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Cities
China Miéville, Michael Moorcock, Paul Di Filippo, and Geoff Ryman: These award winners are on any list of the most inventive, popular, and critically acclaimed talents writing in the realms of fantasy and science fiction today. Their four original creations for this collection range from surreal visions of the infinite to high-tech nightmare; from apocalyptic ruins stalked by heroes and vampires to a near future where the aged terrorize the young.
304 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2003
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About the author
Peter Crowther
194 books40 followersPeter Crowther, born in 1949, is a journalist, anthologist, and the author of many short stories and novels. He is the co-founder of PS Publishing and the editor of Postscripts.
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Displaying 1 - 11 of 11 reviews
November 3, 2015
Right lets start this one again (suffered some serious procrastination there)..
I have had this book for some time now although it wasnt till I decided to read it and add it to GR that I realised HOW long I had owned it. Yes go on and check,
Anyway it is part of a project by Peter Crowther called Fouresight (thats one to fight the auto correct over) which takes four prominent authors and gets them to write a story on a particular subject - in this case cities. I will admit I think its a rather audacious challenge since its not often (or easy I guess) that the city you are basing your story in is in fact the intended star of the show.
The stories as you can imagine are varied and wildly imaginative - and for me the variations in styles and stories make some easier and more interesting than others. The book is just shy of 300 pages and with 4 stories spread amongst the pages makes for almost novella in length, however once the stories get going its surprising how quickly the pages pass by.
It is very difficult I find to comment about anthologies of any kind as their content by their very nature are varied and extreme (maybe not in the graphic sense but certainly in style, and subject and character as that is what makes one story different to the next surely) and such an experimental book as this just compounds it. However if you are looking for some excellent examples of shorter fiction by some of the more creative authors among us then this is a great place to start - however be warned they are varied.
One final comment to say - this appears to be the last of the series of 4 books - I have Infinities and Futures but I cannot find the first book in the series, a shame but I am sure I will at some point. Also if these are imaginative now I wonder how they were received when the books were first published.
I have had this book for some time now although it wasnt till I decided to read it and add it to GR that I realised HOW long I had owned it. Yes go on and check,
Anyway it is part of a project by Peter Crowther called Fouresight (thats one to fight the auto correct over) which takes four prominent authors and gets them to write a story on a particular subject - in this case cities. I will admit I think its a rather audacious challenge since its not often (or easy I guess) that the city you are basing your story in is in fact the intended star of the show.
The stories as you can imagine are varied and wildly imaginative - and for me the variations in styles and stories make some easier and more interesting than others. The book is just shy of 300 pages and with 4 stories spread amongst the pages makes for almost novella in length, however once the stories get going its surprising how quickly the pages pass by.
It is very difficult I find to comment about anthologies of any kind as their content by their very nature are varied and extreme (maybe not in the graphic sense but certainly in style, and subject and character as that is what makes one story different to the next surely) and such an experimental book as this just compounds it. However if you are looking for some excellent examples of shorter fiction by some of the more creative authors among us then this is a great place to start - however be warned they are varied.
One final comment to say - this appears to be the last of the series of 4 books - I have Infinities and Futures but I cannot find the first book in the series, a shame but I am sure I will at some point. Also if these are imaginative now I wonder how they were received when the books were first published.
January 27, 2008
Cities is a very strange anthology of four longish speculative stories with urban themes. Three of those stories are excellent, and one is awful (the latter being the only thing preventing tis from being a 5-star book).
A Year In The Linear City (Paul Di Filippo) is an amazing exploration of a one-dimensional city, with Hell on one side and Heaven on the other. The protagonist, a writer of speculative fiction, imagines worlds that aren't one-dimensional. The result is a fascinating, weird, and hilarious work of screwball speculation by the genre's maddest hatter.
The Tain is a dark, edgy story written by China Miéville but inspired by a short piece written by Borges. In it, the creatures that live on the other side of our reflections (called imagos) revolt and break through into our world. Civilization effectively collapses, and two very different protagonists struggle to reconcile themselves with their other halves.
