The Pastel City by M. John Harrison

It wasn’t easy to find a copy of The Pastel City by M. John Harrison, considering that it was first published in 1971 this wasn’t all that surprising. I did manage to get one, but it made me wonder why if it was considered a must-read book in the genre why was it so hard to get? I also hadn’t heard of the author or the work, but I’ve had some recent good luck (Ken Grimwood’s Replay) on that front with the list recently. Maybe The Pastel City would be another diamond in the rough.

I’m not sure where the quote on the front came from, it may have been a review, but there was no source cited, possibly the publisher came up with it. It proudly proclaims ‘The best fantasy since Dune.’ I suppose I should give them point for not referencing Lord of the Rings, but I’ve always considered Dune a sci-fi novel and Dune is a whacking thick book, The Pastel City at 144 pages barely qualifies as a novella.

It’s part of the Dying Earth milieu. The Pastel City is an important city in the remnants of a once technologically advanced society. As with some of the other books in the list I found myself question it’s fantasy qualifications. The world of Viriconium may or may not be a future Earth, that’s never made clear, and there is a dwarf, but again it’s not clear if he’s part of a magical race or he’s the way he is due to a medical condition. He does have an affinity with metal, so it may have been the former and Harrison was using him to poke fun at the genre.

The story is very basic, the protagonists, who come across as stock standard sword and sorcery clichés wandering across the bleak and blasted landscape, spend their time arguing, philosophising and fighting. Most of the time they don’t even know why they’re fighting, it’s just what they do.

Harrison is a great user of language and his prose is undeniably beautiful, especially when he’s describing the landscape down to the tiniest detail. However I also like to see a tightly written plot and strongly defined characters and I didn’t get that with The Pastel City.

The characters for the most part, like the main characters in Eddison’s The Worm Ouroboros, from which Harrison could have drawn inspiration, were largely interchangeable and fairly shallow. The only one I could tell apart clearly was Tomb the Dwarf, and that was largely because he was nearly always referred to as a dwarf, plus Tomb is a pretty cool fantasy name.

The book was short, which was good, because I wouldn’t have wanted to spend much more time reading it. It and the author were both highly recommended in the list, so it’s a shame it didn’t connect with me. Maybe it wasn’t the right work to get a real feel for how talented M. John Harrison is. Later works that also have as their setting a world that has been significantly altered by technology that has either disappeared or created a disaster are Terry Brooks Shannara series, I believe the later books actually explore the events that led up to the creation of the Tolkienesque world readers first encountered in The Sword of Shannara. Robert Jordan’s Wheel of Time books also make references to a technologically advanced society and characters occasionally encounter remnants of that civilisation. Mark Lawrence’s debut Prince of Thorns is set in a future Earth that has been altered forever by a nuclear catastrophe. The Pastel City may in part be inspired by Jack Vance’s Dying Earth concept, but not having ever read Vance I can’t really give any recommendations there.

Nights of Villjamur

I first heard about Nights of Villjamur when it was published in 2009 and wanted to give it a go then, but for reasons that I’ll never understand I couldn’t get a copy of it down here until late in 2010 and with my ever growing TBR pile it’s taken me until now to actually read it.

Damn! I enjoyed this book. It’s hands down my favourite thing to read in 2011 so far.

To me, there was something almost hypnotic about the book, I became immersed in it very early and remained so until I turned the last page to find that there were no more.

Most of the criticism that I’ve seen has been positive, with the exception of one scathing review over at Strange Horizons.

