Cinnabar, la ciudad en el centro del tiempo

by Edward Bryant, Elvio E. Gandolfo (Translator)

Cinnabar era un flujo de torres de cristal y paredes metálicas encaramado a la cima de acantilados rojos que se derrumban hasta una estrecha cinta de playa y después el océano. El desierto. La faja verde. La ciudad. El mar. Parecía haber poco más en el mundo. Se rumoreaba que el ferrocarril elevado corría hasta un sitio llamado Els. Pero nadie estaba del todo seguro; nadie recordaba haber viajado alguna vez tan lejos. Un día pudo verse un hombre sobre el camino a Cinnabar. Marchaba desde el desierto hacia la ciudad, silbando melodías marciales mientras caminaba."

Todos los tiempos y todas las posibilidades convergen en Cinnabar. Para experimentar su magia uno debe: buscar su entrada, a la vez lejana y cercana… recorrer incontables parsecs y milenios… cruzar al otro lado del espejo… seguir el sendero de ladrillos amarillos… girar a la izquierda en la estrella del norte y seguir adelante hasta el alba… O usar este libro como mapa. he aquí los compañeros de viaje: Tourmaline Hayes, la sex star de la Red; Obregón, el científico absolutamente no especializado; Leah Sand, la melancólica animadora de televisión; Jade Azul, la madregata creada por la computadora; Puma Lou Landis, una heroína; Sidhe, el tiburón que viajó 350 millones de años; Harry Vincent Blake, el estudiante del Siglo XX que cayó por la conejera; y Términex, la última, intermitentemente sana, computadora. ¡Una expedición a la Ciudad de las alternativas infinitas!

Genres: Science Fiction, Fantasy, Short Stories, Dying Earth, Fiction, Anthologies, Collections

242 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1976

About the author

Edward Winslow Bryant, Jr. was born August 27, 1945 in White Plains NY and was raised on a cattle ranch in Wyoming. He attended the University of Wyoming, where he earned a Master’s in English in 1968 and ’69. He went to the Clarion Writers’ Workshop in 1968. In 1972 he moved to Denver CO, where he founded the Northern Colorado Writers Workshop. He helped found and run many other workshops and classes as well, including the Colorado Springs Writers Workshop.

Bryant was an accomplished science-fiction writer, mostly of short stories. He began publishing SF work with “They Come Only in Dreams” and “Sending the Very Best”, both in January 1970. For the next two decades he was a frequent contributor to magazines and anthologies, and though his fictional output slowed in the ’90s, he was still active as a critic. He was a familiar figure at conventions, especially in Colorado fandom. He was a frequent guest at the World Horror Convention, and chaired the 2000 convention in Denver.

With Harlan Ellison he wrote Phoenix without Ashes (1978), and solo short novel Fetish appeared in 1991. He also edited 2076: The American Tricentennial (1977), and was an editor for Wormhole Books. He wrote screenplays and occasionally appeared in films.

--excerpted from Locus Publications

Reviews

[Craig · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a collection of eight stories all set in the far-future city of Cinnabar, with different themes and storylines but a few over-lapping characters. It's not a fix-up novel, and even the styles and the focus shift from aggressively New Wave to Old School and back again. It's a very good and thought-provoking selection; the individual stories were originally published in the Universe, Infinity, and Clarion original anthology series, as well as a trio from Vertex magazine. My favorites are The Legend of Cougar Lou Landis, Brain Terminal, and Sharking Down.

[Robert · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book is isn't a novel; it's a collection of short stories with a common setting and overlapping sets of characters. This kind of thing isn't done that much anymore (unless by Alexander McCall Smith) but was not so terribly unusual in the SF genre back when magazines were still at least on equal terms with paperback books. In this case the common setting is Cinnabar, the City at the Centre of Time, which is not a Utopia, but stands alongside some other Cities of the fantastical literary genres as a place that many real people would like to go to, at least for a visit. (Moorcock's Tanelorn and M. John Harrison's Viriconium are two such kindred Urbs.) Indeed in one story, an adolescent male is forcibly, though accidentally, dragged from the 1960s to Cinnabar, which may be the only human community left in its time. This simple device allows Bryant to contrast the culture he was writing in with the culture he was writing about very effectively. What is Cinnabar like, then?

When I first read the book I was a teen (like the visitor to Cinnabar) and I was greatly impressed by the book. Twenty or so years later I remembered liking it greatly for its atmosphere and for one story in particular...Sharking Down. I didn't remember much detail about the city, just an over-all notion of other-worldly, dream-like strangeness. Re-reading it I find that this is because the place is not described in great detail and it is placed between the sea and the desert, between two empty worlds. One's imagination is allowed to work on it as new locales and oddities and strange characters are introduced, never filling the place, indeed leaving it still largely empty and unexplored. There is so much room for more stories that seem never to have appeared. I forgot just how much sex there is in Cinnabar - seems like they hardly have time for anything else! Sometimes it's a distraction but over-all it is a big aspect of what Bryant was writing about - 30 or so years after its publication we aren't really much closer to the exceedingly permissive attitudes he gives his characters and it seems to me that one reason amongst many is that the problem of disease has got worse rather than better.

