Tenebris NoxM. John Harrison's published (what appears to be) his top 10 best novels of all time. I'm not sure whether he was part of The Guardian's 100 best novels - which I personally found aenemic. Harrison's is an interesting list.
November GrauOn a more positive note I have been deriving some comfort from a re-read of "Light" by M John Harrison, especially the Kearney subplot, which is in some ways very similar to the premise of Harrison's weird fiction novel "The Course of the Heart", which is pretty much my favourite novel for lots of reasons.
Kearney is a physicist rather than a dabbler in the occult, but like the people in TCotH he draws down the attention of a Something from another realm and it ploughs up his life, making him "sclerotic with anxiety" and leading him to perform acts that violate basic norms of human behavior for reasons he never really comes close to understanding. Harrison is better than any author I've read at evoking the kind of state where you're constantly expecting something incomprehensible and dreadful to happen without knowing what form it will take. Or states in which apparently harmless objects or circumstances suddenly bloat with poorly-grasped meaning, a meaning which can be seductive and intriguing in its mystery but which is usually just baleful. Moments when the veil is not pierced, but when you can feel something shoving up against it like an uneasy sleeper under a blanket. The banal offers no protection from it; if anything it acts as a lightning rod. Many horror authors write about this kind of thing but Harrison excels at making the terrifying absurd emerge seamlessly from the banal like a Magic Eye image.
I also like the way it seems to be related to the emergence of desire in his characters, most of whom seem to be pretty horny in a way that feels very casual compared to the song and dance many sci-fi writers make about sex, and which therefore feels very real. There's rarely any direct link between the immanence or eruption of the weird and the flowering of desire in his characters, yet somehow the two currents seem correlated.
#ScienceFiction #MJohnHarrison #WeirdFiction
Kearney is a physicist rather than a dabbler in the occult, but like the people in TCotH he draws down the attention of a Something from another realm and it ploughs up his life, making him "sclerotic with anxiety" and leading him to perform acts that violate basic norms of human behavior for reasons he never really comes close to understanding. Harrison is better than any author I've read at evoking the kind of state where you're constantly expecting something incomprehensible and dreadful to happen without knowing what form it will take. Or states in which apparently harmless objects or circumstances suddenly bloat with poorly-grasped meaning, a meaning which can be seductive and intriguing in its mystery but which is usually just baleful. Moments when the veil is not pierced, but when you can feel something shoving up against it like an uneasy sleeper under a blanket. The banal offers no protection from it; if anything it acts as a lightning rod. Many horror authors write about this kind of thing but Harrison excels at making the terrifying absurd emerge seamlessly from the banal like a Magic Eye image.
I also like the way it seems to be related to the emergence of desire in his characters, most of whom seem to be pretty horny in a way that feels very casual compared to the song and dance many sci-fi writers make about sex, and which therefore feels very real. There's rarely any direct link between the immanence or eruption of the weird and the flowering of desire in his characters, yet somehow the two currents seem correlated.
#ScienceFiction #MJohnHarrison #WeirdFiction
Book buy this morning: Climbers by M. John Harrison. Very excited to find this in the Oxfam shop this morning. It's a book I've been keeping an eye out for over the last few years. The other one by Harrison that I'm always on the look out for is Viriconium. Just sat and read first five chapters of Climbers. Fabulous writing.
#booksbuy #mjohnharrison
#booksbuy #mjohnharrison
Boldly.BlueWelcome to the Borderlands: A Definitive Guide to the New Weird
https://boldly.blue/new-weird-fiction-guide/
A definitive guide to the New Weird — the genre that ate the walls between #sciencefiction, #fantasy, and #horror.
#NewWeird #SpeculativeFiction #ChinaMieville #JeffVanderMeer #MJohnHarrison #NnediOkorafor #WeirdFiction #GenreFiction #HorrorFiction #FantasyFiction #LiteraryAnalysis
https://boldly.blue/new-weird-fiction-guide/
A definitive guide to the New Weird — the genre that ate the walls between #sciencefiction, #fantasy, and #horror.
#NewWeird #SpeculativeFiction #ChinaMieville #JeffVanderMeer #MJohnHarrison #NnediOkorafor #WeirdFiction #GenreFiction #HorrorFiction #FantasyFiction #LiteraryAnalysis
Welcome to the Borderlands: A Definitive Guide to the New Weird - David Somerfleck | Science Fiction Author
A definitive guide to the New Weird — the genre that ate the walls between science fiction, fantasy, and horror. Origins in Lovecraft and Machen, the 2003 naming debate, in-depth analysis of Perdido Street Station, Annihilation, Viriconium, and Who Fears Death, author quotes, political dimensions, and eight craft principles for writers entering the territory.
Brian LavelleTo say I’m excited about the impending publication of the new novel, The End of Everything, by M. John Harrison would be something of an understatement.
“Phillip Tennent makes his living at the tideline, collecting artefacts that wash up from the Channel. It's been years since the crisis changed everything, but its exact nature remains obscure. Government barely functions, the seas are full of new creatures, Europe has been mislaid. It feels like the end.
Now Phillip has fished out of the water an object he can't keep. A creature that keeps changing. An artefact he must take inland, before it destroys everything he thinks he knows.”
I love that cover design, the sickly way the “Everything” in the title collapses towards the bottom of the page, a metaphor for decay, runoff, entropy or perhaps something much worse.
As another (connected) Mike once asked “What is the exact nature of the catastrophe?”
#MJohnHarrison #TheEndOfEverything #SpeculativeFiction #Books #Bookstodon @bookstodon
the roamerYes, sadly M John Harrison has closed his account. On his blog he made a statement on 6 January that he has disconnected from Bluesky and Mastodon.
I don't think this has anything to do with Mastodon specifically, it seems he just wants to focus on his writing. He also has disabled comments on his blog entries. May the greater calm be conducive to his writing.
I fully understand this decision, though for us here it's a real loss. I loved his posts, they made a difference. It felt he belonged here.
I share your sense of loss.
Michael WhelanA KNIGHT OF MADNESS (1981)
Acrylic - 36” x 26”
Each time the reader returns to M. John Harrison’s Viriconium, the fictional city that borrows its name from the historic Roman-English settlement, the city is changed. 1/2
#fantasy #fantasyart #sff #illustration #mjohnharrison #inviriconium
Thank you, M John Harrison, for this blog post. As ever, surprising and slightly disorienting, and thus also in a twisted way very re-assuring.
On seeing architecture and making sense of it:
"I don’t know what I’m looking at in any sense–architecturally, historically, in terms of economics, occupation, lifestyles, materials technology and the layers of technique that every extension or roof repair or repurposing of a stable block has demanded. When you are neither Meades or Pevsner, you have to make the best of the glaringly vacant space of your viewpoint; your illiteracy. In fact I wouldn’t want to do anything else. But the older I get the more I’m forced to admit slyly the difficulties of this position; & I regret that I never learned what I needed to."
Wow. I will let these thoughts work themselves through my system.
Brian Lavelle has moved#NowRereading The Course of the Heart by #MJohnHarrison (in the new Serpent’s Tail edition published last week).
In the intensity and sapping misdirection of the current heatwave in the north of France, it seems as good a time as any to start to re-read one of my favourites of Mike’s novels. For all I know (and may soon discover) it may be the most auspicious of conditions in which to experience the book’s unsettling story.
