SHIP OF FOOLS by Richard Paul Russo

I have this friend. We’ll call him Dave, because that is his name. Dave is a sci-fi nut. An entire wall of his apartment is lined with shelves stuffed with old mass-market paperbacks. I listen to what he has to say on the subject, because he’s read so much more of it than I have. So when he slapped a book in my hand one night called Ship of Fools, by Richard Paul Russo, and told me it was “phenomenal,” I took him seriously.

Russo was born in 1954. His first short story, “Firebird Suite,” appeared in Amazing Stories in 1981. His first novel, Inner Eclipse, followed in 1988. His second novel, Subterranean Gallery (1989), won the Philip K. Dick Award and was nominated for the Arthur C. Clarke Award. He is best known for a trilogy of novels centering on the character of Lt. Frank Carlucci, entitled Destroying Angel (1992), Carlucci’s Edge (1995), and Carlucci’s Heart (1997). Nick Gevers wrote in a 2000 interview that Russo’s writings “are characterized by an understated intensity and an affecting compassion; their deft painterly depictions of the extreme edges of human emotion and experience are carefully observed and crafted.” Gevers’ description applies equally well to Ship of Fools, published in 2001.

The book begins aboard a massive spaceship called the Argonos. The Argonos has been floating through space for hundreds of years, so long that its original mission has been forgotten by those aboard. Earth is no longer suitable for habitation. The novel’s protagonist is Bartolomeo Aguilera, an orphan with severe physical deformities that he compensates for with a mechanical exoskeleton. Aguilera is the closest confidant of the ship’s captain, Nikos, and is distrusted by all because of it, in particular the scheming Bishop Soldano, the current head of the Church.

One day the Argonos picks up a signal originating from a planet capable of human habitation, dubbed Antioch. Captain Nikos sends a team to investigate, but a horrifying discovery compels the Argonos to flee. However, this discovery triggers another signal, leading the Argonos to perhaps the most important find in human history: an alien starship, seemingly abandoned, floating in the depths of space. What is its connection to the terror on Antioch, and what other secrets might it conceal?

You might think from the description that Ship of Fools is your standard “haunted house in space” story, something akin to a literary Event Horizon. On its surface, it is that. A good deal of the novel concerns the exploration of the alien starship, and many characters meet violent ends within. Russo’s pacing rivals the best thriller writers; I am not a very fast reader, but I finished Ship of Fools quickly.

Beneath its thriller surface, however, Ship of Fools has huge concerns on its mind. This is a science-fiction novel about that most unscientific of topics: religion. Does God exist? Is there Evil in the universe? Do we have free will, or are our fates predetermined? These are hefty questions for any writer, and while I doubt this novel will make anyone discard their copy of the Summa Theologiae, it is impressive how thoughtfully Russo explores his subject within the context of the horror-thriller.

There is a beautiful scene where Aguilera and Father Veronica, one of the Argonos‘ priests, discuss God and free will. Aguilera is an atheist, and genuinely does not understand how anyone could find comfort in a God that seemingly ignores our pain and struggles. Father Veronica answers:

“If He had created us in such a way that we could only do good, if we were incapable of acting badly, selfishly, causing pain or harm, then the notion of free will would be meaningless, would it not? Not only that, true free will precludes God’s intervention in our lives. There is no real free will if God intercedes to protect us or save us from the consequences of our own or other people’s actions or choices. We have to face those consequences ourselves.”

In short, Father Veronica is explaining the sacrifice God has made to allow us autonomy. I am also an atheist, but I must confess that this scene left me in tears, for the first time in my life coming close to something resembling understanding of what it might mean to have faith.

I have read much criticism of the ending – that it takes too long, that it falls back on monster movie clichés, that it leaves too much unresolved. Perhaps these things are true, and yet if I were in Russo’s shoes I’m not sure I would have written it any differently. I will agree the climax drags a bit, but Russo’s writing is so brisk that in the end this hardly matters. I would also argue the ending subverts monster movie tropes by having the final confrontation between humans and aliens occur “off-screen,” as it were.

The third criticism seems more substantial, but I think it misses the point. Ship of Fools does leave much unresolved, particularly the nature of the alien starship. At the end of the book we know little more than we did at the beginning – which is to say, almost nothing. I can see how some readers might come away disappointed. However, I believe answering our questions would have undermined the novel’s themes. Is there Evil in the universe? Had Russo allowed us enough information to impose morality on the aliens, he would have answered a question that, ultimately, is unanswerable. Instead, he wisely leaves us to draw our own conclusions, and this is his approach to the other big questions of the text.

In the United Kingdom, Ship of Fools was published under the title Unto Leviathan. Regardless of title, this is one of the best science-fiction novels I have read, an exciting and frightening tale that never loses sight of its characters or its themes. I appreciated that the protagonist was differently abled – it felt fitting, with humans outcast in the depths of the space, that the novel should center on an outcast. I also appreciated the multi-cultural crew of the Argonos. It seems others felt similarly: Ship of Fools netted Russo his second Philip K. Dick Award.

In short, you should read this. It’s phenomenal.

NEXT TIME: The Rats by James Herbert!

“Black Destroyer” by A. E. van Vogt

The Golden Age of Science Fiction is generally agreed to have begun in 1939 and ended, depending on who you ask, as early as 1946 or as late as 1960. It came after the pulp era of the 1920s and ’30s, and before the experimental New Wave sci-fi of the ’60s and beyond. Many of the genre’s most famous authors – among them Isaac Asimov, Robert A. Heinlein, Ray Bradbury, and Arthur C. Clarke – made their names during this period. Golden Age sci-fi strikes a particular tone, favoring scientific accuracy, adventurous settings, linear narratives, and heroes (overwhelmingly male) who solve problems with can-do spirit.

I have already said that the Golden Age of Science Fiction began in 1939, but more specifically, it began with the July issue of Astounding SF. John W. Campbell had taken over as editor two years earlier, and the magazine had been improving in quality with each issue (Golden Age sci-fi is sometimes called “Campbellian science fiction,” as Campbell’s influence dominated the field for years). This was one of the first truly great issues under his leadership. It included the first story by Isaac Asimov to appear within its pages, but the real groundbreaker was the tale featured on the cover: “Black Destroyer,” by the Canadian writer Alfred Elton van Vogt (read it here).

The plot is simple enough. Intrepid explorers land on an alien planet to investigate the ruins of an ancient city. They think they are alone. They are not. They are stalked by the Coeurl, a large cat-like creature. The Coeurl has exhausted its food supply, and in the humans it sees a chance for survival. It allows itself to be taken aboard their ship, where it begins to kill the crew and build a ship of its own in an attempt to escape to the freedom of space.

