London, Ontario is located in Southern Ontario. No doubt London, Ontario has many fine qualities, but if foreigners have heard of it at all, it is because the place name is a shibboleth that reliably identifies Canadians1. They may also have heard of it as a punchline on the Mary Tyler Moore TV show.
One would be very hard pressed to find five SFF stories set there.
London, England is an entirely different matter. Consider these five works, which are very small sample of works set in London2.
The Borribles by Michael de Larrabeiti (1976)
Particularly bold runaway children become pointy-eared Borribles. Borribles embrace lives of adventure. They are immortal until their luck runs out and they are killed or worse, are reduced to normal children again by having their ears cropped. All Borribles crave glory, for only by earning enough glory can they earn names.
Eight nameless Borribles are offered the chance to win names. The hated rat-like Wimbledon Rumbles intend to conquer Battersea. The Borribles would lose a conventional fight. However, if the eight Borribles can kill all eight members of the Rumble High Command, the invasion will fail. Glory awaits! Or so the eight are assured.
Persons of a certain age will be surprised and delighted by the many cultural references that de Larrabeiti slips into his novel. Other people may be alarmed by what they discover when they track down some of the allusions. Learning that which one was happier not knowing is part of the fun of reading older works.
SS-GB by Len Deighton (1976)
The United Kingdom has fallen to Nazi Germany. The UK is occupied. Winston Churchill has been executed. King George VI is a prisoner in the Tower. A few partisans are holding out, but it is only a matter of time before German troops find and kill them.
Detective Superintendent Douglas Archer answers to Gruppenführer Fritz Kellerman now. Otherwise, his job is the same post-Occupation as it was pre-Occupation: investigate and solve mundane murders, like that of the dead man in the run-down apartment over the antique shop. Except there’s nothing mundane about the investigation that follows. In fact, the fate of the world depends on its outcome.
I could do a piece on police procedurals set in worlds where the Nazis won. It may be that the Nazi tendency towards barefaced lies and concealing inconvenient facts is a difficult setting for works in genres based on uncovering truths that villains want concealed.
A Darker Shade of Magic by V.E. Schwab (2015)
Able to walk between the four alternate Londons, Kell serves as Red London’s ambassador to Grey and White London. Kell could as easily step into Black London, but no sensible person travels there after Black London lost control of its magic.
Kell has a lucrative sideline: interdimensional smuggler. Kell makes the mistake of transporting a package without establishing its provenance. Kell then makes the worse mistake of losing the package to pickpocket Lila. Now Kell must find Lila before some very bad people searching for the packet find Kell.
I wonder what the odds are that having established that no sensible person travels to Ravenholm some cursed location like Black London, the plot will somehow, inevitably, involve that Bad Place? Is it one hundred percent?
Stray Souls by Kate Griffin (2012)
Unexpectedly imbued with the abilities and responsibilities of a shaman, Sharon Li reacted as any normal person might on discovering they are suddenly and without warning now a person of magical significance. Li formed Magicals Anonymous, a support group for the esoterically perplexed. Of which London has no small number.
Matthew Swift, London’s Midnight Mayor, has a use for the Magicals. A god is missing. Swift would prefer not to resolve the matter himself. How better to help the troubled members of the support group come to terms with their natures than by handing them a mystery that they don’t seem notably well-suited to solve—a mystery on which the fate of London depends?
Is Swift a lazy, useless nob who should be punted from office or a visionary manager able to see in people the potential they themselves cannot? As the focus is on Li and her pals, not Swift, that question is never fully resolved.
Cruel Pink by Tanith Lee (2013)
Emeni’s post-Collapse London provides an almost perfect stage for homicidal urges…but only almost perfect. Klova lives in a utopian London; too bad about her kleptomania. Rod lives in a mundane London, yet one in which his friends are somehow vanishing. Actor Irvin embraces both men and women, something that will not win accolades in a 18th century London not known for broad-mindedness. Four very different people, living in four different eras.
Linking them? The city of London, a common address, and their seemingly unremarkable, reclusive landlady.
This is a short novel, so it’s rather impressive that Lee flirts with five genres within its narrow bounds. Also impressive is the fact that, despite the odds against them, the characters manage to find reasonably happy outcomes, which is not generally the way to bet with Tanith Lee.
There are many, many works set in London that might have been mentioned. Some, like Babel, I have not yet read. Others, like the Rivers of London books, are being saved for other purposes. Still others, such as The World at Bay, are too obscure to mention even in passing. Nevertheless, feel free to extol the virtues of your own favorite examples in comments below.
