The View from the Cheap Seats

by Neil Gaiman

  Remember, when reading these books, Google is your friend. Wikipedia is your friend. If you are curious, look it up. Were there really Celts in Galatea—modern Turkey—that the British would have recognized as cousins, speaking a similar tongue? (Why yes, there were. Wikipedia tells me that three Gaulish tribes traveled southeast, the “Trocmi, Tolistobogii and Tectosages. They were eventually defeated by the Seleucid king Antiochus I, in a battle where the Seleucid war elephants shocked the Celts.”) Were there really vomitoria, where Romans went to vomit? (No, there weren’t. It’s a common misconception. A vomitorium was actually a kind of hallway. But this is a rare slip.)

  Not for All the Gold in Ireland brings us an older Photinus. I’m not sure that he’s wiser, but he’s softer, less monstrous. And he’s funnier (both books are funny, although the humor of Votan is gallows humor). He’s off to get back a document, and on the way he’s going to wander a long way into a number of stories. He’ll become Manawydan, son of Llyr, the hero of several branches of the great Welsh prose work known as The Mabinogion (as are many of the people we will meet on the way—Pryderi, for example, and Rhiannon. Taliesin turns up too, centuries before we would expect the legendary Taliesin, but it is a title, we learn, not a name, handed down from bard to bard).

  And there’s a strange and glorious achievement here: For the people are human, yes. But they are also mythical, larger than life. Not always in the way that we expect culture heroes and gods to be, but in a new way: they are avatars of gods, avatars of heroes: are these the Odin and the Loki and the Thor of legend, or do they echo them? Do the gods and heroes have a separate existence from Photinus and his crew, and are our protagonist and his friends being pushed through tales that will need to exist?

  As the tale goes on, we meet other heroes (is Photinus a hero? He is the hero of his own story) and when we encounter Setanta, the given name of the Irish hero known as Cú Chulainn, we can predict that we will slip, as we do, from The Mabinogion into the Táin. And Not for All the Gold in Ireland concludes itself in a manner that is both a valid conclusion to the book we have been reading and a cliffhanger, and perhaps also a setup for another book, one in which, I suspect, Photinus would have found himself Quetzalcoatl of the Aztecs and Kukulkan of the Mayans.

  That book was never written. John James did not return to Photinus: he wrote other novels, fine and powerful, and different. These are books that have been brought back into print by people who love them, and would not let them be forgotten. If you are willing to walk and ride with Photinus, who was called Votan and Manannan and many other names, and who only wanted to increase his family’s wealth, and to bed the willing wives of absent officers, then he will repay you, not with amber, or mammoth ivory, or Irish gold, but with stories, which are the finest gift of all.

  * * *

  This is the introduction to the Fantasy Masterworks edition of Votan and Other Novels, 2014.

  * * *

  On Viriconium: Some Notes Toward an Introduction

  People are always pupating their own disillusion, decay, age. How is it they never suspect what they are going to become, when their faces already contain the faces they will have twenty years from now?

  —“A Young Man’s Journey to Viriconium”

  And I look at the Viriconium cycle of M. John Harrison and wonder whether The Pastel City knew it was pupating In Viriconium or the heartbreak of “A Young Man’s Journey to Viriconium” inside its pages, whether it knew what it was going to become.

  Some weeks ago and halfway around the world, I found myself in the center of Bologna, that sunset-colored medieval towered city which waits in the center of a modern Italian city of the same name, in a small used bookshop, where I was given a copy of the Codex Seraphinianus to inspect. The book, created by the artist Luigi Serafini, is, in all probability, an art object: there is text, but the alphabet resembles an alien code, and the illustrations (which cover such aspects of life as gardening, anatomy, mathematics, and geometry, card games, flying contraptions, and labyrinths) bear only a passing resemblance to those we know in this world at this time: in one picture a couple making love becomes a crocodile, which crawls away; while the animals, plants and ideas are strange enough that one can fancy the book something that has come to us from a long time from now, or from an extremely long way away. It is, lacking another explanation, art. And leaving that small shop, walking out into the colonnaded shaded streets of Bologna, holding my book of impossibilities, I fancied myself in Viriconium. And this was odd, only because until then I had explicitly equated Viriconium with England.

  Viriconium, M. John Harrison’s creation, the Pastel City in the Afternoon of the world; two cities in one, in which nothing is consistent, tale to tale, save a scattering of place-names, although I am never certain that the names describe the same place from story to story. Is the Bistro Californium a constant? Is Henrietta Street?

  M. John Harrison, who is Mike to his friends, is a puckish person of medium height, given to enthusiasms and intensity. He is, at first glance, slightly built, although a second glance suggests he has been constructed from whips and springs and good, tough leather, and it comes as no surprise to find that Mike is a rock climber, for one can without difficulty imagine him clinging to a rock face on a cold, wet day, finding purchase in almost invisible nooks and pulling himself continually up, man against stone. I have known Mike for over twenty years: in the time I have known him his hair has lightened to a magisterial silver, and he seems to have grown somehow continually younger. I have always liked him, just as I have always been more than just a little intimidated by his writing. When he talks about writing he moves from puckish to possessed. I remember Mike in conversation at the Institute for Contemporary Art trying to explain the nature of fantastic fiction to an audience: he described someone standing in a windy lane, looking at the reflection of the world in the window of a shop, and seeing, sudden and unexplained, a shower of sparks in the glass. It is an image that raised the hairs on the back of my neck, that has remained with me, and which I would find impossible to explain. It would be like trying to explain Harrison’s fiction, something I am attempting to do in this introduction, and at which I am, in all probability, failing.

