Like all good literature, Harrison's stories are worth reading again and again; the more you read, the more you understand.' Iain M. Banks Over the last thirty years, M. John Harrison has been inspiring readers and writers alike across the world. His return to science fiction in 2002 with the magnificent space opera LIGHT was a monumental triumph, shortlisted for every major award in the genre. He combines brilliant storytelling with complex plots and evocative, mesmerising writing. THINGS THAT NEVER HAPPEN is M. John Harrison's definitive collection of short fiction, twenty-four dazzling stories of science fiction and fantasy; the perfect introduction to one of Britain's most brilliant writers.
When a writer like M. John Harrison looks at love, you know the results will be unusual and compelling, evocative and imaginative, dark, depressing and transcendent. In SIGNS OF LIFE, the beautiful Isobel Avens dreams of flying like a bird; Mick ¿China¿ Rose runs a fast (and sometimes illegal) courier service to the genetics industry. When they meet and become lovers, it sets off an unstoppable train of events. Set in London and Budapest, against a backdrop of cosmetic surgery, genetic engineering and medical waste-dumping, SIGNS OF LIFE is both a sparely written thriller and an unforgettable love story. THE COURSE OF THE HEART follows three students whose lives are changed forever by the ritual they carry out one May night in a Cambridge meadow. To escape the consequences, they seek out the Coeur, a country which emerges from the shifting borders of Europe under only the most special conditions. In the Coeur anything is possible: even hope; even redemption.
In Harrison's dangerously illuminating new novel, three quantum outlaws face a universe of their own creation, where the rules are made up--and broken--along the way, and where there's only one thing more mysterious than darkness.
Simon's father has been accused of the murder of a rival cab driver and Simon faces a life branded as the son of a murderer. Then he meets Charley, grieving for her dead father, the murder victim, and they determine to find out the real story behind the murder. Together they can face up to the danger which surrounds them, and bring back some hope for the future. Michael Harrison was born in Oxford in 1939. He has taught in North Queensland, London, Oxford, and Hartlepool but is now a part-time librarian in Oxford and enjoys visiting schools as a writer. He is married with two grown-up sons. His previous books include a history of witches, funny novels, retellings of Norse myths, a book of poems, Junk Mail, and a retelling of Don Quixote. Together with Christopher Stuart-Clark, he has anthologised many books for OUP, including The Oxford Treasury of Classic Poems. Facing the Dark is his second novel for OUP, and is now reissued in a smaller mass- market format.
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. ‘M. John Harrison’s slippery, subversive stories mix the eerie and familiar into beguiling, alarming marvels. No one writes quite like him; no one I can think of writes such flawless sentences, or uses them to such disorientating effect.’ – Olivia Laing, author of The Lonely City ‘These stories map a rediscovered fictional hinterland, one tucked behind the glossier edifices of modernity and genre with views down alleyways into pubs and flats where Patrick Hamilton glares balefully at J. G. Ballard.’ – Will Eaves, author of This is Paradise ‘M. John Harrison moves elegantly, passionately, from genre to genre, his prose lucent and wise, his stories published as SF or as fantasy, as horror or as mainstream fiction. In each playing field, he wins awards, and makes it look so easy. His prose is deceptively simple, each word considered and placed where it can sink deepest and do the most damage.’ – Neil Gaiman, author of American Gods ‘With an austere and deeply moving humanism, M. John Harrison proves what only those crippled by respectability still doubt – that science fiction can be literature, of the very greatest kind.’ – China Miéville, author of Perdido Street Station
A companion volume to the very successful "Short! A Book of Very Short Stories". A book of very short poems which will make you smile and make you think, and which you won't be able to forget. * Very short poems are highly appealing to children who may be put off by longer ones. * Wonderful, witty black and white illustrations throughout.* Michael Harrison has edited many best-selling anthologies for the OUP.* Michael Harrison lives in Oxford.
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.
