Viriconium Nights
by John Harrison
Gollancz
1985, reprinted 2005
I know there are people who love John Harrison's Viriconium series, who hold it up as an exemplar of post-modern fantasy and heap praise on the way the latter stories undermine the continuity established by the first novels. How destabilizing! How anti-canon, how avant-garde! Having now finished the series, I find myself baffled by this perspective. The Pastel City was a masterpiece, A Storm of Wings was an ambitious but flawed sequel, and as for the rest, I can't really understand why Harrison bothered to write it, and I feel deceived by the rave reviews that convinced me to read it.
Viriconium Nights is a collection of short stories that Harrison wrote alongside the three Viriconium novels, the earliest one published later the same year as The Pastel City, which means this wasn't even a bad idea Harrison got later, it was always a parallel project, which means I need to revise the date on which my opinion of him drops to be much earlier. These stories aren't even set in Viriconium, but rather in Uroconium, which we're told in the story "Viriconium Knights" is just one of thousands, perhaps an infinite number of alternate Viriconiums, where every possible variation on the tales told in the novels have played out.
The main reason to care about a story is because it's told well. Another is because, internal to itself, it appears to have stakes that matter. A story about a man catching a bus and a story where a man has a dream he caught a bus are both equally fictional, but in the second story, the bus ride isn't 'real' even within the context of the fiction, and seems to matter less. When multiple stories are told in sequence, we might care about the later stories in part (or entirely) because we care about the setting or the characters and want to find out what happens to them next.
By any of these three metrics, I simply don't care about Viriconium Nights. I don't think the stories are told particularly well, they have few stakes within themselves and are deliberately placed in a context where the outcome of any of them doesn't matter, and Harrison explicitly tells us that this isn't the city and these aren't the same characters he wrote about earlier, even if they have the same names.
When I reviewed In Viriconium, a commenter noted that based on an interview Harrison gave, even that book might not be set on the same fictional Earth as the first two. I've been thinking about what I want to say about that, because I'm not annoyed as the commenter, but like, I am annoyed at Harrison, especially if he really tried to claim that after the fact in an interview. If you want something to be true, say it in the book, not on social media, not to the press! Because what the actual text of In Viriconium says, in many places, is that this is the same city we've been in before, that it survived the War of the Two Queens, the arrival of the Reborn Men, the invasion of the Locusts, and the emigration of the Reborn Men to the north, to the wastes where the Locusts had been. What the book says is that The Grand Cairo is the future self of Tomb the dwarf, the same Tomb who saved the city from multiple disasters and who shepherded the Reborn Men on their migration.
In the short story "Viriconium Knights", Harrison does say, in the text of the story, that there are many versions of the city, and many potential stories that could be told about people who look like the ones you know but definitely aren't the same people. If I understand Harrison's project, he's trying to approximate - in a short time span, alone, and on purpose - something that happens to other fictional worlds slowly and accidentally as a result of their tales being told and retold countless times by many authors. It happened to the Greek myths, and arguably to many modern superheroes. There's no one true Batman I can point to as being real all the others imposters. And if I like two different Batman stories, it can only be because I think both are told well, not because one represents the future of the other.
I already didn't really like In Viriconium, and if I thought it wasn't, like an epilogue, telling me the eventual fate of the city I read about before, then I wouldn't have any interest in it at all. A Grand Cairo who is the same Tomb from before is interesting (and infuriating and pathetic), but if he's not even that, if he's just some other guy, then he's only a guy I don't care about who sucks. An old man Batman who has retired from heroing and become the mayor of Gotham, only to discover he doesn't know how to help in a crisis he can't punch, and worse, that his impatience with non-violent solutions is exacerbating the city's problems, is a tragic, compelling figure. Some other Bruce Wayne, whose parents were never killed, who never became a vigilante, who just grew up as a spoiled rich kid, and then became mayor and was bad at it, is boring and frustrating, and the fact that anyone bothered to write about him feels like a disservice.
Viriconium Nights has a couple of stories about Lord teagus-Cromis from The Pastel City that do nothing to illuminate him as a character. The rest focus on members of Uroconium's demimonde, which seems to be where Harrison's interests truly lie. Places like the Bistro Californium and the observatory, artists like Ansel Verdigris, Ashlyme, and Audsley King get mentioned in passing again and again, often with just enough detail to make sure you know that no, these aren't the same versions you read about before, possibly not even the same versions referenced in the other stories in this book. We see a couple members of the fighting clubs (like underground boxing, but with razor blades), a couple dancers, a couple instances of Morgante the dwarf, who is extra explicitly not Tomb. We see ordinary people viewing the city with ambivalence, a mix of desire and caution. And for reasons unclear to me, we get repeated mentions of Mari Lwyd, a real-world Welsh tradition that involves parading a horse's skull through the street.
The best, maybe the only good story in the book in my opinion, is "A Young Man's Journey to Viriconium", in which Harrison tries his hand at writing like Borges, specifically like the story "Tlon, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius", where the real world is assailed by the incursion of imaginary objects manifesting out of a work of fiction. In "A Young Man's Journey", our narrator believes that Viriconium is a parallel Earth where everything is better and more real, and he wishes to escape our mundane world and travel to Viriconium. It's good, but it has no connection to any of the other stories except the name. It could have as easily been about a young man's journey to Oz or Wonderland or Tlon; nothing about the story really requires it to be Viriconium.
I would still recommend The Pastel City to any fantasy fan, and if you simply cannot get enough, I might cautiously suggest A Storm of Wings. But then, I would recommend you stop. Truly, even if you've been left wanting more, I think you'll be happier not getting it. If you want a weird city fantasy from around the same time, try KJ Bishop's The Etched City; if you want one more recent, consider Jared Pechacek's The Weste Passage.
