Viriconium Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Praise

  THE PASTEL CITY - PROLOGUE ON THE EMPIRE OF VIRICONIUM

  INTRODUCTION

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  EPILOGUE

  A STORM OF WINGS

  A STORM OF WINGS

  1 THE MOON LOOKING DOWN

  2 GALEN HORNWRACK AND THE SIGN OF THE LOCUST

  3 A FISH EAGLE IN VIRICONIUM

  4 IN THE CORRIDORS

  5 GALEN HORNWRACK AND METHVET NIAN

  6 THE SUDDEN EMBODIMENT OF BENEDICT PAUCEMANLY

  7 ST. ELMO BUFFIN AND THE NAVIGATORS OF IRON CHINE

  8 GALEN HORNWRACK AND THE NEW INVASION

  9 THE EXPLANATIONS OF THE ANCIENT AIRBOATMAN

  10 ALL THE WOUNDS OF THE EARTH

  EPILOGUE

  IN VIRICONIUM

  IN VIRICONIUM - THE FIRST CARD DEPOUILLEMENT

  THE SECOND CARD - THE LORDS OF ILLUSIONARY SUCCESS

  THE THIRD CARD - THE CITY

  THE FOURTH CARD - THE LORD OF THE FIRST OPERATION

  THE FIFTH CARD - THE HERMETIC FEAST

  EPILOGUE

  THE LAMIA & LORD CROMIS

  THE LAMIA & LORD CROMIS

  VIRICONIUM KNIGHTS

  VIRICONIUM KNIGHTS

  THE LUCK IN THE HEAD

  THE LUCK IN THE HEAD

  STRANGE GREAT SINS

  STRANGE GREAT SINS

  LORDS OF MISRULE

  LORDS OF MISRULE

  THE DANCER FROM THE DANCE

  THE DANCER FROM THE DANCE

  A YOUNG MAN’S JOURNEY TO VIRICONIUM

  A YOUNG MAN’S JOURNEY TO VIRICONIUM

  About the Author

  ALSO BY M. JOHN HARRISON

  Copyright Page

  VIRICONIUM PRAISE FOR M. JOHN HARRISON

  “A Zen master of prose.” —Iain Banks, author of The Algebraist

  “That M. John Harrison is not a Nobel Laureate proves the bankruptcy of the literary establishment. Austere, unflinching and desperately moving, he is one of the very great writers alive today. And yes, he writes fantasy and SF, though of a form, scale and brilliance that it shames not only the rest of the field, but most modern fiction.”

  —China Miéville, author of Iron Council

  PRAISE FOR VIRICONIUM

  “In the best tradition of the finest writing, Viriconium is universal and particular together. It is the ultimate city, the very essence of what we understand such a collection of buildings, thoroughfares, monuments, institutions, concerns, inhabitants, lives and fates to be.”

  —Iain Banks, author of The Algebraist

  “Exemplary fictions of unease shot through with poetic insight and most beautifully written.” —Angela Carter, author of The Magic Toyshop

  “Viriconium is a scintillating kaleidoscope of cities.” — Observer

  “Beautifully written and disconcertingly haunting.” — Time Out

  “The fantasy is grounded in M. John Harrison’s sense of reality. . . . It is lifelike. It is also written in the kind of prose which, as you tap a nail on a crystal glass, never rings false.” —Guardian

  “[Harrison] writes with a cool and disciplined hand. His prose is always elegant, but never vain . . . unerringly he seeks the underside of things.”

  —Times Literary Supplement

  “A witty and truly imaginative writer.” —Literary Review

  “Enjoyably rancid imagination . . . extraordinary, lively, and moving.”

  —Sunday Times

  “M. John Harrison’s Viriconium series is brilliant, beautiful, and absolutely essential reading. The breadth of vision and imagination alone in these books is unparalleled. It is truly one of a kind and will continue to haunt you in the best possible way for years.”