Firing The Cathedral, by Michael Moorcock, is flatly awful. Part of some other continuity, it's stocked with characters who can't stand on their own, and crowd the largely incomprehensible plot like clowns in a clown car. Best bet is to skip this one entirely.
V.A.O. by Geoff Ryman is an interesting look at a future of universal facial identification and elderly hackers. What happens when the superhackers of tomorrow become the elderly of the day after, in a world saturated with information technology? Hijinks, that's what!
So in conclusion: If you're a fan of experimental, exotic speculative fiction, get the book and skip the third story.
A Year In The Linear City (Paul Di Filippo) is an amazing exploration of a one-dimensional city, with Hell on one side and Heaven on the other. The protagonist, a writer of speculative fiction, imagines worlds that aren't one-dimensional. The result is a fascinating, weird, and hilarious work of screwball speculation by the genre's maddest hatter.
The Tain is a dark, edgy story written by China Miéville but inspired by a short piece written by Borges. In it, the creatures that live on the other side of our reflections (called imagos) revolt and break through into our world. Civilization effectively collapses, and two very different protagonists struggle to reconcile themselves with their other halves.
Firing The Cathedral, by Michael Moorcock, is flatly awful. Part of some other continuity, it's stocked with characters who can't stand on their own, and crowd the largely incomprehensible plot like clowns in a clown car. Best bet is to skip this one entirely.
V.A.O. by Geoff Ryman is an interesting look at a future of universal facial identification and elderly hackers. What happens when the superhackers of tomorrow become the elderly of the day after, in a world saturated with information technology? Hijinks, that's what!
So in conclusion: If you're a fan of experimental, exotic speculative fiction, get the book and skip the third story.
March 8, 2016
I abandoned the first story at page 8, too hard to read, story obfuscated by literary allusion.
The second story was good, a mind boggling idea made real.
so far the third has me hooked on the multiple quotes which seem to bear little relationship to the story if there is one?
I abandoned the third story as well, actually, I couldn't find a story but the multiple quotes at the head of each chapter were interesting,
I nearly threw the book away at this point. I'm glad I didn't. Ryman's V.A.O. is a good solid read full of ideas and heart. This story earned 2 of the 3 stars the anthology garnered. Mieville got the other.
The second story was good, a mind boggling idea made real.
so far the third has me hooked on the multiple quotes which seem to bear little relationship to the story if there is one?
I abandoned the third story as well, actually, I couldn't find a story but the multiple quotes at the head of each chapter were interesting,
I nearly threw the book away at this point. I'm glad I didn't. Ryman's V.A.O. is a good solid read full of ideas and heart. This story earned 2 of the 3 stars the anthology garnered. Mieville got the other.
Currently reading
December 11, 2023A Year in the Linear City (read 2023 November 25):
It was astonishingly hard to get ahold of this story, and I bought this entire book just for it. I now no longer remember why I wanted to read it, but I don't think I would have been prepared regardless. It is very much what it says on the tin, a recounting of events over one year in a -- the -- linear city. Like a year in the life of most people, some story arcs tie up neatly and most don't.
The person into whose life we're invited is more or less an author-insert, and the linear city is an infinite and fantastical expansion of what might be any American city, though not Boston or any of those early-colonial cities with European street non-grids. The City is a perfect grid of 2 columns: on one side the River (the near-visible landmass beyond presumed to be Heaven), on the other, railway Tracks (beyond them, presumed to be Hell), and between them 2 blocks separated by a street called Broadway. The Broadway I know is a transverse and not an axis of Manhattan, but Manhattan of the 90s fits in pretty well. Probably even the 70s, though I know a lot less of that.
Everyday life is both humdrum (well, as much as that of a successful magazine author can be -- I hazard most readers can't evaluate the truthfulness of this depiction) and mundanely fantastic: just below the surface, everyone is obsessed with the afterlife. The denizens of the city have the curse of knowing which side their loved ones have gone to after death, though not the blessing of what that means. Their only hope is to go to the same side. Death is marked dramatically, with huge spectral beings flying into the room and removing the corpse. Those who go to the River are carried away by Fishwives (harpy-mermaids) and those who go to the Tracks are taken by Yardbulls (which I imagine as a cross between the stereotypical horned-winged devil and the Chicago Bulls logo). People believe the River is Heaven and the Tracks Hell because such obviously good and bad people go there respectively. Meanwhile, there's an illicit trade in scales, rumored to be from Fishwives but actually from god-knows-where under the city. And there are 2 currencies, each representing one of these psychopomps, whose relative value fluctuates all the time for some reason.
