Search Worlds Without End

A magnificent city existing on the fringes of the past, and on the brink of destruction, Viriconium -- With a foreword by Neil Gaiman.

Available to American readers for the first time, this landmark collection gathers four groundbreaking fantasy classics from the acclaimed author of Light. Set in the imagined city of Viriconium, here are the masterworks that revolutionized a genre and enthralled a generation of readers:

• The Pastel City
• A Storm of Wings
• In Viriconium
• Viriconium Nights

Back in print after a long absence, these singular tales of a timeless realm and its enigmatic inhabitants are now reborn and compiled to captivate a whole new generation.

In the distant future, a medieval system rises from the ruins of a technology that destroyed itself. Armored knights ride their horses across dunes of rust, battling for the honor of the Queen. But the knights find more to menace them than mere swords and lances. A brave quest leads them face to face with the awesome power of a complex, lethal technology that has been erased from the face of the Earth - but lives on, underground.

In the wasteland of a future world, the pastel city struggles in the grip of the sign of the locust.

Viriconium: the pastel city was the last bastion of the civilized world where Queen Methvet Nian ruled supreme. Now she watched, helpless, as the time of the locust became a monstrous reality, turning the inhabitants into hideous mindless insects. Cellur,the bird lord, emerged from his underground exile, the first to respond to the call. Soon he was joined by Tomb, the iron dwarf, and the first of the reborn men, Alstath Fulthor. They journeyed to the desolate plains of the north in search of the evil's source, only to encounter a paralysing menace that threatened to destroy their very minds....

Viriconium is an omnibus volume containing all the Viriconium stories, originally published in four books: The Pastel City, A Storm of Wings, In Viriconium, and Viriconium Nights.

The Pastel City of Viriconium was a temple of lost hope.

The gods had come down to frolic drunkenly in the gutters. Time had been stretched so thin as to lose its meaning. The pestilence had spread from the Low City to the High. And the last great artist sat in the plague zone where she waited for the end. Something had to be done. Ashlyme had to do it. And in that year of the apocalypse, he was the only man who dared.

First published in the UK as In Viriconium.

This new collection of stories returns us to the strange, haunting, mutable world of Viriconium and its citizens. A city of the imagination, a place in which the familiar and the utterly strange mingle together. Everything in Viriconium is subject to change.

Table of Contents:

• Author's Note - essay
• The Lamia and Lord Cromis - (1971) - novelette
• Lamia Mutable - (1972) - short story
• Viriconium Knights - (1981) - short story
• Events Witnessed From a City - (1975) - short story
• The Luck in the Head - novelette
• The Lords of Misrule - (1984) - short story
• In Viriconium - novella
• Strange Great Sins - (1983) - short story