The Malacia Tapestry was published by Jonathan Cape in 1976. Malacia is a city-state in an alternate world — vaguely Mediterranean, vaguely Renaissance, wholly imaginary — where the ruling council has passed a “Law of Donostia” forbidding change of any kind. The city exists in a state of permanent stasis: the architecture does not evolve, the social structures do not change, the technology does not advance. Dinosaurs (or their equivalents — Aldiss calls them “ancestral animals”) still live, serving as beasts of burden. The arts flourish, but only within established forms. Innovation is heresy.
Perian de Dorostoy Dorostorios is a young actor — handsome, vain, talented, and chronically short of money — who becomes involved with a magician-inventor named Otto Dorostorios, who has developed a primitive form of photography (or “zahnoscopy”). The device can capture images on treated metal plates, and Otto sees it as a revolutionary technology that will transform Malacia. But in a city where change is illegal, any revolution — even a technological one — is a threat to the established order.
The novel is a picaresque — Perian drifts through adventures, love affairs, and theatrical productions while the larger conflict between stasis and change builds around him. Aldiss’s Malacia is rendered with the detailed beauty of a Canaletto painting: canals, piazzas, churches, theaters, gardens, and the constant presence of the ancestral animals grazing in the background. The novel is lighter than most of Aldiss’s work, almost playful, but its theme — the tension between the comfort of tradition and the necessity of change — is serious.
Collecting The Malacia Tapestry
First edition (Jonathan Cape, London, 1976): Cloth binding, dust jacket.
Market values:
- First edition, fine/fine: $60–$150
- Very good/very good: $25–$60