M. John Harrison
Prose craftsman

M(ichael) John Harrison – Mike Harrison – (born in Warwickshire in 1945 under the sign of Leo) is one of Britain’s best writers in any genre.

He moved to London to became a student teacher during early 1960s and published his first story in 1966 – but this he later disowned! He sold his first acknowledged story, the low-key “Baa Baa Blocksheep”, to the controversial and groundbreaking sf magazine New Worlds in 1968.

From 1968 to 1975 he was literary editor of the magazine, rubbing shoulders with authors like Michael Moorcock, J. G. Ballard, and Brian Aldiss.and has been a full-time writer nearly all his adult life.

Harrison, among others, contributed several tales about Moorcock’ “English Assassin”, Jerry Cornelius. Harrison’s Cornelius stories were perhaps tauter than others’ – including Moorcock’s own. Moorcock himself says (Introduction to The Lives and Times of Jerry Cornelius) —

In my view three of the very best Cornelius stories ever done were by M. John Harrison. For a while his imagination sparked mine and vice versa. He invented, for instance, Shakey Mo Collier and was responsible for the title of the third book in the tetralogy, The English Assassin.

Harrison’s Cornelius stories – which later appeared in the anthologies The Nature of the Catastrophe (Hutchinson 1971) and in The New Nature of the Catastrophe (Millennium 1993), but not in any of his own collections – are:

• “The Ash Circus” (1969)
• “The Nash Circuit” (1969)
• “The Flesh Circle” (1971)

While Harrison is probably best known for his Viriconium series, he has written many fine novels and short fiction covering the spectrum of science fiction, fantasy, and mainstream… well, really, much of his work is defies categorisation.

In 1999, Harrison won the Richard Evans Award (named after the near-legendary figure of UK publishing who died in 1996), created to honor genre fiction authors selected as “highly worthy but insufficiently recognized”.

Novels

The Committed Men (New Authors Limited/Hutchinson 1971)

The scene is England after the apocalypse. Social organisation has collapsed, and the survivors, riddled with skin cancers, eke out a precarious scavenging existence in the ruins of the Great Society… Among the mutants are a group of reptilian humans – alien, cancer-free but persecuted by the smoothskins. When one of them is born of a human mother in Tinhouse, a group of humans sets off to deliver it to its own kind. The search of these committed men for the tribes of mutants is the theme of this powerful and strangely hypnotic novel.

This is an impressive novel that prefigures the later The Pastel City in its quest across a ravaged country.

◊	The Centauri Device (Panther 1975)

A freewheeling space opera, reminicent of Alfred Bester’s manic novels – The Demolished Man (Shasta 1953), Tiger! Tiger! (Sidgwick & Jackson 1956; U.S. NAL 1957 as The Stars My Destination). This may be Harrison’s weakest novel, maybe because the mode conflicts with Harrison’s melancholic voice and pessimism.

John Truck is the last of the Centaurans. He’s been a loser all his life, scratching a living all over the galaxy, surviving on his luck along with all the other spaceport losers.

But now he has suddenly become the universe’s most valuable commodity, pursued from planet to planet in a deadly game of hide-and-seek. World leaders, priests, puhers and anarchists are all after John Truck, for only he holds the key to the Centauri Device, bound up in the complex web of his genetic system. And he who holds the Centauri Device holds the fate of the galaxy in his hands, for it may be the most terrible weapon ever seen, or it may be God…

At the end, Truck duly triggers the Centauri Device and destroys the Earth, a resolution at odds with most books of this sub-genre. Harrison anticipates the political sensibilities of authors such as Ken MacLeod – his extension of the Arab-Israeli conflicts of the sixties and seventies into a galactic struggle seems strangely contemporary – and the complexities of Iain M. Banks’ Culture novels.

One of the joys of this novel is Harrison’s choice of names of the anarchists’ spaceships, such as: Atalanta in Calydon, Melancholia that Transcends All Wit, and Strange Great Sins (the last the title of one of Harrison’s Viriconium stories!).

◊	Climbers (Gollancz 1989)

A mainstream novel about rock-climbing – Harrison is himself a keen rock climber – which won the Boardman Tasker Memorial Award for Mountain Literature, until then given only to nonfiction works.

