#M. John Harrison

[humanoidhistory]

Chris Foss cover art for The Machine in Shaft Ten and Other Stories by M. John Harrison, reprinted in Future Life, July 1979.

[aaronsrpgs]

book I finished / book I started / book I saw in a little free library

[roseunspindle]

June 2025 TBR

(re-read) ^_^

31-40

[patrickbrianmooney]

The material universe, it would would appear, has little absolute substance. It hardly exists. It is a rag of matter, a wisp of gas, a memory of some former state. Each sentient species perceives the thin evidence of this state in a different way, generating out of this perception its physical and metaphysical Umwelt: its little bubble or envelope of 'reality.' These perceptual systems are hermetic and admit of no alternative. They are the product of a particular set of sense organs, evolutionary beginnings, and planetary origins. If the cat were to define the world, he would exclude the world of the housefly in his mouth. Each species has its fiction, and that fiction is to all intents and purposes real, and the actual thin substance of the universe becomes more and more debatable oneiric, hard to achieve, like the white figures that will not focus at the edge of vision.

M. John Harrison, A Storm of Wings (1980), ch. 9

[inajar]

“Identity is not negotiable. An identity you have achieved by agreement is always a prison.”

Mr. Ambrayses, in M. John Harrison, “A Young Man's Journey to Viricoinum”

[bormgans]

THE COMMITTED MEN - M. John Harrison (1971)

Ever since the excellent short story and flash fiction collection You Should Come with Me Now, I have been a fan of M. John Harrison. In 2023, he published some kind of memoir, Wish I Was Here – one of the best books I’ve ever read. I’ve reviewed most of the work he wrote this century, but I hadn’t read any of his 20th century output. I needed to remedy that, and so I picked his first novel from…

[billlaotian]

[justforbooks]

Wish I Was Here is a masterpiece. Formally inventive, constantly surprising, M John Harrison has written an archaeology of fragments that shivers with wholeness. As always with M John Harrison, you're never quite sure what you're reading or where it will take you next.

There are only a few certainties: that it will surprise you, sometimes astound you, and leave you profoundly changed. Late style is when the people who have all your life jumped in front of you waving their arms - No! Careful! - jump out one more time to encourage you to run them down, and this time you do. M. John Harrison has produced one of the greatest bodies of fiction of any living British author, encompassing space opera, speculative fiction, fantasy, magical and literary realism. Every book is subversive of genre and united by restless intelligence, experimentation and rebelliousness of spirit.

This is his first memoir, an 'anti-memoir', written in his mid-seventies with aphoristic daring and trademark originality and style, fresh after winning the Goldsmiths Prize in 2020. Many of our most prominent younger writers now recognise him as the most significant British writer of his generation. He is 'brilliantly unsettling' (Olivia Laing), 'magnificent' (Neil Gaiman), 'one of the best writers of fiction currently at work in English' (Robert Macfarlane).

Daily inspiration. Discover more photos at Just for Books…?

[certainlyathrill]

good grief !

(part 2)

[retroscifiart]

Michael Whelan ‘The Floating Gods’ by M John Harrison (1982)

[greisekinderschar]

Get Back: gay crisis condensed (PART 3)

I don't wanna go on the roof

other parts

[aaronsrpgs]

book I finished / book I started

[roseunspindle]

July 2025 TBR

*omnibus

[patrickbrianmooney]

The unmarked journeys of the soul: as we descended the foothills, we came upon old roads lined with sagging yews and blunt formless stone beasts. Here there is little left to humanize the debased earth; this is the beginning of the end, where the empire wastes away with its own geography. On the narrow strip between the mountains and the coastal flats only the giant hemlock grows now, and among it the ruins of the Afternoon are rotting, cities made of bloody glass submerged beneath cold and muddy lagoons: the ancient Fen Cities, among whose broken towers now creep the black wherries of the Evening, tacking and creaking from saithe to staithe in pursuit of a bleak diminishing trade. Of the old roads none are whole. The wide fused highways of the Afternoon peter out into shattered flags or limestone cobbles laid in Borring's day, eventually into sheep-trod, nettle, and smallholding.

M. John Harrison, A Storm of Wings, ch. 6 (p. 181 in ISBN 978-0-553-38315-7)

[ncwhereman]

“But the main secret The Beatles shared was how four tough working-class lads had come to accept the benefits of acting coquettishly for a wealthy, middle-class homosexual. People said their image was that of the boy next door, but it wasn’t. To anyone who’d seen it before, their image was instantly identifiable. It was the cool, cocky brashness of a kid who’s found a sugar-daddy and got himself set up in Mayfair.” - Simon Napier-Bell

[georgeharrisonsmiling]

Only a Northern Song