Book 2 in the Viriconium sequence. This is the volume where Harrison's influence & Mieville's, Vandermeer's debt is most clear. Both sequel and remix of The Pastel City, its many totems (swordsman, queen, dwarf, destruction) cast to different effect, its language baroque, even more world-weary, and strange.

A Storm of Wings is in incredibly frustrating book because the author both tries too hard and doesn't try hard enough. For example, M. John Harrison tries far too hard to convince the reader that the setting of his novel is dream-like, hallucinatory, and weird. That's a fine world-building goal in itself, but when one of your primary ways of achieving a phantasmagorical setting is to describe things over and over with the words “indescribable” and “alien,” you're actively avoiding engaging with

Bit of a slog in comparison to the first book of the series. I'm going to take a little break from this series and get back to it at a later point. It's definitely not as compulsive a setting as Gormenghast which is the series it's often linked with. It reminds me more of that film from the 80s, Krull.

A Storm of Wings is the second volume in the Viriconium four book cycle. Smash! Boom! Bang! - the sounds of British author M. John Harrison shattering expectations and boundaries surrounding the genres of fantasy and science fiction. As for the reader, novel as mindbender and bizarre mindmelter - all in a winged storm less than 150 pages. Remarkable. We return to the lands and cities of Viriconium eighty years following events described in The Pastel City, that bygone era where Lord tegeus-Cromi...

I will preface my opinion of this novel with this: I love dystopian and post-apocalyptic fiction... but Harrison's writing is a bit too bleak for me.I kept thinking of Westeros while reading this novel... but this one seems even more depopulated and terrible. In a world already so bloody and barren, how is there still so much time and opportunity for slaughter? Where are all of these people coming from, and how is the population and food supply being replenished?My "suspend disbelief" button doe...

Imagine u wanted to be a bug really bad but your body said no ur a 500lb spaceman. What would you do¿

Harrison had matured as a writer when he penned this sequel to The Pastel City - some nine years having passed in between - and it showed: he discarded or relegated to the background the weaker elements from the prior book and concentrated upon its, and his, strengths. Harrison has always excelled at painting atmospheric scapes and moods; at finding the sorrow and melancholy, the potentiality for loss and regret that is inherent in existence, in the passage of space through the straitening p...

This might be my least favorite book in the Viriconium series. While it's highly original and very well written, it felt like a transitional novel and not fully developed. That being said it's thrilling in spots because of that. You can feel Harrison stretching himself and it occasionally produces some very exhilarating moments.

I wanted to like it more than I did.I understand the influence this book had on a lot of the writers usually classified as the New Weird. Parts of it really were great, but somehow reading it felt like a chore instead of, well, fun.Just like the first book in the Viriconium series, I would have loved the book to spend more time in Viriconium itself.

Kind of forgot that fiction could do this, until I encountered Harrison for the first time last year. I read a review that called his prose style a 'leisured opacity' and I think that's great and I'll leave it at that.

Chaos, madness, insanity. These are words that feel apt to describe this second book of the Viriconium series by M. John Harrison. And how could it not be so, as half of the book's main characters are either mad or insane and its protagonist is more chaotic than a air-bubble under boil. As usual, I will avoid going into describing the synopsis of the book, you can read that up there ^. Instead, I will go straight into my review.CharactersI've read in other reviews that this novel's characters ar...

I don't know what kind of mood you would have to be in to enjoy this book. And so many writers I admire, admire this book. Harrison's depiction of an exhausted far-future earth is dark and at times brilliant, but it's a chore. Some people have dreams of walking through fog or waist-deep sludge where each step is an doomed effort at making any progress. That was my experience with this second volume in the Viriconium series. After two stabs at it, I am calling it quits.

M. John Harrison’s second Viriconium story (1980) is a dull, rudderless, exasperating 2-star novel with eruptions of 5-star genius suckerpunching this reader throughout.Imagine climbing an enormous spiral-staircase of junk-DNA with sudden, gleaming strands of revelatory code supercharging your journey at unforeseen intervals. There is depth, power, and splendor, but mostly weariness and frustration that Harrison couldn’t devise a tighter story-frame for his bracing imaginative gifts.Nouveau Weir...

One of the most memorable characters in A Storm of Wings is the fabled lunanaut Benedict Paucemanly, who, after one hundred years of imprisonment on the moon, can not only no longer retain his original form, but also has difficulty maintaining any particular shape. He expands and contracts automatically, helplessly, and occasionally disintegrates into little globules resembling scores of floating clouds. His speech, although suggestive and poetic, is difficult to decipher. Occasionally he comes

I have been persevering with M. John Harrisons challenging Viriconium books. I have been listening to them via audio and backing this up by reading the physical books. These books need several reads. I use the word persevere in a non-negative light. Harrisons prose is dense, a single sentence is packed with imagery, metaphor and literary punch. A lazy reader can easily miss details that make Harrisons world rich, textured and evocative.I really enjoyed 'A Storm of Wings', the sequel to 'The Past...

Certainly wasn't expecting this after Pastel City. Kind of inspiring how this author pulls off a combination of weird high style, scenes of insane scale and movement, and an absolutely twisted and beautiful vision. rare dude.

ORIGINALLY POSTED AT Fantasy Literature.A Storm of Wings is the second part of M. John Harrison’s VIRICONIUM sequence. Viriconium has been at peace for eighty years after the threat from the north was eliminated, but now there are new threats to the city. Something has detached from the moon and fallen to earth. A huge insect head has been discovered in one of the towns of the Reborn. The Reborn are starting to go mad. Also, a new rapidly growing cult is teaching that there is no objective reali...

Read as part of the Viriconium Collection: But really, what did I just read?Where The Pastel City at least a basic architecture of a fantasy novel, A Storm of Wings is a baroque madhouse. Although short, I had a hard time getting through this, finding myself lost in prose descriptions several times and really just wanted to get to the end. Set many years after the Pastel City, the Reborn Men have trouble distinguishing time lines, and are caught between the present and their past. A strange cult...

The most disturbing and maddening of the Viriconium trilogy, but also the most eloquent and poignant.A horde of intergalactic telepathic alien locusts, lost and aimless, descends on a broken, ailing world, mutating reality and in turn being remade by its disease and dysfunction. Viriconium is a thin, shifting dream of a world, with a long forgotten past, of which only echoes and ghosts remain..."'The world,' whispered Benedict Paucemanly, 'is desperately trying to remember itself . . . blork . ....

Devastating and disorienting. It's one of the most surreal novels I can remember, and it plays with memory and time and reality so carelessly that it throws you often into the effluvium of existence in a rotting world on a dying earth. It's shockingly beautiful in this grotesque and horrifying way. Harrison writes almost exclusively perfect sounding sentences, but they never distract from the miasma that's called the narrative.It's a novel populated by people and reality literally going insane.