We Are Close, We Are Almost There

Zachary Gillan reflects on Jeffrey Ford’s ‘Well-Built City Trilogy’ in the era of resurgent fascism.

By Zachary GillanDecember 30, 2025

• SF

• Politics

IT IS PERHAPS suitable for our weird moment of history that the books that best sum up the early days of living under Donald Trump’s second presidency came out more than two decades ago: Jeffrey Ford’s trilogy about “the Well-Built City,” ruled by a megalomaniacal fascist. Together comprising a surreal picaresque, the books follow the physiognomist Cley, an enforcer of his society’s caste system, as he stumbles toward redemption after casting off the influence of the city’s hegemonic social system—racist, misogynistic, and xenophobic to its core. The books deserve attention in themselves, but they are particularly relevant now for their examination of the fascist’s fear of complexity and twisted misuse of subjectivity. I have argued elsewhere for the usefulness of reading weird fiction radically, as a metaphor for living within the resurgence of fascism. The Well-Built City, one of my favorite trilogies, provides a useful case study.

In the first novel, The Physiognomy (1997), Cley is sent by Drachton Below, the “Master” of the Well-Built City, to a remote mining town on the edge of an endless forest to investigate the theft of a fruit said to confer immortality. In the course of his fruitless investigation, he disfigures a young woman he’s obsessed with before realizing the error of his ways and dedicating his life to earning her forgiveness and overthrowing Below. In Memoranda (1999), the second novel, survivors of the destruction of the Well-Built City have built a new town, which Below sabotages with a sleeping sickness. Cley, sent to retrieve the antidote from Below, finds that the dictator has succumbed to his own creation, and has to enter Below’s memory (in the form of a floating island populated by four scientists) to find it. In the final novel, The Beyond (2001), Cley ventures into the titular forest/world to find Arla Beaton and atone for his mistreatment of her, accompanied only by his black dog, Wood, one of the great canines of literature. Ford has said that he approached the trilogy with “each book dealing with how we view the world—externally, internally, and as a part of it.” We might also read the trilogy as sharing a structure with Dante’s Divine Comedy: infernal, purgatorial, and paradisiacal. Throughout, Cley’s search for the earthly paradise—perhaps a literal place, perhaps not—is bound up with his quest for forgiveness in general and from Arla Beaton specifically.

Ford’s trilogy is generally considered part of the New Weird movement of the turn of the century. The New Weird was, to simplify greatly, an approach to writing novels of weird fiction set within secondary worlds (particularly fantastical urban ones), emphasizing the core tendencies of weird fiction: an ambiguous relationship to genre, a dedication to the inexplicable, and an unsettling relationship to the world. As Ann and Jeff VanderMeer have argued, the New Weird subverted the romanticized ideals of earlier fantasy by “choosing realistic, complex real-world models” as their jumping-off points.

That sense of complexity is especially evident in Ford’s trilogy, most particularly in its use of subjectivity. Ford comes from a capital-L literary background, not just a fantasist but also a fabulator, a writer who “violate[s], in various ways, standard novelistic expectations by drastic—and sometimes highly effective—experiments with subject matter, form, style, temporal sequence, and fusions of the everyday, the fantastic, the mythical, and the nightmarish.” Fabulation, in this sense, is how the weird operates within fantasy, by emphasizing the subjectivity and unknowability of the imagined world, over an approach that “world-builds” in a supposedly objective sense. This latter approach is most egregious in the way it deals with race, which is presented not as a social construct but as a biological one: races have innate tendencies, including biologically essentialist good or evil natures, and their physical characteristics reflect this fact (e.g., the physically beautiful and innately good elves versus the physically and ethically horrendous orcs). In most fantasy fiction, in other words, the science of physiognomy is real, expressing objective truths about a person’s character in their physical characteristics.

Physiognomy, in the real world, is a disgraced, outmoded pseudoscience used to justify oppression, endemic throughout history but particularly popular in the 18th and 19th centuries, following the writing of Swiss quack Johann Kaspar Lavater. It was a treatise of Lavater’s that Jeffrey Ford, an erstwhile PhD student, stumbled upon in the Temple University library, sparking “the realization that this kind of bogus scientific pursuit had not died out in the eighteenth century but was still very strong in the minds of many people in society at the end of the twentieth century.” As Ford described in the introduction to the 2008 reissue of The Physiognomy, his disgust with the idea that “a person’s moral worth could be determined by their physical appearance” combined with the “insistence on the importance of ‘surface’ in our own time” to become the idea behind the trilogy.

Ford couldn’t have known how resurgent fascism would become over the next three decades, and he doesn’t make the link with epic fantasy explicit, but this is part of what makes The Well-Built City Trilogy a cornerstone of the New Weird revolution. Ford lays bare the farcical nature of physiognomy and troubles not only the genre of fantasy but also our own fascist reality.

