Okay, so I know a few of us have read this book and some of us are reading it currently. I finished it a month or two ago, and while I really enjoyed it. I loved the first book's straight-forward story, the characters (especially teagus-Cromis), all that. The third book I thought was really interesting, all the discussions about art -- how I was almost laughing out loud at some points and then just sitting their, shocked and horrified. The short stories had some cool things going for them that seemed to tie (or confound) the other books.

But there's some stuff that really threw me. For instance, the timeline between the individual books -- none of it is consistent. My copy has an intro by Neil and he mentions this...Why did Harrison go this route, do you think?

Also, what's the deal with the fish heads? They're featured prominitely in the third novel and at least two of the short stories, but I don't understand the symbolism. Anyone?

As I finished reading the stories, I realized that some of the characters in the short stories have different names but sound phonetically similar (can't remember the specific names, but it's the main character in both Viriconium Knights and the Dancer and the Dance). Does this just play into many versions of the same world?

So, yeah. This is a big first post, but I'm just curious to see what other people think about it all.

I'm still very early in the book (same version as yours, too), so I'll have more to say once I actually, y'know, read it, but I'm really enjoying it so far.

(btw, Harrison's "Light" was rather confounding in places too)

*bumped* for Zoneseek

quote:

Originally posted by The Scoundrel:
But there's some stuff that really threw me. For instance, the timeline between the individual books -- none of it is consistent. My copy has an intro by Neil and he mentions this...Why did Harrison go this route, do you think?

Also, what's the deal with the fish heads? They're featured prominitely in the third novel and at least two of the short stories, but I don't understand the symbolism. Anyone?

As I finished reading the stories, I realized that some of the characters in the short stories have different names but sound phonetically similar (can't remember the specific names, but it's the main character in both Viriconium Knights and the Dancer and the Dance). Does this just play into many versions of the same world?

After reading Mervyn Peake, I saw two main branches in fantasy
Tolkien -> David Eddings, Robert Jordan, etc.
Mervyn Peake -> China Mieville, Jeff VanderMeer, Michael Moorcock

There's a sort-of parallel in sf, and I took a title from William Gibson as a tenet of the Peake camp: "No Maps For These Territories."

But what about Ursula Le Guin? Patricia McKillip? Robin McKinley?

I know you said "main" branches, but ... .

- Cho

quote:

Originally posted by Chomiji:
But what about Ursula Le Guin? Patricia McKillip? Robin McKinley?

I know you said "main" branches, but ... .

- Cho

Only Le Guin I've read is The Left Hand of Darkness, I don't know the rest.

The idea is from William Gibson's theory of "termite art." A Tolkien-type story is this big structured monolith with a map. But worlds like Gormenghast and Viriconium are phantasmagoric, can't be nailed down, and stories can go on tangents, intersect, or contradict each other.

With the new maps coming out, Pratchett seems to be moving from the Peake to the Tolkien camp, but of course there's a lot of overlap between the two.

You should read the first 3 "Earthsea" books by LeGuin, at least. They are very much modern fantasy classics.

- Cho

Interesting, Zoneseek. I'd never come across this before. But all of Mieville's stuff in Bas Lag feels like it has a linnear timeline. And so does Gibson's Sprawl and...can't remember the name for his second series.

I've been hearing a lot about Mervyn Peake and Gormenghast recently. I'll have to check that out, too.

There are also maps of (parts of) Bas-Lag, I believe.

There are maps for Bas-Lag? But even if there aren't, I suppose it makes sense that there could be. As 'The Scoundrel' says above, his work is 'linear' in feel. China Mieville works to create a universe which is self consistent for us as readers. Really, for all his well articulated attacks on Tolkien, Mieville could in some ways be considered to be on the same branch. He has a much greater sense of and fascination with the grotesque, and then there's his politics too of course (far to the left against Tolkien's little Englander sentiments), but it could be argued that these are really only surface details. Personally, I think that Mieville's fiction still orientates itself in opposition to Tolkien and his many copiests (he's a very self aware writer I think), but still, on some fundamental level, his fiction *works* in the same way.

M John Harrison though, is deliberately inconsistent. I read an interview with him in an issue of The Edge years ago (don't know if it can be found online) where he said that he was purposely sitting out to deconstruct sword and sorcery fiction with Viriconium. And one of his points is very simple - to point up how fantasy isn't real. Think of the last short story (well, it's the last story in my edition of Viriconium Nights, I think they amended the order of the novels and stories with the collected edition), where there's a character in the real world ('ours' if you like) who's desperate to reach the imaginary world of Viriconium, only to fail, because of course it doesn't exist (and thinking about it, characters seeking after *something* which is ultimately unatainable are a feature of Harrison's fiction, especially in The Course of the Heart). So there are no maps of Viriconium because you're never going to be able to go there. It's almost, at the end of the sequence, as if Harrison is punishing those of us who enjoy reading fantasy for our enjoyment. That's how I remember reading it anyway.

Have no idea about the fish heads though. To be fair, it's years since I read them.

Oh, and sorry to be pernicerty, but 'termite art' is not William Gibson's theory. It was an idea first expressed by the film crtic Manny Farber (the relevant essay can be found in his collection 'Negative Space'). I deffinately agree that it can be usefully applied to a great many things though (and of course, in one sense, *all* fantasy, whether inspired by Tolkien or Mervyn Peake or whoever, can be considered 'termite art' depending on the context).

quote:

Originally posted by feste:
Oh, and sorry to be pernicerty, but 'termite art' is not William Gibson's theory. It was an idea first expressed by the film crtic Manny Farber

William Gibson's misinterpretation of Manny Farber's termite art. From the Gibson blog:

quote:

MANNY FARBER AND DIVINE BIT-ROT
Someone posts that, just as I imagined I might be doing, I’ve recalled Farber’s idea completely incorrectly. There, you see: that is the wonderful thing that is higher education! I have been navigating all these years, in part, on the basis of my own distortion of Farber’s idea. But I do know that when I first read it, I must have done so with at least a degree of comprehension, and that I felt both enlightened and emboldened. Perhaps I had it right, then, but it’s become encrusted in memory, overgrown with jewels and barnacles…

Termite art in action! Nothing is fixed, everything is reinterpreted.

Has anyone else read Harrison's rant on worldbuilding? It's stirred up a lot of frustration in SF/F community but it seems to go hand in hand with what Feste was saying.

There's an essay he published on the fantastic metropolis website a few years ago, entitled 'What It Might Be Like to Live in Viriconium' which says much the same thing. In fact, going back and looking at it, I think that's probably where I got most of what I wrote above from. So that's probably why it goes hand in hand with what I said!

Quote:
“What would it be really like to live in the world of…?” is an inappropriate question, a category error. You understand this immediately you ask it of the inscape of, say, Samuel Beckett or Wyndham Lewis. I didn’t want it asked (and I certainly didn’t want it answered) of Viriconium, so I made that world increasingly shifting and complex. You can not learn its rules. More importantly, Viriconium is never the same place twice. That is because—like Middle-Earth—it is not a place.

And ZoneSeek, I deffinately agree that a theory can be developed by others. From the essays I've read in Negaitive Space, Manny Farber was mostly engaged with looking at how film depicts reality (or 'space'), although that no doubt does him a disservice as a description. He doesn't seem to have had any interest in fantasy of any kind. But that doesn't mean others can't use his ideas for completely different ends. Like I said, I was just being pernickity!