  —Jonathan Carroll, author of White Apples

  “M. John Harrison’s Viriconium sequence is the jewel in the crown of twentieth-century fantasy, a work that proves irrefutably that fantastic literature can be Art with a capital A, holding its own alongside the very finest writing of our time, or any other.”

  —Elizabeth Hand, author of Mortal Love

  “M. John Harrison is a true master of English prose. He possesses the eye of a painter, the ear of a bard, and a rigorous and playful intellect. The Viriconium novels and stories are infused with a haunting genius that never falters.” —K. J. Bishop, author of The Etched City

  PRAISE FOR LIGHT

  PRAISE FROM REVIEWERS

  “Profoundly thoughtful, complex, fascinating . . . well worth the wait.”

  —Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

  “Harrison’s talent for brilliant, reality-bending SF is on display yet again with this three-tiered tale. . . . This is space opera for intelligentsia, as Harrison tweaks aspects of astrophysics, fantasy and humanism to hum right along with the blinking holograms in a welcome and long overdue return.” — Publishers Weekly (starred review)

  “Mind-bending in both its conceptual framework and literary deftness.”

  —Entertainment Weekly (A rating)

  “An ambitious, accomplished space opera that brings [Harrison] to the genre’s front rank . . . surely one of the best novels of the year, irrespective of genre.” —San Francisco Chronicle

  “A story of wonders, both on the personal and the cosmic level . . . Harrison has done something remarkable. He has turned descriptions of quantum mechanics and astrophysics into a poetry of longing, and awe, with an almost Sylvia Plath–like sense of dread. Light is a rare piece of science fiction, and one of the finest I have read. It is also one the best-written books I have read this year.” —Boston Globe

  “Succeeds in evoking the sense of wonder that science fiction readers look for in the best of the genre.” —New York Times Book Review

  “Sentence by sentence [Harrison] is almost certainly one of the most skilled SF writers alive . . . an unusually strong and even, for all its brutality, touching example of how character and physics can illuminate each other in the best hard SF. Light is likely to be one of the most rewarding and challenging novels of the year, and goes a long way toward explaining just what it is that Harrison can do that other writers find so astonishing.”

  —Locus

  “Here we have ‘space opera’ that brilliantly transcends its humble pulp origins while simultaneously glorying in them. The result is a gripping, thrilling, meditative novel which can be read and enjoyed on multiple levels. . . . In direct line from Cordwainer Smith and Keith Laumer, Michael Moorcock and Norman Spinrad, Harrison has adapted the conceits of space opera until the form is big enough to hold all the marvels he jams within.” —SciFi.com (Editor’s A+ pick)

  “M. John Harrison’s Light is not just among the best SF novels of the year—it’s without question the best read of the year. . . . Not since Stepan Chapman’s The Troika and Iain M. Banks’s Use of Weapons has a novel managed to so single-handedly revitalize and re-energize the SF field. . . . Harrison has combined his astute, ruthless characterization with the SF form, to create a work that bristles and seethes with energy and intelligence, a work both playful and sublimely serious. . . . Imagine the best pure adrenaline SF novel twinned to a stunning mainstream novel to get an idea of the overall effect. . . . The pleasures of this book are wide and numerous. I cannot recommend Light highly enough.” —SFSite

  “A wonderful, playful and solidly genre-based masterpiece . . . Don’t hesitate. Buy this book and read it. You will thank me.” �
� Interzone

  “The ride is uproarious, breath-taking, exhilarating. . . . Gem-like images blink into existence, perfect in their place, both wise and sly. . . . This is a novel of full spectrum literary dominance, making the transition from the grainily commonplace now to a wild far future seem not just easy but natural, and connecting the minimal and the spectacular with grace and elegance. It is a work of—and about—the highest order.” — Guardian

  “An increasingly complex and dazzling narrative . . . Light depicts its author as a wit, an awesomely fluent and versatile prose stylist, and an SF thinker as dedicated to probing beneath surfaces as William Gibson is to describing how the world looks when reflected in them. . . . SF fans and skeptics alike are advised to head towards this Light.” — Independent

  “Harrison’s writing is top-notch and involving. He takes old ideas and mechanisms from early science fiction and invigorates them with a sense of possibility and even, strange within this dark and foreboding book, transcendence and hope.” —BookPage.com

  “The sort of book that leaves you wondering, in the best way possible, what the heck really happened . . . a wild, satisfying ride.”