There are multiple little resolutions but the big resolution, , is about the extent of the city. The protagonist's friend once marked a subway car to see if it would come back, and it never did. When he runs away in grief after the death of his lover, he too is never seen again. Troublingly, each borough (100 streets, or 200 blocks each containing ~1 building) specializes in certain goods, so everyone knows that some of their everyday goods come from elsewhere -- but not where. Communication is basically impossible with people from 250,000 blocks (2500 boroughs) away. A borough in this world is honestly quite long (and after all, it's said that British accents change every 25 miles or so) and has only 2 neighbors, but it's bizarre and probably satirical that the alienation of difficult terrain can occur in an urban environment connected by a subway.
No one knows how the city really works, and engineers semi-blindly fix instead of building anything new. It takes to extremes the separation that many people have from the environment that sustains them. Some people know a great deal about how their environments physically work, whether it's the forager in the woods or the electrical engineer stringing up wires. Others know a great deal about physical principles that apply to any environment, but not necessarily how to manipulate their own immediate one, the natural scientists of the world. The protagonist and his friends are the sort who have dedicated their lives to the human interactions facilitated by the environment, without thinking too much about it: artists but also politicians. Even the firefighter is mostly reactive, valued more for her strength and bravery than her tactical knowledge. It's possible the protagonist is just not the type to care about these things and so wouldn't mention them, but it bothers me when speculative fiction takes this route out of depicting the world it's built.
I appreciated the big swing it took with the worldbuilding. I'm also somewhat disappointed because it seems like some of the worldbuilding was back-burnered, or used as a gag, to tell a rather banal story about being a writer with a hot girlfriend and a rakish best friend. I wanted to see more of or maybe even understand this mysterious world and the cultures in it. The gags about "ha ha, the sci-fi writer character is speculating about our universe, what a lark" were kind of frustrating because they wasted words that could have been spent developing his universe.
It was astonishingly hard to get ahold of this story, and I bought this entire book just for it. I now no longer remember why I wanted to read it, but I don't think I would have been prepared regardless. It is very much what it says on the tin, a recounting of events over one year in a -- the -- linear city. Like a year in the life of most people, some story arcs tie up neatly and most don't.
The person into whose life we're invited is more or less an author-insert, and the linear city is an infinite and fantastical expansion of what might be any American city, though not Boston or any of those early-colonial cities with European street non-grids. The City is a perfect grid of 2 columns: on one side the River (the near-visible landmass beyond presumed to be Heaven), on the other, railway Tracks (beyond them, presumed to be Hell), and between them 2 blocks separated by a street called Broadway. The Broadway I know is a transverse and not an axis of Manhattan, but Manhattan of the 90s fits in pretty well. Probably even the 70s, though I know a lot less of that.
Everyday life is both humdrum (well, as much as that of a successful magazine author can be -- I hazard most readers can't evaluate the truthfulness of this depiction) and mundanely fantastic: just below the surface, everyone is obsessed with the afterlife. The denizens of the city have the curse of knowing which side their loved ones have gone to after death, though not the blessing of what that means. Their only hope is to go to the same side. Death is marked dramatically, with huge spectral beings flying into the room and removing the corpse. Those who go to the River are carried away by Fishwives (harpy-mermaids) and those who go to the Tracks are taken by Yardbulls (which I imagine as a cross between the stereotypical horned-winged devil and the Chicago Bulls logo). People believe the River is Heaven and the Tracks Hell because such obviously good and bad people go there respectively. Meanwhile, there's an illicit trade in scales, rumored to be from Fishwives but actually from god-knows-where under the city. And there are 2 currencies, each representing one of these psychopomps, whose relative value fluctuates all the time for some reason.
