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Veniss Underground / Balzac's War

av Jeff VanderMeer

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1408193,917 (3.52)Ingen/inga
Dreams and nightmares entwine as three fellow travellers strive to achieve their deepest desires. Nicholas seeks to escape his demons in the dark city of Veniss' shadowy underground. But in doing so, makes a deal with the devil himself. Then in her fevered search for him, his twin sister, Nicola, spins her own unusual and hypnotic tale as she discovers the hidden secrets of the city. Finally, haunted by Nicola's sudden, mysterious disappearance and gripped by despair, Shadrach, Nicola's lover, embarks on a mythic journey. He must steel himself to visit the nightmarish levels deep beneath the surface of the city, to bring his love back to light. For these depths hold perils that are both complex and chilling. There, he will find wonders beyond imagining . . . and horrors greater than the heart can bear. Literary alchemist Jeff VanderMeer has produced a triumph of the imagination, revealing the mysterious city of Veniss through three intertwined voices. Veniss Underground is an unforgettable journey exploring the limits of love, memory and obsession. This edition includes the novella Balzac's War.… (mer)
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Visa 1-5 av 8 (nästa | visa alla)
Veniss Underground 2.5
Balzac's War 5 ( )
  bibliopolitan | Dec 6, 2021 |
Vandermeer has published many more short stories than novels, and his preference for the short format shows – Veniss is a very short novel (in my edition bundled with an unrelated (?) ‘novella’ (I’d still call it a short story) to fill out the book.
Its length is my biggest complaint with the work. Vandermeer shows the reader an immensely complex, vivid setting – but in around 200 pages, there isn’t time to explore it in the depth one might like to – and the plot itself is very slight.
Veniss is 28th-century Dayton (?) – a crumbling city with wealth on the surface, and untold numbers of literally underground levels filled with the poor, mutants, biohazards, and bioengineered creatures. The milieu is one that’s becoming familiar to readers of SF (although Vandermeer refers to his world as “not SF, but a phantasmagoria”), heavily reminiscent of Mieville, and full of allusions to other mythological and literary works.
But even in this grotesque future, people are just still regular people, trying to make lives for themselves, full of their own concerns.
Nicholas is a failed artist, who pulls in some favors from his friend Shadrach for a meeting with the near-mythical bioengineer Quin, hoping to get a job or commission out of it.
For unknown (?) reasons, Quin, who’s more of an evil cipher than a character, hell-bent on taking over the world with his bioengineered meerkats (!), decides to use Nicholas to go after and kidnap Nicholas’ sister, Nicola, who happens to be Shadrach’s ex-.
Shadrach’s still in love with Nicola, so he goes on an Orphic journey into the Wellsian/Lovecraftian underground levels of hell to rescue Nicola before all her parts are used up by the organ banks.
Of course, this being a dark-and-jaded type of book, one can’t expect an ending full of light and purity… but it doesn’t turn out all that bad, either…
Overall – I liked it. But I’d been hearing such good thing about the book that I guess it didn’t quite live up to the hype.
In the “Afterword,” Vandermeer gives us Quin’s backstory, and an explanation of why he isn’t a fully realized character (we’re supposed to merely be seeing his through the eyes of the ‘narrators’ of the three parts of the book – Nicholas, Nicola and Shadrach) – but the very fact that that explanation is necessary admits to a degree of awkwardness there.

My edition of this novel also included the story “Balzac’s War.”
I loved this story. For me, it packed much more of an emotional punch than ‘Veniss,’ and was really near-perfectly crafted.
In (I believe, a different) decaying future, humans in a crumbling society are being invaded by (possibly) an alien species. The invaders welcome worship, and offer humans ‘immortality’ by the method of transplanting their heads onto a monstrous, engineered, non-human body. However, these monsters with human heads are sent to war against their former compatriots and families. It’s unsure if they are still ‘themselves’ at all…
This story deals with one man in particular dealing with his wife coming back in such a form… Really an amazing, powerful story.
( )
  AltheaAnn | Feb 9, 2016 |
First Nicholas goes looking for Quin and finds him. Then Nicola, his twin, goes looking for Nicholas, and he finds her. Then Shadrach, Nicola's lover, goes looking for Nicola and then for Quin. It's all set in the city of Veniss, wrapped in a wall a mile thick to keep the desert out. Decaying, decadent, fragmenting, inward-looking, Veniss is one of the last, lingering enclaves of humanity, and it's sitting on top of a vast, hellish underground labyrinth where Quin rules supreme.

Quin is a genetecist and mad scientist who has created intelligent meerkats with human arms and blue, multi-limbed ganeshas. His kingdom is packed to the rafters with grotesqueries and abominations and left-over atrocities. It's Shadrach who, like Orpheus, must venture into this hideous underworld for love and revenge, with a meerkat's head tied to his arm, to find the man who made it all.