  —Bookslut.com

  PRAISE FROM OTHER AUTHORS

  “M. John Harrison’s Light is a remarkable book—easily my favorite SF novel in the last decade, maybe longer—and the image that remains in my head after the book was done is that of light as foam, like the sea foam ‘between the water and the dry land’ . . . a book that exists in the spaces between things . . . very lovely.” —Neil Gaiman, New York Times–bestselling author of Endless Nights and American Gods

  “M. John Harrison proves what only those crippled by respectability still doubt—that science fiction can be literature, of the very greatest kind. Light puts most modern fiction to shame. It’s a magnificent book.”

  —China Miéville, award-winning author of Perdido Street Station and The Scar

  “M. John Harrison is the only writer on Earth equally attuned to the essential strangeness both of quantum physics and the attritional banalities of modern urban life. This is space opera for these dark times, and Light is brilliant.”

  —Iain M. Banks, author of Complicity, The Bridge, and Consider Phlebas

  “I loved it . . . the story is somehow both bewildering and utterly clear, razor-sharp and wide enough to encompass worlds, and the language is beautiful, nailing both the bizarre and the mundane with eerie skill. On every other page there’s a line which makes you think ‘it can’t get better than this,’ and then it does. An amazing book: not just a triumphant return to science fiction, but an injection of style and content that will light up the genre.” —Michael Marshall Smith, author of Spares and One of Us

  “Post-cyberpunk, post-slipstream, post-everything, Light is the leanest, meanest space opera since Nova. Visually acute, shot through with wonder and horror in equal measure, in Light’s dual-stranded narrative M. John Harrison pulls off the difficult trick of making the present seem every bit as baroque and strange as his neon-lit deep future. Set the controls for Radio Bay and prepare to get lost in the K-Tract. You won’t regret it.”

  —Alastair Reynolds, award-winning author of Revelation Space and Chasm City

  “Light is a literary singularity: at one and the same time a grim, gaudy space opera that respects the physics, and a contemporary novel that unflinchingly revisits the choices that warp a life. It’s almost unbearably good.” —Ken MacLeod, author of The Star Fraction and Cosmonaut Keep

  “At last M. John Harrison takes on quantum mechanics. The first classic of the quantum century, Light is a folded-down future history bound together by quantum exotica and human endurance. Taut as Hemingway, viscerally intelligent, startlingly uplifting, Harrison’s ideas have a beauty that unpacks to infinity.”

  —Stephen Baxter, award-winning author of The Time Ships

  ALSO BY M. JOHN HARRISON

  NOVELS

  The Commited Men (1971)

  The Centauri Device (1974)

  Climbers (1989)

  The Course of the Heart (1992)

  Signs of Life (1997)

  SHORT STORY COLLECTIONS

  The Machine in Shaft Ten and Other Stories (1975)

  The Ice Monkey and Other Stories (1983)

  GRAPHIC NOVELS

  The Luck in the Head (1991) with Ian Millar

  INTRODUCTION

  On Viriconium: Some Notes Towards an Introduction

  People are always pupating their own disillusion, decay, age. How is it they never suspect what they are going to become, when their faces already contain the faces they will have twenty years from now?

  —“A Young Man’s Journey Towards Viriconium”

  And I look at the Viriconium cycle of M. John Harrison and wonder whether The Pastel City knew it was pupating In Viriconium or the heartbreak of “A Young Man’s Journey Towards Viriconium” inside its pages, whether it knew what it was going to become.