There are multiple little resolutions but the big resolution, , is about the extent of the city. The protagonist's friend once marked a subway car to see if it would come back, and it never did. When he runs away in grief after the death of his lover, he too is never seen again. Troublingly, each borough (100 streets, or 200 blocks each containing ~1 building) specializes in certain goods, so everyone knows that some of their everyday goods come from elsewhere -- but not where. Communication is basically impossible with people from 250,000 blocks (2500 boroughs) away. A borough in this world is honestly quite long (and after all, it's said that British accents change every 25 miles or so) and has only 2 neighbors, but it's bizarre and probably satirical that the alienation of difficult terrain can occur in an urban environment connected by a subway.
(The math here doesn't really check out. It takes "about an hour" by ship to traverse a borough, yet the total trip in that direction is said to take 2 weeks, which is a factor of 7 too fast. By Manhattan-standard slim blocks, 100 blocks would be about 8km, and 8kph is a much more realistic speed for a passenger boat than 60kph.)
No one knows how the city really works, and engineers semi-blindly fix instead of building anything new. It takes to extremes the separation that many people have from the environment that sustains them. Some people know a great deal about how their environments physically work, whether it's the forager in the woods or the electrical engineer stringing up wires. Others know a great deal about physical principles that apply to any environment, but not necessarily how to manipulate their own immediate one, the natural scientists of the world. The protagonist and his friends are the sort who have dedicated their lives to the human interactions facilitated by the environment, without thinking too much about it: artists but also politicians. Even the firefighter is mostly reactive, valued more for her strength and bravery than her tactical knowledge. It's possible the protagonist is just not the type to care about these things and so wouldn't mention them, but it bothers me when speculative fiction takes this route out of depicting the world it's built.
I appreciated the big swing it took with the worldbuilding. I'm also somewhat disappointed because it seems like some of the worldbuilding was back-burnered, or used as a gag, to tell a rather banal story about being a writer with a hot girlfriend and a rakish best friend. I wanted to see more of or maybe even understand this mysterious world and the cultures in it. The gags about "ha ha, the sci-fi writer character is speculating about our universe, what a lark" were kind of frustrating because they wasted words that could have been spent developing his universe.
September 16, 2019
"A Year in the Linear City" by Paul di Filippo - 2.5/5 stars.
It was an interesting story, and I thought the premise was definitely its main highlight. I really enjoy the concept of huge, dystopian cities. I didn't particularly vibe with any of the characters, though, and was slightly frustrated by the male/female dynamic. The men were definitely more real than the women...
"The Tain" by China Miéville - 3/5 stars.
This story was the reason I picked up this book in the first place, so I admit I was kind of disappointed. It was an interesting story, but especially after the first one, it really did WOW me.
Again, it had an amazingly inventive premise but not great characters to back it up. I thought the concept was so cool and all the ideas that went into it were great, but Scholl never became very real. There were a lot of names thrown around but no one got to me. There was also just a bit too much going on on the page to really get the heart of it across - Miéville definitely muddied the concept with too many words.
Loooove the mirror writing, though. That's my favorite kind of sprinkling of form within writing.
"Firing the Cathedral" by Michael Moorcock - -/5 stars DNF
No.
I really couldn't do it. Too many Nazis, too much 9/11 anti-Muslim, just grossness happening. I never really made it to the point of the story because I couldn't get past the barrage of upsetting quotes or the two characters with continuous references to Nazis/looking like Nazis.
"VAO" by Geoff Ryman - 2/5 stars.
This story actually would have gotten 3 stars, but I knocked one off for the completely uncalled for use of "fairies" for a gay couple. Like what the hell did they ever do to the main character for him to call them slurs like that? I get the narrator was supposed to be kind of "edgy" but you can be edgy without being a complete ass.
Once again, great premise. Really interesting. And at least for this story, even though I did not like the main character, I felt like I knew something about him. He was definitely the closest to the reader out of all the characters of all the stories.