It’s not hard to see why sci-fi scholars point to this specific story as the start of the Golden Age of Science Fiction. The literary qualities I described at the beginning of this essay are fully formed here. Adventurous setting: check. Linear narrative: check. Plucky human heroes: check. Scientific accuracy: well, I suspect van Vogt didn’t consult any scientists before writing this, but he at least attempts to make his science seem plausible. Reading this story today, you recognize a template for a great deal of the popular sci-fi that followed, particularly the 1956 film Forbidden Planet and, on television, the original incarnation of Gene Roddenberry’s Star Trek (1966-69).

Historical importance aside, though, the quality of van Vogt’s prose is wildly uneven. Many of his sentences are laughable – one paragraph begins, “The little red sun was a crimson ball” – but others achieve a weird power. The opening paragraphs are as good a demonstration of his style as any.

“On and on Coeurl prowled! The black, moonless, almost starless night yielded reluctantly before a grim reddish dawn that crept up from his left. A vague, dull light it was, that gave no sense of approaching warmth, no comfort, nothing but a cold, diffuse lightness, slowly revealing a nightmare landscape.

Black, jagged rock and black, unliving plain took form around him, as a pale-red sun peered at last above the grotesque horizon. It was then Coeurl recognized suddenly that he was on familiar ground.”

Ugh. That is bad. “Nightmare landscape”? “Unliving plain”? “Grotesque horizon”? I don’t even know where to begin with that description of light. The story is full of such language. Still, despite its clumsiness, there’s something evocative about it. Van Vogt has a vision, and that vision is compelling; it is simply that he is not quite able to express it with the poetry it deserves. He gets just close enough that we keep reading.

Stephen King is less generous than I am in his assessment of van Vogt’s abilities. In a 2013 article for The Atlantic, King opined that “he was just a terrible, terrible writer. His short story, ‘Black Destroyer,’ begins: ‘On and on, Coeurl prowled!’ You read that, and you think – my god! Can I really put up with even five more pages of this? It’s just panting!”

King is not the first to make such comments. An early critic of van Vogt’s was Damon Knight (author of, among other things, “To Serve Man,” the basis of a celebrated episode of The Twilight Zone). Knight wrote, “In general van Vogt seems to me to fail consistently as a writer in three elementary ways: 1. His plots do not bear examination. 2. His choice of words and sentence-structure are fumbling and insensitive. 3. He is unable to either visualize a scene or to make a character seem real.”

Knight’s observations have merit. Van Vogt’s writing, as previously discussed, stumbles often. As for characterization, I will say that the Coeurl is a vividly imagined creature. We get a good sense of its history, motivations, and capabilities. The humans, though, are boring, barely defined archetypes. We get names, job titles, and little else. I didn’t mind at all when any of them met a horrible demise. To be honest, by the end I was rooting for the creature. Considering how the story concludes, that’s a disappointment.

Not everyone agreed with Knight’s assessments, though. One of van Vogt’s stalwart defenders was Philip K. Dick, who wrote, “There was in van Vogt’s writing a mysterious quality…all the ingredients did not make a coherency. Now some people are put off by that. They think it’s sloppy and wrong, but the thing that fascinated me so much was that this resembled reality more than anybody else’s writing inside or outside science fiction.” Harlan Ellison wrote, “Van was the first writer to shine light on the unrestricted ways in which I had been taught to view the universe and the human condition.”

While the story that spawned it has been more or less forgotten except by genre aficionados, the Coeurl lives on in popular culture. It was the inspiration for the displacer beast, a classic monster in the tabletop role-playing game Dungeons & Dragons, and has appeared as an enemy in the Final Fantasy video game series since 1988. I would also argue that the Coeurl inspired the “salt vampire,” which drains sodium from its victims, in the 1966 Star Trek episode “The Man Trap.”

In 1950, van Vogt reworked “Black Destroyer” into the first section of his fix-up novel The Voyage of the Space Beagle (the term “fix-up” was coined by van Vogt himself). One of the other stories integrated into the novel was called “Discord in Scarlet,” originally published in the May 1950 issue of Other Worlds. The first story describes a nearly indestructible alien creature killing the crew of a human spaceship off one by one. The second describes an alien stowaway that implants parasitic eggs in the stomachs of the ship’s crewman. If you think this sounds like Ridley Scott’s 1979 film Alien, you will not be surprised to learn that van Vogt thought so too. He sued 20th Century Fox for plagiarism, but the case was settled out of court.

To conclude, I don’t know if I’d recommend this to the casual reader. At this point there are far better “evil alien stalks human prey” stories to choose from; as I’ve already discussed, there are significant issues here with characterization and quality of writing. If you’re interested in the history of science fiction, though, this is an essential read.

NEXT TIME: ANNIHILATION by Jeff VanderMeer!

“A Boy & His Dog” by Harlan Ellison

In April of 1969, a story by Harlan Ellison appeared in the magazine New Worlds. Ellison was already a well-known name, having won three Hugo Awards in as many years. The story was included in Ellison’s short story collection The Beast That Shouted Love At The Heart Of The World later that year. The tale was called “A Boy & His Dog” – a modest title for a story that has had a profound influence on science-fiction since.

The story takes place in the year 2024 following a nuclear war and concerns – as you would expect – a boy and his dog. Vic, the boy, is fifteen years old and, befitting his age, obsessed with sex. Having grown up parentless in a post-apocalyptic wasteland, Vic has no real grasp of morality or ethics and rapes whatever women he can find. He is aided in his search for sex by his dog, Blood. Blood is telepathic, the result of government experiments before the war. Because of this governmental tampering, Blood has lost the ability to scavenge for food himself. In return for finding food, Blood helps Vic find women.

Women are scarce in this world, you see. While the men went out to fight the war, the women stayed at home in major population centers, which were subsequently bombed. It’s an interesting plot point, but not one that I feel is terribly well-explained. It seems odd to me that almost all women were wiped from the face of the earth while the men who were actually fighting the war survived in great numbers. I understand that short stories are, well, short, but I would have liked to learn more about this. Ellison, to his credit, does explore the implications of this somewhat – vintage pornography is a valued commodity in this world and it is not uncommon for men to engage in gay sex.

The story begins with Vic and Blood going to the movies to watch the aforementioned vintage porn. While in the theatre, Blood smells a woman and helps Vic track her to an abandoned YMCA. Vic prepares to rape her, but stops short. Something happens to him that has never happened before. He finds himself interested in her. He notices her hair, the color of her eyes. She talks to him and looks him in the face. He wants to talk back. Then they are attacked by a gang whose members want the girl for themselves. Vic and Blood protect her, and by the time the smoke clears Vic’s in love.