In retreat from his failed marriage, Mike heads for the Yorkshire Moors, where he joins Normal, Gaz and Sankey on their obsessive quest for the perfect crag.

Through climbing, Mike discovers an intensity of experience – pain, fear and adrenalin – that obliterates the rest of his world; and for a time, a genuine escape. But it is gained at a price…

In an interview, Harrison said this about climbing —

It’s to do with self-awareness, but paradoxically it doesn’t leave you any self to be aware of. That was the big thing in my life: but it wasn’t necessarily the healthiest or the most mature thing.

◊	The Course of the Heart (Gollancz 1992)

A “literary fantasy novel” that explores a complex relationship between this world and an imagined other world.

One hot May night, three Cambridge students carry out a bizarre ritual. They will spend the rest of their lives haunted by that deed.

In the mysterious post-war autobiography of travel writer Michael Ashman, they read, twenty years later, of a country called the Coeur – a place of ancient, visionary splendour taht re-emerges periodically through the shifting borders of Europe at times of unrest. In the Coeur, everything is possible. There, they may find not only escape from their nightmares, but transcendance and redemption.

Like the protagonists in Climbers, these friends discover that true escapism requires a deeper understanding of the “reality of Reality”.

◊	Signs of Life (Gollancz 1997)

A “literary sf novel” that might also be described as a genetics thriller combined with a modern romance.

Mick Rose runs a fast – and sometimes illegal – courier service to the genetics industry. Money is plentiful, and life with his young lover Isobel is all he ever wanted. But Isobel is dissatisfied. Beautiful, she wants to be more beautiful; earthbound, she dreams of flying. And when she takes a new DNA-based genetic treatment, Mick finds out more han he wants to know about Isobel – and the goods his firm has been carrying all these years.

◊	Light (Orion/Gollancz 2002)

A multi-threaded story weaving two rollicking space operas and a pre-millenial tale of two scientists…

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 return to science fiction.

… although Harrison diagrees: “it’s a very mainstream work”, a synthesis of science fiction – “woven out of quantum theory, emergence theory and a throwaway speculation of Janna Levin’s” – and themes developed over Climbers, The Course of the Heart, and Travel Arrangements. There are a couple of nods towards The Centauri Device – the Chambers gun, for instance – even though it’s Harrison’s least favourite book. In contrast to his earlier space opera, and perhaps surprisingly, Light ends on an optimistic note.

◊	Anima (Gollancz 2005)

An omnibus edition of Signs of Life and The Course of the Heart.

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.

Collections

	The Machine in Shaft Ten and Other Stories (Panther 1975)
	“The Machine in Shaft Ten” (New Worlds Quarterly 3, ed. Michael Moorcock, Sphere 1972, as by Joyce Churchill)
	“The Lamia and Lord Cromis” (novelette, New Worlds Quarterly, ed. Michael Moorcock, Sphere 1971)
	“The Bait Principle” (New Worlds February 1970)
	“Running Down” (novelette, New Worlds 8, ed. Hilary Bailey, Sphere 1975)
	“The Orgasm Band” (Transatlantic Review ????)
	“Visions of Monad” (New Writings in SF 12, ed. John Carnell, Corgi 1968)
	“Events Witnessed From a City” *
	“London Melancholy” (The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction May 1969)
	“Ring of Pain” (Quark/3, ed. Samuel R. Delany & Marilyn Hacker, Paperback Library 1971)
	“The Causeway” (New Worlds Quarterly No. 2, ed. Michael Moorcock, Sphere 1971)
	“The Bringer with the Window” (Again, Dangerous Visions, ed. Harlan Ellison, Doubleday 1972, as “Lamia Mutable”)
	“Coming from Behind” (New Worlds 6, ed. Michael Moorcock & Charles Platt, Sphere 1973)

The Machine in Shaft Ten… was the first Harrison book that I bought… if I remember correctly, from Godfrey’s in York. Somewhen over the years I gave this away or lost it… regrettably, it’s long out of print.

Many of these stories reflect the experimental modes of New Worlds and were pretty hard going – especially for a teenager more used to reading Asimov, Clarke, and Heinlein!

