Viriconium - M. John Harrison

Written by M. John Harrison
Read by Simon Vance
Format: MP3
Unabridged

This landmark collection gathers four groundbreaking fantasy classics from the acclaimed author of Light. Set in the imagined city of Viriconium, here are the masterworks that revolutionized a genre and enthralled a generation of readers: The Pastel City, A Storm of Wings, In Viriconium, and Viriconium Nights. Back after a long absence, these singular tales of a timeless realm and its enigmatic inhabitants are now reborn and compiled to captivate a whole new generation.

A few words from Neil Gaiman on Viriconium:
“Viriconium is three novles and a short story collection, spanning much of M. John Harrison’s illustrious career - what an ambitious task to imagine an alternate version of someplace that may be London, albeit a punk-sensibility London in a post-apocalyptic future. It’s as if Mike Harrison remembered a place that will never exist, or at least not for millennia, and fleshed it out with art and legends and glorious gods hiding amidst the population.

The first novel, The Pastel City, introduces Lord tegeus-Cromis, called upon to be the reluctant defender of Virconium from a barbarian onslaught. Eighty years later, in the novel A Storm of Wings, a race of demi-gods rises to threaten Viriconium. The short stories In Viriconium are glorious and terrifying by turns, butt they are always incredibly human and incredibly real, and you get the joy of M. John Harrison’s prose, which is crystalline and sharp and uplifting…. Viriconium Nights is my favorite novel of the sequence.

Simon Vance is the gold-standard of narrators, and I’m thrilled and proud to have him. He’s brilliant, and he’s brought entire worlds to life before in the Millennium Trilogy and in Anthony Powell’s twelve-book cycle Dance to the Music of Time. He is the man of a hundred voices, a thousand voices, and as soon as Mike and I heard him, we knew we’d found the man to carry us there and back again.”

Award-winning author, narrator, and screenwriter Neil Gaiman personally selected this book, and, using the tools of the Audiobook Creation Exchange (ACX), cast the narrator and produced this work for his audiobook label, Neil Gaiman Presents.