A Storm of Wings

A Storm of Wings

by John Harrison

1980, reprinted 2005

A Storm of Wings is the second of John Harrison’s science fantasy books centered on the far-future city of Viriconium. The first book, The Pastel City, is set on earth in the Evening, a kind of quasi-medieval period that follows after the fall of the ultra high-tech civilizations of the Afternoon. That first book reads almost like a sequel, because Harrison introduces us to a King-Arthur-like figure who ruled Viriconium and united the surrounding lands, but then the whole book is set after his death. The dead king’s daughter, the young queen, calls her father’s old allies out of retirement for help as Viriconium is invaded by her half-sister, leading an army of human raiders and scifi monsters left over from the Afternoon.

A Storm of Wings is set another 80 years later. The young queen is now a woman in middle age (human lifespans are longer in this era, it seems). Her father’s equivalent of the Knights of the Round Table are all dead, except for Tomb the dwarf and the ancient, possibly immortal wizard-figure Cellur. Society is Viriconium has become less medieval and more futuristic thanks to the Reborn Men, an army of soldiers from the Afternoon who were specially trained to fight the scifi monsters, who Tomb woke up out of suspended animation for help in the war. It’s not initially clear how, but the other important detail from the first book is that Tomb mentioned several times that his mentor was the first person in the Evening to travel to the moon, and that journey is the source of this book’s problems. Unbeknownst to anyone, he’s returned to the earth, and he’s brought something with him...

So, A Storm of Wings leans more into the scifi half of science fantasy. It’s also probably more literary, because while the first book had dense, almost poetic passages of description, and featured slightly unconventional heroes in a strange setting, its plot still followed the structure of an adventure story.

This second book is more ambitious, though in my opinion not quite as good. The main protagonist of Pastel City was a reluctant hero because he was old and retired, weary and mournful, and he wanted to be a poet. In Storm, Harrison goes fully anti-heroic. We get someone who repeatedly rejects the attempts to recruit him, who was an apprentice airship pilot in the war* (which destroyed all the airships)*, who’s spent the last 80 years angry and embittered and working as an assassin. Tomb and Cellur are little more than elderly advisors at this point. Cellur’s tower has collapsed and his flock of mechanical birds is all but gone. We get a witness to the alien trouble, a Reborn woman who has only a tenuous grasp to reality, and one of the queen’s advisors, another Reborn Man who is in the middle of losing his grasp as well. And to guide them, the ghostly psychic projection of Tomb’s mentor, a babbling, farting, levitating sphere of ectoplasm, who sometimes warns of danger or leads the way, but is otherwise incapable of coherent thought.

What especially makes Storm different though, is that while nominally the monsters this group has set off to find and defeat are alien insects, originally from deep space, more recently from the moon, the actual problem they have to solve is a kind of epistemic crisis, a fundamental disagreement about the nature of reality itself.

I mentioned that both the Reborn protagonists experience something like delusions; Harrison tells us this problem is ubiquitous among the Reborn Men. Some part of their minds still wants to live in the Afternoon. This is presented like a kind of degenerative schizophrenia. They suffer hallucinations and fugue states and lose the ability to care for themselves or to live among anyone but their own kind.

The citizens of Viriconium increasingly join the Sign of the Locust, a cult that preaches that the world is an illusion, it isn’t real. By the start of the book they’ve become violent. By the end they are all partially turning into insects, growing new limbs and other bodyparts as though they’re cancerous tumors.

When our protagonists, a mix of reluctant and incapable, finally learn the truth, the problem isn’t just that alien insects have landed on the earth. It’s almost metaphysical. Harrison claims the earth looks the way it does not just because of its physical matter, because of how we, collectively, because of how our minds interpret that arrangement of matter. But the insects have alien minds, different needs, a new psychology, and the world responds by becoming what they need it to be.

The insects are like the angels from Neon Genesis Evangelion or the hronir from Tlon from Borges’s story “Tlon, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius”. Their presence is an incursion of a competing idea that strives to overwrite the world as we know it, a dream trying to become real. The changing landscape, the toxic yellow mist, the mutating cultists, the city of Viriconium overlaid with another version of itself made of spiderwebs and wasps’ nests, the insects themselves growing human limbs and organs in a process that mirrors the cultists - the apocalypse is here, and it is the physical manifestation of a disagreement about meaning. You can’t fault Harrison for trying something daring.

That said, I think I prefer The Pastel City. Harrison leans so hard into making his characters unlikable that I didn’t especially enjoy reading them, even as they opposed an end of the world scenario that’s more like a nightmare or horror film than like a disaster movie. I liked his prose better before too. In Storm he repeatedly describes scenes as though we are watching them on a screen, including people walking onto, then across, the out of our unmoving field of vision. It felt like reading a description of a comic or movie, it’s not an effect I enjoy in literature. If other critics are to be believed, both these two are just warm-ups, and it’s the next couple books where Harrison will really impress me. It’s an open question though, whether what is mostly widely praised about his writing will be something I enjoy more than a clear story, told well.