The trilogy literalizes the “bogus scientific pursuit” of physiognomy as a pseudo-magical power granted by Below to his followers, but the opening of the first novel makes clear that both “the Physiognomy” and Cley are farces. Cley’s cluelessness and self-satisfaction (and his unreliability as a narrator) are immediately apparent in his interactions with villagers who fear him not because of his self-proclaimed physiognomic superiority but because of his state-sanctioned power. This is reinforced by his belief that the “curious one-finger salute” they give him is a recognition of his rank. He is, further, prone to hallucinations brought on by the drug “sheer beauty,” which is produced and supplied by Below as a literal opiate of the masses. Cley tells himself that the Physiognomy is “an exacting science, a combination of reality and objectivity capable of rendering a perfect justice.” Below, unlike Cley, knows that the Physiognomy is a nonsensical tool of social control, and Ford masterfully captures, via the two characters, the spectrum of fascist archetypes: the smirking leader, openly manipulating his underlings into believing something he clearly doesn’t himself, and the sniveling, pompous, ideologically brainwashed underling. Both, though, are motivated by their fear of uncertainty, of complexity, of being imperfectly human.

This combination of subjectivity and complexity is inherent in the structure and narration of the trilogy. Where the first two books are narrated in the first person by Cley, who isn’t an entirely reliable narrator, the third is told from the viewpoint of Below’s adopted son Misrix, a demon from the Beyond perpetually caught between desires to become more human and, conversely, to renounce humanity and return to the wilderness. The majority of the third book recounts, in third person, Cley’s adventures in the Beyond. Misrix claims to be viewing them from afar by tasting the air, supplemented in his understanding by his use of sheer beauty, and his narration is even less reliable as a result. When Misrix plans to submit his writings to the court trying him for murder, his own lawyer asks him, “Is the writing not subjective?” One might ask the same of Ford’s trilogy.

The tension between Below and Cley feeds into an overall mood of paranoia and surveillance. Cley’s hallucinations and terror, and the constant threat of substance withdrawal, with Below controlling his supply of sheer beauty, bleed into his subjective experience of his mission as a physiognomist, as well as his failure and punishment. Below, revealing that he’s aware of an insult that Cley whispered into his pillow years before, tells Cley, “I don’t read, I listen.” The trilogy also externalizes this subjective mood of paranoia and places it in the story’s landscape: the island in Memoranda boasts at its center a tower called the Panopticon, from which a demonic head periodically flies to terrify and surveil its prisoners. Memoranda’s unreal island within the unreal world of the trilogy retroactively casts doubt on the Well-Built City, itself a construct of Below’s mind, a memory palace writ large.

Cley’s imprisonment in the middle act of The Physiognomy also emphasizes the constructed, fictional narration of the storyworld. Imprisoned in a hellish sulfur mine on an isolated island, Cley interacts with a pair of twin jailers; the kinder Corporal Matters of the day watch tells Cley that his own mind, not the island, is the prison, and then the cruel Corporal Matters of the night watch insists that “the mine is [his] mind”: “While you work, you are in my mind, tunneling through my head, and I see you always. My mind is always killing you as you dig through it.” The Beyond opens by noting that some believe the world is a sentient, massive head floating in space: “If this is so, then the Beyond, that immense wilderness, […] is certainly, in its danger, its wonder, its secrets, and absence of reason, nothing less than the world’s imagination.”

These are stories all taking place in someone’s head. Paranoia, panopticon, viewpoint, narration—all are unsettling constructs that convey Ford’s vision of fascism. “Structure determines existence in the physical world,” Cley reminds himself in a panic as he begins to lose his supposed “power” in The Physiognomy. Of course, to pull this thread even further, these are all stories that took place in Jeffrey Ford’s head and then the reader’s. M. John Harrison, progenitor and patron saint of the New Weird, once said about his own work: “Like all books, Viriconium is just some words.” There’s a strong pull of metafiction at play in the written-account nature of the narratives, which interact with and blur into an embedded narrative of a previous foray into the Beyond. Misrix asserts at one point that the world has a mind, and “a cynical one at that. It deals in irony with all the subtle grace and sharp wit of a master storyteller.” One might say the same of Ford.

The Physiognomy itself—in both reality and in the books—is a desperate attempt to authoritatively claim objectivity in the view of the supposedly superior and supposedly rational viewer/measurer, and thereby to deny the subjectivity of others. This power grab, the preferred approach of Trump and his hangers-on, might be called kayfabe: a nonsense term, borrowed from professional wrestling, that refers to a “slippery, ever-wobbling jumble of truths, half-truths, and outright falsehoods, all delivered with the utmost passion and commitment.” Moira Donegan recently wrote about the administration’s insistence on a male gender marker on trans actor Hunter Schafer’s passport, arguing that “it represents a lie, an assertion in total contradiction not only to how she sees herself, but to how everyone else sees her, to the reality of how she lives her life.” As Donegan put it, “we are told that what we see and feel and experience of trans people does not count, that we should not believe our lying eyes.” That, in other words, our subjectivity and interiority are less important than the external judgment of fascists.

Elsewhere, similarly, Trump himself told a reporter who questioned the Catholic discontent with a tweeted image of him as pope, “You mean they can’t take a joke? You don’t mean the Catholics, you mean the fake news media. The Catholics loved it. I had nothing to do with it. Maybe it was AI.” The constant railing against the fake news media is a holdover from Trump’s emergence on the political scene a decade ago, but the AI angle is newer. It’s a form of gaslighting that’s currently enveloping society in a fog of doubt: how can we trust our own senses when the hallucinations of nonsentient machines are everywhere?