- Canadians reliably add either Ontario or England after London. Other people, being unaware of London, Ontario, do not need to disambiguate. [My site editor Karen Lofstrom notes that London, Ontario is frequently mentioned in Jason Slaughter’s popular urbanist YouTube channel, Not Just Bikes. He calls it Fake London and contrasts its suburban wastelands to the bike and transit paradise of Amsterdam, his new home.] Why isn’t the Canadian city named New London or, even better, something new and unique? Because Canadians are collectively unable to grasp the utility of unique names. This is why if one refers to Father of Confederation John Hamilton Gray, one then needs to clarify if one means Father of Confederation John Hamilton Gray from New Brunswick or the Father of Confederation John Hamilton Gray from Prince Edward Island. ↩︎
- England. I won’t be adding this footnote to every instance of London, as I sense editors would object. Nevertheless, in my heart it is there. ↩︎
One of Tanya Huff’s Blood books, (Blood Trail?) was set in London. I think she’s said the working title was Werewolves of London, Ontario.
Awooooo.
Tanya Huff is criminally underrated.
While there is no London near Seattle, there is a Kent, Washington, which means that one has no choice but to do a local version of the Warren Zevon song set in Seattle suburbs, about a hairy-handed gent, who hangs around in Kent, and lately he’s been seen in Maple Valley.
Warewolves of Auburn.
Of course, Neverwhere comes to mind…
Yeah, I’m shocked it isn’t on this list
Dominion (2013) by C.J. Sansom. Alt-history set in London in 1952. In 1940, Churchill was passed over for Prime Minister in favor of Lord Halifax, who cuts a deal with Nazi Germany: They get a free hand in Europe, and Great Britain holds onto its Empire. By 1952, Britain is effectively “Flnlandized,” with Nazi Germany keeping Britain subordinated and limiting its military. However, Hitler is now dying of Parkinson’s Disease, and the Resistance, led by Churchill, is getting ready to move.
The alternate London , haunted by the Problem, in the Lockwood and Co. books immediately comes to mind.
I immediately thought of this. Just finished that series; definitely one of my recent favorites.
china mieville’s “kraken” belongs on this list– one of the coolest urban fantasy books ever, with a london that’s a terror and a joy to explore.
Brothers in Arms by Lois McMaster Byjold predominently takes place in London.
The horror anthologoid podcast The Magnus Archives and its spinoff The Magnus Protocol center around agencies based in London. Though the cases occur all over the British Isles (with a few beyond), there are several that take place in London proper.
I had utterly forgotten this. Clearly I’m overdue a reread of the Vorkosiganverse.
I appreciate that the Wikipedia page about Brothers in Arms literaly has a quote from James Nicoll. :)
China Mieville has contributed three books about his home town: Un Lun Dun, King Rat, and Kraken. Peter F Hamilton’s Night’s Dawn trilogy also has sections set in London. Most of Charles Stross’s Laundry Files are based in London, and it’s one of the main settings for Neal Stephenson’s Baroque trilogy. Douglas Adam’s Dirk Gently lives in London. The fractured London of Ken MacLeod’s Star Fraction is an interesting one, and Lodon also crops up a lot in William Gibson’s Blue Ant trilogy.
Honestly, as a non-Londoner, the capital’s ubiquity in media gets kinda old. How about an article about SFF works set in British cities that aren’t London?
Oh yes, Garth Nix’s The Sinister Booksellers of Bath takes place in Bath, as does Mortal Follies by Alexis Hall IIRC. The former is a sequel, though, and The Left-Handed Booksellers of London is set in a 1980s London not quite our own, for reasons beyond the supernatural powers that are about.
Like I need an excuse to talk about Threads….
I suppose Threads is technically SFF, but in my head it’s filed under horror. It’s just too scarily plausible.
(I’m sure I read something else in the last few years set in Sheffield, but that doesn’t narrow it down much).
But if we’re gathering non-London cities, there’s Jeff Noon’s Vurt set in Manchester, Tim Maughan’s Infinite Detail, set in Bristol, practically on my old doorstep (and this about it’s future Stokes Croft rang true, if someone left a tank unattended there for 24 hours, it would be covered in graffiti, guaranteed). Ken MacLoed’s recent Lightspeed Trilogy is set in Glasgow, and most of Jasper Fforde’s Thursday Next series is set in an alternative Swindon (you can tell it’s a fictional Swindon, because it’s not a s***hole ;).
You’re not thinking of Leeds in The Nightmare Stacks by any chance?
Off the top of my head there’s TL Huchu’s Edinburgh Nights, although Edinburgh is still a capital, set in a future or alternate Britain where magic is a known force and there was some kind of very bad thing in the not too distant past, leading to economic devastation and a (partially?) restored monarchy.
The aforementioned Babel, set in Oxford.
KJ Charles has the Charm of Magpies books, set in a magical 19th century Britain and mostly taking place at a rural manor and some small villages.
