Viriconium - a series of four books (three novels; one short story collection) set in a far-far-future world at the point where science fiction morphs into fantasy, that is, a world of futuristic airships, robots and computerized eagles but also a world where knights in armor ride horses into battle under a queen's banner. T. John Harrison is breathtaking. I haven't read such world building, imagination firing fantasy since I paid a visit to J. R .R. Tolkien's Middle Earth forty years ago. Incid...

How much you enjoy Viriconium will most likely depend on why you read fantasy. Actually, scratch that: how much you enjoy Viriconium relies on what you expect out of your reading, period.If you see books as comfort food, you are probably going to hate Viriconium because this collection is the stark opposite of that. If you read fantastic literature for complex plots, strong character development and clear, lucid writing, then you are also probably going to hate Viriconium. Not because the novel

The idea to chart the final decay of civilisation from multiple realities – each more entropic than the last – was a premise full of possibility, and it set high expectations. The book’s intelligent, flamboyant style was, at times, quite beautiful. But as Lou Reed once sang: ‘Between thought and expression there lies a lifetime.’ And it’s in this space that I found the cycle as a whole disappointing – especially in the final third.The narrative arc was lacking, and it felt like an impressionisti...

Sometimes, your favorite authors love a book, tell you how wonderful it is, how masterful, how pivotal the work is. So you buy it, and put it on your shelf, peruse it periodically, and wait until it's just the right moment, the right time, the moon and the stars are just right and you look at it and decide that now, now is the time to read Viriconium. It doesn't click, but you keep reading. Sometimes books just need time. You need to let your mind shift, click in with the author, see the beauty

These stories are enigmatic and maddening, poignant and magnetic, with beautiful writing and phantasmagoric imagery. They are not easy reading. Plots take a backseat to settings and mood, all of which are frayed and thick with a heavy fog. There are inconsistencies between the stories, characters and places who have the same name yet appear and act wholly different. A shifting reality, as if the stories are etched on a palimpsest. Yet there is something captivating about Harrison's mysterious, a...

It's hard to write about Viriconium without being infected by its style. This is a collection of three short novels and some short stories about Harrison's imagined city of Viriconium. The first two novels, Pastel City and Storm of Wings, are recognizable as fantasies. They offer heroes, monsters, queens, epic battles. Pastel City might be the most traditional, with an Elric vibe. The third novel, In Viriconium, changes course, presenting the lives of artists and criminals without much fantastic...

Added because in the acknowledgements of Perdido Street Station, M John Harrison is one of only two authors credited (the other being the wonderful Mervyn Peake).And then Forrest recommended this specific one (see comments under my copy of light: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...

THE PASTEL CITY This opening salvo in the Viriconium series benefits from Harrison's icily fertile imagination and innate writing chops—but the latter was still at a raw, developing stage back in 1971 when The Pastel City was originally published, and there really isn't that much to distinguish it from other rote fantasy from the same period. A decrepit, grim, and feral atmosphere—reminiscent of Moorcock, or even Glen Cook's The Black Company in its earlier incarnations—helps, but it

I was on a dark fantasy kick for a few weeks. I like the first story in this one a lot.

ORIGINALLY POSTED AT Fantasy Literature.Viriconium sits on the ruins of an ancient civilization that nobody remembers. The society that was technologically advanced enough to create crystal airships and lethal energy weapons is dead. These Afternoon Cultures depleted the world’s metal ores, leaving mounds of inscrutable rusted infrastructure with only a few odds and ends that still work. The current citizens of Viriconium are baffled by what they’ve dug up, but they have no idea what any of it i...

