M. John Harrison's Viriconium is a compendium of several shorter works about the empire of Viriconium, the last great bastion of humanity on a far-future Earth that has been exhausted of nearly all of its natural resources and most of its historical memory. The setting shares the same features as most Dying Earth fantasy: a revival of medievalism, the transformation of technology into myth, and, most importantly, a weary attitude. Viriconium, however, adds an additional level of exhaustion. Not only is the world spinning to an end, but even the empire of Viriconium is falling apart, decades removed from its greatest age. (It's hard to understand why Viriconians aren't perpetually crippled by clinical depression.)

The only good story of the book, "The Pastel City," is a fairly straightforward quest tale. An aging tegeus-Cromis, a former super-soldier during Viriconium's Golden Age, is reluctantly called back to duty after foreign forces threaten Viriconium. Straight away, you know that various cliches must be fulfilled--the gathering together of the old gang, the death of a friend, the righteous reignition of the retired warrior's uncannily effective swordplay--and Harrison does not disappoint. But the conventionality of the story doesn't detract from its awesomeness. tegeus-Cromis's trek through and beyond Viriconium, like Severian's journey across Urth, gives us a panaromic view of Harrison's eerie and compelling fictional world, from the rust deserts that hide the remains of gargantuan machines, to an ancient obsidian tower housing inconceivable technologies and a not-entirely-human prophet. Add to this an army of brain-harvesting robots (who thought that was a good idea?), and you've got a rollicking adventure with a fairly satisfying ending.

The rest of the stories in Viriconium are not as good. The longer novellas ("A Storm of Wings," "In Viriconium") share "The Pastel City"'s odd setting and neat scenery, but lack that story's narrative drive. The shorter stories wander even further afield. After "The Pastel City," Viriconium becomes too weird to be interesting, its characters too random and unmotivated to be fully comprehensible. I understand that the breakdown in mental health and in even such basic things as chronology are meant to parallel the decrepitude of the world, but just because Viriconium is exhausted doesn't mean that the reader should feel the same way.

(Yes, yes, the Viriconium stories aren't meant to be straightforward. But I don't enjoy stories that sacrifice storytelling for an intellectual point.)

Copyright © 2006 Steven Wu