The Pastel City

Viriconium #1

by M. John Harrison

The first book in the Viriconium In the distant future, a medieval system rises from the ruins of a technology that destroyed itself. Armored knights ride their horses across dunes of rust, battling for the honor of the Queen. But the knights find more to menace them than mere swords and lances. A brave quest leads them face to face with the awesome power of a complex, lethal technology that has been erased from the face of the Earth--but lives on, underground.

Genres: Fantasy, Science Fiction, Fiction, Dying Earth, Post Apocalyptic, Science Fiction Fantasy, Novels

157 pages, Mass Market Paperback

First published September 1, 1971

About the author

aka Gabriel King (with Jane Johnson)

Michael John Harrison, known for publication purposes primarily as M. John Harrison, is an English author and literary critic. His work includes the Viriconium sequence of novels and short stories, Climbers, and the Kefahuchi Tract trilogy, which consists of Light, Nova Swing and Empty Space.

Reviews

[Bill Kerwin · Rating 5 out of 5]

M. John Harrison, one of the youngest of the young Turks of the New Wave science fiction/ fantasy movement, wrote The Pastel City (1971) as an anti-fantasy, a sword and sorcery epic that would frustrate the expectations and disturb the complacency of devotees of the watered-down Tolkien and third-rate Howard and Leiber imitators that flooded the fiction market of the time. Now, more than forty years later, it is clear that the New Wave has accomplished its task so well that The Pastel City seems more like an affectionate, sophisticated re-imagining of a genre than an attack upon it, more like a shift in tone than the vanguard of an insurrection.

It possesses--at least at first reading--many of the traditional pleasures of the genre, being sort of Three Musketeers, by way of Moorcock, with elements of Space Opera and scavenger culture, plus an ancient wizard and a mechanical-genius dwarf thrown in for good measure. True, it all takes place in an exhausted, damaged landscape, but Harrison describes the waste and detritus in such evocative and vivid prose (influenced by but not derivative of J.G. Ballard) that both the eye and ear delight in its bleak beauty. Soon, however, the warriors' plans for Queen and Country begin to wither, characters you have come to love fail and die, and you begin to sense that--even in the third volume of this trilogy (if this indeed be a trilogy)--nothing will turn out alright, even in the end.

I give The Pastel City my highest praise because Harrison not only writes a poetic prose unusually concentrated and compact, but he also summons up--when he deigns to use it--a narrative genius for clear and concise expression. As a consequence, this novella (scarcely more than 45,000 words) communicates a universe more complex and rich in detail than any typical fantasy volume three or four times its size.

[mark monday · Rating 4 out of 5]

oh the pretty city! a pastel dream, a symbol, a memento mori to the afternoon past; a vision held of that sunny afternoon, held in place like a butterfly in amber. the afternoon has passed but this pastel city lives on in its fragile fugue state, imagining a past that never can be again and forgetting itself, what it is and what it should be. our heroes fight the northern hordes and their fearful weapons to save this pretty pastel city. but should they? they fight for a dream, and all dreams are fleeting.

oh such pretty words! Harrison channels Jack Vance and his science fantasy The Dying Earth in this slim and enticing tale. the elegant prose, the terseness, the cynicism about the cyclical quality of human struggle. but he does not ape Vance; he is his own human. and so the pretty prose, the colors, the evanescence of it all, are suffused with a melancholy and dread quite unlike the moods of that author. this gorgeous book conjures Vance in all of his stylishness, but has made itself into something quite different.

oh you pretty things! warriors and a young queen: a poet, a dandy, a dwarf, an old man, an heiress. they speak poetry and sing songs while sharpening swords, they grumble and moan and battle and mourn, they fit themselves into giant metal contraptions, they fly to the rescue. these fearless characters, all of them heirs to a past that must be overcome. the future is a bright and shiny thing: there is no room there for poets and fanciful dreams of times long ago. if the past returns, it will return transformed. this is how a new world must begin; pretty pastel memories must be forgotten.

[J.G. Keely · Rating 4 out of 5]

Fantasy has always had its moralizers and its mischief-makers, those who use the symbolism of magic to create instructive fables, and those who use the strangeness of magic to tap into the more remote corners of the soul, and then obscure their transgressions behind the fantastical facade. Like Moorcock, Leiber, and Vance, Harrison is playful, he is rebellious.

Indeed, in his swift, pulpy approach, Harrison very much resembles those authors, but his voice sets him apart. There is a scintillation, a sophistication, a turn of phrase which shows a practiced hand, and unlike many fantasy authors, Harrison's voice is very consistent. He is aware of what he is doing, the effect he means to produce, and he generally succeeds.

Moorcock was fond of saying that he was a 'bad writer with big ideas', and the same can be said of many genre writers, from R.E. Howard on, but Harrison is not a bad writer, and it's enjoyable to see someone of his skill take up the torch--leaving no doubt why he was so successful in inspiring New Weird authors like Mieville and VanderMeer to tear into genre (with varying degrees of success).

He had already made a name for himself as an editor and ruthless critic working at Moorcock's New Worlds, often lamenting the shallow predictability of genre fiction (his critical work has been collected in Parietal Games ), and this is clearly a stab at trying to break out of that monotony--to practice what he had been preaching. It is rather less wild and experimental than his later works, but there is something very effective in the straightforward simplicity displayed here.

The most obviously groundbreaking aspect of the work is his setting (not, as Harrison would insist, his 'world'). He combines science fiction and fantasy tropes quite freely, but with much greater success than Leiber's clunky attempts, and much more overtly than Moorcock's nods to quantum physics in Elric. It acts as a reminder that despite all the purists trying to drive a definitive wedge between the genres, they are really doing the same thing: creating physical symbols through which to explore ideas (it's Clarke's Third Law again).

An easy example is Star Wars, a fantasy story about wizards, prophecy, spells, magic swords, funny animals, good vs. evil, and the monomyth which adopts science fiction only as an aesthetic, a 'look'. It isn't forward-looking, it's mythical, which is why the laser beams only shoot at a fixed point in front of the ship, like World War I biplanes. Nowadays, the concept of mixing fantasy and sci fi has trickled down into the public consciousness, showing up in cartoons like Adventure Time--and to a large part, we have Harrison to thank for that, because his version (complete with laser swords) came years before Star Wars, and also presents a much more nuanced view of the world.