A lot of the comparisons that have been made have tried to pigeon hole the book as either part of the New Weird movement or as part of Jack Vance’s Dying Earth milieu, as I haven’t read anything classified as New Weird (think China Mieville) or The Dying Earth (both Mieville and Vance are on my to read list) I can’t comment on the validity of those comparisons. As I read two names kept cropping up in my mind. One was Scott Lynch (The Lies of Locke Lamora) and the other was Joe Abercrombie (The First Law trilogy). Not really surprising as Lynch’s best known work came out in 2006 (I read it in 2008) and Abercrombie hit the scene in the same year, and I also read the opening book of The First Law (The Blade Itself) in 2008. I kept comparing Newton’s city of Villjamur with Lynch’s Camorr. There are similarities, although Camorr is far more detailed and complex, to me it was this extra character in The Lies of Locke Lamora, whereas Villjamur, while alien and atmospheric, is merely a setting. Newton and Abercrombie share a rather bleak outlook, but I found Newton’s characters more rounded than Abercrombie’s. Joe’s characters spend a lot of their time fighting and fucking or talking about fighting and fucking. Mark’s do both, but far less often and with more style for the most part. It’s rather like Joe’s people flunked out of high school and Mark’s went on to complete university. The other huge variance is the type of character they write. Beyond his Neanderthal zombies I’ve never see Abercrombie introduce any truly magical being. In Newton’s opening to his Legends of the Red Sun series people rub shoulders with Garudas (flying soldiers based on a creature from Hindu and Buddhist mythology, the Garudas in Nights of Villjamur seem to owe more to the Buddhist version than the Hindu one), there are Banshees who call out at the moment of a person’s death, a prostitute can create art that comes to life and then we have the Rumels, bipedal creatures that have tails and seem to be rather lizard-like, they also live 3 – 4 times as long as a human and I haven’t even mentioned the tusked Dawnir, creatures that seem ageless and whom for time has no real meaning. We have zombies called Draugr (he got that one from Norse mythology) and something that sounds like a cross between a lobster and a person that they don’t even have a name for yet. I was completely caught up in the breadth and brilliance of Mark Charan Newton’s creation.

There are 3 separate stories running in Nights of Villjamur, all largely centred around the coming ice age that is engulfing the archipelago and forcing people to flee to the city. Events are set in motion when the mentally unstable Emperor Johynn kills himself and puts his totally unprepared daughter Jamur Rika on the throne. The 3 stories running through the narrative concern 3 characters and are different in style, two of them do converge towards the end of the book, though.

Brynd Lythraea is a hard bitten career soldier, he’s also an albino and a homosexual (I’m not really sure why the decision was made to make him gay as it didn’t impact in any way, shape or form on the rest of his story), he takes his commandoes to a far flung island and finds himself in an unwinnable fight against a terrifying enemy. Brynd does other things in the course of the book, he’s the one who returns the new Empress; Rika, to Villjamur, but this struggle formed the bulk of his story. It had the feel of a typical knights and swords quest combined with a WW II action story.

The world weary rumel Jeryd works as an investigator for the Inquisition (a job that their extended lifespan makes them ideal for) and he’s investigating the mysterious deaths of highly placed civil servants. He doesn’t know that he’s being betrayed from within and that it could have consequences not only for himself and his wife Marysa, but the Empire itself. At times I had to check and ensure that the book in my hands wasn’t written by Martin Cruz Smith.

My personal favourite narrative was that involving the dashing swashbuckler Randur Estevu, he came to Villjamur looking for a way to extend his dying mother’s life and wound up winning the heart of a Princess. Randur is a dab hand with a sword and an accomplished dancer, he’s also a charmer, but he gets a lot more than he bargains for when he agrees to teach Eir (Empress Rika’s younger sister) how to dance and fight at the same time. This particular storyline became a bit Boys Own towards the end, but it was fun to read.

If you like Joe Abercrombie, then give Mark Charan Newton and his Legends of the Red Sun a try. I’m going to look for a copy of City of Ruin.

Fan Fiction

I'm actually not sure why I'm writing this or if I'm even trying to make any specific point, but I came across an interesting post from George RR Martin (the author of the epic A Song of Ice and Fire fantasy series) on his Not a Blog:http://grrm.livejournal.com/151914.html
regarding fan fiction.

Mr Martin's post was inspired by a rant Diana Gabaldon posted on her blog about it and the 1,000+ responses that the post generated. George Martin's own post got more than 400 responses and he eventually had to lock the thread due to the sheer volume of response.

I've long known George RR Martin is an opponent of fan fiction and actively discourages his fans from writing anything based on his creations (he refers to it as 'playing in someone else's sandbox'). My main issue with Mr Martin and fan fiction is that he doesn't seem to fully understand what it is.

Some time ago a poster on his Not a Blog asked him why he was opposed to fan fiction and his response was a rather flippant comment that he was all for fans writing fiction, he'd just rather they use their own creations, not his to do it. I'm sorry Mr Martin, but that isn't fan fiction, that's fiction.