This is a short, dense, structurally clever book that might be unbearable if it wasn't so well written. Vandermeer makes poetry out of the horrors and the odd flash of beauty, and there's plenty of conceptual wit, staggering visions and flashes of beauty to keep the reader engaged. It's hard not to emerge from this book feeling a ghostly fraction of the transformations undergone by the characters, and look at the world and people and other books a little differently. It's a mad book about a mad world. Recommended. ( )
  Nigel_Quinlan | Oct 21, 2015 |
Down below. Ten years since he had been there, and who knew how it might have changed, have warped, have permutated, in his absence? Somehow, he had thought, as a child might, that it had not existed at all after he had left, but had been a nightmare from which he had which he had finally woken up. Why such a place should exist was a question hopelessly tangled in other questions, lost in the below level passageways, long ago.

Veniss is a city that is only just keeping its head above water - the AIs and machinery are still maintaining the city, but nobody is in control. Nobody understands how the machines work or can intervene to alter or stop obsolete processes and the underground levels of the city where the miners and other workers spend their lives, are places of pain, torture and horror. Quinn's genetically enhanced meerkats and ganeshas seem both endearing and useful, but Nicholas, Nicola and Shadrach find that the truth of Quinn's work is far more ghoulish and sinister than the surface dwellers suspect when each in turn is drawn down into his world.

I can't say I really liked this story, even though it was very interesting. It's much more gruesome and distubing than "City of Saints and Madmen", even though Veniss is a more human city than Ambergris - Jeff VanderMeer has a very weird imagination indeed and an obsession with the hidden places under the earth and the things that lurk there, in the dark.

The book also contains a novella called "Balzac's War", a sad story set in the same world, at a later time, when the cities have fallen and the last vestiges of the technology that mankind no longer understands are finally breaking down. ( )
  isabelx | Apr 17, 2011 |
*Contains (minor) spoilers*

Nicholas is no better as a holo artist than he was trying to create sustainable life in his home lab as a child. He has no success, is bullied by the local police and using way to much drugs. When he decides to ask his sister’s ex-boyfriend to arrange a meeting with Quin, the mysterious bio-engineer that rules the vast underground levels under the city Veniss, he has protection in mind. He means to ask Quin for a meerkat, a genetically altered creature to serve and protect him. Quin’s creations are already all over the city, employed by its many warring fractions as soldiers and labour. Unfortunately, Nicholas does the mistake of not just asking, but trying to make a deal. And like, that, he’s vanished from the face of the city.

Nicola, his twin sister, tightly bonded to him through their artificial upbringing, looks for him everywhere, until finally she finds out that someone has been using his credit card - ten levels below ground. So she too heads down into the unknown, and is gone.

And finally her ex-boyfriend Schadrach, a low-grade employer of Quin, gets word of the disappearance of the love of his life – in the most horrible way possible. Now it’s his turn to head into the city’s dark underbelly – to go back into the underground he once came from – on a mission of either rescue or vengeance.

A very VanderMeer-esque setup this: someone goes after someone who has gone after someone into unknown, weird territory where normal rules don’t apply. The descent into hell gains a level of mystique from this, an added complexity. Hell? Hell, yes. Veniss might not be as carefully constructed as Ambergris (even though one can absolutely see this debut as a pre-study in a way), but the imagery is as bizarre and creepy as they come. The further down we come, the more grotesque and outrageous is the imagery. Hieronymus Bosch comes to mind, more than once.

In the end, the “quest” (so to speak) doesn’t quite live up to the savage world-building. In a way, the human aspect of the book is perhaps too simple, people’s motives too straight, making it feel a bit small. It isn’t quite up there with the Ambergris books. Then again, vey few things are, and this remains deeply original and haunting.

This volume also included the novella Balzac’s war, set in the same world but years later. This is a haunting and sad story about fighting an enemy that is only too familiar, and the price of immortality. Very weird, scary and beautiful, to me this is probably the best part of the book. ( )
1 rösta GingerbreadMan | Dec 21, 2010 |
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Rostant, LarryOmslagmedförfattarevissa utgåvorbekräftat
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Contains the novel "Veniss Underground" and the novella "Balzac's War". Do not combine with the entry for the novel only or for the expanded edition with several short stories.
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Dreams and nightmares entwine as three fellow travellers strive to achieve their deepest desires. Nicholas seeks to escape his demons in the dark city of Veniss' shadowy underground. But in doing so, makes a deal with the devil himself. Then in her fevered search for him, his twin sister, Nicola, spins her own unusual and hypnotic tale as she discovers the hidden secrets of the city. Finally, haunted by Nicola's sudden, mysterious disappearance and gripped by despair, Shadrach, Nicola's lover, embarks on a mythic journey. He must steel himself to visit the nightmarish levels deep beneath the surface of the city, to bring his love back to light. For these depths hold perils that are both complex and chilling. There, he will find wonders beyond imagining . . . and horrors greater than the heart can bear. Literary alchemist Jeff VanderMeer has produced a triumph of the imagination, revealing the mysterious city of Veniss through three intertwined voices. Veniss Underground is an unforgettable journey exploring the limits of love, memory and obsession. This edition includes the novella Balzac's War.

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