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
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.
M. John Harrison's first collection of stories since THE ICE MONKEY ('bears comparison with Peter Carey and Ian McEwan, but he is grittier than Carey and wittier than McEwan' -- TLS). These are brilliant, obliquely fantastic tales, grounded in an acutely-observed contemporary reality, into which obtrude flashes of a world beyond our world, a world which would transform the lives of the book's characters, if only they knew how to find it.
A magnificent city existing on the ringes of the past, and on the brink of destruction, Viriconium • With a foreword by Neil Gaiman 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
*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 Gibson Winner 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.
Set in the unique world first featured in the award-winning Light, here is a story of love, murder, and intergalactic noir on the razor’s edge of the imagination, as envisioned by the incomparable M. John Harrison. 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. Vic Serotonin is an illegal “travel agent” into and out of Saudade. His latest client is a woman as unpredictable as the site itself—and maybe as dangerous. She wants a tour inside Saudade just as a troubling new class of biological artifacts have started leaving—living algorithms that are 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 artifact, Vic must make one final trip as the universe around him rapidly veers toward viral chaos.
In M. John Harrison’s dangerously illuminating new novel, three quantum outlaws face a universe of their own creation, a universe where you make up the rules as you go along and break them just as fast, where there’s only one thing more mysterious than darkness. In contemporary London, Michael Kearney is a serial killer on the run from the entity that drives him to kill. He is seeking escape in a future that doesn’t yet exist—a quantum world that he and his physicist partner hope to access through a breach of time and space itself. In this future, Seria Mau Genlicher has already sacrificed her body to merge into the systems of her starship, the White Cat. But the “inhuman” K-ship captain has gone rogue, pirating the galaxy while playing cat and mouse with the authorities who made her what she is. In this future, Ed Chianese, a drifter and adventurer, has ridden dynaflow ships, run old alien mazes, surfed stellar envelopes. He “went deep”—and lived to tell about it. Once crazy for life, he’s now just a twink on New Venusport, addicted to the bizarre alternate realities found in the tanks—and in debt to all the wrong people. Haunting them all through this maze of menace and mystery is the shadowy presence of the Shrander—and three enigmatic clues left on the barren surface of an asteroid under an ocean of light known as the Kefahuchi Tract: a deserted spaceship, a pair of bone dice, and a human skeleton. Praise for Light “Uproarious, breath-taking, exhilarating . . . This is a novel of full spectrum literary dominance. . . . It is a work of—and about—the highest order.”—Guardian “An increasingly complex and dazzling narrative . . . Light depicts its author as a wit, an awesomely fluent and versatile prose stylist, and an SF thinker as dedicated to probing beneath surfaces as William Gibson is to describing how the world looks when reflected in them. . . . SF fans and skeptics alike are advised to head towards this Light.”—Independent “Light is a literary singularity: at one and the same time a grim, gaudy space opera that respects the physics, and a contemporary novel that unflinchingly revisits the choices that warp a life. It’s almost unbearably good.”—Ken MacLeod, author of Engine City
John M. Harrison delivers an extraordinary, genre-bending novel that weaves together mythology, sexuality, and the troubled past and present of Eastern Europe. It begins on a hot May night, when three Cambridge students carry out a ritualistic act that changes their lives. Years later, none of the participants can remember what exactly transpired; but their clouded memories can't rid them of an overwhelming sense of dread. Pam Stuyvesant is an epileptic haunted by strange sensual visions. Her husband Lucas believes that a dwarfish creature is stalking him. Self-styled Sorcerer Yaxley becomes obsessed with a terrifyingly transcendent reality. The seemingly least effected participant in the ritual (who is haunted by the smell of roses) attempts to help his friends escape the torment that has engulfed their lives. Skyhorse Publishing, under our Night Shade and Talos imprints, is proud to publish a broad range of titles for readers interested in science fiction (space opera, time travel, hard SF, alien invasion, near-future dystopia), fantasy (grimdark, sword and sorcery, contemporary urban fantasy, steampunk, alternative history), and horror (zombies, vampires, and the occult and supernatural), and much more. While not every title we publish becomes a New York Times bestseller, a national bestseller, or a Hugo or Nebula award-winner, we are committed to publishing quality books from a diverse group of authors.
One of M. John Harrison's most acclaimed novels in a career of near universal acclaim, CLIMBERS is, perhaps, the least fantastical of his novels. Yet it carries life-changing moments, descriptions of landscape bordering on the hallucinogenic and flights of pure fictive power that leave any notion of the divide between realistic and unrealistic fiction far behind. First published in 1989, CLIMBERS has remained a strong favourite with fans and reviewers alike. A young man seeks to get a grip on his life by taking up rock-climbing. He hopes that by engaging with the hard realities of the rock and the fall he can grasp what is important about life. But as he is drawn into the obsessive world of climbing he learns that taking things to the edge comes with its own price. Retreating from his failed marriage to Pauline, Mike leaves London for the Yorkshire moors, where he meets Normal and his entourage, busy pursuing their own dreams of escape. Travelling from crag to crag throughout the country, they are searching for the unattainable: the perfect climb. Through rock-climbing, Mike discovers an intensity of experience - a wash of pain, fear and excitement - that obliterates the rest of his world. Increasingly addicted to the adrenaline, folklore and camaraderie of the sport, he finds, for a time, a genuine escape. But it is gained at a price... This dark, witty and poetic novel is full of the rugged beauty of nature, of the human drive to test oneself against extremes, and of the elation such escape can bring. CLIMBERS was featured on BBC Radio 4's A GOOD READ in February 2021. Poet Helen Mort called it "a poetic portrait of the strange and fascinating, very niche world of rock climbing" and Harriett Gilbert called the writing "like prose poetry, it's beautiful.
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.
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