On the surface, Harrison's rusted-out future world resembles Vance's, but it's much closer to fellow New Wave Britisher J.G. Ballard (or Le Guin): a fantastical headspace of extremes, when everything is dying and collapsing around you, and yet life goes on--dwindling, certainly, but fundamentally not very different from how it has always been. It’s a portrait of existential dread, our fear of being alone, our foolish habit of nostalgia, of seeing the past not as it was, but as a sort of promised land, a missed opportunity for our neurotic brain to cling to.

The dying world is the legacy of poets (at least, of the Victorians, who have the most influence on our modern notions of the poetic self), from Byron’s Darkness to Shelley’s The Last Man and the mythology of Blake--and of course arch-pilferer Eliot’s The Waste Land. Indeed, in this post-modern world, it’s become almost trite to riff on The Waste Land and it’s world built around the sad, intellectual man who regrets that all meaning has been stripped away, and he’s left to figure it out on his own.

However, fantasy has long been lagging behind, particularly highly-visible epic fantasy, like Tolkien’s, which behaves as if existentialism and skepticism never happened, instead inundating the reader in a top-down, authoritative voice full of message and allegory and obvious symbolism--though Tolkien himself often denied that this was the case, as a believer, to him the real world was a symbolic allegory.

The 'dying Earth' is the same old trick of fantasy, to take a state of mind and literalize it, to produce a setting that reflects it, and through which the author can explore it. It's like how in a Gothic novel, it rains when people are said, and lightning strikes as the villain observes the results of his cruelty.

Sure, it's also what a comics writer does when he puts the fate of the world at stake to increase the tension--but I won't say it's a bad trick, or a dirty one--it all depends on the magician who is using it. Are the a con artist, trying to win us over and sell us something, or are they a trickster like Houdini or James Randi, forcing us to confront the fact that we can so easily be fooled--indeed, that we may want to be fooled.

I find Harrison to be a trickster, an invoker of our better nature, if only because he realizes that the mind can be unsure--it can change--so, what happens to a world founded upon a changing mind? It's a question Harrison only touches on here, before diving in headlong in the next book, and finally getting a grasp on it in the third and fourth.

Unfortunately, one area where Harrison fails to meaningfully improve upon earlier genre outings is the portrayal of women. They are rarely present, and when they are, they tend to the weak and distant. We don't get inside their heads as we do the male characters, and so they do not really feel like complete characters, but objects of focus and motivators for the men around them. I mean, it's not like we're getting a trite Madonna/Whore love triangle, like Tolkien's, but moving from 'bad' to 'neutral' isn't much of an improvement, especially for a book written in the seventies--and the portrayals don't get much deeper in the later books.

I've often complained that many genre authors (like fellow dying-earther Gene Wolfe) give you two hundred pages of plot buried in four hundred pages of explanation, description, exposition, repetition, and redundancy--but I'm glad to say that in Harrison's case, he's happy to give us the two hundred and leave off the rest.

My List of Suggested Readings in Fantasy

[Glenn Russell]

The first of four Viriconium books, The Pastel City is a spectacular tale of adventure with philosophical overtones and undertones. Rather than shining the spotlight on the arch of events, here are a batch of notables a reader will encounter along the way:

The Order of Methven: An invasion from the north propels old warrior Lord tegeus-Cromis out of retirement. And to think, he was planning to live his remaining years in his tower as a recluse composing poetry and playing music. Sorry, Cromis! You must strap on your famous sword and ride your horse to gather your Methven friends who once fought ferociously on behalf of Viriconium since impending disaster requires you to defend your young queen and the lands within her domain.

We join tall, thin Cromis from the first to last chapter, the ideal main character for M. John Harrison since the aging champion radiates knightly virtue and is a keen observer of beauty both in nature and in art.

The New Earth: Viriconium and the Pastel City arose five hundred years following the collapse of the Afternoon Cultures with their highly technological and scientific achievements, cultures such as our own which left a vast wasteland of rust and decay. In this new age, the transformation of fauna and flora is striking - for example, there are docile giant lizards nearly the size of dinosaurs and great sloth-like beasts fifteen feet tall when standing upright, beasts known as albino megatheria so gentle and friendly the queen keeps one as a house pet.

Mysterious Messenger: A huge vulture approaches Cromis and delivers a message: "go at once to the tower of Cellur on the Girvan Bay." On closer inspection Cromis can see the vulture is made of intricately formed metal and is capable of engaging in dialogue, a creature, he reckons, made with know-how from the Afternoon cultures.

Energy Weapons: Diabolical instruments from the Afternoon Cultures that perhaps electrocute their victims. The author cleverly doesn't elaborate here; rather, he leaves the details of these deadly weapons to the reader's imagination.

Airboats: Yet again another piece of technology from the Afternoon Cultures, crafts frequently equipped with energy cannons. Not surprisingly, Viriconiums judge those Afternoon Cultures as geared toward war and destruction. Quite a statement on our present era.

Dwarf Eleven Feet Tall: One of the most fascinating parts of the novel: Cromis' old fighting friend, ax wielding Tomb the dwarf rigs himself with an immense motorized skeleton contraption with extended arms and legs so he can swing into battle towering above mere men, "a gigantic paradox suspended on the thin line between comedy and horror." Not only is Tomb a fighter and master mechanic, this dwarf spouts one-liners like a first-rate stand-up comic. Thanks, M. John! Every life and death adventure needs a spot of humor.

The Birdmaker: Cellur of Lendalfoot has gathered the wisdom of hundreds of years as he had passed beyond time into a state of exaltation. "He wore a loose, unbelted black robe - quilted in grouped arrangements of lozenges - which was embroidered in gold wire patterns resembling certain geometries cut into the towers of the Pastel City: those queer and uneasy signs that might equally have been the visual art or the language of the mathematics of Time itself."

