Loved itCity of the Singing Flame by Clark Ashton Smith. I will give an A. I think that it's the best weird fiction that I've read.
Review 1 of 3
The City of the Singing Flame (1981)
Others: Positive When Giles Angarth disappeared, nearly two years ago, we had been friends for a decade or more, and I knew him as well as anyone could purport to know him. Yet the thing was no less a mystery to me than to others at the time, and until now, it has remained a mystery. Like the rest, I sometimes thought that he and Ebbonly had designed it all between them as a huge, insoluble hoax; that they were still alive, somewhere, and laughing at the world that was so sorely baffled by their disappearance. And, until I at last decided to visit Crater Ridge and find, if I could, the two boulders mentioned in Angarth's narrative, no one had uncovered any trace of the missing men or heard even the faintest rumor concerning them.... Contents: · Poet of the Singing Flame · The City of the Singing Flame · The White Sybil · The Tale of Satampra Zeiros · The Theft of the Thirty-Nine Girdles · The Door to Saturn · The Dark Eidolon · The Black Abbot of Puthuum · The Garden of Adompha · The Maze of Maal Dweb · The Flower-Women · The Enchantress of Sylaire · The Beast of Averoigne · The Hunters from Beyond
- ISBN:
- 9780671834159
Genres: science fiction
Lists: …
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Also science fiction78%Bookpilled loved both13%Similar descriptionsPersonalize your recommendations9%To walk the night
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Others: PositiveTo Walk the Night unfolds like a mystery novel. Bark Jones has gone home to visit Dr. Lister, the father of his friend Jerry, and together they hope to lay the mystery that revolves around the deaths of Jerry, and before him Jerry’s mentor astronomer Professor LeNormand. The one key to both men’s deaths is LeNormand’s, and now Jerry’s widow, Selena.
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Also science fiction80%Bookpilled loved both13%Similar descriptionsPersonalize your recommendations7%The inverted world
Christopher Priest
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Others: Mostly positiveThe city is winched along tracks through a devastated land full of hostile tribes. Rails must be freshly laid ahead of the city and carefully removed in its wake. Rivers and mountains present nearly insurmountable challenges to the ingenuity of the city's engineers. But if the city does not move, it will fall farther and farther behind the "optimum" into the crushing gravitational field that has transformed life on Earth. The only alternative to progress is death. The secret directorate that governs the city makes sure that its inhabitants know nothing of this. Raised in common in creches, nurtured on synthetic food, prevented above all from venturing outside the closed circuit of the city, they are carefully sheltered from the dire necessities that have come to define human existence. And yet the city is in crisis. The people are growing restive, the population is dwindling, and the rulers know that, for all their efforts, slowly but surely the city is slipping ever farther behind the optimum. Helward Mann is a member of the city's elite. Better than anyone, he knows how tenuous is the city's continued existence. But the world--he is about to discover--is infinitely stranger than the strange world he believes he knows so well.
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