Below, we come to find out, is motivated by a single-minded flight from the grief that impacted his life when he lost his beloved sister in childhood and embarked on a fanatical quest for control, for possible immortality, for surety. Cley, at the outset, is less clever, less aware than the perpetually self-amused Below, but similarly afraid of complexity and uncertainty. As one erstwhile ally reminds Cley, after he complains of the complexity of life in the Beyond, “simplicity will be yours in the grave.” Hundreds of pages earlier in the trilogy, Cley notes that he (along with many of his fascist colleagues) was always afraid of the dark and the unknown: “There was no face to it, no signs to interpret, no clues to decipher in an attempt to discern a friend or foe. The physiognomy of the night was a great blankness that scorned my instruments and harbored the potential for true evil.”

The fascist’s hatred of complexity and vulnerability is tied to their fear of actual subjectivity even as they impose the false subjectivity of kayfabe on their subjects. In addition to the Physiognomy and sheer beauty, Below keeps his population in line with technology designed to ease their lives, to remove the friction of daily existence. After his overthrow, the survivors of the destruction of the Well-Built City are “suspicious, to a fault probably, of devices that will make our lives easier, remembering how much freedom one must forsake for their comfort.” A contemporaneous review of The Physiognomy in The New York Times concluded that “Ford writes equally well about the scientific cult of precision and the acceptance of ambiguity. You don’t have to embrace his antiscience message to appreciate the care and skill that went into its framing.” It’s hard to share that reviewer’s apprehension in the world of 2025, with Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and myriad other AI-promoting tech bros promising the elimination of all of life’s friction for those physiologically appropriate enough to kowtow to fascism. This returns us to Ford’s point about surface: life lies within the depths and friction of our efforts.

The animating force of The Well-Built City Trilogy is the work Cley is willing to put in in order to come back to his humanity. Cley rejects Below and the Physiognomy in the first book, but he then spends much of Memoranda drawn back to Below’s world, “breathing his imagination.” Cley is stuck there because of his relapse into addiction to sheer beauty, unwilling to live on his own in the real, sacrificing the past and future for the false paradise of the present, giving in again to the fear of uncertainty that drives the fascist imposition of order and falsity on reality. As Cley tells the woman he falls in love with in the memory-world of Memoranda, who is also a living memory of Below’s formula for sheer beauty and therefore a symbol of Cley’s addiction (if the trilogy has a weak spot, it’s the tendency for women to be plot facilitators), “You help me to forget the past, and the future is so perfectly uncertain. My guilt falls away behind me, and there is no responsibility to tomorrow. With you I am in the present. The present is a kind of paradise.” False paradises abound in The Well-Built City, not least in the form of the city itself. The white fruit of paradise, the MacGuffin that propels the first book, was found on the corpse of a prehistoric man named Ea, but when he is reanimated, he dismisses it: “What is paradise? […] That white fruit is an unchanging dream. It is death, as you call it.” The backwards-looking, violently enforced stasis of fascism is death.

There’s an important distinction to be made here between the nonsense gaslighting of the fascists and the fact that much of our experience is subjective. Against the fascist aesthetic opioid of sheer beauty, we have to focus on the frictional grit of what the surrealists called convulsive beauty. The scholar Krzysztof Fijalkowski described this as the “oxymoronic” association of beauty with “the unknown, with desire and with the promise of revelation […] characterized by tensions, by open-ended and dynamic but contradictory impulses.” Sheer beauty lulls its users, pulling them away from friction and the active quest for paradise, immuring them in ineffable placidity and comforting illusions.

For Cley in particular, it’s a way to ignore the weight of the guilt he feels for what he did to Arla Beaton. Instead of the static, crystalline (and supposedly objective) reactionary ideal of “beauty” held by the fascist/physiognomist, we—and Cley—have to find the surrealist beauty in the new and unexpected, and particularly in their juxtaposition. The Beyond, the paradisiacal, being-part-of-the-world concluding book of the trilogy is, in my view, one of the crowning achievements of American fantasy. It’s largely so because much of the book is given over to the contrast between the beauty of the nature of the Beyond itself and Cley and Wood’s exhausting struggles to survive it. The Beyond, indeed, pulls the reader into subjectivity to such a degree that it splits itself into two competing narratives that push and pull against one another without resolving that friction.

Cley’s journey, perhaps, is not just toward redemption but also toward an embrace of his own humanity, vulnerable and complex as it is. Even in the throes of the struggle against fascism, the movement toward paradise is incumbent in our actions to improve ourselves and the world. When Cley asks Ea, at the close of The Physiognomy, if there is really a paradise on earth, the answer is “Oh, yes. […] We are journeying toward it. […] It is everything you thought it would be.” Thereafter, this becomes a running gag for the two of them, joking and earnest at the same time: “We are close, Cley. We are almost there.” In real life, it feels very far away right now, but we can find it in the friction of resistance.