New Weird Cities and where to find them

A slight detour from our regular schedule into weird, weird cities.

Ever since discovering the New Weird with Perdido Street Station by China Miéville, and then City of Saints and Madmen by Jeff Vandermeer I've been loving this subgenre, but especially its cities.

I just love me a good weird fantasy city.

Ever since then I've been searching for books and stories that scratch the same itch. This post contains all the ones I've found so far. This is not an extensive guide, as I'm leaving out some books I didn't enjoy, but it should give anyone interested in weird city fantasy enough to read.

What does a city need to be to be included in here? Well, weird, but in the New Weird vein, which can contain any or some of these elements:

• The city is big, often too big to be mappable or knowable completely

• The city is ever changing. Sometimes even multiple stories in the same city contradict each other. It can be post-modern, it can be surreal, it can be magical realism.

• The city is a political hotbed. It's X-punk (often steampunk), but with an emphasis on the punk part.

Also this is what should have been called Urban Fantasy, not books about rural werewolves and suburban vampires.

What’s your favorite weird city?

Precursors

Of course the new weird didn't spring out of nothing. Whenever you ask for recommendations, these forerunners will eventually be suggested.

• Invisible Cities, Italo Calvino (1972)

  I can see the influence Calvino had on a lot of the new weird/post modern writers. Calvino certainly understands the city. I really enjoyed it, but, probably a bit blasphemous, sometimes it feels a bit repetitive and pseudo-philosophical. The descriptions of cities tend to blend together after a while. I appreciate the craftsmanship of the structure of the book, but if it was half as short it would have had more impact on me.

• The Viriconium stories, M. John Harrison (1971-1984)
  Especially the books (Viriconium Nights and In Viriconium) that actually take place in Viriconium had a big influence on my own weird cities (San Sibilia especially).

• Tainaron: Mail from Another City, Leena Krohn (1985)

  Tainaron is a city like no other, populated by talking insects, as observed by the nameless narrator. Atmospheric and beautiful, the prose suggests more than it explicitly says. It's also more a collection of vignettes and musings than what I would call a novel.

The New Weird

The books that started it for me.

• The Ambergris books, Jeff Vandermeer

  City of Saints and Madmen (2002), Shriek: An Afterword (2006), Finch (2010). Each book is very much it's own thing as Vandermeer does not like to repeat himself. Like Viriconium, Ambergris is a city that is never quite the same, a city where even history is not really stable. City of Saints and Madmen is a postmodern collection of short stories, fake histories and 'scientific' articles. Shriek and Finch are more traditional novels. Shriek, with it's focus on artists is a big influence on San Sibilia.

• The New Crobuzon books, China Mieville
  Perdido Street Station (2000), The Scar (2002), Iron Council (2004). New Corbuzon is steampunk on steroids: weird races in a London-like metropole. Gonzo & political.

• The City & the City, China Miéville (2009)

  Not a secondary world fantasy like the New Crobuzon books, but a great study of a weird city: here two cities occupy the same space without interacting. A great noir detective steeped in weirdness.

• The Etched City, K.J. Bishop (2003)

  Ashamoil is one of the greatest New Weird cities. Often compared to Miéville's New Corbuzon, to me Bishop's Ashamoil feels closer to Vandermeer's Ambergris.

  
  Ashamoil like Ambergris consists in a otherworldly place where the edges of reality are not always as clear. Ashamoil is highly evocative of cities like New Orleans and Paris, while definitely being it's own creation.

• Teatro Grottesco, Thomas Ligotti (2006)

  Not as fantastical, but certainly adjacent to the genre. Not for the faint of hard. Ligotti does not write happy stories. Decaying city scapes, depressing monotonous lives, creepy puppets and clowns: this is not upbeat stuff. Bleak.

• Thunderer, Felix Gilman (2007)

  Ararat is a great weird city: unmappable, powered by belief and gods with a Dickensian London feel. I especially loved the work on the Atlas, where a coterie of poets, scientists and dilettantes try to codify and describe the geography and history of the city. Very different in tone than the sequel, this is one of the books I would recommend to people wanting more 'classic' New Weird.

  

• Gears of the City, Felix Gilman (2008)

  A completely different feel from the first book, Thunderer. Where the first book sometimes felt like epic fantasy, which got (new) weirder while progressing, Gears of the City is weird from the beginning, but also more claustrophobic.

  
  It's an ambitious book, political, imaginative, dark and funny. While the main plot let me down a bit, traveling through the city and it's different iterations was great. A lot of the side characters add much to the story.

  
  (If you like Weird West, be sure to check out Felix Gilman's Half-Made World novels, especially The Rise of Ransom City).