◊	The Ice Monkey and Other Stories (Gollancz 1983)
	“The Ice Monkey” (New Terrors 2, ed. Ramsey Campbell, Pan 1980)
	“The New Rays” (Interzone 1, Spring 1982)
	“The Incalling” (The Savoy Book, ed. David Britton+Michael Butterworth, Savoy 1978)
	“Settling the World” (The New Improved Sun, ed. Thomas M. Disch, Harper & Row 1975)
	“The Quarry” *
	“Running Down” (The Machine in Shaft Ten and Other Stories, Panther 1975)
	“Egnaro” (The Year’s Best Horror Stories: Series X, ed. Karl Edward Wagner, Daw 1982)

The title story focuses on climbing – ice rather than rock – amd like Climbers draws on real people and events which, Harrison asserts, gives it its emotional depth.

	Travel Arrangements (Orion 2000)
	“Old Women” (Women’s Journal, 1983 )
	“Small Heirlooms” (Other Edens, ed. Chris Evans & Robert Holdstock,Unwin 1987)
	“The Gift” (Other Edens II, ed. Chris Evans & Robert Holdstock,Unwin 1988)
	“The Horse of Iron and How We Can Know It” (Tarot Tales, ed, Rachel Pollack & Caitlin Matthews, Arrow/Legend 1991)
	“Gifco” (MetaHorror, ed. Dennis Etchison, Dell Abyss 1992)
	“Anima” (Interzone 58, April 1992)
	“Empty” (Sisters of the Night, ed. Barbara Hambly & Martin H. Greenberg, Warner Aspect, 1995)
	“Seven Guesses of the Heart” (The Shimmering Door, ed. Katharine Kerr & Martin H. Greenberg, HarperPrism 1996)
	“I Did It” (A Book of Two Halves, ed. Nicholas Royle, Gollancz, 1996)
	“The East” (Interzone 114, December 1996)
	“Suicide Coast” (The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, July 1999)
	“The Neon Heart Murders” (The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, April 2000)
	“Black Houses” (The Ex Files, ed. Nicholas Royle, Quartet, 1998)
	“Science & the Arts” (The Times Literary Supplement, 1998)

	Things That Never Happen (Night Shade Books 2002; Gollancz 2004)
	“Introduction” by China Miéville
	“Foreword”
	“Settling the World” †
	“Running Down” †
	“The Incalling” †
	“The Ice Monkey” †
	“Egnaro” †
	“The New Rays” †
	“Old Women” ‡
	“The Quarry” †
	“A Young Man’s Journey to London” (changed by altering several instances of just one word from “A Young Man’s Journey to Viriconium”)
	“The Great God Pan” (Prime Evil, ed. Douglas E. Winter, Signet 1988)
	“Small Heirlooms” ‡
	“The Gift” ‡
	“The Horse of Iron and How We Can Know It” ‡
	“Gifco” ‡
	“Anima” ‡
	“Isobel Avens Returns to Stepney in the Spring” (Omni, November 1984)
	“Empty” ‡
	“Seven Guesses of the Heart” ‡
	“I Did It” ‡
	“The East” ‡
	“Suicide Coast” ‡
	“The Neon Heart Murders” ‡
	“Black Houses” ‡
	“Science & the Arts” ‡
	“Story Notes”

This is essentially an omnibus of The Ice Monkey (†) and Travel Arrangements (‡) together with three other stories and extensive notes by the author.

With Jane Johnson, as Gabriel King

Jane Johnson was Publishing Director of Voyager and Tolkien for HarperCollins UK. She says (Random House):

One of the first authors I worked with was M. John Harrison: we fell for each other in a big way and lived together for nearly 10 years, before splitting amicably in 1995. That same year we started working on The Wild Road, and the collaboration has, amazingly, kept us on very good terms, despite the inevitable aethestic wrangles!

That book was followed by two others in a trilogy about Tag the cat and a further novel, unrelated but also with a feline theme.

	The Wild Road (Century 1997)
	The Golden Cat (Century 1998)
	The Knot Garden (Century 2000)

Nonesuch (Century 2001)