This morning I got a little hype when this Mac OS theme reminded me of M. John Harrison’s incredible fantasy series Viriconium, which I think is, like much of his work, less known than it should be in the US. I was inspired to pull my different editions off the bookshelf and I wanted to make a little post as a pitch and a reading guide, because it’s one of my favorite things I’ve ever read.
Like all of Harrison’s work, whether it’s his recent and profoundly distressing The Sunken Land Begins to Rise Again, set in present-day England, or the blenderized hard-SF tropes and Zone Vibes of the “Kefahuchi Tract” trilogy (Light, Nova Swing, and Empty Space: a Haunting), Viriconium is built from familiar genre pieces but held together with an ethereal, displaced aesthetic and a focus that never quite lands where you might expect it to. It tells the stories of and in and around a fantasy city, located on a far-future and ruined earth, beset and haunted by strange threats and phenomena, inhabited by moody and compelling figures. The deep time of the setting merges with the melancholy of the characters to create, as in all of Harrison’s work, a sense of haunting that permeates all. Wikipedia compares him to TS Eliot but it also feels to me like if AE Housman were goth.
I first encountered Viriconium living in the UK where I was able to get the Gollancz edition (left). Stateside, it’s easier to get the Spectra collection (right), which is unfortunate. Last April, Harrison posted a few tweets about this edition:
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This is a nice edition. But such a pity they didn't interleave the stories with the novels, as in Gollancz's UK volume. A recent story, "Jack-of-Mercy's", completes V yet again & is available in this collection [🐥] (https://x.com/mjohnharrison/status/1652228527964528640?s=61)
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There are only two no-nos around packaging this series: (1) ignore its internal randomisation (2) use the title foisted on "In Viriconium" by some minor US paperback apparatchik in 1983. Both are avoidable by consulting the actual author of the text. 🐥
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Packaging frames & contexts the text. For me, the book--& it is one book, one volume--never found anything like its proper packaging & is therefore a bit of a disappointment. I'd tend to resist a new edition now, & wash my hands of it unless I could control its presentation. 🐥
It’s deeply frustrating to me, as a fan, that the author of this important collection of work has very simple and clear expectations for how it should be presented and yet it is so hard for American readers especially to access it in that presentation. Some enterprising US press should undertake a new edition with Harrison’s direction; I’m sure I can’t begin to imagine what’s involved in the rights there, though.
Here is the interleaved sequence in the Gollancz edition that Harrison praises:
- Viriconium Knights
- The Pastel City
- Lords of Misrule
- Strange Great Sins
- A Storm of Wings
- The Dancer from the Dance
- The Luck in the Head
- The Lamia & Lord Cromis
- In Viriconium (published in the US as The Floating Gods 👎)
- A Young Man’s Journey to Viriconium
The new story “ Jack-of-Mercy's” appears in the 2017 collection You Should Come With Me Now