Viriconium (2 page)

“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 considered 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.

A Storm of Wings
takes a phrase from the first book as its title and is both a sequel to the first novel and a bridge to the stories and novel that follow and surround it. The voice of this book is, I suspect, less accessible than the first book, the prose rich and baroque. It reminds me at times of Mervyn Peake, but it also feels like it is the novel of someone who is stretching and testing what he can do with words, with sentences, with story.

And then, no longer baroque, M. John Harrison’s prose becomes transparent, but it is a treacherous transparency. Like its predecessors,
In
Viriconium
is a novel about a hero attempting to rescue his princess, a tale of a dwarf, an inventor, and a threatened city, but now the huge canvas of the first book has become a small and personal tale of heartbreak and of secrets and of memory. The gods of the novel are loutish and unknowable, our hero barely understands the nature of the story he finds himself in. It feels like it has come closer to home than the previous stories—the disillusion and decay that was pupating in the earlier stories has now emerged in full, like a butterfly, or a metal bird, freed from its chrysalis.

The short stories that weave around the three novels are stories about escapes, normally failed escapes. They are about power and politics, about language and the underlying structure of reality, and they are about art. They are as hard to hold as water, as evanescent as a shower of sparks, as permanent and as natural as rock formations.

The Viriconium stories and novels cover such aspects of life as gardening, anatomy, mathematics, geometry, card games, flying contraptions, and labyrinths. Also, they talk about art.

Harrison has gone on to create several masterpieces since leaving Viriconium, in and out of genre:
Climbers,
his amazing novel of rock climbers and escapism takes the themes of “A Young Man’s Journey Towards Viriconium” into mainstream fiction;
The Course of the Heart
takes them into fantasy, perhaps even horror;
Light,
his transcendent twining sf novel, is another novel about failed escapes—from ourselves, from our worlds, from our limitations.

For me, the first experience of reading
Viriconium Nights
and
In
Viriconium
was a revelation. I was a young man when I first encountered them half a lifetime ago, and I remember the first experience of Harrison’s prose, as clear as mountain water and as cold. The stories tangle in my head with the time that I first read them—the Thatcher years in England seem already to be retreating into myth. They were larger-than-life times when we were living them, and there’s more than a tang of the London I remember informing the city in these tales, and something of the decaying brassiness of Thatcher herself in the rotting malevolence of Mammy Vooley (indeed, when Harrison retold the story of “The Luck in the Head” in graphic novel form, illustrated by Ian Miller, Mammy Vooley was explicitly drawn as an avatar of Margaret Thatcher).

Now, on rereading, I find the clarity of Harrison’s prose just as admirable, but find myself appreciating his people more than ever I did before—flawed and hurt and always searching for ways to connect with each other, continually betrayed by language and tradition and themselves. And it seems to me that each city I visit now is an aspect of Viriconium, that there is an upper and a lower city in Tokyo and in Melbourne, in Manila and in Singapore, in Glasgow and in London, and that the Bistro Californium is where you find it, or where you need it, or simply what you need.

M. John Harrison, in his writing, clings to sheer rock faces and finds invisible handholds and purchases that should not be there; he pulls you up with him through the story, pulls you through to the other side of the mirror, where the world looks almost the same, except for the shower of sparks. . . .

Neil Gaiman
Narita Airport, July 25, 2005

THE PASTEL CITY

PROLOGUE ON THE EMPIRE OF VIRICONIUM

Some seventeen notable empires rose in the Middle Period of Earth. These were the Afternoon Cultures. All but one are unimportant to this narrative, and there is little need to speak of them save to say that none of them lasted for less than a millennium, none for more than ten; that each extracted such secrets and obtained such comforts as its nature (and the nature of the universe) enabled it to find; and that each fell back from the universe in confusion, dwindled, and died.

The last of them left its name written in the stars, but no one who came later could read it. More important, perhaps, it built enduringly despite its failing strength—leaving certain technologies that, for good or ill, retained their properties of operation for well over a thousand years. And more important still, it
was
the last of the Afternoon Cultures, and was followed by Evening, and by Viriconium.

For five hundred years or more after the final collapse of the Middle Period, Viriconium (it had not that name, yet) was a primitive huddle of communities bounded by the sea in the West and South, by the unexplored lands in the East, and the Great Brown Waste of the North.

The wealth of its people lay entirely in salvage. They possessed no science, but scavenged the deserts of rust that had been originally the industrial complexes of the last of the Afternoon Cultures, and since the largest deposits of metal and machinery and ancient weapons lay in the Great Brown Waste, the Northern Tribes held them. Their loose empire had twin hubs, Glenluce and Drunmore, bleak sprawling townships where intricate and beautiful machines of unknown function were processed crudely into swords and tribal chieftains fought drunkenly over possession of the deadly
baans
unearthed from the desert.