Brian Aldiss - The Malacia Tapestry (1978)

"'Somebody told me that Satan has decided to close the world down, and the magicians have agreed. What would happen wouldn't be unpleasant at all, but just ordinary life going on more and more slowly until it stopped absolutely.'
   "'Like a clock stopping,' Armida suggested.
   "'More like a tapestry,' Bedalar said. 'I mean, one day like today, things might run down and never move again, so that we and everything would hang there like a tapestry in the air for ever more.'"

'The Malacia Tapestry' is a lyrical Fantasy about a stagnating magical city. Following on from his experimental New Wave works 'Report On Probability A' (1967) and 'Barefoot In The Head' (1969) but before his re-invigoration of hard SF with the Helliconia trilogy (1982 - 1985), Brian Aldiss turned to Fantasy to explore his usual themes of degeneration and decay. Like the later Viriconium novels, the only other books it much resembles, 'The Malacia Tapestry' forgoes traditional plot in favour of atmosphere, generated by some of Aldiss's finest prose. The impoverished actor Perian de Chirolo undergoes a series of misadventures in the city of Malacia, cursed by ancient magicians never to change, and the course of these events reveal the life of the city, in which myth and superstition have mingled inseparably with very real magic. Malacia is rendered in hyperreal, magical realist intensity, its languid decadence allowing Aldiss to reflect on the nature of art and the necessity of change.
   Much of the distinctive flavour of 'The Malacia Tapestry' comes from its invocation of the grotesque and the grime, something it shares with Viriconium but descends back to Mervyn Peake's Gormenghast books. Perian and his actor friends are all heavy-drinking, philandering lowlifes, as comic as they are tragic, and the image of the plague-ridden corpses being airlifted through the sky on inflatable balloons to infect the camps of the invading Turkish army is equally ridiculous and horrifying. As well as creating a compelling tone, this approach allows Aldiss to ground the novel, making Malacia feel more real and lived-in than your standard high Fantasy setting, which in turn allows him to blur the line between magic and myth within the story. Malacia features winged humans, dinosaurs, (called 'ancestrals' by the Malacians), and magicians, placing it firmly in the realm of the fantastic. However, the magicians don't use their powers to fight evil, but sell fortunes and perform tricks for bored tourists by the side of the road, the winged humans are not angels but are just another kind of people, who interbreed with normal humans to have children with vestigial wings, become frustrated housewives, and lose their ability to fly as they get older, and the dinosaurs are either used as domestic animals or hunted for sport by the upper classes. Thus Aldiss subverts the fantastical elements in the story by making them mundane.
   Aldiss then goes on to explore the interaction between the magical elements and the myths and superstitions of the Malacians. The city of Malacia has its own distinct culture, which is different from ours partially because it has been shaped and molded by these fantastical elements, however the ambiguity between what is real and what is myth makes it difficult to tell by how much. Malacian cosmology is an inversion of the Christian creation - they believe that the world was created by Satan, and that God appeared later to rebel against him and act in the interest of humans. Magicians, who worship Satan, and symbolise stasis, coexist with priests who worship God, who symbolises change. Thus the people of Malacia live their lives caught between these two opposing forces not of Good and Evil, but of Law and Chaos. Malacia's ancient curse preventing change symbolises the encroaching victory of Law, a society sliding into its own decadence. However, how much of this is the result of the magicians' curse, and how much of it is the ruling elite of Malacia and its council brutally preserving their own power at the expense of the downtrodden and exploited working class, is left to the reader to interpret. Aldiss hints at how seriously we shouldn't take the Malacian's own traditional views in the use of 'ancestrals' to describe the dinosaurs, and Perian's father's research into the Malacian's evolution that suggests they are descended from the dinosaurs, despite the characters' blatant mammalian natures.
   All of this hints towards the political thrust of the book. Despite the best efforts of the ruling council, rebellion is fermenting in Malacia due to the horrific conditions faced by the city's large, working class population, whose exploitation keeps the aristocracy of Malacia in power. Aldiss explores how the feudal societies standardly depicted in Fantasy would be fairly miserable for the majority of the population, and the necessity of social change to give more power to the people. The Malacian aristocracy are all portrayed as hopelessly decadent, self-absorbed and manipulative, whilst the working class cast of Bengstohn's play are much more sympathetic, their anger stemming from the struggles they face trying to make the best of life in a system that is unfairly stacked against them. Bengstohn hopes that his play, captured by the new medium of his innovative photo system, will spread his message that the ruling classes are morally bankrupt and prove a useful tool for bringing down the whole stagnant system. Thus, the actors in his play will play a part in bringing change to Malacia, ironically by standing still for long stretches of time while his device captures the image. Aldiss also explores how resistant people are to change, and how insidiously the forces that maintain the status quo enforce themselves on people's world view. Perian, as an actor with an academic father and a well-married sister, codes as middle class, but to all intents and purposes he lives in comparable poverty to the rest of Bengstohn's workers. However, his greatest desire is not to overthrow an unfair system that does him no favours, but to become part of the ruling class himself, improving his lot but doing nothing for anyone else. Perian complains that the plot of Bengstohn's play is unoriginal and cliche-ed, its moral too obvious, but he remains impervious to its message until he lives out the plot in exact detail himself. It is this alone that is sufficient to awaken the revolutionary instinct in himself, rather than the message in any art.