1985, reprinted 2005
I know there are people who love John Harrison's Viriconium series, who hold it up as an exemplar of post-modern fantasy and heap praise on the way the latter stories undermine the continuity established by the first novels. How destabilizing! How anti-canon, how avant-garde! Having now finished the series, I find myself baffled by this perspective. The Pastel City was a masterpiece, A Storm of Wings was an ambitious but flawed sequel, and as for the rest, I can't really understand why Harrison bothered to write it, and I feel deceived by the rave reviews that convinced me to read it.
Viriconium Nights is a collection of short stories that Harrison wrote alongside the three Viriconium novels, the earliest one published later the same year as The Pastel City, which means this wasn't even a bad idea Harrison got later, it was always a parallel project, which means I need to revise the date on which my opinion of him drops to be much earlier. These stories aren't even set in Viriconium, but rather in Uroconium, which we're told in the story "Viriconium Knights" is just one of thousands, perhaps an infinite number of alternate Viriconiums, where every possible variation on the tales told in the novels have played out.
The main reason to care about a story is because it's told well. Another is because, internal to itself, it appears to have stakes that matter. A story about a man catching a bus and a story where a man has a dream he caught a bus are both equally fictional, but in the second story, the bus ride isn't 'real' even within the context of the fiction, and seems to matter less. When multiple stories are told in sequence, we might care about the later stories in part (or entirely) because we care about the setting or the characters and want to find out what happens to them next.
By any of these three metrics, I simply don't care about Viriconium Nights. I don't think the stories are told particularly well, they have few stakes within themselves and are deliberately placed in a context where the outcome of any of them doesn't matter, and Harrison explicitly tells us that this isn't the city and these aren't the same characters he wrote about earlier, even if they have the same names.
When I reviewed In Viriconium, a commenter noted that based on an interview Harrison gave, even that book might not be set on the same fictional Earth as the first two. I've been thinking about what I want to say about that, because I'm not annoyed as the commenter, but like, I am annoyed at Harrison, especially if he really tried to claim that after the fact in an interview. If you want something to be true, say it in the book, not on social media, not to the press! Because what the actual text of In Viriconium says, in many places, is that this is the same city we've been in before, that it survived the War of the Two Queens, the arrival of the Reborn Men, the invasion of the Locusts, and the emigration of the Reborn Men to the north, to the wastes where the Locusts had been. What the book says is that The Grand Cairo is the future self of Tomb the dwarf, the same Tomb who saved the city from multiple disasters and who shepherded the Reborn Men on their migration.
In the short story "Viriconium Knights", Harrison does say, in the text of the story, that there are many versions of the city, and many potential stories that could be told about people who look like the ones you know but definitely aren't the same people. If I understand Harrison's project, he's trying to approximate - in a short time span, alone, and on purpose - something that happens to other fictional worlds slowly and accidentally as a result of their tales being told and retold countless times by many authors. It happened to the Greek myths, and arguably to many modern superheroes. There's no one true Batman I can point to as being real all the others imposters. And if I like two different Batman stories, it can only be because I think both are told well, not because one represents the future of the other.
I already didn't really like In Viriconium, and if I thought it wasn't, like an epilogue, telling me the eventual fate of the city I read about before, then I wouldn't have any interest in it at all. A Grand Cairo who is the same Tomb from before is interesting (and infuriating and pathetic), but if he's not even that, if he's just some other guy, then he's only a guy I don't care about who sucks. An old man Batman who has retired from heroing and become the mayor of Gotham, only to discover he doesn't know how to help in a crisis he can't punch, and worse, that his impatience with non-violent solutions is exacerbating the city's problems, is a tragic, compelling figure. Some other Bruce Wayne, whose parents were never killed, who never became a vigilante, who just grew up as a spoiled rich kid, and then became mayor and was bad at it, is boring and frustrating, and the fact that anyone bothered to write about him feels like a disservice.
Viriconium Nights has a couple of stories about Lord teagus-Cromis from The Pastel City that do nothing to illuminate him as a character. The rest focus on members of Uroconium's demimonde, which seems to be where Harrison's interests truly lie. Places like the Bistro Californium and the observatory, artists like Ansel Verdigris, Ashlyme, and Audsley King get mentioned in passing again and again, often with just enough detail to make sure you know that no, these aren't the same versions you read about before, possibly not even the same versions referenced in the other stories in this book. We see a couple members of the fighting clubs (like underground boxing, but with razor blades), a couple dancers, a couple instances of Morgante the dwarf, who is extra explicitly not Tomb. We see ordinary people viewing the city with ambivalence, a mix of desire and caution. And for reasons unclear to me, we get repeated mentions of Mari Lwyd, a real-world Welsh tradition that involves parading a horse's skull through the street.
The best, maybe the only good story in the book in my opinion, is "A Young Man's Journey to Viriconium", in which Harrison tries his hand at writing like Borges, specifically like the story "Tlon, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius", where the real world is assailed by the incursion of imaginary objects manifesting out of a work of fiction. In "A Young Man's Journey", our narrator believes that Viriconium is a parallel Earth where everything is better and more real, and he wishes to escape our mundane world and travel to Viriconium. It's good, but it has no connection to any of the other stories except the name. It could have as easily been about a young man's journey to Oz or Wonderland or Tlon; nothing about the story really requires it to be Viriconium.
I would still recommend The Pastel City to any fantasy fan, and if you simply cannot get enough, I might cautiously suggest A Storm of Wings. But then, I would recommend you stop. Truly, even if you've been left wanting more, I think you'll be happier not getting it. If you want a weird city fantasy from around the same time, try KJ Bishop's The Etched City; if you want one more recent, consider Jared Pechacek's The Weste Passage.