Jolt of the Weird: Similar to British author Christopher Priest with his expanding of dimensions, such things as time, space, gravity or invisibility, an expansion I term "jolt of the weird," we likewise encounter such a weird jolt in the concluding chapters of The Pastel City.

In this way, Viriconium is NOT in the fantasy tradition of J. R. R. Tolkien. Nope, no fantasy novel for M. John Harrison. There is good reason the author has been called a genre contrarian. Some might even see him as a genre smasher - after all, he has spoken openly about his dissatisfaction with the boundaries and categories set for much genre fiction.

As to how exactly M. John Harrison expands, zigzags, reshapes and otherwise explodes and revitalizes the world of Viriconium, you will have to read for yourself.


British author M. John Harrison, born 1945

"Above him rose the Pastel Towers, tall and gracefully shaped to mathematical curves, tinted pale blue or fuchsia or dove-grey. They reached up for hundreds of feet, cut with quaint and complex designs that some said were the high point of an inimitable art, thought by others to be representations of the actual geometries of Time." - M. John Harrison, The Pastel City

[Bradley · Rating 5 out of 5]

Before we had the Fallout games or Mad Max, we had certain authors who set foot on the bleak, desolate, post-apocalyptic wastelands who said, "What if we jumped ahead by thousands of years after our super-high-tech society has collapsed like the Roman Empire had, devolve it back to the stage of Knights and warring factions, maintain some of the laser weapons, and turn powertools into maces and swords, and mechanical birds to pluck the eyes out of our enemies."

Right-o! I'm on board.

Now make the writing evocative and depressing and full of verve and striving against impossible odds. Golems and brain-stealing robots against heroes of the oldest caliber. Make sure it draws you in and never goes tongue-in-cheek.

Then you'll have this one. :) 1972.

Yes, we've had many like this over the years, but sometimes, the best writing is the most elegant. :)

[Juho Pohjalainen · Rating 5 out of 5]

I appreciate the sadness and melancholy this book evoked in me. The world is essentially dead, the ground lifeless and polluted, the old empires gone - and still its dying people split up in pointless factions and wage war and kill each other. It's all described effectively and evocatively, in a way that's easy to read and remember and quick to get through. Likewise well-described is the grit and misery of warfare, of all the fear and pain, tears and blood, guts and red mist, and how it all comes alive in a way that makes me feel like I was there myself (even though I'd rather not). I grow to like the main characters, the depression and guilt and other burdens each carry, the way they bicker but still work together. And I love to hate the main antagonist: what a treacherous smug rat-bastard.

None of this without even going to all the laser guns, skyships, brain-stealing robots, or mechanical birds. The setting this book evokes is a fairly amazing place, even in the middle of all the grim death and inevitability of final dark. The old kingdoms are gone, it's pretty well gotten through that the world lives its final days, but there's still some glory left. Just a shame that these people would rather break the rest of it than unite to rebuild things... although the ending does change things rather a lot, in a way that I'm not sure actually fits the rest of the story all too well, but you be the judge.

Overall this was a pleasant surprise and I greatly enjoyed my time with it. You should probably read it too, if you like this sort of a thing at all - or maybe even if you tend not to.

[Phil · Rating 4 out of 5]

Set in a distant future on Earth, The Pastel City reminded me of Vance's The Dying Earth and (for more modern readers) Cage of Souls. The remains of humanity live on the artifacts and tech from the past and the Earth itself contaminated by industrial waste and other toxins. The titular Viriconium, e.g., the Pastel City, exists as a shadow of its past, but still the biggest city at the heart of the Southern Empire.

The plot remains deceptively simple, however, and the power of the novel rests with Harrison's prose and style, which people seem to like or dismiss as purple; I gravitate toward the former 😎. Harrison brings us a dying world, with bogs and swamps of metal waste. Some people mine the wastes for surviving tech while others fish and herd goats and such. The tale centers on several members of the Methven, followers and soldiers of Methven Nian, who took war to the Northern folk and taught then to fear him. When the tale beings, several decades later, a handful of the remaining Methvan seek to halt the Northern invasion...

I loved the contrast of the old tech (blasters, flying machines, etc.) juxtaposed to swords and plate mail-- sword and laser for sure! Quite an adventure for our heroes siuch as Toad the Dwarf and tegeus-Cormis, some of the last Methvan left. While easy to read as a simple adventure, Harrison evokes more existentialist themes as well-- what should we do when the Earth is dying? Can we ever have peace? Why did the 'Afternoon' civilizations (e.g., the last round of high-tech societies) basically destroy one another and leave a waste? So, very enjoyable, but much more complex that simply a sword and sorcery adventure. 4 pastel stars!

[Robin Sloan · Rating 5 out of 5]

My god, the language. The names. tegeus-Cromis! Canna Moidart! I was underlining whole pages—copying them out. Nominally, this is a book about a poet-warrior roaming a depleted planet. In truth, I think it's a book about how beautiful and bad-ass English can be.

[Jamie · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5 stars. I found a lot to like in The Pastel City - the desolate, post-apocalyptic Dying Earth settings; the bizarre forgotten technologies and mysterious ancient, yet still menacing secrets of the long dead Afternoon Cultures; the brooding mood and dark overtones; and of course Harrison's elegantly crafted prose. Yet it all felt thin. Perhaps that's a failing of trying to stuff such a richly imagined world into a very short book. Had this been published a decade or two earlier, I think it could have potentially been a seminal work of sci-fi, but by 1971 it's clear it's lack of depth would have kept it from achieving greater recognition. Plus, following the release and success of the first Planet of the Apes film in 1968, the concept of a sword and sorcery type quest story in a post-apocalyptic Dying Earth sci-fi setting wasn't exactly novel.

[Tijana]

Da ponovim šta sam rekla u društvu po završetku čitanja, ovo je kao da je Harison pročitao Viteza sudbine svog drugara Murkoka pa rekao "e, ovo je super, ja ću da napišem to isto ali da bude UMETNOST". Pastelni grad ima sve što su voleli pisci britanskog Novog talasa naučne fantastike: postapokalipsu, intenzivno flertovanje s epskom fantastikom, kitnjast stil i jarke boje (pasteli iz naslova su čista laž). Sve zajedno i dalje nije previše daleko od srazmerno niskobudžetnih a konceptualno ambicioznih SF filmova toga doba kao što je Zardoz - na pojedinim mestima je takoreći dovoljno da zažmurite i ukazaće vam se oni specijalni efekti iz sedamdesetih, upravo takav slatko nostalgični treš osećaj.