  Some weeks ago and halfway around the world, I found myself in the centre of Bologna, that sunset-coloured medieval towered city which waits in the centre of a modern Italian city of the same name, in a small used bookshop, where I was given a copy of the Codex Seraphinianus to inspect. The book, created by the artist Luigi Serafini, is, in all probability, an art object. There is text, but the alphabet resembles an alien code, and the illustrations (which cover such aspects of life as gardening, anatomy, mathematics, geometry, card games, flying contraptions, and labyrinths) bear only a passing resemblance to those we know in this world at this time: in one picture a couple making love becomes a crocodile, which crawls away; and the animals, plants, and ideas are strange enough that one can fancy the book something that has come to us from a long time from now or from an extremely long way away. It is, lacking another explanation, art. And leaving that small shop, walking out into the colonnaded shaded streets of Bologna, holding my book of impossibilities, I fancied myself in Viriconium. And this was odd, only because until then I had explicitly equated Viriconium with England.

  Viriconium, M. John Harrison’s creation, the Pastel City in the afternoon of the world; two cities in one, in which nothing is consistent, tale to tale, save a scattering of place-names, although I am never certain that the names describe the same place from story to story. Is the Bistro Californium a constant? Is Henrietta Street?

  M. John Harrison, who is Mike to his friends, is a puckish person of medium height, given to enthusiasms and intensity. He is, at first glance, slightly built, although a second glance suggests he has been constructed from whips and springs and good, tough leather, and it comes as no surprise to find that Mike is a rock climber, for one can without difficulty imagine him clinging to a rock face on a cold, wet day, finding purchase in almost invisible nooks and pulling himself continually up, man against stone. I have known Mike for over twenty years; in the time I have known him his hair has lightened to a magisterial silver, and he seems to have grown somehow continually younger. I have always liked him, just as I have always been more than just a little intimidated by his writing. When he talks about writing he moves from puckish to possessed. I remember Mike in conversation at the Institute for Contemporary Art trying to explain the nature of fantastic fiction to an audience: he described someone standing in a windy lane, looking at the reflection of the world in the window of a shop, and seeing, sudden and unexplained, a shower of sparks in the glass. It is an image that raised the hairs on the back of my neck, that has remained with me, and that I would find impossible to explain. It would be like trying to explain Harrison’s fiction, something I am attempting to do in this introduction, and, in all probability, failing.

  There are writers’ writers, of course, and M. John Harrison is one of those. He moves elegantly, passionately, from genre to genre, his prose lucent and wise, his stories published as sf or as fantasy, as horror or as mainstream fiction. In each playing field, he wins awards and makes it look so easy. His prose is deceptively simple, each word considere
d and placed where it can sink deepest and do the most damage.

  The Viriconium stories, which inherit a set of names and a sense of unease from a long-forgotten English Roman City (“English antiquaries have preferred Uriconium, foreign scholars Viroconium or Viriconium, and Vriconium has also been suggested. The evidence of our ancient sources is somewhat confused,” a historical website informs us) are fantasies, three novels and a handful of stories which examine the nature of art and magic, language and power.

  There is, as I have already mentioned, and as you will discover, no consistency to Viriconium. Each time we return to it, it has changed, or we have. The nature of reality shifts and changes. The Viriconium stories are palimpsests, and other stories and other cities can be seen beneath the surface. Stories adumbrate other stories. Themes and characters reappear, like Tarot cards being shuffled and redealt.

  The Pastel City states Harrison’s themes simply, in comparison with the tales that follow, like a complex musical theme first heard played by a marching brass band. It’s far-future sf at the point where sf transmutes into fantasy, and the tale reads like the script of a magnificent movie, complete with betrayals and battles, all the pulp ingredients carefully deployed. (It reminds me on rereading a little of Michael Moorcock and, in its end-of-time ambience and weariness, of Jack Vance and Cordwainer Smith.) Lord tegeus-Cromis (who fancied himself a better poet than swordsman) reassembles what remains of the legendary Methven to protect Viriconium and its girl-queen from invaders to the North. Here we have a dwarf and a hero, a princess, an inventor, and a city under threat. Still, there is a bitter-sweetness to the story that one would not normally expect from such a novel.