This first section of the story is standard pulp sci-fi. Ellison was hardly the first to write post-apocalyptic fiction; such stories were commonplace during the Cold War. Ellison, for the most part, doesn’t deviate from the norm here – his wasteland is populated by roving gangs and glowing (though unseen) mutants. Vic narrates and his tone is grim, no-nonsense; this approach allows the story to absorb the reader in a way a campier tale would not.

What humor there is comes from Blood, whose sarcastic voice is very similar to Ellison’s himself. Despite being a dog, Blood is the brains of the duo. Unlike Vic, he is well-educated and frequently enlightens his companion in matters of history, grammar, and survival strategies. He also teases Vic by calling him “Albert,” a sly reference to Albert Payson Terhune, the author of “dog novels” such as Lad: A Dog and The Heart of a Dog. Blood tends to serve as Vic’s moral compass, reminding the boy of their obligations to one another when Vic is distracted by women or other temptations.

The girl is named Quilla June. She comes from “downunder,” a society that lives in a massive underground facility. Before the war, scientists built a couple hundred of these shelters, and the middle class and good Christian folk of America (“squares of the worst kind,” in Vic’s words) settled in to recreate the comfortable lives they knew up top. Blood knows that the people who live downunder distrust surface dwellers and warns Vic against involving himself with Quilla June, but Vic doesn’t listen. Quilla June knocks Vic out with a pistol and runs away. Furious, Vic pursues her to the downunder town of Topeka. Blood refuses to follow and stays on the surface, even though he will not be able to find food on his own.

The section of “A Boy & His Dog” set in Topeka is what gives the story its metaphorical bite. Before now, the story has been vivid and exciting pulp fiction. Here, Ellison aims higher, unleashing a scathing commentary on American middle class values. Vic’s description of the town reads like a Norman Rockwell painting:

“They rocked in rockers on the front porches, they raked their lawns, they hung around the gas station, they stuck pennies in gumball machines, they painted white stripes down the middle of the road, they sold newspapers on the corners, they listened to oompah bands on a shell in the park…they walked hand-in-hand with some of the ugliest chicks I’ve ever seen, and they bored the ass off me.”

It is a picture-perfect recreation of small-town Americana, but from the beginning Vic realizes how bland and empty it is to live there. “They ate artificial shit: artificial peas and fake meat and make-believe chicken and ersatz corn and bogus bread and it all tasted like chalk and dust to me.”

In her book Harlan Ellison: The Edge of Forever, Ellen Weil neatly summarizes how clinging to the past has ruined Topeka’s future: “The Topekans have chosen to deal with historical change by denying it, substituting instead a repressive condition of stasis, enforced even down to the level of daily speech, in which everyone must politely address everyone else as ‘Mr.’ or ‘Mrs.'” As Weil notes, a society that exists in a tightly regulated stasis is not a new idea for Ellison; it is the basis of one of his most famous stories, “‘Repent, Harlequin!’ Said The Ticktockman.”

The point Ellison is making is clear: the society up top and the society down under are both corrupt, because both have abandoned decency and human kindness. The society underground responded to the war by clinging to the past so tightly that it has started to die, which has resulted in a cruel utilitarian existence. The surface, meanwhile, has gone in the opposite direction, discarding societal norms and descending into anarchy.

We learn why Quilla June has lured Vic to Topeka: The population is growing sterile and most of the babies are girls. Topeka needs virile men to keep the population from dying out. At first, Vic is delighted to serve as the town stud, but within a week he finds the fake sunlight and forced politeness of the town’s citizens repressive and yearns to escape. This is another section of the story that made me wish that the story had more focus on female characters. Ellison seems to be setting up a contrast between the predominantly male surface and the predominately female Topeka, but ultimately he never does anything with this. I suppose I can cut Ellison some slack; a literal “war of the sexes” might have been a bit much.

Vic enlists Quilla June in his escape plan and they make their way back to the surface. Ellison has a few more jabs to make at small-town hypocrisy on the way out; Quilla June’s “prayer-shouting Poppa” is revealed to desire her sexually, and Vic uses this desire to incapacitate him during the escape. By the time they reach topside, Blood is starving. Quilla June begs Vic to leave Blood behind and go with her, asking, “Do you know what love is?” Faced between saving his dog, whom he depends on for survival (and who depends on him), and the girl he loves, Vic makes a choice: “Sure I know. A boy loves his dog.”

The implication is obvious: Vic kills Quilla June and feeds her to Blood. Some readers of the story have interpreted the scene to be cannibalistic – in The Edge of Forever, Weil even draws parallels between “A Boy & His Dog” and the cannibalism in H. G. Wells’ The Time Machine. However, Harlan Ellison has explicitly stated on more than one occasion that Vic does not engage in cannibalism.

Considering how often I’ve brought up the dynamic between the sexes in the story, I think now is a good time to address the accusations of misogyny that have followed the story around for decades. The novella was turned into a movie of the same name in 1975. Harlan Ellison did not write the screenplay; this was done by producer Alvy Moore and director L. Q. Jones. Noted feminist theorist and sci-fi novelist Joanna Russ (The Adventures of Alyx) wrote in her essay “A Boy & His Dog: The Final Solution,” “Sending a woman to see A Boy & His Dog is like sending a Jew to a movie that glorifies Dachau; you need not be feminist to loathe this film.” Ellison himself denounced the film’s ending, calling it “moronic” and “hateful,” and labeled Jones a “sexist loon.” Because the film is a generally faithful adaptation of the plot of the story, the two are often conflated.

However, it is important to separate the film and the story when discussing potential misogyny. The society Vic lives in, and certainly Vic himself, are ragingly misogynistic, but I do not believe the tale itself is as well. Ellison, in his introduction to Vic & Blood, a graphic novel adaptation of the story illustrated by Richard Corben, defends himself thusly: “[People] seem blissfully unaware of history (well, duh) and what happens after a decimating war in which food, weapons, shelter and women become valuable chattel… I show my real attitude towards these matters by making Vic little more than a beast, while Blood represents culture, wit, intellect, saavy, and civilization at its best.”

Joanna Russ goes into the matter in depth in “The Final Solution”:

“The story is, to my mind, somewhat different from the film; no one in the story is totally sympathetic or totally evil, and in particular the events surrounding the two main characters’ escape from the story’s underground society – he’s an intruder and she’s a native, but both are misfits – are such as to preclude choosing one character as morally better than another. The story’s point seems to be that both the societies, above ground and under ground, are rotten. Furthermore, the story is told from the male character’s point of view, a technique that admits both his relative ignorance of the other people in the tale and his natural bias in favor of himself.”