Kažu ljudi a i internet da su kasniji Harisonovi romani posvećeni Virikonijumu znatno drugačiji i bolji, proveriće se.

[Steve · Rating 4 out of 5]

M. John Harrison’s The Pastel City is a title I picked up from, I believe, James Cawthorne’s Fantasy: The 100 Best Books. It’s a fine read, and it had me thinking around the mid-way point that the story was becoming an Anti-Rings story, but that’s probably not accurate. The Pastel City does have many of the standard features you can find in a great number of fantasy novels: a brooding poet-warrior alone in his castle, a young and beautiful queen under siege, a bad (and older) queen, a cranky dwarf, a traitor, etc. What makes this story different is that it casts these familiar figures against a wasted landscape that reminded me more of the “Forbidden Zone” from Beneath the Planet of the Ape’s, than the more varied world of Middle Earth. In other words, The Pastel City is clearly operating under a different fantasy template, which is Harrison’s own, and quickly (the book is only 175 pages long) becomes a sci-fi novel, with mechanical birds, Terminator-like brain eaters with electric axes, and even an alien/magician/scientist who lives in a high tower. The current civilization in the novel is dependent on whatever can be scavenged from the remains of previous cultures (called the “Afternoon Cultures”). Weapons of a far superior nature are of course big finds, and one big find by the bad queen sets into motion an attack on the good queen.

As I said above, this is a short novel jam packed with battles and betrayals and weird creatures, but perhaps too much happens too quickly. As a result, excepting Cromus, the poet-warrior, characters remain seemingly flat and undeveloped, action scenes often seem like outlines or sketches. Still, it’s hard to say. Harrison is a very good writer, and clearly he’s doing something with the genre itself, and the lack of character development may simply be by design. At one point late in the novel, Cromis, laboring through a dust storm, speculates on the nature of Time, and human endeavor, and concludes that they are all “eroded men.” He sounds a lot like another poet – Eliot, with his hollow men, and my guess is that Harrison has created a world, even with its heroes and villains, and quests, that is winding down, where meaning itself is being leached away by Time – and the unending cycle of human folly. But I’ll have to read the rest of the series to find out where he goes with these intriguing ideas, and how he packages them. So far, pretty good.

[Hosein · Rating 5 out of 5]

شهرِ پاستلی، جلد اول از چهارگانه‌ی ویریکونیوم، همین چند دقیقه پیش خوندنش رو تموم کردم. می‌تونم بگم توی دوازده سالِ اخیر این نزدیک‌ترین حس به خوندنِ گروهان سیاه رو داشت. شهرِ پاستیلی سال ۱۹۷۱ منتشر شد و با وجودِ تحسین منتقدها، هیچ‌وقت اون محبوبیتِ هم‌دوره‌ای‌هاش رو نتونست پیدا کنه. کتابی که موقعِ انتشار با تلماسه و ارباب حلقه‌ها مقایسه می‌شد الان توی گودریدز کمتر از دو هزار ریت داره و حقیقتا اگه بگم بین آندریتد‌ترین‌هاست ذره‌ای اغراق نکردم. اما از اون سمت نویسنده‌ی مورد علاقتون احتمالا یک‌جایی ازش الهام گرفته و پیدا کردن نقلِ قول ازشون در مورد بزرگی این کتاب سخت نیست.

دقیقا مثلِ همون چیزی که در مورد گروهان سیاه گفتم، شهرِ پاستلی هم برای فهمیدنِ راحت طراحی نشده بود. اتفاقاتِ مختلفی در حدِ تغییرِ دنیای داستان میوفتادن، اما نه ما و نه شخصیت‌ها درست نمی‌فهمیم چه دقیقا چه اتفاقی افتاده. بهترین توضیح در موردِ داستانش همون پاراگرافِ اول کتابه:

حدود هفده امپراتوری نامدار در دورهٔ میانی زمین برخاستند.
‏این‌ها فرهنگ‌های عصرِ پسین بودند. همه‌شان جز یکی برای این روایت اهمیتی ندارند، و نیاز چندانی نیست از آن‌ها سخن بگوییم، جز این‌که هیچ‌یک کمتر از یک هزاره نپایید و هیچ‌یک بیش از ده هزاره دوام نیاورد؛ این‌که هرکدام، به‌اندازه‌ای که سرشت خودشان، و سرشت کیهان، به آن‌ها اجازه می‌داد، رازهایی بیرون کشیدند و آسایش‌هایی به دست آوردند؛ و این‌که هرکدام، سرانجام، آشفته و سردرگم از کیهان عقب نشستند، کوچک شدند، و مردند.

در طولِ خوندن داستان فهمیدم اتفاقا تاریخِ هر هفده امپراتوری بسیار اهمیت دارن و کمک می‌کنن به درک بهتر داستان، اما نویسنده ترجیح داده در موردشون صحبت نکنه. دنیای ویریکونیوم از بیشتر آثار مدرن بزرگ‌تره، اما خودِ کتاب اینقدر قدیمیه که پیش از یکسری قوانینِ فانتزی نوشته شده. اونقدر وارد بحث سیستم جادویی نشده، حتی می‌شه گفت خیلی از جاها نزدیک می‌شه به آثارِ عصر نقره‌ای علمی-تخیلی و سعی می‌کنه منطقِ داستانی رو از اون‌ها بگیره.

