At this point in his evolution, the young Harrison had yet to take up arms in the fierce guerrilla war against the complacencies of genre fiction that would define the next twenty years of his career.
There are glimpses some intense nature writing, lines haunted by TS Eliot, a flirtation with entropy, but they remain just glimpses, half formed confirmation that it was written 10 years before the author had indeed found himself. On a lazy Sunday afternoon re-read, I looked for signs of the mature M. It has a vivid cinematic quality and a sense of the epic which made me think that Netflix or Amazon should be fighting over the property rights in their recent rapacious search for fantasy content. The plot is a straightforward – a band of heroes at the end of time set out to save the world. John Harrison is wasting his time and his gift with this sort of material” but also added that “if you like elegantly crafted, elegantly written sword and sorcery, this book is all you could ask for.”Īlthough it’s the weakest of the three Viriconium novels, (with an especially underwritten role for the solitary female character who seems only to exist to be in a state of peril) it still makes for a solid science fantasy adventure. In a contemporaneous review, Michael Bishop said that “M. Harrison has said he didn’t find himself until 1980, and it’s true that it is difficult to recognise this straightforward piece of escapism as a Harrison novel, the young writer is strongly under the influence of Michael Moorcock, and this reads like fantasy in the Elric vein. The first, The Committed Men, is out of print today, and the second, The Pastel City, would go on to become the foundation to the acclaimed Viriconium sequence.
In miniature, the end of the world.ġ971 saw the publication of M.
It is a poor empire I have… Everywhere the death of the landscape.
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