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Pilgrimage
Paperback original novel. A voyage through a self-contained, moving city that houses all of mankind.
220 pages, Mass Market Paperback
First published April 7, 1981
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Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews
July 28, 2020
An ancient city is migrating across the land. When Brann had to flee the dilapidated back of the city, which was being torn down, he explored forbidden and forgotten routes and shafts that were as mysterious as the path and destiny of The City itself. Poking around lost chambers and basements of an ancient, self-enclosed, single-building city of ginormous size is fascinating. It has some of the same appeal as Hiero's Journey through the ruins of a post-apocalyptic land.
May 21, 2019
Maddeningly a one-and-doner future fic fave, he (or she, as author info is both scant and more speculative than not) this is a goodly slab of city saga, given behemothic treatment. Only 9/10, because a chapter amidst a work otherwise approaching the masterful took a (thankfully brief) fantasy side trip into the supernatural, and it was not a fit, momently softening the nuts and bolts. Adventure, intrigue, and dealable romance; but mostly I got my future fic fix. Hoping for some solid biographic information on the author, and for more where this came from, I went in search of a hardcover edition; but it seems the spec-lit universe is holding out on me in that department; and so is Mendelson.
January 6, 2020
[Note that I have tagged this as a generation ship story, which it isn't, but it has a same sort of atmosphere]
Teenager Bran lives in an absolutely huge city that is thought to contain the whole world by its inhabitants. I never quite worked out the dimensions but it's miles across and hundreds of levels high, and tens of miles long. Generations of people have lived in the city such that nobody remembers any other way of living. Around every 10 years the 'tailend' section of the city is demolished and its occupants go on 'pilgimage' to the other end of the city, where the materials from the demolished section are used to build a fresh new section. This continues generation after generation such that the city is slowly moving across the landscape. Nobody remembers why. Everything has started to decay and breakdown, and there are remnants of technology that nobody understands or can repair.
As Bran lives at the tailend, it is soon his group's turn to go on pilgrimage to the other end of the city. However, strange events start to happen like the appearance of a 'giant dwarf' and shaking of the city. The causes the occupants to panic and leave early. Bran, his girlfriend and his best friend decide to leave their families and go on a journey through the forgotten parts of the city. This is actually pretty interesting and full of tension as you're never quite sure what weird things are going to be encountered next.
I would have given this five stars but a couple of the encounters seemed pretty unlikely to me, there is one particularly lame short section, and the end was a bit of a non-event. Once it is revealed what's going on, the story kind of fizzles out. A good sci-fi story overall though.
Teenager Bran lives in an absolutely huge city that is thought to contain the whole world by its inhabitants. I never quite worked out the dimensions but it's miles across and hundreds of levels high, and tens of miles long. Generations of people have lived in the city such that nobody remembers any other way of living. Around every 10 years the 'tailend' section of the city is demolished and its occupants go on 'pilgimage' to the other end of the city, where the materials from the demolished section are used to build a fresh new section. This continues generation after generation such that the city is slowly moving across the landscape. Nobody remembers why. Everything has started to decay and breakdown, and there are remnants of technology that nobody understands or can repair.
As Bran lives at the tailend, it is soon his group's turn to go on pilgrimage to the other end of the city. However, strange events start to happen like the appearance of a 'giant dwarf' and shaking of the city. The causes the occupants to panic and leave early. Bran, his girlfriend and his best friend decide to leave their families and go on a journey through the forgotten parts of the city. This is actually pretty interesting and full of tension as you're never quite sure what weird things are going to be encountered next.
I would have given this five stars but a couple of the encounters seemed pretty unlikely to me, there is one particularly lame short section, and the end was a bit of a non-event. Once it is revealed what's going on, the story kind of fizzles out. A good sci-fi story overall though.
May 27, 2023
Although this book was far from perfect (or even great), it was weird, unpredictable, and engaging enough to let me overlook many of its faults.
The biggest fault, for me, was the seemingly forced addition of sexuality and sex scenes. Literally sometimes it was just a quick sentence to sort of remind readers that these are humans that want to have sex. The protagonists were teens, so it fits, but it didn't flow naturally in the story at all. Other than that, the writing just got a bit off and clunky sometimes.
The good was that I was consistently surprised by this old sci-fi book. I feel like I'm rarely surprised these days. But this story's setting was unique, as was the premise, giving it a fresh (to me) feel. The humans in the book are in a massive moving city of 25 million plus people. The city crawls across the land by disassembling the back and reassembling it at the front, for thousands of years. It turns out humans ruined the earth and some that couldn't get themselves to escape to space did this instead. In the city, it's very segmented, so if they go far in any direction, it's like a new country.