داستان بیشتر از اینکه روی شخصیت‌ها متمرکز باشه، روی رویدادهاست. اینطوریه که بدون هیچ بیلد آپ خاصی اتفاق‌ها میوفتن و معمولا در مقیاس‌های بزرگی هم اون‌ها رو داریم. چیزی که نظرم رو بیشتر از همه جلب کرد اهمیتِ شعرها در پی‌رنگ و توصیف‌های بی‌نظیرِ جان هریسون بودن. یکم توضیح سخته که چطور از یکسری دیالوگِ عجیب ما به تصویرسازی‌ای از نبردِ لشکرِ ربات‌ها و انسان‌ها می‌رسیدیم. مثلا این نمونه بخشی از جنگیه که اواسط کتاب اتفاق میوفته:

‏ضربهٔ آنان به سپاه واتربک وحشیانه بود. ویریکونیومی‌ها، که پیشاپیش با یورش زورق‌های هوایی از هم پاشیده و آشفته شده بودند، پراکنده، جدا افتاده از فرماندهان خود،در تلاشی نومیدانه و ناتوان برای شکل دادن به چیزی شبیه موضع دفاعی در اردوگاه ویرانشان بی‌هدف می‌چرخیدند.
‏اما کموسیت‌ها خویشتن‌داری آنان را سلاخی کردند.
‏آنان هق‌هق کردند و مردند. شتاب‌زده و نیمه‌آموزش‌دیده به خدمت گرفته شده بودند. تیغه‌های تقویت شده، شمشیرهایشان را چون پنیر می‌بریدند. زره‌هایشان نتوانست نقشِ زره را بازی کنند. آن‌ها دریافتند به آن‌جا تعلق ندارند.
‏در لحظهٔ نخستین تماس، مهی سرخ و ظریف از خط نبرد به هوا پاشید، و مردگان، طعامِ مرگ را فرو دادند، در حالی که زندگان در مه می‌جنگیدند و از خود می‌پرسیدند چرا مغازه‌ها و مزرعه‌هایشان را ترک کرده‌اند. بسیاری از آنان تنها از شوک و بیزاری مردند، همان‌گاه که خون از شریان‌های بریدهٔ رفیقانشان قوس می‌زد و به ارتفاع‌هایی ناممکن می‌پاشید، و هوا از بوی روده‌های ترکیده پر می‌شد.

کتاب پر بود از توصیف‌هایی به این شکل. احتمالا اگه چند سال پیش یکی فقط همین بخش رو هم بهم نشون داده بود من زودتر سراغِ خوندنِ این مجموعه می‌رفتن. الان هم بی‌صبرانه منتظرم که سرم خلوت بشه و جلدهای بعدی رو بخونم.

[Craig · Rating 4 out of 5]

The Pastel City is the first book in Harrison's Virconium sequence, a far-future science fantasy world much like Vance's Dying Earth or Moorcock's End of Time. It's a medieval society that functions on the ruins of a fallen high-technology civilization. It's a very thoughtful novel but still filled with plenty of action and a captivating plot. One tries not to judge the book by its cover, but I remember this one making me hungry. I remember going into a convenience store with a pocketful of change and the intention of buying some lunch, but the cover of the Avon first U.S. paperback edition's Gray Morrow cover caught my eye from the book spin-rack by the counter. It had the sweep of Dean Ellis, the color of Kelly Freas, the action of Ed Emshwiller, the detail of Virgil Finlay, the background of Paul Lehr, the character of Stephen Fabian, the immediacy of Frank Frazetta... I was hooked. Needless to say, I bought the book and went hungry. Never regretted it. It's still one of my favorites.

[Kat Hooper · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5 stars
ORIGINALLY POSTED AT Fantasy Literature.

Viriconium sits on the ruins of an ancient civilization that nobody remembers. The society that was technologically advanced enough to create crystal airships and lethal energy weapons is dead. These Afternoon Cultures depleted the world’s metal ores, leaving mounds of inscrutable rusted infrastructure with only a few odds and ends that still work. The current citizens of Viriconium are baffled by what they’ve dug up, but they have no idea what any of it is for.

tegeus-Cromis, “who fancies himself a better poet than swordsman,” used to be Viriconium’s best fighter until he left the Pastel City after King Methven died. But Viriconium is now under threat — young Queen Jane, Methven’s daughter, is about to lose the empire to her evil cousin. Queen Jane needs the help of the men who once served her father so faithfully, so she sends tegeus-Cromis to find and take command of her army. Along the way, he picks up some of his old comrades and is accosted by a talking metal vulture who insists that Cromis go directly to see a mysterious man who lives in an obsidian tower by the sea. According to the mechanical bird, the future of Viriconium, indeed the whole world, depends on it. As the men travel north, they discover that the Afternoon Cultures left behind a lot more than piles of rusting metal.

The Pastel City, published in 1971, is the first part (only 158 pages) of M. John Harrison’s science fantasy epic VIRICONIUM which, according to sources, was inspired by Jack Vance’s DYING EARTH and the poetry of T.S. Eliot. Characterization and pacing are sometimes a bit weak, but the scenery in The Pastel City is grand, and I enjoyed the story. In many ways it reminded me of THE LORD OF THE RINGS — a group of comrades (including a dwarf) travel through beautiful and desolate landscapes (across rivers and marshes, through mountain tunnels, etc.) on a quest to destroy something so they can save the world.

A major difference, and what saves the book from being simply another quest fantasy, is the post-apocalyptic vision of an unknown advanced civilization which died out mysteriously, leaving samples of their devastating handiwork behind. Thus, the dwarf arms himself with an 11-foot tall mechanical skeleton and carries some sort of laser. Cromis and his friends ride into one battle on horseback, but leave in a glass blimp. Cool.

I was fascinated by the discoveries that Cromis and his friends made and the hints that the Afternoon Cultures understood the mathematics of the universe. The thought that our heroes may have “woken something from the Old Science” is a frightening one, especially since they have less idea about how to control it than their dead predecessors did. There’s a clear message here, but it’s not heavy-handed. As Queen Jane says:

We have always regarded the Afternoon Cultures as a high point in the history of mankind. Theirs was a state to be striven for, despite the mistakes that marred it. How could they have constructed such things? Why, when they had the stars beneath their hands?

Though I’m reviewing each book in the VIRICONIUM epic separately, I’m actually listening to the audiobook version of the omnibus edition. It’s recently been produced by Neil Gaiman Presents and is narrated by Simon Vance who is one of the absolute best in the business. This is a high-quality production and highly recommended for anyone who wants to read one of M. John Harrison’s best-loved works.