While I do not think Harlan Ellison has written a misogynistic story, he does have a tendency of writing female characters who betray others, or who invoke hatred in male characters – Ellen, for example, in “I Have No Mouth & I Must Scream,” or Pretty Maggie in “Pretty Maggie Moneyeyes.” Quilla June fits that profile. Over the course of the story she betrays Vic and the people of Topeka, and the coldness with which she attempts to murder her own mother during the escape chills even Vic.

For the sake of brevity, I won’t list all the ways that “A Boy & His Dog” has influenced science fiction. There are, however, two major descendants of the story and its various adaptations that are well-recognized in popular culture: George Miller’s film The Road Warrior, and the video game series Fallout. In an interview with The Dissolve in 2013, Ellison claims that Miller called him from Australia to admit that he “ripped off” The Road Warrior from the film of A Boy & His Dog. Jesse Heinig, programmer on the original Fallout, stated in an article for Escapist that “A Boy & His Dog influenced Fallout on many levels, from underground communities of survivors to glowing mutants.”

Since its publication, “A Boy & His Dog” has been renowned as one of Ellison’s masterpieces. It won the Nebula Award for Best Novella in 1969 and was nominated for the Hugo. Ellison wrote two short follow-up stories in the subsequent decades, “Eggsucker” (which recounts the early days of Vic and Blood’s friendship), and “Run, Spot, Run,” in which Vic develops a conscience after Quilla June’s murder. For years, Ellison claimed that these stories were part of a larger work called Blood’s A Rover, but the completed novel never materialized. However, in January of 2018, Subterranean Press announced that it would be releasing the completed novel later that year.

As for me, I loved the story. Its vivid setting, complicated characters, social satire, and clear influence on future works of science fiction make it essential reading.

NEXT TIME: “Black Destroyer” by A. E. van Vogt!

“Aye, and Gomorrah…” by Samuel R. Delany

Where to begin when discussing the life and work of Samuel R. Delany? The man’s oeuvre is so complicated, so vast, so intelligent, so erotic, that it’s hard to find a jump-off point. Should we start with his science-fiction? That is where his career began. What about his essays? They certainly tackle important issues: class, memory, language, sexuality, perception. He is also a literary critic who focuses on queer studies and issues in science-fiction. All of these facets are worth contemplation. I think, however, that it might be best to start with something simple: Samuel R. Delany likes coffee.

Delany was born in New York City in 1942. Raised in Harlem, his aunts were the civil rights pioneers Sadie and Bessie Delany; his father, Henry, was the first Black Bishop of the Episcopal Church. Though he has identified as gay since adolescence, he was married to poet, translator, and critic Marilyn Hacker for fourteen years (she was aware of his orientation and has identified as a lesbian since their divorce). The first short story he ever sold is the focus of today’s post, “Aye, and Gomorrah…”, which appeared in Harlan Ellison’s seminal 1967 anthology Dangerous Visions. The story won the Nebula Award for Best Short Story that same year. His work has earned four Nebula Awards, two Hugo Awards, the Stonewall Book Award, two Lambda Awards, and the Brudner Prize. While not a theme, per se, you will notice that coffee is mentioned often in many of his works.

As he moved later into his career, his work began to explore sexual themes to an extent still not seen in most mainstream writing. Delany views sexuality as a means of contact and connection that should be celebrated; he posits that ignoring it is dangerous and limits dialogue between children and parents on the subject. Novels such as Dhalgren and Stars In My Pocket Like Grains of Sand contain many explicit passages, leading some to label his work as pornography (a term that Delany himself endorses). These themes have carried through to his most recent work, including his 2012 novel Through the Valley of the Nest of Spiders. His essay collection Times Square Red, Times Square Blue eloquently argues that the “cleaning up” of Times Square in the 1990s that eliminated the area’s infamous peepshows and sex movie houses in the name of family values was actually a campaign of gentrification that damaged the landscape of the city – for Delany, these theaters were valuable because they represented a microcosm of city life that transcended boundaries of race, class, and orientation.

“Aye, and Gomorrah…” does not contain any of the explicit eroticism of his later work, but sex still hovers over the proceedings. The story concerns itself with a group of “Spacers,” or astronauts. To counteract certain effects of space radiation, Spacers are neutered before puberty, sterilizing them and giving them an androgynous appearance that makes their birth sex difficult to determine. Spacers are fetishized by a subculture of “frelks,” those who find their sexlessness and unattainability arousing. The Spacers take advantage of this subculture by prostituting themselves out for amusement or money, or perhaps to ease their own loneliness. The majority of the story takes place in Istanbul, and follows an unnamed Spacer who is slowly and tentatively propositioned by a native frelk (also unnamed).

The first time I read this story, I wasn’t sure exactly what I had just experienced. After some thought, I realized this was because Delany does not spoon feed his readers a single bit of information. The history of his world and the culture being presented are rendered in small background details and in dialogue. He follows the rule of “show, don’t tell” more faithfully than almost any writer I have thus encountered. This a story that requires a read just to work out what exactly is going on. Only in subsequent reads, after the surface details have been worked out, can the reader focus on the meat of the story.

The second time I read this story, I was struck by how profoundly sad it is. Spacers live in perpetual motion. They have no home; between jobs on Mars, Jupiter, or Ganymede, they bounce around Earth looking for entertainment. Wherever they land, they are not welcome: A recurring refrain throughout the story is, “Do you not think, Spacer, that you…people should leave?” They do not have their own language; at several points the Spacer attempts to speak in the local language and is immediately corrected. They do not really have maturity, as the process to transform them into Spacers essentially leaves them as children. They do not have sex and have no interest in sex. They are the ultimate Other, of our world but of the stars, of our species but unable to propagate it. They belong in their own social class, and are reminded of that at all turns. Despite their worship of Spacers, ultimately the frelks merely objectify them. This is a story about loneliness, about people who do not belong anywhere.

The parallels to homosexuality are unmistakable. “Aye, and Gomorrah…” was written three years before the Stonewall riots, and fifteen years before the discovery of AIDS. The 1950s saw McCarthyism target homosexuals as security risks; thousands of people lost their jobs or were discharged from the military on the mere suspicion of being gay. The Post Office tracked where homosexual material was mailed. Police frequently raided gay bars. For decades homosexuality was listed in the Diagnostic & Statistical Manual (DSM) as a mental disorder. Gays were so marginalized that many became invisible. The Spacers are a symbolic representation of this isolation: Early in the story, an obviously homosexual blonde man tells the Spacer, “The police. They don’t bother us. You are strangers, though…” As the ultimate outsiders, Spacers face even less protection from the police than gay people. In light of that, it is not surprising that the Spacers never stay in any one place too long.

