M. John Harrison Livres

The beloved cult classic from the winner of the 2020 Goldsmiths Prize: a novel of life-changing moments, incredible descriptions of landscape and the power of an obsession.

This is Elric-like in its presentation. It wouldn't be surprising if the author (at the time of publication, still in his twenties) was strongly influenced by Moorcock's style of writing & subject matter. In a far-future world where technology is on the decline & swords & sorcery on the rise, a civil war in Earth's last great kingdom threatens to destroy civilization. The aggressor kingdom has unearthed ancient relics of the past it cannot control. Overall the story moves pretty quickly, with some relatively memorable characters with forgettable names. The ending is cliched. Earth has evidently gone through several cycles of decline & rebirth (Midsummer Century, anyone?). Even the ancient artifacts & places don't bear any recognizable resemblance to things known today. That lends things a bit too much unreality. Others may find the far future vista refreshing.--Caleb N. Diffell (edited)

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EMPTY SPACE is a space adventure. We begin with the following dream: An alien research tool the size of a brown dwarf star hangs in the middle of nowhere, as a result of an attempt to place it equidistant from everything else in every possible universe. Somewhere in the fractal labyrinth beneath its surface, a woman lies on an allotropic carbon deck, a white paste of nanomachines oozing from the corner of her mouth. She is neither conscious nor unconscious, dead nor alive. There is something wrong with her cheekbones. At first you think she is changing from one thing into another - perhaps it's a cat, perhaps it's something that only looks like one - then you see that she is actually trying to be both things at once. She is waiting for you, she has been waiting for you for perhaps 10,000 years. She comes from the past, she comes from the future. She is about to speak... EMPTY SPACE is a sequel to LIGHT and NOVA SWING, three strands presented in alternating chapters which will work their way separately back to this image of frozen transformation.

In Viriconium, the young men whistle to one another all night long as they go about their deadly games. If you wake suddenly, you might hear footsteps running, or an urgent sigh. After a minute or two, the whistles move away in the direction of the Tinmarket or the Margarethestrasse. The next day, some lordling is discovered in the gutter with his throat cut. Who can tell fantasy from reality, magic from illusion, hero from villain, man from monster ... in Viriconium? Published here for the first time in one volume, and in the author's preferred order, are all the Viriconium stories, originally published in four books: The Pastel City, A Storm of Wings, In Viriconium and Viriconium Nights.

A sequel to the bestselling LIGHT, 'a novel of full-spectrum literary dominance' (GUARDIAN).

"M. John Harrison is a cartographer of the liminal. His work sits at the boundaries between genres - horror and science fiction, fantasy and travel writing - just as his characters occupy the no man's land between the spatial and the spiritual. Here, in his first collection of short fiction for over 15 years, we see the master of the New Wave present unsettling visions of contemporary urban Britain, as well as supernatural parodies of the wider, political landscape. From gelatinous aliens taking over the world's financial capitals, to the middle-aged man escaping the pressures of fatherhood by going missing in his own house& these are weird stories for weird times."--Page 4 of cover

'Light puts most modern fiction to shame. It's a magnificent book' China Mieville.

Modern London and an uncanny presence living in the rivers and canals come together in the first new novel in seven years from one of SF's best-reviewed and most-loved authors.