. . . or at least till after the Hugo/Campbell deadline, but I just ran across it and, given the amount of pressure exerted in the SF world over the last few years to venerate Mr. Harrison, I was delighted to find no less a quasi-authority than Cheap Truth At The Age Of One expressing thoughts so similar to mine.

The Floating Gods by M. John Harrison. Timescape, $2.50. This book is called In Viriconium in Britain, but was stupidly retitled for American release, presumably because Timescape believes we are boneheads. It’s the third book in a sword-and-sorcery trilogy that includes The Pastel City and A Storm of Wings.

It’s clear that a different but allied form of decadence [different from, and allied to, that of Jack Vance’s Lyonesse] has struck Across the Water. Its trademark is not perversion, but exhaustion. The Pastel City rejoiced in such sprightly characters as Tomb, “the nastiest dwarf that ever hacked the hands off a priest,” whose rotten malevolence was a welcome relief from Harrison’s sometimes stifling meditations on spiritual decline.

The Floating Gods has no such characters. It is set in a city smothered under a nebulous Plague Zone. Possibly Harrison has spent too much time in Brixton. Despair seems to have been printed across his eyeballs in letters of fire. The Floating Gods is a relentless exercise in total, stifling futility; it is one long, gray, debilitating dream.

Harrison’s extraordinary talent merely crams the reader’s head more firmly into the bucket. It is impossible to read this book without considering suicide. It is painful to read; painful even to think about. Let’s hope to God something happens soon to cheer him up.

No sign of that, alas. Though I’ve heard Mr. Harrison claim that people who find his work depressing just don’t get the joke.

---

God, I ♥ the email. Only in this day and age could one generation’s pseudo-zinester criticism manqué find the bar to finding and citing the previous generation’s rants so profoundly lowered. In fact, someone should start a Cheap Truth blog, in persona as “Vincent Omniveritas”, in the manner of Pepys and Caesar. Crush and burn the artificial categories of “past” and “future”!