The frelks are as important to this parallel as the Spacers. They are, in their way, as marginalized as the Spacers; even the objects of their desire look down on them. Sometimes they look down on themselves: “Perverted, yes? In love with a bunch of corpses in free fall!” Delany uses the relationship between frelks and Spacers to mirror common arguments used by conservative groups against homosexuals over the years. Because Spacers have been neutered they cannot receive sexual pleasure or reproduce with their frelk partners – those who claimed that homosexuality is “unnatural” often pointed to the lack of ability to reproduce as a reason for that unnaturalness. Indeed, the frelk in the story seems to think her own desires are wrong. But she also voices what is perhaps Delany’s moral for the whole story: “You don’t choose your perversions.” It does not matter who you love; what matters is connection.

“What will you give me? I want something,” I said. “That’s why I came. I’m lonely. Maybe I want to find out how far it goes. I don’t know yet.”

“It goes as far as you will. Me? I study, I read, paint, talk with my friends” – she came over to the bed, sat down on the floor – “go to the theater, look at spacers who pass me on the street, till one looks back; I am lonely too.”

In the fifty years since this story was written, gay rights have come a long way. There were the aforementioned Stonewall riots, which kicked off the modern LGBT rights movement in the United States. In 1977 homosexuality was finally removed from the DSM. In 1982, Wisconsin became the first state to pass anti-discrimination laws for gay people. 1988 saw the first World AIDS Day. In the 1992 ruling of Romer v. Evans, the Supreme Court found that Colorado’s 2nd amendment denying gays rights was unconstitutional. In 2009, President Barack Obama signed into law the Matthew Shepard Act. There were setbacks, such as the signing of the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) by President Bill Clinton in 1996 and the passing of Proposition 8 in California in 2008. However, the historic Supreme Court ruling of Obergefell v. Hodges granted gays the right to marry in 2015.

In light of this, I think the story has a different meaning today than at the time of its writing. When Delany wrote it, he clearly meant for Spacers to represent homosexuals. Now, in 2016, I think the Spacers more closely parallel the transgender community, which is still struggling for equality. The Spacers, having no easily identifiable gender, are continuously rejected for that very fact. Like many transgender people, they are treated as sexual curiosities rather than individuals. Delany himself is slightly more coy on the subject: “I’m not sure how the change in the social status of homosexuality, sadomasochism, and the like have changed how we read the story today. Ask me what the story is about now, however, and I’ll probably say it’s somehow about the desire for desire.”

I fear that I have made this story sound like a thesis about gender and sexual politics. It is not. Delany knows how to write. Like Hemingway, his style is economical, but he has a eye for detail that can result in understatedly gorgeous prose:

Bo laughed to break tensions. “Say, last time I was in Istanbul – about a year before I joined up with this platoon – I remember we were coming out of Taksim Square down Istiqlal. Just past all the cheap movies we found a little passage lined with flowers. Ahead of us were two other spacers. It’s a market in there, and farther down they got fish, and then a courtyard with oranges and candy and sea urchins and cabbage. But flowers in front.”

To sum up, this is a classic story, beautifully written with complex themes. It’s well worth reading, and can be found in several anthologies. I recommend Aye, and Gomorrah, and Other Stories, published in 2003, that collects almost the entirety of Delany’s short sci-fi/fantasy stories.

Before I go, a note on the title. The title clearly refers to the Biblical cities of Sodom and Gomorrah, destroyed by God, according to some interpretations, for the sin of homosexuality. Delany, as a gay man, clearly does not find homosexuality to be wrong, and there is no explicit explanation for this title in the story. I suspect he means for us to thoughtfully consider the issue. Perhaps I’ll ponder the matter over a cup of coffee.

NEXT TIME: “The Willows” by Algernon Blackwood!

THE DYING EARTH/THE EYES OF THE OVERWORLD by Jack Vance

“You must save yourselves,” Rogol Domedonfors told them. “You have ignored the ancient wisdom, you have been too indolent to learn, you have sought easy complacence from religion, rather than facing manfully to the world.”

So intones the king before sinking into a five thousand-year slumber. His kingdom is technologically advanced but culturally stagnant. Its people have fallen into petty religious squabbles. He believes that if he removes the stability of his reign it will force his people to reconcile and grow. It does not. The kingdom devolves until two warring factions have grown so far apart that they literally cannot see each other. Then a stranger strides into their midst in search of treasure…

This is “Ulan Dhor,” the fifth of six stories that comprise Jack Vance’s The Dying Earth. But I get ahead of myself.

John Holbrook Vance was born on August 28, 1916. Weak eyesight prevented military service, but he was able to secure a position as a seaman in the Merchant Marine. Sailing proved to be a lifelong passion and is a motif in much of his work; in fact, he jointly built a houseboat with fellow science fiction authors Frank Herbert and Poul Anderson, which they then sailed in the Sacramento Delta. He was a devoted fan of Dixieland jazz, and played the cornet, ukelele, harmonica, and banjo.

He was also one of the most accomplished science fiction/fantasy authors of the 20th century. He won the Hugo Award three times (in 1963, 1967, and 2010), the Nebula Award, the Jupiter Award, the World Fantasy Award, and the Edgar Award (he wrote many mystery novels under the pseudonym Ellery Queen). In 1997 he was named the fourteenth Grand Master of the Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers of America, and in 2001 was inducted into the Science Fiction Hall of Fame. His work is characterized by carefully constructed prose that is frequently described as “baroque,” though I will touch on that later. He died in 2013 at the age of 96. He was a very prolific author: the Vance Integral Edition collects all of his writing into 45 hardback volumes.

As you would expect given the age of this series, the individual volumes of the Dying Earth books are no longer available. They are, however, still in print in the Tales of the Dying Earth omnibus edition, published in 2000 by Orb Books (pictured above). This is the edition I bought, and while I have issues with the ridiculous sci-fi city pictured on the cover, the writing within is unimpeachable.

THE DYING EARTH (1950)

The Dying Earth is one of those legendary volumes that has had a lasting impact on future authors and other creative types, particularly within the sci-fi/fantasy field. It was ranked 16 out of 33 in Locus‘ 1987 poll of All-Time Best Fantasy Novels, and was one of five finalists for the 2001 “Retro Hugo” for Best Novel. It is what is termed a “fix-up,” that is, a novel comprised of short fiction that has been previously published. Oftentimes in fix-ups the author will edit the stories for consistency, or perhaps add a framing device to tie them all together.