[Chris Gousopoulos · Rating 5 out of 5]

This deceptively seems like pulpish sword & sorcery but it turns to be a deeply evocative, melancholic and poignant meaningful story. Set in a terrific post apoc world of vibrant imagery, contrasted between long lost technological achievements now decaying and exotic hostile landscapes, colors and phenomena. It is a gem of its times. The 70s, when artists stretched many of the expressional boundaries. Many of the sci-fi/fantasy icons and concepts in Viriconium echo in many of later works. Star Wars for example, or my favorite role playing game the Fading Suns.
Apart from the vivid , inspired world, I was even more impressed by the beautiful and meaningful prose that echoes from our deeper melancholy. The magnetism and symbolism of sadness and loss. The constant commentary on the use of technology. The iconic cinematography.
This is the kind of fantasy that would probably not appeal to readers who want to read a many volumed plot driven series like Jordan's or Sanderson's. It is closer to the spirit of Gene Wolfe or Michael Moorcock. A brilliant short tale full of poetry, impressions and profundity.

[Ben Loory · Rating 4 out of 5]

harrison is a wonderful writer-- evocative, sweeping, musical, and strange-- and this is the best book i've ever read about knights in the far future fighting ancient brain-eating robots. my only complaint is that it wasn't longer. not at the end, but in the middle.

[Žarko]

Ovo je ispalo i čudno i jednostavno i melanholično akcijaško sumanuto ludo čitalačko skustvo i kolko god tegeus Cromis drvio o tome - vreme ovaj roman nije samlelo. Nije ložana kao Murkok, ali da sam imao ovo u vreme kad sam čitao Murkoka...

[Miodrag Milovanović · Rating 4 out of 5]

Moje prvo pravo suočavanje sa Harisonom, ako se izuzmu neke već zaboravljene priče u antologijama novog talasa.
Zašto?
Ne znam.
Negde tamo na kraju sedamdesetih godina prošlog veka moje zanimanje za čitanje je bilo prilično haotično. Iako je naučna fantastika činila dobar deo ukupnog korpusa, prevashodno u prevodu - ali i u prvim pokušajima čitanja na engleskom (uglavnom dobri stari Asimov i tematske SF antologije) - tu je zaista bilo svega - od prvih pokušaja rvanja sa klasicima svetske književnosti do gutanja X-100 romana i Tragova, na drugom kraju tasa.
Međutim, epska fantastika nikako nije bila nešto što bih svesno uzeo da čitam.
Murkokovog Erlika koji se pojavio kod nas 1978. praktično nikad nisam pročitao. Možda sam mislio, tada na kraju tinejdžerskih godina, da to više nije za mene. Sećam se da sam jednom probao da ga čitam i ubrzo odustao.
Premekano...
Kada je Pastelni grad objavljen u ediciji Supernova desetak godina kasnije, doživeo je istu sudbinu, s tim da mu nisam dao ni šansu.
Greška.
Pastelni grad nije neka vrhunska književnost, ali nije ni nešto što se ne bi moglo i ne bi trebalo čitati. Napisan 1971. godine, on u sebi nosi mnogo ostataka '68. i repova britanskih predstavnika "novog talasa". Gledano iz sadašnje perspektive, možda ova knjiga bolji predstavnik duha tog vremena nego neka Oldisova ostvarenja ili zanimljive ekstravagance tipa "Toplotne smrti univerzuma".
U stvari, ovo je dosta dobra prethodnica onih najboljih ostvarenja u pod-žanru "naučna fantastika-epska fantastike, kako se kome ćefne" - vidi kasnije ostvarenja Džina Volfa, Dena Simonsa, Martina itd. itd.
Ne znam koliko bi mi ovo prijalo u većim količinama, verovatno ne, ali u ovom malom pakovanju, Pastelni grad je prava bombona.
PS: Od prevoda Vojislava Despotova sam očekivao više...

[Ruxandra Grrr · Rating 4 out of 5]

Gosh, how do I feel about this? I think I mostly liked it! I really liked the worldbuilding and the scifantasy of it all, this vision of the future of earth where it's all piles of trash and all the resources have been extracted and people have gone back to medieval times. I like the concept of Afternoon Cultures and to be honest, the outfits (very ren-faire, super 70s color-wise) are groovy, man!

The writing was also pretty good, the kind of writing that's urgent and that says a lot with as few words as possible. That felt enjoyable. And so many cool elements! Like the mechanical birds and the 11-foot exoscheleton and so on...

Character-wise, this was a bit meh for me, I don't even know if they're well rounded cause I was just not interested! And sad to report that there's only one female character who speaks and she's 17 and she keeps sobbing on the main character. Her name is Jane! She is literally the only one with a 'regular / generic' name!

3.5/5

Let's see if I finish this whole-ass series by book club on Friday!

[Szplug · Rating 3 out of 5]

This opening salvo in the Viriconium series benefits from Harrison's icily fertile imagination and innate writing chops - but the latter was still at a raw, developing stage back in 1971 when The Pastel City was originally published, and there really isn't much to distinguish it from other rote fantasy from the same period. A decrepit, grim, and feral atmosphere - reminiscent of Moorcock, or even Glen Cook's The Black Company in its earlier incarnations - helps, but it cannot fully compensate for a rather weak story line and rushed ending. Furthermore, the characterization borders upon non-existent; surely I cannot be the only reader who finds tegeus-Cromis insufferably self-absorbed and whiney, a murderous, brooding baby. The only real standout is Tomb the Dwarf, essentially Chucky from Child's Play with a head more stretched and longer hair, encased in an eleven-foot high titanium exoskeleton and wielding a flesh-slicing energy axe in a maniacally gleeful fashion.