One thing I did not forget is Sharking Down. Because I love it. It is the penultimate story of the collection and spends much of its time on matters extraneous to the central plot, setting things up for the final story - I'd forgotten all that - but I'd remembered accurately the main thrust and plot of the story, which is about sharks. Not just any old sharks, either, but two Carcharodon Megalodon - apparently the largest sharks to have swum the oceans of Earth, 20m long as full grown adults. One of these has been ressurected through genetic means, the other is a synthetic reconstruction - and the latter was specifically built to fight the former. What happens I shall not say and why it happens - well, see if you can figure it out from the cryptic clues given in the earlier part of the story.

I've told people the story of Sharking Down repeatedly, cutting it to its bare essentials, so that it has taken on a sort of oral tradition in my mind and in some ways that version is better than Bryant's - but only outside the context of the book. Within it, Bryant rules. Why do I love this essentially simple story? Because it is about sharks, and I love sharks, as did Bryant. And if you're going to have a fantastical story about sharks, why bother with Great Whites or Tigers? Why not go for the Ultimate Shark, instead? Hence Megalodon. It's a great story - but perhaps if you don't admire a-moral predators as much as I do you won't think so.

Over all this re-reading of Cinnabar was enjoyable but many of the SF ideas presented which seemed radical to me twenty years ago are rather old hat now - the book survives mainly on its atmosphere, characters and pair of really big fish...

****************************************************************************************************

On reading for a third time, I notice that the two stand-out stories are those I give some details of above: the one where Cinnabar receives a visitor from 1963 and Sharking Down. There are many subtleties in the latter that I am not sure I had noticed previously. For instance, the name of the genetically resurrected shark has been carefully chosen by the author to have multiple symbolic meanings in relation to the rest of the story and the title also has multiple interpretations.

I should try to dig up more by Bryant; there is another short story collection, at least.

[Ira (SF Words of Wonder) · Rating 3 out of 5]

Check out my full, spoiler free, video review HERE.

Sort of a fixup novel, since all 8 short stories take place in the bizarre city of Cinnabar. Very confusing and disorienting at first, but as you read through the collection you will start to learn more about Cinnabar and its unique inhabitants. There are some characters that show up in multiple stories, sometimes giving the reader a plot thread to follow. Overall, this was a good read, I pushed through some of the stories I didn’t like to find out what was going on.

My favorite stories:
• Sharking Down (so weird and fun, my favorite)
• Brain Terminal (the final story, felt like The Wizard of Oz)
• The Road to Cinnabar (first story, good intro, pay attention at the end)
• Hayes and the Heterogyne (a time travel story that is a great way to explain more about Cinnabar, funny too)

[Derek · Rating 2 out of 5]

It overturned my expectations twice. I went in expecting something akin to Viriconium--a dying science-fictiony city at the end of time--but this seemed to be defied in the early stories. But just as I started to groove to the mysterious not-obviously-futuristic feel, it twisted again and became that Viriconium. Actually more sort of a Dancers at the End of Time and The City and the Stars.

Afterwards, I'm not sure what to think. The stories make a more poetic sense than anything else, and may not be intended to convey more than an otherworldly mood. There are elements of literary experimentation that put it into the New Wave school.

I honestly would have preferred if the stories kept to the outskirts of Cinnabar, and the city itself kept a mystery.

[Peter Tillman · Rating 3 out of 5]

Chance purchase at the Phoenix bookstore in SLO, and one I've somehow missed, over the years. It's Bryant's homage to Ballard's Vermilion Sands, and starting out very well indeed, with that frisson of strangeness that's kept me reading this stuff for, well, longer than many of you have been alive.

Well, the first couple of stories were really good, 4-star, but then they started going downhill. I went back & read "Sharking Down", as another reviewer here really liked it. Eh for me, and for the last story. I skipped a couple before the shark one. 2.6 stars overall, for the 6 stories I read.

By chance, the second Vermillion Sands-inspired collection read last year. The other was Lee Killough's "Aventine" (1981), and I recommend it: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...

And if you missed Vermilion Sands (1971), start there first. Remarkable stories. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/7...

