To 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

A 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

@mjohnharrison

"... so I know how those churns feel: out of one's time."

#MJohnHarrison #time

@mjohnharrison

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.

#MJohnHarrison #architecture #MakingSenseOfThings

#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.

#MJohnHarrison #TheCourseOfTheHeart #BritishNovels

I’ve been reading (and re-reading) a lot of @mjohnharrison’s work recently.

The presence of cats in many of his novels and short stories is such a pleasing thing: vectors of both strangeness and the mundane, these wondrous creatures stopping to stare at doorways into thin places and then cleaning their faces as though wiping away the dust of the world.

#MJohnHarrison #Cats

@mjohnharrison

Golly, one whole year to wait! Thank you for the teaser.

("Petrol coloured water" is such an evocative image.)

#MJohnHarrison #books #literature #TheEndOfEverything

@mjohnharrison

"but you already feel, somewhere in the back of your head, the whole contraption tipping & lurching toward a real structured thing. I love that feeling."

Creator's reward. Very precisely expressed.

#MJohnHarrison #writing #structurefinallyemerging #creativity #TheEndOfEveryThing

https://ambientehotel.wordpress.com/2023/08/08/next-book/

#bookstodon #books #sciencefiction #mjohnharrison

https://www.thequillandthequasar.com/m-john-harrison-light/