Babel isn’t set in London, it mostly takes place in Oxford with a couple of detours to Canton.
I first encountered the Borribles via D&D. There’s an adventure in an old issue of Dragon magazine in which the party need to go recover a holy artifact which has been hidden in another world (specifically in the British Museum), so to London they must go, via a portal on a little island. The description of London was both wrong and strangely focused on street kids and truant officers, whom the PCs were expected to ally with and oppose respectively. I learned much later from someone who knew the author that he was a huge fan of the Borribles, and wanted to do a Borribles supplement for D&D but couldn’t get the license.
That’s “The City Beyond the Gate” by Robert Schroeck, Dragon #100 (August 1985).
…which you probably realized already, since I think that you did a Where-I-read thread on it over at RPG.net.
Yeah, that was me
Ben Aaronovitch’s Rivers of London series is set largely in London.
The name is a dead giveaway.
London, Ohio?
I was looking to see if anyone else would mention it. London Ohio is less than 1/40th the population of London, Ontario, which is less than 1/20th the population of Lindon, England
Yes. That’s the series James is saving, as he stated, “for other purposes”.
Robert Rankin, who sets many of his novels in the London (UK) suburb of Brentford. (And the first time I typed that, it came out as Brantford, which is an hour east of London (ON)).
I’ve mentioned his The Hollow Chocolate Bunnies of the Apocalypse here before, but his Brentford novels include much forgotten Victorian technology, such as Tesla towers beaming electricty.
Bartimaeus? After all, like James, he loves footnotes…
False Face, by Welwyn Wilton Katz. Street names should be familiar to the denizens of London. Plus an obvious expy of Sifton Bog.
(Wait. This book is set in London, Ontario.)
The Anubis Gates by Tim Powers, set in 1810 London (with a brief detour to 1684), and involving time travel, and Romany and Egyptian magic.
A novel that’s been mentioned here once or twice but certainly fits the bill is Mutant 59: The Plastic-Eaters (1971) by Kit Pedler and Gerry Davis. With author connections to both Doctor Who and Doomwatch, this bonzo apocalypse has become less absurd with recent advances in bioengineered bacteria that consume plastic but does have London’s infrastructure melting in hilarious ways.
not read that one
Matthew Swift’s story is told in the four books beginning with A Madness of Angels.
Kate Griffin wrote the sequel to Stray Souls (The Glass God) and then started writing as Claire North.
Her early books were written as Catherine Webb.
I came here to say this. I felt that Stray Souls was a weak follow up to the main Midnight Mayor books.
I really really REALLY regret the fact that she dropped the Kate Griffin books and moved on to Claire North. Don’t get me wrong, the North books are fine, but the Griffin books were very enjoyable larks which I periodically re-read just for the pleasures therein.
Bonus points to the post’s graphics people for using a German edition of SS-GB!
Jo Walton’s Small Change trilogy is a solid entry in the “police procedurals set in worlds where the Nazis won” category.
Paul Cornell’s Shadow Police books – I won’t call them a trilogy, as they were dropped by the publisher after three of a planned five – sit somewhere between China Mieville and Ben Aaronovitch. Definitely worth a read.
Kim Newman’s Anno Dracula is set in a London some time after something went seriously wrong part way through Stoker’s novel; as a result, van Helsing’s head is on a spike on the Tower wall, Victoria is undead, Vlad Tepes is her new consort — and all the vampires from all the 19th-century novels about same have gathered in London. This makes finding out who’s killing them difficult; the vampires don’t get along with each other, and a suspect might have any of a wide variety of powers — or just be a human very good at hiding. This is the first of a handful of mashups (later novels include appearances by undead Poe, von Richthofen, Bond, the Addamses, and Andy Warhol), although the only one in London.
For what it’s worth, there are also (at least) 18 Londons in the US: incorporated towns or cities in Arkansas, California, Kentucky, and Ohio, plus 14 unincorporated communities that are pleased to rejoice in the name of Mother London.
Speaking of Mother London … Really, nobody’s mentioned Michael Moorcock? Jerry Cornelius is an absolute Londoner, as is his less glamorous clone Jerry Cornell; and Jherek Carnelian spends a great deal of time in Victorian London. That’s just to get started with…
Katherine Addison’s Angel of the Crows is set in an alternate Victorian London where subcultures of lycanthropes, vampires and other, less desirable sorts are a fact of life, if not one in which many rejoice. The angel of the title is a Sherlock Holmes analogue, but rather more unworldly than Holmes. Still solves crimes, though.
“I wonder what the odds are that having established that no sensible person travels to
Ravenholmsome cursed location like Black London, the plot will somehow, inevitably, involve that Bad Place? Is it one hundred percent?”100%. Chekov Gun Law requires it.