[Bernard · Rating 4 out of 5]

I've finished the book, but for the life of me I couldn't tell you exactly what it's about. I suspect I'll have to read it a few more times before I understand it thoroughly. On the surface, it's a short collection of loosely connected stories centering around an unusual caste of characters (a woman adventurer/polygamist, a mad scientist, and a shark being a few). The setting is Cinnabar, an eternal city with on a desolate planet. Society in Cinnabar is very technologically advanced. Hardly anybody dies of old age because of the state of medicine, and the city is run by a super AI.

The book is short, but it's almost impossible to fully understand what's going on the first time you read a chapter. Part of that is because the author's writing style is a bit dense and also because the stories are very fragmented. I believe the exercise of the narrative is to take these fragments and construct a whole picture of the city and the underlying story, but I haven't been able to quite do that yet.

It's also a quite sexual book in a casual sort of way. I think this is because everyone in the city is very old with young bodies, so all of their inhibitions have faded away long ago and they don't know what else to do in their spare time. Most of the time I'm not comfortable with overt sexuality in a book, but in this case it didn't really bother me. It's more part of the setting than intentional titillation. Definitely not as bad as Game of Thrones, anyway.

Part of why I think I need to read the book again is because there were a couple parts that absolutely stunned me with how accurately it portrayed human nature. I think one chapter in particular has changed the way I look at life.

Overall, I would recommend this book if you don't mind something out of the ordinary, even for science fiction. It's a short read and the writing is beautiful, if disorienting. But keep in mind that this book is about the city just as much as it is about the characters. You have to understand the city before you can comprehend the characters or the plot.

[Lord Humungus · Rating 2 out of 5]

Bryant's short stories appeared in Omni and were always well written and a little different. This comp deals specifically with the Cinnabar setting and was supposed to be some of this best work. Though well written, it didn't connect with me. Disappointed, I still haven't read more Bryant at this time of writing.

[Bradley · Rating 2 out of 5]

Ugh. Did not like most of the stories in this book. Goodbye.

[Apocryphal Chris · Rating 3 out of 5]

Cinnabar by Edward Bryant is a themed short story collection first published in 1976, containing eight stories written between 1971 and 1976.

The stories are all set in the far future city of Cinnabar, a place perhaps located at the end of the world. It is an homage to J.G. Ballard’s Vermillion Sands, and shares much in the way of tone with that collection. There are also some dying earth vibes, more reminiscent of Gene Wolfe than Vance, I would say.

Five of the stories are really short, about 10 pages each. Three are rather longer, 30-40 pages each, and these were the later written ones. I found the shorter stories to be rather on the boring side, and not really evoking much sense of place. But I really liked three longer stories quite a lot. These all featured the recurring characters of Tourmeline Hayes, a sex artist, and Timnath Obregon, a dilettante science tinkerer, and, in a key background role, Terminex, Cinbabar’s central computer.

Bryant’s prose is not as strong as Ballard’s, Wolfe’s or Vance’s, but the top three stories were certainly imaginative and entertaining enough to have me curious about reading more of his work. These three stories featured an encounter with a time traveller from the past, a journey to discover the unknown centre of Cinnabar, and a curious episode that arises after Obregon recreates an extinct megashark. Bryant mostly wrote short stories, his work appearing in Orbit, Vertex, and Again Dangerous Visions, among others.

3/5 for the lot, averaged from 2 for the shorter stories and 4 each for the three longer ones.

[Mark Stackpole]

I'm with John Clute on this one: the stories take a distressing journey from heady new wave experimentation to clunky commercial conventionalism. And it seems like every SF author in the seventies had a Wizard of Oz story to purge from their system.

[Jimmy · Rating 2 out of 5]

Exudes the stale must of 70’s sex-obsessed scifi. A smorgasbord of curious conceits stunted by superficial explorations that, like a 13 year old boy scoring a Playboy out of an alley dumpster, scrabbles past the preamble to leer at the centerfold.

[Sir Blue · Rating 5 out of 5]

There is a city at the center of space time. There looking for the energy Crystal's. They do battles with guns and swords. Mech suit robots and armor.

[Rog Petersen · Rating 2 out of 5]

I read a few of the stories, got bored, put it down, thought I'd go back to them, book is just cluttering up my end table. I have no idea how to review this thing.

[Jack T · Rating 5 out of 5]

4.5

[Robin · Rating 2 out of 5]

As short stories none possess any real power, and together they make a very uneven collection. Bryant seems too enamoured of his own creation to share it with anyone in any meaningful way; the result is stifled and barely coherent. There is one truly good story here (Hayes and the Heterogyne) that helps illuminate facets of human nature, but it might not be worth trudging through all the rest.

[Charles · Rating 3 out of 5]

I'm giving this 3 and a half stars really. It definitely has an otherworldly feel that stays with you.

[Jake · Rating 3 out of 5]

More of a 3.5.

[Howard Brazee]

Surrealistic book of stories with common characters and a far futuristic city of Cinnabar between the ocean and the desert.