Simon Ings - City Of The Iron Fish (1994)

"In the beginning, my father once explained to me, the inventive powers of the Ceremonies were so great that the whole City was changed. Even before the scraps of poetry escaped between the ribs of the fish - even, indeed, before the sun had set on the Ceremonies themselves - the streets of the City would begin to shift. The usual hills were laid flat, revealing great, half-recognized vistas; elsewhere, great ironstone crags and grassy banks appeared from nowhere, with rivulets coursing down them, and at their foot ran waterways which gave onto canals which gave onto ponds, and with them all sorts of bridges and sluices and tatty terraced houses with overgrown bank gardens; staircases and slip-ways would slide in and out go view do the celebrants as they left the Circus; sometimes the Circus itself would disappear only to repeat itself further down the road. You might never find the expected streets, but sometimes one of them would appear of a sudden behind you as you walked.
   "People in those early days tried flagging their houses before the Ceremonies so that afterwards they might find their way home again. Whether the flags worked is not recorded, but the habit of making and planting them stuck, even when, centuries later, the City had grown too complex and well-realized for a single Ceremony to much alter its geography." 

"Fantasies aren't 'hopeful', they're an admission of failure - mere masturbation." Blythe Maravell

In 'City Of The Iron Fish', Simon Ings uses Fantasy to explore an ambivalence towards Fantasy and our relationship towards art as a whole; is art's role to provide an escape from the harsh, unforgiving nature of reality, or is its job to force us to confront the truth, however uncomfortable and bleak that may be? Ings achieves this by forcing his characters to confront the fact that they may be fictional creations living in an artificial world.
   The eponymous City, with its seafaring traditions and plentiful supplies of water, sprawls across two opposing hills linked by bridges. Yet it is situated in the middle of a vast desert, and the river running between the hills is one of tarmac. The City is maintained by powerful magic, which is governed by a complex and seemingly meaningless series of rituals. The people who live there have ideas and old stories about other times, other places and ways of life, but no one has ever found anything outside the City but desert. Every twenty years, the Ceremony of the Iron Fish renews the magic supporting the City, but in recent times the power of the ritual has faded, and people are starting to lose faith.   While most people are happy not to question their situation, Thomas Kemp, fallen scholar and narrator, just can't help picking at the threads of weirdness surrounding him. Who put the seafaring City in the middle of the desert? Is there a wider world out there, and why is the City cut off from it? Of course there's an easy answer for those of us reading the book: because this is how the author wrote it. Compelling Fantasy or SF settings don't necessarily need to make a whole lot of ontological sense, but the works in question rarely deal with what effect living in such a transparently artificial environment would have on those who live there. There's a tendency to cordon off kitschy Fantasy art from surrealism, but in a way being trapped inside a Roger Dean painting would be as disturbing as finding yourself on the beach in 'The Persistence Of Memory'; neither parse as real. As Thomas Kemp describes his early life with his parents, going away to university, his sexual awakening, Kemp as a character is rounded and believable but the setting, intentionally, never quite convinces. There is something dreamlike about the City, with its ancient formalised meaningless rituals and its grotesque caricatures of characters recalling Gormenghast, down to the bizarre names. With its mutable geography, unexplained isolation and deserted, crumbling alleyways - 'the sort of landscape you might imagine someone concocting who had never seen a city, and had no idea what it was for' - the City resembles Bellona from Samuel R. Delany's masterpiece 'Dhalgren', another book in which the characters begin to suspect they and their situation are fictional. And so, logically enough, when Thomas and his friend the artist Blythe Maravell go on a journey outside the City to find out what is there, they come to a place marking the boundaries of their artificial existence, outside which they simply cannot exist. 
   None of this would be effective if what had gone before didn't give the illusion of reality, and while the City itself and the more grotesque supporting characters frequently signpost their impossible nature, Thomas and Blythe are wonderfully convincing and well rounded characters, and the everyday lives of the people they encounter throughout the City and living on the fringes of the desert ring true. Because of this, we are able to feel Thomas' and Blythe's existential horror as they reach their hands past a certain point and see them reduced from flesh to articulated plastic to stick drawings. 
   The book goes on to explore the effect this revelation has on both characters, and also on the City as a whole, as others make the same journey and a cult of despair and nihilism spreads. Thomas becomes an artist and seeks solace in Fantastical art, that which seeks to imagine a future everyone is beginning to realise is impossible for the City, before becoming depressed and burying himself in debauchery. Blythe, on the other hand, uses her art to confront the bleakness and hopelessness she sees all around her. The two characters struggle with the balance between hope and despair whilst the City crumbles around them into chaos. Whilst Tom eventually finds escape into Fantasy hollow and meaningless, he declares near the end of the book, 'One problem with despair... it makes you stupid!' And in many ways his despair leads him as poorly as his earlier optimism did, and Ings' depiction of a society where despair has curdled into violence and hatred is truly chilling. Ultimately, the characters band together to make a last stand performing the Ceremony of the Iron Fish in order to restore the City before it is destroyed by the nihilists. Fittingly, this has no bearing on the outcome, the real founding ceremony having been carried out by Thomas as a child in the beginning of the book and corrected later with Blythe's help, but it allows the characters to regain some semblance of agency, and the result is even the more grotesque characters get a chance to shine, to show us what they are made of. 
   'City Of The Iron Fish' ends with the whole idea of the City being scrunched up and tossed aside by its creator. However this isn't as bleak an ending as it may seem. With the Ceremony of the Iron Fish, the book explores the idea of art as an act of creation or reification, giving reality and meaning not just to a fictional world we imagine but the world we perceive around us. However with the second half of the book's slide into despair and bleakness, it also explores writing as an act of destruction, the act of creating people restricted by artificial boundaries as cruel, the author as a capricious god doling out cruelty upon cruelty to their creations. With the apparent destruction of the manuscript of the book, the characters are finally free from this external influence. All the characters get to interact again with those who died over the course of the narrative, giving them a chance at closure the story wasn't going to allow them. And meanwhile, the City starts to take on a new and different form, as the unseen writer prepares to write again, but not before they provide Thomas and Blythe with a way out of the narrative.   

