new wave – TimeSpace Warps

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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 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.

in Praise for his writing:

‘The exactness, acute self-consciousness and vigilant self-restraint of Harrison’s writing give it piercing authenticity.’ Ursula K. Le Guin

‘One of the best writers of fiction currently at work in English.’ Robert Macfarlane

As a Fantasy writer he has no peer – inheritor of Mervyn Peake’s crown, he is, in the opinion of many critics, the originator of what is now known as ‘The New Weird’, his superb “Viriconium” stories and novels subverting Sword & Sorcery and Dying Earth motifs peopled with strange characters trapped in a strange world they never made.

His mainstream novel ‘Climbers’ is the only novel to ever win the Boardman Tasker climbing literature prize, expressing his interest in the interactions between character and landscape (he has long been a dedicated rock climber).

Harrison’s short stories run the gamut: from observational comedy to subtle ghost stories, from tales of cosmic entropy, their evocative settings and realistic charcters entrance – readers in Bath are still talking about the magnificent reading he gave of “Egnaro” at the Bath store in 1989.

Iain M. Banks described the first volume of his ‘Kefahuchi Tract’ trilogy as “Brilliant.” Like Banks, his work is admired by readers of both general fiction and genre fiction.

M. John Harrison is also one of The Guardian’s preeminent critics and reviewers. Come along to hear M. John read from his new collection, You Should Come With Me Now, which will be published by Comma Press in October.

review of the anthology by Gary K. Wolfe

Doe Lea (read here a free short story by M. John Harrison featured in this anthology)

blog of M. John Harrison