Vance uses a different method, that of shared characters: A supporting character in one story will be the main character in another. The book opens on Turjan of Miir, a wizard who aims to create living beings using magic. He seeks the council of the seemingly omniscient Pandelume (who, like a creature from a H. P. Lovecraft story, brings madness to anyone who looks at him). Pandelume has created a beautiful woman named T’sais, but he created her incorrectly – she sees only ugliness, and hates the world and everyone in it. Turjan creates a girl named T’sain using his newfound knowledge. In the next story, Turjan is a prisoner, held by Mazirian the Magician, who aims to wrest from his captive the secret of creating life. In the next story, T’sais and T’sain meet, forcing T’sais to confront her bitter worldview. They also have a passing encounter with Liane the Wayfarer, a bandit who gets own story a few pages later.

These are not all the characters in the book, but I hope I have illustrated the organic way in which Vance weaves his stories together. There are plenty of other wonderful characters and creatures to be encountered here – Deodands, maneaters with skin black as night; Twk-Men, tiny men who ride dragonflies and offer information in exchange for gifts; Etarr, a witch who replaces her lover’s face with a demon’s; and perhaps my favorite, Chun the Unavoidable (the sobriquet is chillingly appropriate), who wears a cloak fashioned from the eyes of his victims.

I mentioned above that Vance’s writing is often characterized as “baroque,” which essentially means “mannered and ornately detailed.” Aspects of this I agree with – his writing is definitely mannered. I do not, however, think it is ornate, as that implies complicated sentence structures and advanced language. Vance’s writing doesn’t spin circles around itself. His sentence structures are quite accessible and tightly controlled. He will not use torrents of adjectives when one will suffice. While he does occasionally make use of what I call “dictionary vocabulary” (for example, “nuncupatory”), he most often opts for words that are unusual but can still be understood in context by the average reader. This is, I think, why his prose is such a joy to read: it doesn’t insult one’s intelligence, but it never becomes needlessly obtuse. Consider this excerpt from “Ulan Dhor”:

But even in my life I saw the leaching of spirit. A surfeit of honey cloys the tongue; a surfeit of wine addles the brain; so a surfeit of ease guts a man of strength. Light, warmth, food, water, were free to all men, and gained by a minimum of effort. So the people of Ampridatvir, released from toil, gave increasing attention to faddishness, perversity, and the occult.

This is wonderful writing, easily understood despite its seemingly complicated artifice.

I had expected to respect more than like this book. Friends who had read it informed me it does not reach the heights of later books in the series. While I agree with that assessment, I still loved this book. The writing is muscular and descriptive, the world enchanting. The characters, often anti-heroes, still find moments of humanity that are all the more touching because of their faults.

A brief note on the title: Vance’s preferred title for this book was Mazirian the Magician, and that is how it is titled in the Vance Integral Edition. The Dying Earth was chosen by Vance’s editor, and I honestly think it’s a much stronger, and certainly more evocative, title. Mazirian is not a major enough character, in my opinion, to warrant naming the entire book after him.

THE EYES OF THE OVERWORLD (1966)

“I categorically declare first my absolute innocence, second my lack of criminal intent, and third my effusive apologies.” – Cugel the Clever

After a sixteen year hiatus (so count your blessings, George R. R. Martin fans), Vance returned to the series with the second installment, The Eyes of the Overworld. Like the previous book, this is a fix-up, consisting of five novelettes originally published in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction between December 1965 and July 1966, and one original chapter (“Cil”). Vance expanded and revised various portions of the different stories before publication of the book.

The plot centers on one of Vance’s most iconic creations: Cugel the Clever, an utterly amoral thief. He is persuaded by a wealthy merchant to rob the home of a nearby magician, who catches Cugel in the act. As recompense, Cugel agrees to retrieve a special item for the magician – a violet contact lens which, when worn, shows the wearer the Overworld, an improved version of reality where a hut becomes a palace, a table scrap becomes a feast, and the ugly become beautiful. To ensure Cugel’s compliance, the magician affixes a barbed and hooked alien named Firx around Cugel’s liver. Then he dumps Cugel in the northern wastelands, leaving the particulars of obtaining the Eye and returning home to the thief.

Vance’s preferred title for this book was Cugel the Clever, and that is how it is titled in the Vance Integral Edition. I think this is a more fitting, if less interesting, title than The Eyes of the Overworld, as the Eyes themselves only really feature in the early section of the book. This is in form a classic picaresque novel; character is ultimately more important than story, and the story itself is episodic rather than cohesive.

Still, what a rich set of episodes! My favorite, I think, finds Cugel arriving at a village after long and exhausting travel. The mayor offers him a job that will pay him the entirety of the town’s savings, a prospect the greedy Cugel cannot resist. The job itself seems simple: He must sit atop a tall pole and watch for Magnatz, the mythical enemy of the village. But Cugel is deceived; once he has taken his place at the top of the watchtower he is stranded. The townsfolk provide food with a system of ropes and pulleys, but will not let him down. Cugel decides to escape. The consequences are exciting and unexpected. Another memorable adventure sends Cugel back in time one million years. This is a terrifically entertaining book, more interesting and fulfilling than The Dying Earth.

Cugel himself is a classic Vancian anti-hero. He is a liar, a cheat, a rapist, a killer, a coward, and a thief, yet considers himself superior to everyone around him. He is a wholly unlikeable character, and yet by the end of the story Vance has managed to evoke a surprising amount of sympathy for him, which he accomplishes by fashioning most of the other characters to be even less likable than Cugel is. For every con Cugel successfully pulls off, he is conned himself twice over. In many ways, “the Clever” is an ironic title, and this contradiction is a source of much of the novel’s humor. Cugel’s final blunder at the end of the book is the ultimate expression of his incompetence.

Another seventeen years would pass before Vance returned to the Dying Earth. Cugel’s Saga, a direct sequel to The Eyes of the Overworld and twice as long, appeared in 1983. In the interim, Michael Shea (Nifft the Lean) wrote an authorized sequel called A Quest for Simbilis, which was published in 1974.

Apart from the aforementioned Cugel’s Saga, there is one more book in the series, called Rhialto the Marvellous. These two books shall be covered in a separate post. For the rest of this post, I would like to cover a less obvious topic: Vance’s influence on roleplaying games.

One cannot have a discussion of Vance’s series without acknowledging its impact on a certain game known as Dungeons & Dragons. Both The Dying Earth and The Eyes of the Overworld are included in the famous Appendix N, a list of literary works that influenced D&D creator Gary Gygax (read it here). Many of the listed authors influenced setting and tone more than anything else, but a few of them – such as Vance – had a direct impact on the mechanics of the game. Indeed, Vance is one of the few authors Gygax specifically singles out for his contribution (he even wrote an essay praising his hero, “Jack Vance and The D&D Game,” which you can read here). While Cugel the Clever is an obvious template for the Thief character class, the more important influence was on how magic worked in the game.