Viriconium: A baroque, decaying, phantasmagoric dream cityOriginally posted at Fantasy LiteratureThis is one of those compendiums that really isn’t a traditional sequence at all. Instead, it’s more like four disparate, elusive, and impressionistic paintings that try to capture the essence of an ineffable dream in the form of a city sometimes called Viriconium. The books and stories contained in VIRICONIUM were written over a number of years by the eclectic British writer M. John Harrison.He has

I read "The Pastel City" and "A Storm of Wings". I won't be continuing the series because, altough it is interesting at times, it doesn't hold my interes.Both novels are set in phantasmagorical, post-apocalyptical world. The nature is strange and warped, and creatures are not much different. "The Pastel City" concerns a war between 2 queens, and "A Storm of Wings" deals with an alien force intruding on a weakened world after the battle(s). At times it all reminded me of Gormenghast, but one wher...

A world trying to remember itself Phthisic. Muculent. Gelid. M. John Harrison marshals an arsenal of arcane vocabulary to describe the fetid desuetude of the world of his mythical city of Viriconium. In a handful of stories written over the span of more than a decade, starting in 1971, he traces the fractured, half-remembered rise and fall of the eponymous imagined future city, founded many millennia after the demise of our own civilization. Or was it?Harrison's unparalleled way with words is

Each sentient species perceives the thin evidence of this state in a different way, generating out of this perception its physical and metaphysical Umwelt: its little bubble or envelope of ‘reality.’ These perceptual systems are hermetic and admit of no alternative. They are the product of a particular set of sense organs, evolutionary beginnings, and planetary origins. If the cat were to define the world, he would exclude the world of the housefly in his mouth. Each species has its fiction, and...

I was drawn into Viriconium by an old paperback copy of The Pastel City, which I thought was a fantastic read.Little did I know that Harrison had other ideas for the others in the series. He subverts the tropes of a Tolkien-style fantasy by refusing to construct a consistent world; each story must be read by itself, and is an ever-fading echo of the original telling, more baroque and ornate each repetition. The scale shrinks from a world-traveling conflict to intimate character pieces in an almo...

Viriconium is reminiscent of Vance's Dying Earth or Aldiss's Hothouse or Moorcock's Elric: A dying (or decadent) Earth and its last civilizations. It's actually a collection of three short novels and a handful of short stories.Harrison is not simply telling a tale but is attempting "serious literature" and the reader shouldn't come to these stories expecting to while away a quiet weekend idyll. The most accessible book is the first one, The Pastel City, written in 1971. It narrates the clearest,...

How have I not read this collection of short novels and stories sooner? M. John Harrison is a writer who plays right into my personal tastes. These stories are imaginative, literary and dark. My favorite is A STORM OF WINGS, the second novel in the series, filled with warped perceptions and evocative imagery. It is outlandish and sometimes difficult to follow, but worth the effort. I'll admit, I'm a sucker for challenging and imaginative reads, and enjoyed this collection immensely, but if you'r...

M. John Harrison's VIRICONIUM cycle:As stated in a previous post, what led me to Harrison's science/fantasy omnibus was a quote that it was: "inspired by Jack Vance's Dying Earth series and Mervyn Peake's Gormenghast, although the works are also influenced in their imagery by the poems of T.S. Eliot." The introduction by Neil Gaiman didn't hurt the book's chances either. And then the blurbs (which by nature are alway burbling blurbs) were mostly filled with what can only be described as awe and

I'm going to review this now, even though I haven't quite got to the end because, quite frankly, I don't know if I ever will.This is an omnibus that includes three novels and one short story collection. The stories are arranged in what I can only assume is some sort of chronological order. The first novel "The Pastel City" was published in 1971 and then there is a nine year break after which the two remaining novels and finally the short story collection were published throughout the early 1980'...

From ISawLightningFall.blogspot.comHave you ever gotten something you yearned for -- an oft-delayed vacation, a new car or a fine, aged wine -- only to discover it doesn’t live up to your longing? If so, you may understand my response to M. John Harrison’s Viriconium. Consistently praised in the speculative-fiction community, it is a compendium spanning three novels and seven short stories, all of which center on a city of the same name. Sounds simple, yet describing what Viriconium is and what