Gears of the City by Felix Gilman
I picked up Gears of the City by Felix Gilman because the cover art made it look steampunk and because I’m a sucker for a good city. Gears isn’t steampunk, but it is very much an “eternal city” novel.
Gears of the City introduces a curious cast of characters all struggling to pierce the secret Mountain at the heart of eternal, timeless Ararat at that very moment in time that the ur-city seems to be most in peril.
The central protagonist is Arjun, who has lost much of his memory and is being relentlessly pursued by unnatural Hollow Men as a result of his failed attempt to storm the Mountain in search of his missing god of music. Confused and helpless, Arjun finds himself stranded in a gray, almost musically devoid period in Ararat’s history, virtually at the foot of the Mountain, where he swiftly runs afoul of a captured and prophetic Beast and the dark-coated patrolmen called Know-Nothings. He takes refuge with two sisters, Marta and Ruth Low, who ask him to rescue their sister Ivy from the clutches of the depraved, blaspheming outsider Brace-Bel.
But entering Brace-Bel’s mansion only opens up a multitude of new questions, and as Arjun slowly regains his memory, he realizes that he stands at a significant and perilous moment in the history of Ararat. Both aided and stymied by the other madmen who have managed to slip into the “Metacontext” to travel through Ararat—men like handsome St. Loup, cynical Father Turnbull, and inventive Potocki—Arjun struggles to find the elusive, sociopathic mastermind Shay and return once more to the Mountain.
Gears of the City is a sequel to Thunderer, which also features Arjun and the city of Ararat, but it is not necessary to read Thunderer before reading Gears.
The subgenre that I’m calling “eternal city” isn’t, I’ll admit, for everyone. It’s usually highly fantastic, populated by fascinating, amoral eccentrics and beautiful, deadly beasts who wander through a labyrinthine, ever-changing, immortal metropolis on their own singular missions. It seldom has a straightforward plot, delighting instead in a series of picaresque and/or weird encounters, usually with political overtones. It doesn’t often try to draw the reader in emotionally, instead allowing the reader to engage with the story as a flâneur, intrigued by but detached from the curiosities the novel puts on display. In an eternal city novel, the city itself is essential to the plot, and not merely a setting; moreover, one gets the distinct feeling that the city is essential to many plots; that you’re only reading one story but brushing up against many others just as interesting. An eternal city writer might strengthen this impression by mentioning or returning to the city in several works, keeping the city’s name and some references intact but otherwise feeling free to ignore continuity because, after all, the eternal city is both timeless and ever-changing.
One of the greatest eternal cities is M. John Harrison’s Viriconium, although some other fantasy cities come close to its properties: Gene Wolfe’s Nessus and China Miéville’s New Crobuzon, for example. Roger Zelazny’s Amber, though not a city, has eternal city properties, as does Michael Moorcock’s End of Time — both are locations (a world, a point at time) that cast reflections and/or ripples on many other linked but lesser locations. What other eternal cities am I forgetting? Some otherwise interesting fantasy cities don’t quite make the cut — Sanctuary and Lankhmar, for example, or RPG cities like Greyhawk. And although some real cities have attained near-mythic status in literature, such as London, New York, and Tokyo, I don’t think they’re quite what I’m getting at, although I could probably be persuaded to include them in terms of their existence as literary constructs, at least….
At any rate, Ararat is most certainly an eternal city, and I hope that Gilman continues to refer to it in later works, whether or not he returns to the same characters or histories established in Thunderer and Gears of the City — after all, a truly eternal city stands apart from the people who live within it.
drupagliassotti @ June 15, 2009