This is the Ace original paperback from the early 1980s.
There are 2 books called Viriconium nights. This is the one that includes a novelette called ‘In Viriconium’, which is a shorter version of the novel of the same name. It’s my favourite piece in the book, which I guess is good because it’s the longest. The two Viriconium nightses overlap substantially, but each has pieces missing from the other, so to speak. What that means for assembling a ‘complete’ Var-ecomium sequence, should you feel the drive (keeping in mind that feeling such a drive is in some ways antithetical to the author’s approach) I guess depends on whether you care to try. What do I mean?
Well, first, Harrison is resolutely against rigorous world building. Viriconium changes geography, land marks, governments and even names from story to story. Thus, it is entirely possible that there are ‘Viriconium stories’ that never mention Viriconiom because the city’s name has drifted so far even from Uroconium or Vira ko or whatever that the links have become so tangential as to be unnoticeable; thus, even defining what stories ought to be in such an assemblage is, I suspect, intentionally problematic. (Case in point: one of the stories in this book mentions the machine in shaft 10, a story that does not appear in most lists of what’s in the Varyconium sequence.) If Varoconia is indeed set in the very far future when reality is exhausted and unable to keep its shape, let alone remember its orthography, then this world could be the future of every other piece the author has ever written. Maybe it all fits!
Well, second, Harrison is resolutely against rigorous world building, and seemingly for ambiguity. (It’s not like our world is terribly rigorous in operation.) So I find it hard to believe he would be keen on cutting the Viriconium mob out from the rest of his flock of words and penning it. Clear definitions wrapped up in neat bows are not what this is all about.
I’ve read a few things by Christopher Priest, and there are commonalities with the Dream Archipelago, though Uracotherium came first.
Harrison’s work is stylish. The earlier pieces have the British new wave SF vibe, especially ‘Lamia mutable’ from Again, dangerous visions, ‘Lamia and Lord Cromis’ (from one of the New Worlds anthologies that succeeded the magazine) and ‘Events witnessed from a city’, none of which I fully understood. They are full of symbolism that I don’t get, and ennui, and that end-of-time vibe reminiscent of Moorcock’s Dancers at the End of Time, and of sword and sorcery full of weirdly ill people, like Moorcock’s Elric. Can’t say they are really to my taste. I fail to grasp the logic of the story and end up flicking back through the story looking for some explicative (or even explanatory) pages that were stuck together. In practice I guess I’m just too ignorant to get the allusions and recognise the intertexts and suchlike. I suspect I’m expecting things the stories never were meant to deliver — expecting plot when there is no reason a story and its reading experience cannot be a series of striking images and the responses they evoke; — and Harrison excels at striking images. I shall not forget the astronomer in his horse-faced disguise. (Skulls recur, as do anemones [the flowers, not the sea creatures, though sugared anemones … no, it’s too disgusting] and artists as protagonists, the last of which would ordinarily put me off but here did not.) (I tend to dislike books with writers as protagonists on the grounds of incest, and by policy suspect a painter-protagonist of being a writer in disguise.)
The further from sword and sorcery the stories get, the better I like them. Whether inhabiting the cloying (everything is always damp and plaster is always sloughing away) streets of Viriconium (or Uroconium, or Viri ko, or whatever the city is called this week), or the outlying regions, where Viruconium is the centre of gravity (however far away), the cast of coping, quietly desperate citizens is more interesting than any number of sword-wielding would-be (or trying-not-to-be) heroes. These stories make up the bulk of the book, and are definitely worth a read.
A lot of books are a lot like a lot of other books. M. John Harrison’s books are not like other books. That’s a good thing.and that alone is reason to read them.
To do this, you run LINKS with:
