THE FLOATING GODS

THE FLOATING GODS by M. John Harrison. Timescape, $2.50. This book is called IN VIRICONIUM in Britain, but was stupidly retitled for American release, presumably because Timescape believes we are boneheads. It's the third book in a sword-and-sorcery trilogy that includes THE PASTEL CITY and A STORM OF WINGS.

It's clear that a different but allied form of decadence has struck Across the Water. Its trademark is not perversion, but exhaustion. PASTEL CITY rejoiced in such sprightly characters as Tomb, "the nastiest dwarf that ever hacked the hands off a priest," whose rotten malevolence was a welcome relief from Harrison's sometimes stifling meditations on spiritual decline.

FLOATING GODS has no such characters. It is set in a city smothered under a nebulous Plague Zone. Possibly Harrison has spent too much time in Brixton. Despair seems to have been printed across his eyeballs in letters of fire. THE FLOATING GODS is a relentless exercise in total, stifling futility; it is one long, gray, debilitating dream.

Harrison's extraordinary talent merely crams the reader's head more firmly into the bucket. It is impossible to read this book without considering suicide. It is painful to read; painful even to think about. Let's hope to God something happens soon to cheer him up.