M. John Harrison
M. John Harrison is an author.
Michael John Harrison, who publishes as M. John Harrison, is an English novelist, short story writer and critic with a career-long habit of dismantling the genres he works in. The Viriconium sequence, written between 1971 and 1984, starts as sword and sorcery and ends by refusing to be a series at all, with the city changing name and rules between books. Climbers, from 1989, is a realist novel about rock climbing and evasion. The Kefahuchi Tract trilogy, Light, Nova Swing and Empty Space, is his space opera, and it treats faster-than-light travel as a psychological problem rather than an engineering one. He is a famously unforgiving critic of comfortable worldbuilding.
Books (3)
Where to start with M. John Harrison
Viriconium is the place to begin, provided you read it as four arguments rather than four instalments; the pleasure is watching a fantasy writer refuse to supply a map. Nova Swing is the most enjoyable single novel here, a noir built around a site that spits out impossible objects, though it lands harder after Light, which this catalogue lacks. You Should Come With Me Now: Stories of Ghosts is the purest dose.
M. John Harrison on CrossBinge
- Companion guide: The New Weird: The Complete Guide to Uncanny Fiction