Wikipedia
Viriconium is a fictional city created by M. John Harrison and also the name of the cycle of novels and stories set in and around it.
Viriconium is on a future Earth littered with the technological detritus of millennia (partly inspired by Jack Vance's Dying Earth series and Mervyn Peake's Gormenghast series although the works are also influenced in their imagery by the poems of T.S. Eliot).
The Pastel City concerns the defence of the eponymous city against northern "barbarians" by a melancholy swordsman and poet, 'sometime soldier and sophisticate' Lord tegeus-Cromis. tegeus-Cromis is the hero of the Methven but believes he has finished soldiering forever - until the mercenary Birkin Grif brings dire news of the war between the two queens and the hazard facing the Pastel City. They must travel to the Great Brown Waste to find Tomb the Dwarf, and join forces to fight for Queen Jane and Viriconium - for Canna Moidart and the Wolves of the North have awoken the geteit chemosit, alien automata from an ancient science, which will destroy everything in their path.
The second novel of the series, A Storm of Wings, is set 80 years after the events described in The Pastel City. Lord tegeus-Cromis had broken the yoke of Canna Moidart. But now the Reborn Men, awoken from their long sleep, have inherited the Evening Cultures. Their first representative is Alsath Fulthor. In the wastelands to the north and west of Viriconium, a city is being built - but not by men. It is the Time of the Locust. The attackers are insect-like aliens who threaten to turn the inhabitants of the Pastel City into hideous, mindless insects: the story is told through both human and alien points of view and perceptions. The main characters are a resurrected man, an assassin, a magician, a madwoman, and Tomb, the Iron Dwarf.
The third novel of the series, In Viriconium, whose working title was By Gas Mask and Fire Hydrant, parodies Arthurian motifs and deconstructs the whole series to show that Viriconium is just a fiction: the protagonist Audsley King realizes this and at last can paint the real world, which is our own. The novel is divided into sections named after cards of an imaginary Tarot. The story concerns the efforts of one artist, Ashlyme, to rescue another - the frail, consumptive, dying Audsley King - from the plague zone (the latter is a motif that recurs in Harrison's novel Nova Swing). It is a desperate, misconceived enterprise which draws Ashlyme into unwilling alliance with the sinister dwarf The Grand Cairo, and which goes bizarrely wrong. Yet out of the shambles comes the clue to lifting the plague, which symbolises a paralysis of will. Resonances in the text include the art of Aubrey Beardsley, post-Impressionist art, Mervyn Peake and Wyndham Lewis.
The short fiction of the Viriconium sequence replays this attrition; finally, in "A Young Man's Journey to Viriconium" (later retitled "A Young Man's Journey to London"), Viriconium has become little more than a dream.
Variations of the city appear throughout the series (most frequently as Uriconium and Vriko), in an attempt by Harrison to subvert the concept of thoroughly-mapped secondary worlds featured in certain works of fantasy, particularly those by J. R. R. Tolkien and his host of successors.
Viriconium is an omnibus collection of two books of the Viriconium series by M. John Harrison. It was published in 1988 by Allen & Unwin. The book contains the novel, In Viriconium and the full contents of the short story collection Viriconium Nights. Several of the stories first appeared in the magazines New Worlds and Interzone.