Search results for ""author m. john harrison""

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.

Read more less

*WINNER OF THE GOLDSMITHS PRIZE 2020**A New Statesman Book of the Year*'A mesmerising, mysterious book . . . Haunting. Worrying. Beautiful' Russell T. Davis'Brilliantly unsettling' Olivia Laing'A magificent book' Neil Gaiman'An extraordinary experience' William GibsonWinner of the Goldsmiths Prize 2020, this is fiction that pushes the boundaries of the novel form.Shaw had a breakdown, but he's getting himself back together. He has a single room, a job on a decaying London barge, and an on-off affair with a doctor's daughter called Victoria, who claims to have seen her first corpse at age thirteen. It's not ideal, but it's a life. Or it would be if Shaw hadn't got himself involved in a conspiracy theory that, on dark nights by the river, seems less and less theoretical... Meanwhile, Victoria is up in the Midlands, renovating her dead mother's house, trying to make new friends. But what, exactly, happened to her mother? Why has the local waitress disappeared into a shallow pool in a field behind the house? And why is the town so obsessed with that old Victorian morality tale, The Water Babies? As Shaw and Victoria struggle to maintain their relationship, the sunken lands are rising up again, unnoticed in the shadows around them.

Read more less

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.

Read more less

John Truck was to outward appearances just another lowlife spaceship captain. But he was also the last of the Centaurans - or at least, half of him was - which meant that he was the only person who could operate the Centauri Device, a sentient bomb which might hold the key to settling a vicious space war.M. John Harrison's classic novel turns the conventions of space opera on their head, and is written with the precision and brilliance for which is famed.

Read more less

It is some time after Ed Chianese's trip into the Kefahuchi Tract. A major industry of the Halo is now tourism. The Tract has begun to expand and change, but, more problematically, parts of it have also begun to fall to earth, piecemeal, on the Beach planets.We are in a city, perhaps on New Venusport or Motel Splendido: next to the city is the event site, the zone, from out of which pour new, inexplicable artefacts, organisms and escapes of living algorithm - the wrong physics loose in the universe. They can cause plague and change. An entire department of the local police, Site Crime, exists to stop them being imported into the city by adventurers, entradistas, and the men known as 'travel agents', profiteers who can manage - or think they can manage - the bad physics, skewed geographies and psychic onslaughts of the event site.But now a new class of semi-biological artefact is finding its way out of the site, and this may be more than anyone can handle.

Read more less

'No one alive can write sentences like he can. He's the missing evolutionary link between William Burroughs and Virginia Woolf' Olivia Laing'Among the most brilliant novelists writing today' Robert Macfarlane'Truly gets to the heart of that strange, indefinable otherness of the wild northern landscape' Benjamin MyersRetreating from the ruins of his marriage, Mike leaves London for the wildness of the Yorkshire moors, where he falls in with a group of climbers - a band of misfits and mavericks bound by the pursuit of the unattainable: the perfect climb.Travelling from abandoned urban quarries to misty, lichened crags, Mike discovers an intensity of experience - a wash of pain, fear and excitement - that causes the rest of his world to recede. Increasingly addicted to the adrenaline, folklore and camaraderie of the sport, he begins to lose his grip on the line between passion and obsession - at a cost.With an introduction by Robert Macfarlane

Read more less

Listed by the Guardian as one of the top 100 science fiction books of the 21st century.On the barren surface of an asteroid, located deep in the galaxy beneath the unbearable light of the Kefahuchi Tract, lie three objects: an abandoned spacecraft, a pair of bone dice covered with strange symbols, and a human skeleton. What they are and what they mean are the mysteries explored and unwrapped in LIGHT, M. John Harrison's triumphant novel.

Read more less

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.

Read more less

BOOK OF THE YEAR IN GUARDIAN, OBSERVER, GRANTA AND TLS 'This dazzling anti-memoir is nothing less than a portrait of a writer with a beautiful mind. Harrison turns over what it takes to simultaneously be present to everyday life and imaginative flight. A masterpiece' Deborah Levy, Books of the Year 2023, Observer 'Is M John Harrison the best writer at work today? He's certainly among the deftest and most original, producing immaculately odd sentences in any genre he chooses' Olivia Laing, Summer Pick of 2023, Guardian 'Wish I Was Here by M John Harrison is a revival of the writer's memoir ... slippery and fascinating as any of his fiction' Jonathan Coe, Summer Pick of 2023, Guardian 'Unusual and impressive, Wish I Was Here is also a writing manual of brilliance' Sunday Times M. John Harrison has produced one of the greatest bodies of fiction of any living British author, encompassing space opera, speculative fiction, fantasy, magical and literary realism. But is there even an M. John Harrison and where do we find him? This is the question the author asks in this memoir-as-mystery, turning for clues to forty years of notebooking: 'A note or it never happened. A note or you never looked.' Are these notebooks, or 'nowtbooks', records of failed presence? How do they shine light on a childhood in the industrial Midlands, a portrait of the young artist in countercultural London, on an adulthood of restless escape into hill and moorland landscapes? And do they tell us anything about the writing of the books, each one so different from the last that it might have been written by another version of the author? With aphoristic daring and laconic wit, this anti-memoir will fascinate you and delight you. It confirms M. John Harrison still further in his status as the most original British writer of his generation.