In Vance’s stories, magic-users must memorize spells before they can use them. The spells are so complicated, and take up so much mental space, that the user forgets them the instant they are cast. Moreover, their sheer complexity limits how many one can remember at a time. Mazirian the Magician, for example, “by dint of stringent exercise, could encompass four of the most formidable, or six of the lesser spells.” Thus, choosing exactly which spells to use, and when to use them, becomes of utmost importance. Vance uses this device to generate suspense: As his characters gradually run out of spells, with no opportunity to memorize new ones, their situations become more and more dangerous. This system is known as “Vancian magic” in the gaming community, and while later editions of D&D changed how magic worked, this was the norm for many years. In addition, spells and items mentioned in the novels, such as Prismatic Spray and Ioun stones, made their way into the game, and the name of the magic diety Vecna is an anagram of Vance.

Vance’s influence is not limited to just D&D. Another roleplaying game called Talislanta, written by Stephan Michael Sechi and intentioned as a simpler alternative to D&D, owes so much to Vance that every edition of the game has been dedicated to him. In 2001 Pelgrane Press released The Dying Earth Roleplaying Game, a direct adaptation of Vance’s novels, written by author and game designer Robin Laws.

As I said above, the last two books of the Dying Earth series will be covered in a future post, which will also contain a discussion of Vance’s influence on future authors. Until then, the next few entries here will cover short stories, as I can get through them at a faster pace than novels. In the meantime, I highly recommend everyone read The Dying Earth and The Eyes of the Overworld. I loved them both. They more than earn their status as classics.

NEXT TIME: “Aye, and Gomorrah…” by Samuel R. Delany!

VIRICONIUM: THE NOVELS by M. John Harrison

“Won’t you come see me, Queen Jane?”
– Bob Dylan

This the first post of two covering a series of four books by M. John Harrison known as the Viriconium cycle. This first post will focus on the three novels that make up the bulk of the cycle; the remaining volume, a short story collection, will be the subject of the second post. These will be part of a larger series focusing on the Dying Earth subgenre of science fiction.

Dying Earth tales typically take place at the end of life on Earth, though some go even further to the end of time, with the universe itself breaking apart. One of the earliest examples of Dying Earth fiction is Jean-Baptiste Cousin de Grainville’s 1805 novel The Last Man (not to be confused with Mary Shelley’s post-apocalyptic novel of the same name), which chronicles the last man on Earth’s attempts to find the last woman and repopulate the human race. Lord Byron’s harrowing poem “Darkness” (1816, which you can read here) describes an Earth with a dead sun. H. G. Wells’ novella The Time Machine (1895) briefly takes its narrator to a far future where most life has gone extinct. William Hope Hodgson’s 1912 novel The Night Land imagines the entirety of the human race living together in a massive pyramid called the Last Redoubt (the first arcology in literature) millions of years in the future, the sun long extinguished, waiting for their weakening power sources to fail and the horrors in the darkness outside to overtake them.

From the 1930s onwards, Dying Earth literature is dominated by two figures: Clark Ashton Smith and Jack Vance. Smith was one of the “Big Three,” authors closely associated with the magazine Weird Tales (the other two are Robert E. Howard, creator of Conan the Cimmerian, and H. P. Lovecraft). Between 1932 and 1953, Smith wrote sixteen stories, as well as a one-act play published posthumously, set on Zothique, the last continent on Earth. Smith’s description of the setting is appropriate for most of the literature that followed:

“The continents of our present cycle have sunken, perhaps several times. Some of them have remained submerged; others have re-risen, partially, and re-arranged themselves. The science and machinery of our present civilization have long been forgotten, together with our present religions. But many gods are worshipped; and sorcerer and demonism prevail again as in ancient days. Oars and sails alone are used by mariners. There are no fire-arms – only the bows, arrows, swords, javelins, etc. of antiquity.”

Indeed, most Dying Earth literature from this point on is more closely aligned with fantasy than science fiction. I will not go into much detail on Vance, as I will be covering him in my next post, but his Dying Earth series (which first appeared in 1950) proved enormously influential on later authors. Perhaps the most renowned work of Dying Earth literature in the modern era is Gene Wolfe’s four volume series The Book of the New Sun (1981-3), which Wolfe acknowledged to be directly influenced by Vance.

We now come to M. John Harrison. Born in 1945, he was destined for great things from the start: the second story he ever wrote, “Lamia Mutable” (a Viriconium story, coincidentally), appeared in Harlan Ellison’s 1972 anthology Again, Dangerous Visions. From 1968 to 1975 he was the literary editor of the science fiction magazine New Worlds. In the decades since, he has written a slew of novels and continued to review fiction for publications. He is widely considered one of the leading stylists in sci-fi and fantasy, and has been awarded the J. Tiptree Jr. Award, the Arthur C. Clarke Award, and the Philip K. Dick Award. “A good ground rule for writing in any genre,” Harrison writes, “is: start with a form, then ask what it’s afraid of.”

The Viriconium cycle focuses on a city of the same name, with all novels and stories set in or around it. The world is littered with the detritus of past civilizations; technology from bygone eras still exists and can function, but very few people alive know how to use or repair it. One previous civilization even left its name written in the stars, but, as Harrison notes, “no-one who came later could read it.” As with all Dying Earth fiction, there is a palpable sense of weariness to the proceedings. Like the world in which it is set, Harrison’s characters, particularly in the first book, are past their prime.

The series takes some inspiration from Vance, but also pays homage to Mervyn Peake’s Gormenghast trilogy and the poems of T. S. Eliot. Throughout the series, Harrison attempts to subvert the encyclopedic worldbuilding of authors such as J. R. R. Tolkien. “Worldbuilding is dull,” says Harrison. “It is the attempt to exhaustively survey a place that isn’t there. A good writer would never try to do that, even with a place that is there.” As such, Viriconium is never presented as a concrete place; rather, it is a dream city that reappears in each book in slightly (or not so slightly) different forms.

The series was first published between 1971 and 1985. The books are no longer available individually, unless you get very lucky in a used bookstore; I bought the Bantam Spectra 2005 omnibus edition with an introduction by Neil Gaiman (pictured above – as a side note, there are four different covers from the cycle pictured in this post; graphic designers or those who simply love book covers can find a fascinating look at them here).