PS: I’m very happy to learn that you’re planning something with the Rivers of London. Even the book covers are worth examining.
Hopeland, Ian McDonald
I haven’t read all 40 but Jodi Taylor’s time travel series TheChronicles of St Mary’s is mostly not set in London UK.
https://joditaylor.online/blogs/news/chronicles-of-st-marys-reading-order
They’re mostly not set in Londons of various time periods, but the Time Police spin-off series are mostly in future London (and occasionally past).
I wish to pointlessly complicate this disambiguation by noting that Ontario, California is a city which exists.
…a circumstance of existence which is complicated by CA = either California or Canada, so that “Ontario, CA” could be ambiguous, although Ontario, Canada is usually not written that way (in Canada).
JG Ballard had London feature in quite a few of his books: The Drowned World, High Rise, Crash and I think Concrete Island are set in or around London; also later books Millennium People and Kingdom Come.
Came here to mention Rivers of London and Jo Walton’s Small Change books – both mentioned above. Good job.
Would like to mention the Alex Verus series by Benedict Jacka. Verus moves through the magical side of London battling dark mages and conspiracies. Lots of action, character development and world-building with London as a backdrop.
You beat me to it. Love the Alex Verus books. His newest one, An Inheritance of Magic, is also set in London.
It’s all the figment of a dying prisoner, but by all means, Lavie Tidhar’s A Man Lies Dreaming and even more so its sequel or companion The Lunacy Commission. In each is imagined an alternate London at the end of the 30s, one where the threat that fascism presents is perhaps less deadly and destructive but certainly more local.
There are probably a lot of variants of Holmes in variants of London; the one Raskos’s comment immediately reminded me of is Brihtric Donne in Friesner’s Druid’s Blood. (ISTR his first comment to John H. Weston is “You have been in Aberystwyth”.) Includes other locations in Britain, but is mostly set in London.
I seem to recall that most of William GIbson and Bruce Steriing’s The Difference Engine takes place in London, and about half of Gibson’s The Peripheral is set in London as well.
I would have added Connie Willis BLACKOUT series to the mix.
Almost all of Charles Stross’ Laundry novels.
Victoria Goddard’s Till Human Voices Wake Us set in an alternate-ish London
Adding Dan Simmons’ Drood. London of the time of Dickens and Collins dominates with its mysterious underground and stench.
Benedict Jacka’s Alex Verus series is set in London
Lots of good one’s mentioned here – the Rivers of London series is great, as are the early Laundry Files books. Also – seek out the Felix Castor novels by Mike Carey (he of “The Girl With All the Gifts”. Not found by enough people even with the author’s (relatively) new found prominence.
There must’ve been plenty of scientific romances set in contemporary London, like Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde and War of the Worlds, as well as Victorian gothics like Dracula.
One strange entry from that era is After London, 1885, by Richard Jeffries. Its first third is a future history of environmental collapse & humanity’s reversion to medievalism, written by a scholar living in a post-apocalyptic renaissance. The rest is an adventure in a rewilded England, starring a young hero who’s destined to reunite Britain. But it never says how! Instead the novel ends abruptly, after the hero paddles past a poisonous swamp where London once stood.
Might be good to mention that “Stray Souls” is a spinoff/sequel to four books where Matthew Swift *was* the lead (starting with “A Madness of Angels”) which answer the “Lazy nob or visionary” question quite handily: he’s both.
Two alternates by Harry Turtledove: RULED BRITANNIA, which has Shakespeare working in an England occupied by the Spanish; and last year’s WAGES OF SIN, which is set partly in Salisbury, partly in London, in the nineteenth century of a world in which the HIV virus erupted out of Africa in the 1500s.
I get that Gaiman is super-problematic now, but not even a mention of Neverwhere?
I was going to say where is Rivers of London but you sort of answered that.
Babel is principally set in Oxford, not London, which suggests another thread:: SFF stories set there. We could start with significant chunks of His Dark Materials.
Simon Morden’s Petrovitch Trilogy was set in a a semi-dystopian future London but had glimmers of hope. Really quite enjoyable.
Not sure wqhether to classify this set as fiction of fantasy, but Randall Garrett’s “Lord Darcy” stuff was (alternate reality) London-based, IIRC (all I can find for reference says “an alternate England”)
Am I misremembering? Sadly, I don’t own the books anymore thanks to a daughter’s friend’s unneutered cat…
Only one story takes place in London
I was born in London, England!
My name is Kell, which led me to pick up A Darker Shade of Magic, which I loved—the series is now one of my favourites.
Connections abound.
Hawksmoor, by Peter Ackroyd.
Day of the Triffids by John Wyndham starts in London, creating a trope subsequently seen on screen in both 28 Days Later and The Walking Dead