Hope Mirrlees - Lud-In-The-Mist (1926)

"It was as if the future were a treacly adhesive fluid that had been spilt all over the present, so that everything he touched made his fingers too sticky to be of the slightest use."

Hope Mirrlees only wrote one fantasy novel. 'Lud-In-The-Mist' comfortably predates Tolkein and Peake's defining works of 20th Century English fantasy, yet it still feels wonderfully fresh and decidedly odd. Lud is situated on the confluence between two rivers: the Dawl, bringing trade and prosperity from inland, and the Dapple, which flows from the land of Faerie. The citizens of Lud have renounced all things magical, and with the growing influence of the supernatural preying on the town, it's up to Nathaniel Chanticleer, the town's mayor, to put things right. 
   Though here be elves and faeries, they couldn't be further away from Tolkein's wise, good-natured and somewhat twee creations. Mirrlees takes her cues from folklore; the Fairies are mischievous and cunning, and as in folklore, Faerieland is conflated with the land of the dead. As in John Crowley's 'Little Big', which I am sure must have taken some of its cues from this book, the sense of threat is created by the encroachment of the world of Faerie on our reality. 
   None of this really conveys the great strength of the book, which is Mirrlees' writing style itself. 'Lud-In-The-Mist' gleefully and effortlessly shifts through differing styles and tones whilst maintaining a constant and engaging narrative voice. Throughout the book the wordplay is a delight, and is used by the author to set up and subvert expectations. As a result, you get wonderfully vivid mixed or extended metaphors, like the one I've quoted above. This all adds to the synaesthetic feel of the novel, which really helps at the end where Master Chanticleer rides into the land of Faerie and things get seriously trippy. 
   And then there are her characters. Chanticleer himself is a wonderfully unlikely hero, a bumbling, self-important dreamer; yet his heart is absolutely in the right place so you can't help wanting him to succeed. Among the more villainous characters, her descriptions almost achieve the grotesque surrealism of Mervin Peake's 'Gormenghast', although Mirrlees is more gentle in tone, and even the villains remain sympathetic. After all, the book is ultimately about the reconciliation between the magical and the mundane, as represented by the worlds of Lud and Faerie. A theme throughout is how we need something of the magical in our everyday lives, how the power of words to name things and so to deceive is itself a kind of magic. This kind of meta twist, which finishes off the novel very elegantly, wouldn't be out of place in Gene Wolfe's work. But 'Lud-In-The-Mist' predates all that. It's a testament to the power and originality of this novel that you can feel its influence in much of the more adventurous Fantasy novels so many years on.