THE PASTEL CITY (1971)

This first book in the cycle is easily the most accessible. The plot is functional but hardly inspired – at the request of the ruler of Viriconium, Queen Jane, a group of heroes band together to save the world from an invading threat – and reads like a hybrid of The Lord of the Rings and Dune. What sets the book apart is its stunning prose, rich characterizations, and pervasive sense of loss: the world’s best days are behind it and all the characters know it. As far as those characters go, Tomb the Dwarf is a marvelous creation, an ugly, battle-hardened genius who does combat in a suit of mechanical armor. Cellur is a centuries-old alien who builds mechanical birds to communicate with the world. The melancholy knight tegeus-Cromis, the main character, is memorably described as considering himself “a better poet than swordsman.”

Harrison paints vivid images with his words; he’s a more accomplished stylist than Tolkien or Herbert. Consider this description of a swamp through which the heroes journey:

Charcoal grey frogs with viridescent eyes croaked as the column floundered between the pools. Beneath the greasy surface of the water unidentifiable reptiles moved slowly and sinuously. Dragonflies whose webby wings spanned a foot or more hummed and hovered between the sedges: their long, wicked bodies glittered bold green and ultramarine; they took their prey on the wing, pouncing with an audible snap of jaws on whining, ephemeral mosquitoes and fluttering moths of april blue and chevrolet cerise.

This is gorgeous writing, and sequences such as this help make up for any shortcomings in the plotting. Interestingly, several elements of The Pastel City reappear in George Lucas’ Star Wars films: the young queen (Queen Jane v. Princess Leia/Queen Amidala), a brotherhood of elite knights (the Methven v. the Jedi), an older member of that brotherhood who fought for the queen’s father in a previous conflict (tegeus-Cromis v. Obi-Wan Kenobi), and energy blade weapons (baan v. lightsabers). However, I can find no evidence that suggests Lucas read the book before writing Star Wars.

Upon its publication the legendary Michael Moorcock wrote: “It is so much better than other novels in its field that I believe it will in time become a favorite classic among readers of science fantasy.” I’m not sure I would call it a classic – the derivative story holds it back slightly – but it’s certainly a new favorite.

A STORM OF WINGS (1980)

The second book in the series is a drastic departure from the first, at least stylistically. It’s an alien invasion story in which the invasion itself is not as important as its aftereffects. The invaders – giant spacefaring insects, portrayed with surprising sympathy – cannot survive on Earth, so they attempt to rewrite reality in their favor. As the reality of our heroes (which in and of itself is nebulous; no fewer than four of the six main characters grapple with issues of memory and sanity) collides with that of the insects, the prose becomes increasingly dense and surreal. Harrison uses this to allow Viriconium to physically manifest its endless mutability:

Leaving the palace for the city was like entering a dark crystal (especially at night, under the “white pulpy specter” of the Moon); the shape of things became irregular, refracted; sudden astonishing mirages swallowed the Pastel Towers or engulfed the denizens of the streets beneath them. It was as if Viriconium (the physical city, that is, the millennial artifact which sums up a thousand dead cultures) had suffered some sort of psychic storm, and forgotten itself. Its very molecules seemed to be creeping apart. “As you walk,” the dwarf tried to explain after a single clandestine excursion to the Artists’ Quarter, “the streets recreate themselves around you. When you have passed everything immediately slips into chaos again…”

This mutability extends to the characters as well, in a more abstract way. The plot is, in essence, the same as the first book, and Harrison provides us with a set of heroes who at first glance are the same as well. Cellur the Birdmaster reappears from the previous installment, except he has grown so old he can’t remember his past. The new main character, an assassin named Galen Hornwrack, spends most of the story swearing that he isn’t the hero of the first book. There are numerous occurrences such as these; the entire book can be considered a distorted reflection of the first.

For all its impressive achievements, A Storm of Wings isn’t perfect. The character of Benedict Paucemanly is revolting; if Harrison intended him as comic relief, it didn’t work. The character speaks in gurgles, half-sentences, and non-sentences for most of the book, so it’s a bit jarring when, towards the end, he suddenly gains lucidity and explains the plot in great detail. As I mentioned above, this is a difficult book to read, and some readers might appreciate having the story laid out in easy-to-understand language, but I personally felt it too close to an “info-dump” for comfort. Harrison could have spread his plot points out more evenly. But that, to me, is the book’s only real flaw, and I found it quite rewarding in the end.

IN VIRICONIUM (1982)

As much as I wanted A Storm of Wings to be my favorite book in the cycle (it has on paper the most interesting plot and the language is the most pyrotechnical), my actual favorite was this third installment, the shortest of the three novellas. For the first time all of the action takes place in Viriconium, and it jettisons the grand battles and epic threats of the first two books. This is more magical realism than science fiction, a love story at the end of time. The writing is very straightforward compared to the previous book, but gorgeous turns of phrase and startling details inhabit every page. This is the book in which the city of Viriconium feels most alive, its inhabitants most relatable.

That is not to say that it is without richness of depth. Viriconium is being slowly overrun by a plague that entropies anything it touches until it ceases to exist. The main character, an artist named Ashlyme, seeks to rescue a fellow painter named Audsley King from the plague zone, with the help of a dwarf known as the Grand Cairo and an astronomer named Buffo. As others have noted, the plot plays on Arthurian legend, with echoes of the Fisher King (represented by Audsley) and the Waste Land (represented by Viriconium). The plague provides Harrison with another tool to deconstruct his city and his series; by the end of the novel Audsley has realized that Viriconium is a mere fiction, which frees her from the plague’s paralysis to finally paint the real world: our own. This is about as clear a statement as Harrison makes that Viriconium is meant to represent all cities, real and imagined. It’s a staggering moment.

I do have my quips, however. The sinister Grand Cairo, while entertaining, is no substitute for Tomb the Dwarf, and the disgusting behavior of the Barley Brothers recalls Benedict Paucemanly from A Storm of Wings (though the resolution of their plotline is surprisingly moving). Still, this is easily the most emotionally fulfilling installment in the cycle. This was first published in the U.S. under the title The Floating Gods, and was dedicated to Fritz Leiber, an author we will be seeing a lot of on this blog in the future.

* * *

Taken individually, these three novels all have their merits, but when read together, as I did, it is easier to see Harrison’s grand scheme, fashioning each installment as a series of reflections and mutations of what came before. Those who are expecting straight ahead fantasy action are sure to be disappointed, but those who are willing to put the effort in will find much to admire here. For my part, I feel enriched for having read them.

There is one more book in the cycle that extends Harrison’s machinations even further, a short story collection called Viriconium Nights. Expect my review sometime in the next few months, though there are plenty of other books I want to get to first. Rest assured, however, that it is coming.

NEXT TIME: THE DYING EARTH/THE EYES OF THE OVERWORLD by Jack Vance!