Direct and to the point, this book from one of the field's leaders covers Brownian motion and stochastic calculus at the graduate level, and illustrates the use of that theory in various application domains, emphasizing business and economics. The mathematical development is narrowly focused and briskly paced, with many concrete calculations and a minimum of abstract notation. The applications discussed include: the role of reflected Brownian motion as a storage model, queuing model, or inventory model; optimal stopping problems for Brownian motion, including the influential McDonald-Siegel investment model; optimal control of Brownian motion via barrier policies, including optimal control of Brownian storage systems; and Brownian models of dynamic inference, also called Brownian learning models or Brownian filtering models.
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.
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 called Raintown, 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.
On a hot May night, 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.
Crime Factory Publications presents issue 13 of their award-winning magazine. Featuring interviews with BLACK PULP creators Gary Phillips and Tommy Hancock by Michael A. Gonzales. Ozploitation icon Roger Ward chats about his career with James Hopwood. Ruth Dugdall discusses working with criminals and writing about them with Angela Savage. Tom Darin Liskey writes on Indian Country in our true crime feature. John Harrison covers the Kennedy assassination pulps in his Hip Pocket Sleaze files. And our fiction section is packed this time with a Court Merrigan original piece of long fiction, as well as original short fiction by Mark Richardson, Stephen D. Rogers and Tom Pitts. All this, plus reviews from the Crime Factory team.
In Harrison's dangerously illuminating new novel, three quantum outlaws face a universe of their own creation, where the rules are made up--and broken--along the way, and where there's only one thing more mysterious than darkness.
An unusual story of love finds drifter Mick Rose, who works in a shady waste-disposal job, at a friend's wedding, falling head over heels for a younger woman who dreams of flying.
The Hammer studio is best known for its horror film output from the mid-1950s through the 1970s. This book provides facts about the hundreds of actresses who appeared in those films, including ones released in the twenty-first century by a resurgent Hammer. Each woman's entry includes her Hammer filmography, a brief biography if available, and other film credits in the horror genre. The book is illustrated with more than 60 film stills and posters.
Liverpool 1818. It was time for Liverpool's leading newspaper The Mercury to recruit a 'young investigative journalist' who it would it train and steep in its reformist outlook. Fighting for social and economic justice in England's 'port of empire.' On his way to interview, Edwin Kearney had taken a shortcut through storm-battered Old Dock. What occurred that morning would shape his life and affect those of all about him. In the aftermath, he would encounter dark forces feverishly at work in this hectic, tumultuous place. Across its quays and warehouses. On its streets and in its shadows. Forces and their instruments, locals and their out-of-town allies, devoted to unrelenting crime, privation and misery. The lives and circumstances of its people little more than a commodity to be weighed, bartered and discarded. The brutal physical removal of one community and to enable the imposition of another. Civic dispossession and the pre-emption of rights. An assault on the undefended by the indefensible. In their way, stood the town's fearless newspaper The Mercury, its remarkable owner and the young man who had unwittingly crossed into Liverpool's netherworld and now found himself at the very heart of The Mercury's proposition that 'the welfare of the people shall be the supreme law.' Lives and communities were at stake, the forces against them -native and imported - vicious and formidable- led by one of London's most ingenious and elusive criminals and bolstered locally by his feared Liverpool counterpart. The very existence of Liverpool's crusading newspaper in jeopardy, until a remarkable group of friends and allies also emerged from the shadows.
Exploration tells the intriguing story of the navigators who crossed oceans to chart the coastlines of distant continents, the adventurers who traversed deserts and polar wastes, and the traders who sought new markets and commodities in faraway lands. The secrets of the planet and its living inhabitants have been unraveled thanks to the efforts made by these navigators and adventurers. This new, full-color book begins with a narration of the earliest seagoing ships and the vehicles that transported diplomats, warriors, and merchants around the Mediterranean region and later around the world. It explores the Vikings who terrorized Western Europe and colonized Greenland as well as the swift outrigger vessels that sailed from Asia to the islands of the Pacific. This accessible resource describes the development of navigational instruments to help on long journeys out of sight of landOCoincluding the sextant and compassOCoand explains how to calculate latitude and longitude.
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