The successors

It's hard to draw a line between genres as it is, but at some point people stopped calling books New Weird. Still to me these books are very much a continuation of what I love about the New Weird genre.

• Palimpsest, Catherynne M. Valente (2009)

  Palimpsest is a city beyond our world, a sexually-transmitted city. Weird, surreal. Not for everyone, but poetic.

• Terminal World, Alastair Reynolds (2010)
  Quite a different setting from Reynolds' usual far future, epic space opera.

  
  The atmosphere and the setting of the book reminded me a lot of the books of China Miéville. Like Miéville, Reynolds doesn't bore us with to many details through info dumps, but slowly reveals the setting, with it's dark, and political undertones.

• The Gutter Prayer, Gareth Ryder-Hanrahan (2019)

  For me this book (and it's sequels *The Shadow Saint* and *The Broken God*) scratched the itch left by the New Weird. Guerdon is a fully developed weird city, character driven, but filled with non-traditional fantasy creatures, with some politics and intrigue thrown in for good measure.
  
  If you liked the cities from Vandermeer, Miéville & Bishop, check these books out for sure.

  
  One of my favorite fantasy series of the last few years.

• Blackspire, Benjamin Sperduto (2020)

  Like Gareth Ryder-Hanrahan, Ben is a fellow game designer, but his fiction also comes highly recommended. Blackspire's Lowtown is a filthy and nasty place, but the characters are real, the plot tangles some nice mysteries with political background.

  

Short stuff

Want to wet your feet a bit before diving into the bigger novels? Beneath Ceaseless Skies has been my favorite fantasy outlet for short stories for a number of years now. Beneath Ceaseless Skies publishes “literary adventure fantasy”: stories with a secondary-world setting and some fantasy feel, but written with a literary approach.

Luckily this means that good New Weird fantasy fits the bill.

You can read the stories online. Each issue contains at least 2 stories. To get it as an ebook you'd need to buy the issue or get a subscription, but it's certainly worth the price.

• Architectural Constants by Yoon Ha Lee (Beneath Ceaseless Skies #2, 2008)
  A post-modern new weird story set in a city which seems to change depending on the angle you look at it. Luckily at the heart of the weirdness, there's still, and this is very important, a great story.

• Walls of paper, soft as skin by Adam Callaway (BCS #73, 2011)

  A surreal tale of loss in a city which revolves about paper and the written word.

• Shadows Under Hexmouth Street by Justin Howe (BCS #89, 2012)
  A New Weird flavored story in which we follow an apprentice polisomancer: a city mage, who's searching for his missing teacher.
  (Written by yet another ttrpg designer).

• The Magic of Dark and Hollow Places by Adam Callaway (BCS #96, 2012)
  Another story in the Ars Lacuna cycle.

• Walls of Skin, Soft as Paper by Adam Callaway (BCS #131, 2013)
  Another tale in his Lacuna series. More a series of images than an actual story. But I do love the images Callaway paints of Lacuna.

• The Inked Many by Adam Callaway (BCS #150, 2014)
  The origin story of the Inked Man, a main character in the Ars Lacuna stories.

• Day of the Dragonfly by Raphael Ordoñez (BCS #165, 2015)
  Takes place in Enoch, the world-city. Ordoñez' stories vary between old fashioned weird tales, and more new weird stories. This one is a great mix. While Keftu, our hero, is great weird tale protagonist, battling monsters and old gods, Enoch is a great new weird city, with endless abandoned factory districts, train connections, even to empty parts, and places that bigger on the inside than out.

  
  Influences range from Jack Vance (weird monsters like the maugreth and titles like phylarch are dropped into the story without ever being really explained, which works by giving the place an alien feel), through M. John Harrison (Enoch and Viriconium could be sister cities, how different they are) to Robert E. Howard.

• The Scale Tree by Raphael Ordoñez (BCS #178, 2015)
  Also set in the city of Enoch.

• Call and Answer, Plant and Harvest by Cat Rambo (BCS #195, 2016)
  Cathay is a Chaos Mage, living in the multi-dimensional city of Serendib. Serendib reminded me a lot of Sigil, the center of the Planescape setting.

I want more!

Want to check out my solo journaling games inspired by these weird cities?

• A Visit to San Sibilia - This city never changes, this city never stays the same. Close to the coast in a river delta, San Sibilia’s sprawling districts are connected by rambling trams and ramshackle ferries.

  

• Hiria: The Eternal City - A solo journaling journey into the multiverse You tracked your quarry here, but they escaped to one of Hiria’s manifestations. Will you follow them?

Recommend me anything that you miss from this list!