Fantasy has always had its moralizers and its mischief-makers, those who use the symbolism of magic to create instructive fables, and those who use the strangeness of magic to tap into the more remote corners of the soul, and then obscure their transgressions behind the fantastical facade. Like Moorcock, Leiber, and Vance, Harrison is playful, he is rebellious.Indeed, in his swift, pulpy approach, Harrison very much resembles those authors, but his voice sets him apart. There is a scintillation,...

Before we had the Fallout games or Mad Max, we had certain authors who set foot on the bleak, desolate, post-apocalyptic wastelands who said, "What if we jumped ahead by thousands of years after our super-high-tech society has collapsed like the Roman Empire had, devolve it back to the stage of Knights and warring factions, maintain some of the laser weapons, and turn powertools into maces and swords, and mechanical birds to pluck the eyes out of our enemies."Right-o! I'm on board.Now make the w...

M. John Harrison, one of the youngest of the young Turks of the New Wave science fiction/ fantasy movement, wrote The Pastel City (1971) as an anti-fantasy, a sword and sorcery epic that would frustrate the expectations and disturb the complacency of devotees of the watered-down Tolkien and third-rate Howard and Leiber imitators that flooded the fiction market of the time. Now, more than forty years later, it is clear that the New Wave has accomplished its task so well that The Pastel City seems...

I appreciate the sadness and melancholy this book evoked in me. The world is essentially dead, the ground lifeless and polluted, the old empires gone - and still its dying people split up in pointless factions and wage war and kill each other. It's all described effectively and evocatively, in a way that's easy to read and remember and quick to get through. Likewise well-described is the grit and misery of warfare, of all the fear and pain, tears and blood, guts and red mist, and how it all come...

harrison is a wonderful writer-- evocative, sweeping, musical, and strange-- and this is the best book i've ever read about knights in the far future fighting ancient brain-eating robots. my only complaint is that it wasn't longer. not at the end, but in the middle.

The first of four Viriconium books, The Pastel City is a spectacular tale of adventure with philosophical overtones and undertones. Rather than shining the spotlight on the arch of events, here are a batch of notables a reader will encounter along the way:The Order of Methven: An invasion from the north propels old warrior Lord tegeus-Cromis out of retirement. And to think, he was planning to live his remaining years in his tower as a recluse composing poetry and playing music. Sorry, Cromis! Yo...

The first book in the Viriconium cycle, The Pastel City holds up in that classic seventies $.75 mass-market paperback on a rain afternoon way. I'm an unabashed fan of all of the Viriconium stuff, and while this singular book is merely a preamble to the greater things to come, it can be read on its own, like a lighter and more picaresque Book of the New Sun.

My god, the language. The names. tegeus-Cromis! Canna Moidart! I was underlining whole pages—copying them out. Nominally, this is a book about a poet-warrior roaming a depleted planet. In truth, I think it's a book about how beautiful and bad-ass English can be.

Insanely cool. Dying Earth type things always struck me as weird but I've come to appreciate them. Lets you take the best elements of science fiction and fantasy. Feels like Lucas borrowed a lot from this for Star Wars (energy swords, etc). Love Tomb the Dwarf swinging an axe in an 11-foot-tall exoskeleton. RIP all the dead sloths.

Wow. This maybe the most succinct and technically perfect science fiction novel I've ever read. Very pleased with my first M. John Harrison reading. His writing is the closest to Peake's I've seen yet, both stylistically and in his availability to write some of the most beautiful prose I've read.I would like to share my favorite passage that shows Harrison's grasp on setting and beautiful descriptive language.[In the water-thickets, the path wound tortuously between umber iron-bogs, albescent qu...

3.5 stars. I found a lot to like in The Pastel City - the desolate, post-apocalyptic Dying Earth settings; the bizarre forgotten technologies and mysterious ancient, yet still menacing secrets of the long dead Afternoon Cultures; the brooding mood and dark overtones; and of course Harrison's elegantly crafted prose. Yet it all felt thin. Perhaps that's a failing of trying to stuff such a richly imagined world into a very short book. Had this been published a decade or two earlier, I think it cou...

3.5 starsORIGINALLY 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 an...

I can't review this book. I'll just let China Mieville talk about the two writers who had the greatest influence on him."I don't have space to thank all the writers who've influenced me, but I want to mention two whose work is a constant source of inspiration and astonishment. Therefore to M. John Harrison, and to the memory of Mervyn Peake..." (Intro to Perdido street station).Harrison is an imagest, and 'The Pastel City' is to fantasy literature what Eliot's 'The Wasteland' is to poetry: rivet...

M. John Harrison’s The Pastel City is a title I picked up from, I believe, James Cawthorne’s Fantasy: The 100 Best Books. It’s a fine read, and it had me thinking around the mid-way point that the story was becoming an Anti-Rings story, but that’s probably not accurate. The Pastel City does have many of the standard features you can find in a great number of fantasy novels: a brooding poet-warrior alone in his castle, a young and beautiful queen under siege, a bad (and older) queen, a cranky dwa...

Very unique post apocalyptic setting, like medieval fantasy but with the remnants of old technology. Amazing to think that no one has made a film of this because the setting is so vivid and unique, and there's a whole set of books just begging to made into a distinct franchise. There's similarities to Gormenghast though doesn't have the same unhinged Gothicism but rather a decayed splendour and bittersweet melancholy.

oh the pretty city! a pastel dream, a symbol, a memento mori to the afternoon past; a vision held of that sunny afternoon, held in place like a butterfly in amber. the afternoon has passed but this pastel city lives on in its fragile fugue state, imagining a past that never can be again and forgetting itself, what it is and what it should be. our heroes fight the northern hordes and their fearful weapons to save this pretty pastel city. but should they? they fight for a dream, and all dreams are...

3.5 stars. I really struggled between 3 and 4 stars and basically ended up at 3.5 stars. This is a pretty good science fantasy story that reminded me in tone, writing and story of Moorcock's Corum trilogy, Zelazny's Amber series and Vance's Dying Earth series. I did like each of those series better than this book and thus, in comparison to those works, ended up at the 3.5 star rating. Briefly, the story is based in a far future, Quasimodo medieval world that is littered with technology from ages...

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 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 cannot fully compe...

This deceptively seems like pulpish sword & sorcery but it turns to be a deeply evocative, melancholic and poignant meaningful story. Set in a terrific post apoc world of vibrant imagery, contrasted between long lost technological achievements now decaying and exotic hostile landscapes, colors and phenomena. It is a gem of its times. The 70s, when artists stretched many of the expressional boundaries. Many of the sci-fi/fantasy icons and concepts in Viriconium echo in many of later works. Star W...

I thought this book was a lot of fun. Short, sweet, and fun.I've been keeping an eye out for fantasy that isn't boring, long winded, badly written, filled with cliches, and all the other things that the genre seems ridden with, and while The Pastel City may not come across as entirely original - for it certainly skirts along with many of the worn conventions of the genre - it does so with more depth, a lively angle, and a wry smile.Harrison's writing is worth mentioning too, because it's solid,