Viriconium: Tales of the City

                                  Viriconium … M. John Harrison

Foreword by Neil Gaiman

A Del Rey Books Trade Paperback Original (2005)

 

Viriconium, by M. (for Mike) John Harrison is a 2005 omnibus of three novels and eight short stories, written between 1971 and 1984 and set in and around the fictional city of Viriconium.

          The stories of Viriconium are set so far ahead in time that the world is exhausted and moved past what we would call the future. Poisoned by the landscape-encompassing detritus of past technologies, humanity has descended into a nearly medieval-level of culture, but with access to “superscience energy weapons that the citizens of the city know how to use but have forgotten how to engineer” (Wikipedia). Throughout the stories the topography and history of Viriconium shift and mutate, as if the fabric of reality itself has grown thin and uncertain, or as if the author was unconcerned with consistency but focused on effect.

          And what poisonously beautiful effects there are. One follows the efforts of the ‘heroes’ trying to ensure the continued existence of their lives in the same way one would follow, distraught, the fight of a patient against a pernicious disease, feeling that ‘good health’ will never be an achievable goal but that survival will be some kind of win. The prose is intricate and suggestive, and more than once sent me to a dictionary for the definition of an outré word.  The overall milieu of Viriconium recalls elements of the works of Mervyn Peake, Jack Vance, and of course Michael Moorcock, under whom Harrison started his career as a protégé.

I was more or less sent to Viriconium on the suggestion of Steve Donoghue and his book vlog, and seeing Gaiman attached confirmed the recommendation. I can see how I have missed Harrison for all these years, as famous and as reprinted as they are; for although these stories of his read like fantasy, they are technically science fiction, and that is a neighborhood I have only seldom visited. But Harrison’s work, like his worlds, will not be confined to genre. Reading Viriconium has been an Experience unlike any other and being in its neighborhood opens up new areas on my map.