Eschewing the fantasy staples of sorcery and demons for a technology and automata left behind by the dead Afternoon Cultures, The Pastel City is another entry in the world-weary dystopia of an aged, decayed Earth which underlies such masterpieces as Gene Wolfe's Book of the New Sun and Jack Vance's Tales of the Dying Earth . The stagnation and hopelessness that has become rampant in a tired empire living on salvaged wonders and miracles is nicely communicated - as are such deft touches as a vast, multi-palette marshland of rusting and disintegrated industrial scrap metal, and having the last of the Afternoon Empires spawn new stars in the sky to spell out a permanent message or warning to the eventide survivors, if only they could decipher its unknown code. It all pointed to Harrison's budding promise: The Pastel City is the creation of a young, aspiring apprentice; it is with the sequel A Storm of Wings that he would fully come into his own.

[Adam McPhee · Rating 5 out of 5]

Insanely cool. Dying Earth type things always struck me as weird but I've come to appreciate them. Lets you take the best elements of science fiction and fantasy. Feels like Lucas borrowed a lot from this for Star Wars (energy swords, etc). Love Tomb the Dwarf swinging an axe in an 11-foot-tall exoskeleton.

RIP all the dead sloths.

[Joel J. Miller · Rating 5 out of 5]

Vivid. Powerful. Full of energy and emotion. The Pastel City is a beautifully crafted work of art that’s evokes some of the best writers of its age while becoming its own unique piece.

Like J. G Ballard, M. John Harrison’s prose is elegant and evocative. Like Michael Moorcock, Harrison’s characters are flawed, broken beings, yet full of life and poetry. Like Jack Vance, Harrison paints a future dying earth where technology is magic, and the earth has deserts of rust.

These three inspirations, powered by masterful storytelling, create a unique reading experience that is perfect and engaging. At 157 pages, this feels more like a novella than a novel, but not a single page is wasted.

This is science fiction and fantasy at its most elegant, literary, and artistic form.

[Andrew Horton · Rating 4 out of 5]

The first book in the Viriconium cycle, The Pastel City holds up in that classic seventies $.75 mass-market paperback on a rain afternoon way. I'm an unabashed fan of all of the Viriconium stuff, and while this singular book is merely a preamble to the greater things to come, it can be read on its own, like a lighter and more picaresque Book of the New Sun.

[Vlad]

vivid images of a world that is both familiar and strange, ancient ruins and forgotten legends, where the echoes of the past still reverberate through the present

[Joseph · Rating 5 out of 5]

Wow. This maybe the most succinct and technically perfect science fiction novel I've ever read.

Very pleased with my first M. John Harrison reading. His writing is the closest to Peake's I've seen yet, both stylistically and in his availability to write some of the most beautiful prose I've read.

I would like to share my favorite passage that shows Harrison's grasp on setting and beautiful descriptive language.

[In the water-thickets, the path wound tortuously between umber iron-bogs, albescent quicksands of aluminum and magnesium oxides, and sumps of cuprous blue or permanganate mauve fed by slow, gelid streams and fringed by silver reeds and tall black grasses. The twisted, smooth-barked boles of the trees were yellow-ochre and burnt orange; through their tightly woven foliage filtered a gloomy, tinted light. At their roots grew great clumps of multifaceted translucent crystal like alien fungi.
Charcoal grey frogs with viridescent eyes croaked as the column floundered between the pools. Beneath the greasy surface of the water unidentified 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 and audible snap of jaws on whining, ephemeral mosquitos and fluttering moths of April blue and chevrolet cerise.
Over everything hung the heavy, oppressive stench of rotting metal. After an hour, Cromis’ mouth was coated with a bitter deposit, and he tasted acids. He found it difficult to speak. While his horse stumbled and slithered beneath him, he gazed about in wonder, and poetry moved in his skull, swift as the jewelled mosquito-hawks over a dark slow current of ancient decay.]

Obviously I ate up this poetry, cleverly disguised as fiction on a dying Earth.

[Stephen · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5 stars. I really struggled between 3 and 4 stars and basically ended up at 3.5 stars. This is a pretty good science fantasy story that reminded me in tone, writing and story of Moorcock's Corum trilogy, Zelazny's Amber series and Vance's Dying Earth series. I did like each of those series better than this book and thus, in comparison to those works, ended up at the 3.5 star rating.

Briefly, the story is based in a far future, Quasimodo medieval world that is littered with technology from ages past, some of which can be made to work. Thus, you have knights with "light saber" like weapons, knights on horseback fighting warriors in flying machines and castles fortified with laser cannons. If all of that sounds cool to you (it certainly did to me) than you will probably like this. The writing is good, the story is basic but interesting and at 150 pages, it is a fast read and never boring. I will certainly read the next book in the series because the world building has the makings of a 5 star gem.

[Naz Hassan · Rating 4 out of 5]

I can't review this book. I'll just let China Mieville talk about the two writers who had the greatest influence on him.
"I don't have space to thank all the writers who've influenced me, but I want to mention two whose work is a constant source of inspiration and astonishment. Therefore to M. John Harrison, and to the memory of Mervyn Peake..." (Intro to Perdido street station).

Harrison is an imagest, and 'The Pastel City' is to fantasy literature what Eliot's 'The Wasteland' is to poetry: riveting, powerful, and wholly authentic. Harrison is a master of brevity, in both his seminal, affecting descriptions of his world, and his natural story telling.

If anything, I read this book for its language, rather than the plot. Read this, now. You would not have thought that a world could be built, a city could be felled, a great war could begin AND conclude, a high adventure could be undertaken to save the world, or that a queen could see the fall of her city AND its reconquest ... all in 110 page. 110 PAGES.

Really. I'm not making this up.

[Nikola Pavlovic · Rating 5 out of 5]

Odlicna knjiga! Ili bi mozda pre sobzirom na broj strana mogao da kazem odlicna prica. Rastuzilo me je jedino to sto sam saznao da je ovo prvi od nekoliko delova u serijalu, i da je kao takav jedino on preveden kod nas i to daleke 1989. godine. Broj strana moram priznati itekako utice na kvalitet dela. Ali ideja, ambijent i stil pisanja su prosto previse dobri tako da nisam imao izbora i dao sam ovoj knjizici svih pet zvezdica. Velika je steta sto pisac naprosto skace sa jedne lokacije na drugu i sa jednog zapleta na drugi, bilo je tu prostora za dobih 300 strana! Jedna od najboljih "dzepnih" knjiga koje sam ikada procitao.