In this particular article on his Not a Blog he clarifies that position somewhat with this comment:

"One of the things I mislike about fan fiction is its NAME. Truth is, I wrote fan fiction myself. That was how I began, when I was a kid in high school writing for the dittoed comic fanzines of the early 1960s. In those days, however, the term did not mean "fiction set in someone else's universe using someone else's characters." It simply meant "stories written by fans for fans, amateur fiction published in fanzines." Comic fandom was in its infancy then, and most of us who started it were kids... some of whom did make the mistake of publishing amateur fan-written stories about Batman or the Fantastic Four in their 'zines. National (what we called DC back then) and Marvel shut those down pretty quickly.

The rest of us knew better. Including me. I was a fan, an amateur, writing stories out of love just like today's fan fictioneers... but it never dawned on me to write about the JLA or the Fantastic Four or Spider-Man, much as I loved them. I invented my own characters, and wrote about those. Garizan, the Mechanical Warrior. Manta Ray. The White Raider. When Howard Keltner, one of the editors and publishers of STAR-STUDDED COMICS, the leading fanzine of its day, invited me to write about two of his creations, Powerman and Dr. Weird, I leapt at the chance... but only with Howard's express invitation and permission."

Now just because you personally don't like the name of something doesn't mean that you can ignore it to make your own argument. The accepted view of fan fiction has always been that it is a work of fiction written by a fan of a particular creation whether that be a comic book, a TV show, a movie, a book, whatever using concepts and often characters created by the original work's author/creator. What George wrote when he was a teen wasn't fan fiction, it was fiction, he used his own characters and his own world. What he wrote based on Howard Keltner's works was fan fiction, but he had the difference between George and any number of posters out there on the internet writing their own fan fictions was that he had the permission of the creator and his work was endorsed by the creator.

I found it interesting that Mr Martin throughout all his long post made no mention of Songs of the Dying Earth, an anthology published last year edited by Mr Martin and his friend and collaborator Gardner Dozois featuring stories written by George RR Martin and a number of other authors set in Jack Vance's Dying World concept and using characters created by Mr Vance. Aside from the facts that Jack Vance endorsed, authorised and got some of the proceeds, this work was fan fiction, pure and simple. Mr Martin goes on to say that if he passes away he hopes that neither his descendants or publishers allow anyone to write fiction based on his creations. I find that attitude a little churlish. I hope that when he lives to Jack Vance's age (Mr Vance is 93) and receives a submission from a younger author who idolised him and his work and was inspired by such, to put out a book with others using his ideas and characters, that he like his hero Jack Vance, endorses and authorises said work.

George RR Martin's definition of fan fiction also reclassifies a number of original works. Two that immediately spring to mind are Terry Brooks debut novel Sword of Shannara. There is no doubting that the characters and concept were inspired by Lord of the Rings, but they were definitely original, so by George RR Martin's definition Sword of Shannara should be reclassified as Lord of the Rings fan fiction. Sections of Tad Williams' stunning series Otherland are very obviously inspired by L. Frank Baum's Oz concept and Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland, but no one is going to reclassify Otherland as fan fiction. Bill Willingham's marvelous comic book Fables uses public domain characters from popular fairy tales and nursery rhymes, mostly the Brothers Grimm, but I haven't seen anyone classify Fables as Brothers Grimm fan fiction. In fact that's a comic book that George RR Martin heartily endorses and approves of.

I don't read much fan fiction, and I have a few reasons for that, none of which because I disapprove of it. I find a lot of it poorly written, that which is well written often doesn't properly capture the characters properly and most of it is wish fulfilment; the author writing a conclusion to things as they would have preferred to see it. My wife enjoys fan fiction on certain subjects and that's largely driven by the fact that many of the authors write pairings she'd rather see. Having said that I did write a Buffy fan fiction myself many years ago. I used as little of Joss Whedon's characters and ideas while still making it clear that it was definitely set in the Buffyverse. It was well received, but I never wrote another one, preferring to create my own worlds and characters. My attitude towards fan fiction is live and let live. It's out there, you can't stop it, it was in existence well before the internet, it just wasn't as widely distributed and as long as no one writes this stuff and then tries to sell it as their own creation I don't see the problem or the point of the opposition.