M. John Harrison

"An awesomely fluent and versatile prose stylist" - INDEPENDENT "Amazing achievement ... Harrison pulls off the almost impossible feat of seamlessly blending hard sci-fi, cyberpunk, noir crime ... while doing what all the best literature does" - Goodreads Reviewer Set in the unique world, first featured in the award-winning Light, here is a story of love, murder, and intergalactic noir on the razors edge of the imagination, as envisioned by the incomparable M. John Harrison. In a neighbourhood of underground clubs, body-modification chop shops, adolescent contract killers, and sexy streetwalking Monas, you'll find the Saudade Event - a zone of strange geography, twisted physics, and frightening psychic onslaughts. Vic Serotonin is a travel agent, arranging illegal travel to and from Saudade. His latest client wants a tour and she is a woman as unpredictable as the site itself, and maybe just as dangerous. Coincidentally, a troubling new class of semi-biological artefacts start finding their way out of the site, transforming the real world in unsettling ways. Pursued by a detective intent on collaring him for his illegal tours, and hunted by a gangster convinced that the travel agent has infected him with a rogue artefact, Vic must make one final trip as the universe around him rapidly veers toward viral chaos

The cult classic novel from the author of Climbers and The Sunken Land Begins to Rise Again With an introduction by bestselling author of Our Wives Under the Sea, Julia Armfield 'A spare textual elegance and closure-denying restraint that impresses and fulfils' IAIN BANKS On a hot May night, three Cambridge students carry out a ritualistic act that changes their lives. Decades later, none of the participants can remember what transpired; but their clouded memories bind them together. Unable to move on, Pam Stuyvesant has epilepsy and is plagued by sensual visions. Her husband Lucas believes that a dwarfish creature is stalking him, and invents histories to soothe Pam's fears. Self-styled Sorcerer Yaxley becomes obsessed with a terrifyingly transcendent reality. The narrator is seemingly the least effected participant in the ritual: he is haunted by the smell of roses, and his guilt as he attempts to help his friends escape the torment that has engulfed their lives. Strange, dreamlike and moving, The Course of the Heart is an examination of the edges of humanity where we lie, hide, hurt and heal. 'A gloriously intelligent, beautifully written and thoroughly maddening book' INDEPENDENT

BOOK OF THE YEAR IN THE GUARDIAN, THE OBSERVER (LONDON), GRANTA, AND TLS One of our greatest and most original living writers sets out the perils of the writing life with joyful provocation in this "anti-memoir." M. John Harrison has produced one of the greatest bodies of fiction of any living British author, encompassing space opera, speculative fiction, fantasy, and magical and literary realism. But is there even an M. John Harrison and if so, where do we find him? This is the question the author asks in this memoir-as-mystery, turning for clues to forty years of notetaking: "A note or it never happened. A note or you never looked." Are these notebooks records of failed presence? How do they shine a light on a childhood in the industrial Midlands, a portrait of a young artist in counterculture London, on an adulthood of restless escape into hill and moorland landscapes? And do they tell us anything about the writing of 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 and delight. It confirms M. John Harrison still further in his status as the most original British writer of his generation. "Wish I Was Here is a beautifully strange masterwork. It is as if M. John Harrison's prose devises its own autobiography, while the figure of its author stands to one side tinkering at a eulogy for a dead cat, a manifesto against ruin porn, and a manual of operating procedures for creativity as funky as a Brian Eno card deck. How can this also produce a sublime fugue on memory and aging? Read it and see." --Jonathan Lethem, author of Motherless Brooklyn and The Fortress of Solitude

One of our greatest and most original living writers sets out the perils of the writing life with joyful provocation

The beloved cult classic from the winner of the 2020 Goldsmiths Prize: a novel of life-changing moments, incredible descriptions of landscape and the power of an obsession.

*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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

A sequel to the bestselling LIGHT, 'a novel of full-spectrum literary dominance' (GUARDIAN).

Years after Ed Chianese's fateful trip into the Kefahuchi Tract, the tract has begun to expand and change in ways we never could have predicted--and, even more terrifying, parts of it have actually begun to fall to Earth, transforming the landscapes they encounter. Not far from Moneytown, in a neighborhood of underground clubs, body-modification chop shops, adolescent contract killers, and sexy streetwalking Monas, you'll find the Saudade Event Site: a zone of strange geography, twisted physics, and frightening psychic onslaughts--not to mention the black and white cats that come pouring out at irregular intervals. Vic Serotonin is a "travel agent" into and out of Saudade. His latest client is a woman who's nearly as unpredictable as the site itself--and maybe just as dangerous. She wants a tour just as a troubling new class of biological artifacts are leaving the site--living algorithms that are transforming the world outside in inexplicable and unsettling ways. Shadowed by a metaphysically inclined detective determined to shut his illegal operation down, Vic must make sense of a universe rapidly veering toward a virulent and viral form of chaos...and a humanity almost lost.