[Charles Haywood · Rating 4 out of 5]

As can be seen from a casual glance at my book reviews, while I read little fiction, I am keenly interested in science fiction. Sadly, almost all contemporary science fiction is mere social justice agitprop. But there is some quite good relatively modern science fiction, and in particular, I am fond of (no surprise, I suppose) what is commonly called the “Dying Earth” genre, after the name used by Jack Vance in the 1950s. This book, "The Pastel City," published in 1971, fits squarely into this genre, but is distinguished by the gem-like quality of its writing, elevating it above the average pulp of late twentieth-century science fiction.

As with all Dying Earth books, the story takes place in the distant future. The opening paragraph of the book is, I think, nearly unparalleled in science fiction opening lines. It may not be “Call me Ishmael,” but I don’t think it could be bettered as setting the scene for this book, and for its sequels (though I reject those as uniformly awful). “Some seventeen notable empires arose in the Middle Period of Earth. These were the Afternoon Cultures. All but one are unimportant to this narrative, and there is little need to speak of them save to say none of them lasted for less than a millennium, none for more than ten; that each extracted such secrets and obtained such comforts as its nature (and the nature of the universe) enabled it to find; and that each fell back from the universe in confusion, dwindled, and died.”

The story itself is about the Evening that follows—scavenger cultures, which beat the machines of their predecessors into swords and contest for supremacy among toxic, blasted lands, occasionally finding and using still operating advanced technology. Harrison sketches the backstory, of two queens, and of the defense of one queen (“Methvet Nian, known in her youth as Jane”), who rules the only extant major city, by the scattered remnants of her father’s paladins, against her cousin, Canna Moidart, who has assembled an army that includes awoken sentient killing machines. The story centers on one of the paladins, tegeus-Cromis, “sometime soldier and sophisticate of Viriconium, the Pastel City, who imagined himself a better poet than swordsman.” Living in retirement at his seaside home of Balmacara, he is drawn into the war as the upstart queen’s army approaches the eponymous capital city. He travels to war, though “he knew he would not come again, riding to the light out of battle, to Balmacara in the morning,” assembling his few remaining comrades, in a hopeless, heroic quest.

All of this is extremely well written, even gripping. It especially resonates with me because my goal is avoiding the dwindling and dying of our own civilization, though I see no clear path to renewal of the West, a civilization whose accomplishments make all other human achievements seem slight and unimportant, but whose rulers and guiding lights have become men of the Evening before it was time. The weary assumption of duty by tegeus-Cromis seems like the common lot of those who today defend the West, lacking even a queen to defend. “Falling back in confusion” is the perfect characterization of our civilization. It is said that Harrison wrote The Pastel City as an anti-heroic book, an attempt to undermine the Tolkein revival. If so, it does not read as that fifty years later. True, it is pervaded by a sense of melancholy, with the world viewed through the resigned pessimism of tegeus-Cromis, who is fully aware that he is a man embodied in the Evening, without a future and in the shadow of the glorious past, yet is compelled by his code to come to the aid of the daughter of the king he served. But no aspect of this story is out of place in an archetypal Heroic Narrative; the hero may have a bit more world-weariness than most, and while he succeeds in his quest, there are implications of the seeds of future trouble being sown (tegeus-Cromis and his companions win the fight by reanimating men of the Afternoon), but those are small differences.

While Harrison suggests that the Evening may be followed by Morning, saying of the “resigned, defeated landscape, was it simply waiting to be born? Who can tell at which end of Time these places have their existence?,” there is also a brief reference to an interesting and possibly insurmountable problem that our own successors might face, that of resource exhaustion by dead civilizations. One reason Evening culture cannot advance is not only that technology is lost, but that building blocks needed to rebuild are inaccessible, since the Afternoon stripped all metals from the surface of the Earth. Along the same lines, if our current civilization collapses totally, which admittedly does not seem likely, though plenty of books suggest the possibility, rebuilding industrial civilization would be much harder than was building it initially. This is because we have long since depleted essentially all easy-to-access sources of dense energy, most importantly coal and oil, as well as metals. Without already having advanced industry, a civilization could not restart the Industrial Revolution, even if it had the knowledge of how to construct the necessary machines. Perhaps human ingenuity could find a way around this, but it seems likely that that any post-collapse civilization might be stuck indefinitely in a post-medieval, pre-modern equilibrium. Another good reason to avoid collapse, I suppose.

Aside from its plot, "The Pastel City" sits uncomfortably with the world of 2018, although I am sure its author did not mean it to. Critically, tegeus-Cromis is repeatedly described as keyed to reality, “more possessed by the essential qualities of things than by their names; concerned with the nature of Reality, rather than with the names men gave it.” The same theme, of the iron law of reality, recurs often, as in, for example, the reference in the opening lines to “such comforts as its nature (and the nature of the universe) enabled it to find.” tegeus-Cromis would find no place in America today, when reality, most especially of human nature and human biology, is overtly denied, both by the Left, who believe that the mere assigning and chanting of new names changes reality, and by transhumanists, who imagine that with technology human beings can be endlessly manipulated and remade without tearing the teleological fabric of man. Regardless of political implications, though, this emphasis on reality lends the book a solidity that it might otherwise lack, ensuring the book’s success.

Unfortunately, the delicate and successful balance that Harrison achieves here, between reality and heroism, is destroyed in the sequels that Harrison wrote in the 1980s. These are awful books, full of squalor and nihilism, morbidly bizarre, totally lacking the heroic edge and flashes of faded beauty and glory that make the feeling of unalterable decline in "The Pastel City" bearable for both characters and reader. It is as if Harrison was told that he was too bourgeois in his first book, and he needed to instead fight the Man through some form of deconstruction, spewing out precursors of the unreadable tripe that is most of today’s science fiction. And there are better modern Dying Earth books than "The Pastel City," most notably Gene Wolfe’s exquisite "The Book of the New Sun." Still, reading this book is worthwhile, and like all good fiction, it leaves the reader with a sense of transport, if only for a little while.