  There are writers’ writers, of course, and M. John Harrison is one of those. He moves elegantly, passionately, from genre to genre, his prose lucent and wise, his stories published as SF or as fantasy, as horror or as mainstream fiction. In each playing field, he wins awards, and makes it look so easy. His prose is deceptively simple, each word considered and placed where it can sink deepest and do the most damage.

  The Viriconium stories, which inherit a set of names and a sense of unease from a long-forgotten English Roman city (English antiquaries have preferred Uriconium, foreign scholars Viroconium or Viriconium, and Vriconium has also been suggested. The evidence of our ancient sources is somewhat confused, a historical website informs us), are fantasies, three novels and a handful of stories which examine the nature of art and magic, language and power.

  There is, as I have already mentioned, and as you will discover, no consistency to Viriconium. Each time we return to it, it has changed, or we have. The nature of reality shifts and changes. The Viriconium stories are palimpsests, and other stories and other cities can be seen beneath the surface. Stories adumbrate other stories. Themes and characters reappear, like tarot cards being shuffled and redealt.

  The Pastel City states Harrison’s themes simply, in comparison to the tales that follow, like a complex musical theme first heard played by a marching brass band: it’s far-future SF at the point where SF transmutes into fantasy, and the tale reads like the script of a magnificent movie, complete with betrayals and battles, all the pulp ingredients carefully deployed. (It reminds me on rereading a little of Michael Moorcock and, in its end-of-time ambience and weariness, of Jack Vance and Cordwainer Smith.) Lord tegeus-Cromis (who fancied himself a better poet than swordsman) reassembles what remains of the legendary Methven to protect V
iriconium and its girl-queen from invaders to the north. Here we have a dwarf and a hero, a princess, an inventor and a city under threat. Still, there is a bittersweetness to the story that one would not normally expect from such a novel.

  A Storm of Wings takes a phrase from the first book as its title and is both a sequel to the first novel and a bridge to the stories and novel that follow and surround it: the voice of this book is, I suspect, less accessible than the first book, the prose rich and baroque. It reminds me at times of Mervyn Peake, but it also feels like it is the novel of someone who is stretching and testing what he can do with words, with sentences, with story.

  And then, no longer baroque, M. John Harrison’s prose becomes transparent, but it is a treacherous transparency. Like its predecessors, In Viriconium is a novel about a hero attempting to rescue his princess, a tale of a dwarf, an inventor and a threatened city, but now the huge canvas of the first book has become a small and personal tale of heartbreak and of secrets and of memory. The gods of the novel are loutish and unknowable, our hero barely understands the nature of the story he finds himself in. It feels like it has come closer to home than the previous stories—the disillusion and decay that was pupating in the earlier stories has now emerged in full, like a butterfly, or a metal bird, freed from its chrysalis.

  The short stories which weave around the three novels are stories about escapes, normally failed escapes. They are about power and politics, about language and the underlying structure of reality, and they are about art. They are as hard to hold as water, as evanescent as a shower of sparks, as permanent and as natural as rock formations.

  The Viriconium stories and novels cover such aspects of life as gardening, anatomy, mathematics, and geometry, card games, flying contraptions, and labyrinths. Also, they talk about art.

  Harrison has gone on to create several masterpieces, in and out of genre, since leaving Viriconium: Climbers, his amazing novel of rock climbers and escapism, takes the themes of “A Young Man’s Journey to Viriconium” into mainstream fiction; The Course of the Heart takes them into fantasy, perhaps even horror; Light, his transcendent twining SF novel, is another novel about failed escapes—from ourselves, from our worlds, from our limitations.

  For me, the first experience of reading Viriconium Nights and In Viriconium was a revelation. I was a young man when I first encountered them, half a lifetime ago, and I remember the first experience of Harrison’s prose, as clear as mountain-water and as cold. The stories tangle in my head with the time that I first read them—the Thatcher Years in England seem already to be retreating into myth. They were larger-than-life times when we were living them, and there’s more than a tang of the London I remember informing the city in these tales, and something of the decaying brassiness of Thatcher herself in the rotting malevolence of Mammy Vooley (indeed, when Harrison retold the story of “The Luck in the Head” in graphic novel form, illustrated by Ian Miller, Mammy Vooley was explicitly drawn as an avatar of Margaret Thatcher).

  Now, on rereading, I find the clarity of Harrison’s prose just as admirable, but find myself appreciating his people more than ever I did before—flawed and hurt and always searching for ways to connect with each other, continually betrayed by language and tradition and themselves. And it seems to me that each city I visit now is an aspect of Viriconium, that there is an upper and a lower city in Tokyo and in Melbourne, in Manila and in Singapore, in Glasgow and in London, and that the Bistro Californium is where you find it, or where you need it, or simply what you need.