Galaksin syvyyksissä sijaitsevan asteroidin pinnalta löytyy oudoin symbolein koristeltu luunoppa ja ihmisen luuranko. Miten ja miksi ne ovat päätyneet asteroidille? Löydöksen arvoitus paljastuu energisessä ja monitahoisessa avaruusseikkailussa, joka sukkuloi niin kvanttimekaniikan kuin ihmispsyykenkin salatuissa maailmoissa. Nykyisyys näyttäytyy yhtä outona kuin neonvalaistu tulevaisuus, jotka molemmat toimivat vuosisataisten salaisuuksien näyttämönä. Valo palkittiin Tähtivaeltajalla vuoden 2004 parhaana scifi-kirjana.

Maagisen realismin kaunistamaa scifiä. Isobel tahtoo lentää. Hän seurustelee lain rajoilla liikuskelevan Mick Rosen kanssa, mutta hän on tyytymätön, hän tahtoo enemmän. Hän on kaunis, mutta hän tahtoo olla kauniimpi. Hän on maahan sidottu, mutta hän tahtoo siivet. Niinpä hän päättää hankkia geneettistä apua uudesta dna:sta ja alkaa muuttua. Harrison on mestari rakentamaan syviä ihmishahmoja ja pysäyttäviä hetkiä. Elonmerkeissä hän on luonut ilmapiirin, joka tihkuu saavuttamattomia unelmia. Kirja tuo lukijan eteen tulevaisuuden, joka on jo ulottuvilla, sekä haaveet, jotka pysyvät ulottumattomissa. Harrison havainnoi modernia maailmaa terävin, anteeksiantamattomin silmin. Vuonna 1945 syntynyt M. John Harrison on brittikirjallisuuden omaperäisimpiä visionäärejä. Harrisonin harvalukuinen romaanituotantonsa on aina kulkenut rohkeasti omia polkujaan. Hän on kirjallinen vaikuttaja, jonka ajatukset ovat vahvasti ohjanneet englantilaisen kirjallisuuden suuntaa ja päämääriä aina 1960-luvun lopulta lähtien. Like on julkaissut häneltä aiemmin romaanit Eilisen mystinen sydän ja Valo, joka voitti Tähtivaeltaja-palkinnon vuoden 2004 parhaana scifikirjana. Harrisonin teoksista sanottua: "Huomion arvoinen... Elonmerkit on loistava hybridi, joka sekoittaa scifiä ja korkeakirjallisuutta lumoavaan satuun. Harrisonin dystopinen näkemys Britanniasta hallitsemattoman bioteknologian varjossa on pelottava." - Sunday Times "M. John Harrisonin Valo on mestariteos millä tahansa kirjallisuuden kriteereillä arvioituna. Valo vaatii lukijaltaan suurta panostusta, mutta palkkiona on huikea näky ihmisen ja todellisuuden ytimen kohtaamisessa." - Jussi Ahlroth, Helsingin Sanomat "Vahvasti kirjoitettu Eilisen mystinen sydän on ihmeellinen, synkkä sairaskertomus. Välillä lähes unenomainen kuvaus todellisuuden ja kuvitelmien risteämisestä. Tähän kirjaan voi jäädä pahasti koukkuun." - Toni Jerrman, Tähtivaeltaja "Elonmerkit on romaani, joka muuttuuu sitä paremmaksi, mitä pitemmälle sitä lukee." - Erkki Widenius, Portti Science Fiction "Elonmerkkien ilmaisu ja kerronta on taidokkaan omalaatuista, mutta eispekulaatiivinen aihe pitää romaanin jalat maankamaralla." - Oskari Rantala, Kiiltomato.net

A magnificent city existing on the ringes of the past, and on the brink of destruction, Viriconium Available to American readers for the first time, this landmark collection gathers four groundbreaking fantasy classics from the acclaimed author of Light. Set in the imagined city of Viriconium, here are the masterworks that revolutionized a genre and enthralled a generation of readers: The Pastel City, A Storm of Wings, In Viriconium, and Viriconium Nights. Back in print after a long absence, these singular tales of a timeless realm and its enigmatic inhabitants are now reborn and compiled to captivate a whole new generation. Praise for M. John Harrison's Viriconium "The world that Harrison depicts is intricate and authentic, peopled with a multitude of strange yet lifelike characters--a combination which serves to make his richly imagined empire of Viriconium feel very real indeed. . . . This omnibus collection from the author of Light is canon-reading for those who wish to know the genre's roots, as well as the heights, to which it can aspire."--Kirkus Reviews (starred review) "Brilliant, beautiful, and absolutely essential reading. The breadth of vision and imagination alone in these books is unparalleled. It is truly one of a kind and will continue to haunt you in the best possible way for years."--Jonathan Carroll, author of White Apples "Harrison's Viriconium sequence is the jewel in the crown of 20th-century fantasy, a work that proves irrefutably that fantastic literature can be Art with a capital A, holding its own alongside the very finest writing of our time, or any other."--Elizabeth Hand, author of Mortal Love "M. John Harrison is a true master of English prose. He possesses the eye of a painter, the ear of a bard, and a rigorous and playful intellect. The Viriconium novels and stories are infused with a haunting genius that never falters."--K. J. Bishop, author of The Etched City