Overall:
The main theme of these stories was interesting ideas but not great execution. I picked it up for China Miéville because I normally love his work. His story was okay, and if it had been a Miéville collection I'm sure I would have been more inclined to keep it or reread it at some point. But none of the other authors in the collection really drew me into their work and a couple included some elements that were quite unpleasant to me specifically. So while I'll continue enjoying Miéville, I think I'll give Ryman and Moorcock a hard pass next time.
It was an interesting story, and I thought the premise was definitely its main highlight. I really enjoy the concept of huge, dystopian cities. I didn't particularly vibe with any of the characters, though, and was slightly frustrated by the male/female dynamic. The men were definitely more real than the women...
"The Tain" by China Miéville - 3/5 stars.
This story was the reason I picked up this book in the first place, so I admit I was kind of disappointed. It was an interesting story, but especially after the first one, it really did WOW me.
Again, it had an amazingly inventive premise but not great characters to back it up. I thought the concept was so cool and all the ideas that went into it were great, but Scholl never became very real. There were a lot of names thrown around but no one got to me. There was also just a bit too much going on on the page to really get the heart of it across - Miéville definitely muddied the concept with too many words.
Loooove the mirror writing, though. That's my favorite kind of sprinkling of form within writing.
"Firing the Cathedral" by Michael Moorcock - -/5 stars DNF
No.
I really couldn't do it. Too many Nazis, too much 9/11 anti-Muslim, just grossness happening. I never really made it to the point of the story because I couldn't get past the barrage of upsetting quotes or the two characters with continuous references to Nazis/looking like Nazis.
"VAO" by Geoff Ryman - 2/5 stars.
This story actually would have gotten 3 stars, but I knocked one off for the completely uncalled for use of "fairies" for a gay couple. Like what the hell did they ever do to the main character for him to call them slurs like that? I get the narrator was supposed to be kind of "edgy" but you can be edgy without being a complete ass.
Once again, great premise. Really interesting. And at least for this story, even though I did not like the main character, I felt like I knew something about him. He was definitely the closest to the reader out of all the characters of all the stories.
Overall:
The main theme of these stories was interesting ideas but not great execution. I picked it up for China Miéville because I normally love his work. His story was okay, and if it had been a Miéville collection I'm sure I would have been more inclined to keep it or reread it at some point. But none of the other authors in the collection really drew me into their work and a couple included some elements that were quite unpleasant to me specifically. So while I'll continue enjoying Miéville, I think I'll give Ryman and Moorcock a hard pass next time.
May 15, 2017
A Year In The Linear City 3/5
The Tain 3/5
Firing The Cathedral 1/5
V.A.O. 1/5
The Tain 3/5
Firing The Cathedral 1/5
V.A.O. 1/5
March 20, 2015
This quartet leads off with "A Year In The Linear City" by Paul Di Filippo. It's a charmingly odd story set in a curiously odd world. The best of the lot. Next up is "The Tain" by China Miéville. I think many people would prefer this one, but I'm always bored by Miéville's London book and he squanders an interesting idea on London here. Also vampires. "Firing The Cathedral" is Moorcock's response to the Western governments' response to 9/11. Unfortunately, he forgot to include a story or any comprehensible thoughts. "V.A.O." by Geoff Ryman finished off the collection, which finds a retired hacker in an old folks home. I don't think I like old folks home adventures. There is a nice absurdist slant going on, but the story still didn't click for me.
January 27, 2016
Cyberpunks, steampunks, both the old guard and the new; four short stories gathered together around the (sometimes tenuous) theme of the city.
I was familiar with some of the writers, not with others. The results surprised me at times based on what little assumptions I had, but generally this unusual compilation -bound like a coffee table book - was fairly enjoyable.
I was familiar with some of the writers, not with others. The results surprised me at times based on what little assumptions I had, but generally this unusual compilation -bound like a coffee table book - was fairly enjoyable.
April 23, 2007
This is a collection of four novellas about cities. There are two really good ones in here -- A Year in the Linear City, by Paul Di Filippo, and The Tain, by China Mieville.
April 19, 2013
I enjoyed there out of the four stories... I still have no clue what happened in the third story....
tbr
February 13, 2010loan to mandana
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