Read more less

Throughout his career, M. John Harrison's writing has defied categorisation, building worlds both unreal and all-too real, overlapping and interlocking with each other. His stories are replete with fissures and portals into parallel dimensions, unidentified countries and lost lands. But more important than the places they point to are the obsessions that drive the people who so believe in them, characters who spend their lives hunting for, and haunted by, clues and maps that speak to the possibility of somewhere else. This selection of stories, drawn from over 50 years of writing, bears witness to that desire for difference: whether following backstreet occultists, amateur philosophers, down-and-outs or refugees, we see our relationship with 'the other' in microscopic detail, and share in Harrison's rejection of the idea that the world, or our understanding of it, could ever be settled.

Read more less

The disturbing post-apocalyptic novel The Chrysalids by John Wyndham, author of The Day of the Triffids and The Kraken Wakes and dramatised on BBC Radio 4.David Strorm's father doesn't approve of Angus Morton's unusually large horses, calling them blasphemies against nature. Little does he realise that his own son, and his son's cousin Rosalind and their friends, have their own secret abberation which would label them as mutants. But as David and Rosalind grow older it becomes more difficult to conceal their differences from the village elders. Soon they face a choice: wait for eventual discovery, or flee to the terrifying and mutable Badlands. . . The Chrysalids is a post-nuclear apocalypse story of genetic mutation in a devastated world and explores the lengths the intolerant will go to keep themselves pure.'Perfect timing, astringent humour. . . one of the few authors whose compulsive readability is a compliment to the intelligence' Spectator'Remains fresh and disturbing in an entirely unexpected way' GuardianJohn Wyndham Parkes Lucas Benyon Harris was born in 1903, the son of a barrister. He tried a number of careers including farming, law, commercial art and advertising, and started writing short stories, intended for sale, in 1925. From 1930 to 1939 he wrote short stories of various kinds under different names, almost exclusively for American publications, while also writing detective novels. During the war he was in the Civil Service and then the Army. In 1946 he went back to writing stories for publication in the USA and decided to try a modified form of science fiction, a form he called 'logical fantasy'. As John Wyndham he wrote The Day of the Triffids, The Kraken Wakes, The Chrysalids, The Midwich Cuckoos (filmed as Village of the Damned), The Seeds of Time, Trouble with Lichen, The Outward Urge, Consider Her Ways and Others, Web and Chocky. John Wyndham died in March 1969.

Read more less

'WATCH THOU FOR THE MUTANT!' It is many years since God sent the Tribulation to punish the forebears for their sins, and in the rural settlement of Waknuk David Strorm's father decries any and all blasphemies against nature. Little does he realise that David and his cousin Rosalind, have their own secret aberration which would label them as mutants. But as they grow older it becomes more difficult to conceal their differences from the village elders. Soon they face a choice: wait for eventual discovery, or flee to the terrifying and mutable Badlands. . .'An outstanding success' New York Times

Read more less

With a new introduction by M. John Harrison and a striking new cover design from the artist Stanley Donwood, this acclaimed cult novel sees human existence threatened by devastating climate change. Water. Man’s most precious commodity is a luxury of the past. Radioactive waste from years of industrial dumping has caused the sea to form a protective skin strong enough to devastate the Earth it once sustained. And while the remorseless sun beats down on the dying land, civilization itself begins to crack. Violence erupts and insanity reigns as the remnants of mankind struggle for survival in a worldwide desert of despair. Remarkable for its prescience and the originality of its vision, The Drought is a work of major importance from the early career of one of Britain’s most acclaimed novelists. This edition is part of a new commemorative series of Ballard’s works, featuring introductions from a number of his admirers (including Ned Beauman, Ali Smith, Neil Gaiman and Martin Amis) and brand-new cover designs.

Read more less