unlike The Pastel City--is not a tale in which much "happens" in the sense of dramatic action, despite the occasional clashes of swords (and the rare energy weapons). It is a tale of mind--of experiences, of perceptions, thoughts, philosophies; it is claustrophobia-inducing, grim, nihilistic. It is the next step in Harrison's evolution of Viriconium the concept.

It is a rich book. Harrison now truly flexes his powers of prose-making; the book is well worth reading sheerly for the pleasures of the writing. But the book is not just an ecstasy of prose poetry. It has plot, plot far more subtle, complex, and original than the acceptable but pedestrian plot of the first book. Moreover, Harrison's portrayal of both setting and character, already impressive in that first book, here--like his prose--comes to a yet fuller flowering. And, needless to say, the book is also one of ideas--ideas that we, the readers, need to color in with our own experiences and understandings of life, for Harrison does not hand us thoughts, but rather provokes thought.

In the end, there are revelations sufficient to transform the events of the book into a sequence to which one can assign tangible enough "explanations" that the reader who insists on missing the thrust of the tale and instead asking "But what was really happening?" can be satisfied; but this is the last time in the sequence that Harrison will so pander. The "reality" of the events in the tales, like their meaning, will henceforth be indeterminate, things for their readers to color in as may accord with their tastes and sensibilities.

The sequence of change and growth in scope and power in the series proceeds geometrically. As A Storm of Wings was to The Pastel City, so The Floating Gods is to Storm. The Floating Gods is the story of Ashlyme the poet, if the confused and erratic events described can be called a "story." (Mind, they are confused and erratic by careful design, not by any failing, and in that they of course mimic life and the poor wretches who live it.) The Viriconium of The Floating Gods has no longer even the faint connection of its series predecessors to any time or place recognizable to us. The titular floating gods are a mystery, the place is become a curiously melted-down-and-run-together puddle of all cities and all times; the folk who populate the City are weak, ineffectual, like children playing at adult life without knowing the rules.

All in all, by atmosphere, parallels, significances, allusions, and even a direct reference, we now cannot escape the sense of a close relation between this book at least--and most likely the very idea of Viriconium--and the poetry of T. S. Eliot, notably "The Hollow Men", which, not inappropriately for consideration of Viriconium the idea, famously concludes--

This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper.

Possibly even more germane is Eliot's masterpiece The Waste Land. Viriconium: Viriconium, of the Evening Cultures . . . . What can these hollow people make of their dry, dusty lives? That is what Harrison asks, and answers. But what his answer may be requires us, his readers, to color in his sketch for it to be complete. Harrison is not a facile moralist with mind-numbing homilies to offer; he offers life in raw, sometimes bleeding chunks, and you and I must digest it as we can.

Although the "Viriconium" series is usually called "science fiction," that label clearly derives from the first two books. No one reading The Floating Gods can mistake it for anything but fantasy (a curious and perhaps unique mid-series transformation). Not that it matters: the point of speculative fiction--once called fantastic fiction--is to allow the author to throw light on the human condition in ways not easily accomplished in mainstream fiction.

As Eliot's Waste Land drew its inspiration directly from Jesse Weston's interpretations of Arthurian legend, so in turn does The Floating Gods depend, in at least one crucial way, on an aspect of the Arthur cycle, the episode of the Fisher King (a source of inspiration to many fantasy writers, such as C. S. Lewis). To say much more would be a spoiler, but Harrison has interpreted the crux of that business in a simple yet profoundly insightful way that turns the entire tale, seemingly desultory till that revelation, near the end, into a tightly wound spring that then explosively powers its significance into the reader's consciousness.

With the short stories that make up Viriconium Nights, Harrison takes us yet further into that curiously distorted and distorting version of the place that he described in the prefatory note to the previous volume; he repeats that note in this book, with small but perhaps significant changes.

In these tales we see Viriconium as never the same place twice, even the name of the place changing, the very streets shifting from story to story, only a whisper of continuity--place names which seem familiar; characters we seem to have heard of before; the imperfect repetition of this or that significant event. These tales are those imperfect repetitions, sometimes of one another, sometimes of events in the previous books of the cycle. (The longest of these tales, the title-giving "In Viriconium," is a condensed and strangely variant replay of virtually the whole of The Floating Gods.) The significances of the specific and the particular repetitions we must each glean for ourselves.

And that sums Harrison: we must glean, from his crystalline prose, such meanings as we each uniquely find.

24 of 28 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars More than a little disappointing, December 14, 2006

By	L. Chapin (Columbus, OH USA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

Based upon the descriptions and reviews of Harrison's 'Viriconium' stories, I bought this book and eagerly anticipated reading it. But after reading the first long story, 'The Pastel City,' which was quite good, my appreciation for the book began to take a nose dive as I ploughed into 'A Storm of Wings.' Skipping further ahead to the short stories didn't help much, either. 'Viriconium Knights', for example, was perhaps the most pointless story I have ever come across in over 40 years of reading fantasy and sci-fi.

The man without doubt has the ability to write, and considerable talent with language, but his dreary, pointless, and non-linear scribblings just ended up boring the life out of me. I was never so glad to put a book down.

That's my personal opinion, for what it's worth. Needless to say, I respect the opinions of those who love these works, but evidently don't share their tastes.