  M. John Harrison, in his writing, clings to sheer rock faces, and finds invisible handholds and purchases that should not be there; he pulls you up with him through the story, pulls you through to the other side of the mirror, where the world looks almost the same, except for the shower of sparks . . .

  * * *

  This is the introduction to M. John Harrison’s Viriconium, 2005.

  * * *

  So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish: An Introduction

  Note to the reader from the Introducer: If you have not read this book before, and have come here having just read the previous three books, you should skip this introduction and go straight to the beginning of the book. I give stuff away here. There are spoilers ahead. Just read the book.

  I’ll be here when you get back.

  No, I mean it.

  I’ll put down some asterisks. I’ll see you after them, when you’ve read the book.

  * * *

  DOUGLAS ADAMS WAS tall. He was brilliant: I’ve met a handful of geniuses, and I’d count him as one of them. He was a frustrated performer, a remarkable explainer and communicator, an enthusiast. He was an astonishing comic writer: he could craft sentences that changed the way a reader viewed the world, and sum up complex and difficult issues in aptly chosen metaphors. He combined the trappings of science fiction with profound social commentary and a healthy sense of humor to create fresh worlds. He loved computers, was an astonishingly fine public speaker. He was a bestselling author. He was a competent guitarist, a world traveler, an environmentalist, a man who held remarkably wonderful parties, a gourmand.

  What he was not, and this may seem somewhat odd, especially when you consider how many of them he wrote and sold, and how famously well he wrote them, was a novelist. And this, I suspect unarguably, is the oddest of his novels.

  So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish was Douglas’s first attempt to write a novel from scratch.

  In many ways it could be seen as an experiment. A transitional novel between the galaxy-spanning romps of the first three Hitchhiker’s books and the more Earthbound adventures of Dirk Gently. It was, after all, the first of the three of Douglas’s books not to have originated in the extraordinary period of creativity that took him from the creation of the Hitchhiker’s radio series to the end of his time as script editor of Doctor Who. His first two books, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy and The Restaurant at the End of the Universe, had strong foundations: they were built on the backs of the scripts that Douglas, and (for the second series) Douglas and John Lloyd, had crafted for the original Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy BBC Radio 4 series. The third book, Life, the Universe and Everything was adapted from an unused outline Douglas had written for a Doctor Who film, Doctor Who and the Krikketmen. His next book, the remarkable Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency, was adapted from Douglas’s unfilmed Doctor Who story Shada (with a sprinkling of ideas from the filmed Doctor Who story City of Death).

  The first Hitchhiker’s books had been written by Douglas as a young man for a world that expected nothing, and were published as paperback originals. Now Douglas was, for the first time, being published in hardback. He was a bestselling novelist, who had not yet written a book he was proud of. This may partly have been because he was not a novelist.

  Now he needed to write a book he had been paid a lot of money to write. His accountant had embezzled most of the money and then killed himself. Douglas Adams had gone to Hollywood on his first, abortive, quest to get The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy made into a film. He had lived there for over a year, doing drafts of the film, did not have a good time there, and, surprised and a little battered, he had returned home to a little converted stable house off Upper Street in Islington, and, eventually, and under pressure, put off actually writing So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish.

  His publisher, Pan, found themselves, early in 1984, soliciting a book that was, for the most part, unwritten and for that matter mostly unplotted. The lenticular image on the original cover showed a walrus that became a dinosaur, because Douglas had mentioned that there would be a walrus in the book.

  There would be no walrus in the book.

  It became part of the story of the book that, as the publishing date of the book got closer and the book got no closer to being written, publisher Sonny Mehta had taken a hotel suite and essentially locked Douglas in to write it, editing the pages as they came through. It was a strange way for a book to be written, and some
thing Douglas used as an excuse for any problems that the book had.

  But it was a book he was still particularly proud of when it came out. I remember that.

  Douglas Adams had returned from America to Islington, and So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish occurs in the space that Southern California isn’t. Which is to say that both Douglas’s Outer Space and his Southern California are extremely Californian: the hotel in which rock stars read Language, Truth and Logic by the pool and the bar in which Ford Prefect attempts to pay his bill with an American Express card are not a galaxy apart, and the hooker who has a special service for rich people could exist as easily in one world as another.

  Arthur Dent, in previous stories a flat character who existed mostly to boggle at the improbabilities, often infinite, he was confronted with, became someone significantly more like Douglas. Douglas’s return from America was echoed in Arthur Dent’s return from hitchhiking across all of time and space to an Earth that the readers believed to have been destroyed, and his explanation to the world that he had been in America.

  It might be seen as a problem for a writer who was considered a social satirist to have, a few pages into the first book in a bestselling series, destroyed the Earth. On the good side it sets you free to explore the vastness of the infinite. On the downside, it rather limits you as an observational humorist, when it comes to specifics, and while Douglas may not have been a novelist, he was definitely an observational humorist.

  Still, I think there’s another reason for the restoration of the Earth at the beginning of this book.