The characters are a bit bland and static, but it's two teen boys that are best friends and the main character's crush. They decide to stick together when an earthquake scares everyone else to abandon their area of the city and go on the Pilgrimage to the front of the city. What follows is a wild trip for the three. Somehow there's a semi-magical slave-driver that has taken over a whole segment of the city just to endlessly whip humans into dragging his cart around, looking for more slaves. They later meet giants, who turn out to be normal sized. So our protagonists are small in stature compared to us. Even later, they encounter humans that are so enmeshed with some hyper-advanced technology that they are immortal and have some level of super powers. These people draw them in and have sex with them and try to get them to join them. They escape though, only to later be caught by people even smaller than them in the city's jails. Others let them out, explain to them more about the history of the city, and then bring them to the front of the city, which has also been destroyed, to show them all the inhabitants feeling trapped outside the city, just sort of standing around the ocean beach - millions of them. And the slave driver is there with thousands of people pulling his now massive cart. The hero kills him, sort of, then they eventually decide to go live with some people that had been living outside of the city for a long time. However, most people went back to the ruined city to try to live (but likely die) there. A big realization was that they had been bred for captivity, whether intentionally or not is unknown because of how much history was lost.
Not sure of an overall message here. Perhaps it was anti-city in some ways, suggesting it breeds out characteristics of independence and self-sufficiency. This seems to then be equated with being slaves, preferring horrible lives as long as they're simple and easily understood lives. There may also be a small undercurrent of environmentalism, since it was hinted that humans destroyed the earth that way (as opposed to nuclear war which was so popular a worry back then).
The biggest fault, for me, was the seemingly forced addition of sexuality and sex scenes. Literally sometimes it was just a quick sentence to sort of remind readers that these are humans that want to have sex. The protagonists were teens, so it fits, but it didn't flow naturally in the story at all. Other than that, the writing just got a bit off and clunky sometimes.
The good was that I was consistently surprised by this old sci-fi book. I feel like I'm rarely surprised these days. But this story's setting was unique, as was the premise, giving it a fresh (to me) feel. The humans in the book are in a massive moving city of 25 million plus people. The city crawls across the land by disassembling the back and reassembling it at the front, for thousands of years. It turns out humans ruined the earth and some that couldn't get themselves to escape to space did this instead. In the city, it's very segmented, so if they go far in any direction, it's like a new country.
The characters are a bit bland and static, but it's two teen boys that are best friends and the main character's crush. They decide to stick together when an earthquake scares everyone else to abandon their area of the city and go on the Pilgrimage to the front of the city. What follows is a wild trip for the three. Somehow there's a semi-magical slave-driver that has taken over a whole segment of the city just to endlessly whip humans into dragging his cart around, looking for more slaves. They later meet giants, who turn out to be normal sized. So our protagonists are small in stature compared to us. Even later, they encounter humans that are so enmeshed with some hyper-advanced technology that they are immortal and have some level of super powers. These people draw them in and have sex with them and try to get them to join them. They escape though, only to later be caught by people even smaller than them in the city's jails. Others let them out, explain to them more about the history of the city, and then bring them to the front of the city, which has also been destroyed, to show them all the inhabitants feeling trapped outside the city, just sort of standing around the ocean beach - millions of them. And the slave driver is there with thousands of people pulling his now massive cart. The hero kills him, sort of, then they eventually decide to go live with some people that had been living outside of the city for a long time. However, most people went back to the ruined city to try to live (but likely die) there. A big realization was that they had been bred for captivity, whether intentionally or not is unknown because of how much history was lost.
Not sure of an overall message here. Perhaps it was anti-city in some ways, suggesting it breeds out characteristics of independence and self-sufficiency. This seems to then be equated with being slaves, preferring horrible lives as long as they're simple and easily understood lives. There may also be a small undercurrent of environmentalism, since it was hinted that humans destroyed the earth that way (as opposed to nuclear war which was so popular a worry back then).
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
March 23, 2021
This one is special. Ignore the cover because it suggests something that it isn't. A group of friends-- young kids, barely teens, are caught up in a momentous jolt when the City that Moves Stops. Forced to go on a 'Pilgrimage' to the Frontend with their families, they get lost. But one of them has a eldritch Jewel that opens doors and wakes up ancient machines and they run through an incredible interior world that when you finally piece it together is simply awe inspiring. Give this one a try on a cold Saturday Afternoon.
January 16, 2026
I can't add much to the other reviews. I would like to point out that Mendelson did eventually publish more novels: Song Ba To, a war memoir, in 2011; and Dark Sea Rising, in collaboration with Barry Broad, in 2018. The latter is the first book of a planned series, I believe.
UPDATE 2025: Second reading, many years after the first. This is a novel of big ideas & world-building; it's the kind of book I would like to give extra points for ambition. But Mendelson's prose & characterization don't quite keep up with his premise. It's an intriguing story nonetheless. I wish he had written more. (Copies of this DAW paperback are still cheap & widely available, for those who are curious.)
UPDATE 2025: Second reading, many years after the first. This is a novel of big ideas & world-building; it's the kind of book I would like to give extra points for ambition. But Mendelson's prose & characterization don't quite keep up with his premise. It's an intriguing story nonetheless. I wish he had written more. (Copies of this DAW paperback are still cheap & widely available, for those who are curious.)
Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews