Settling the World

M. John Harrison
Comma Press

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.

M. John Harrison is a novelist working, most notably, at the edges of science fiction with a foot in the worlds of weird or strange fiction. He first came to public attention through his work for New Worlds magazine as one of the 'New Wave' writers alongside the likes of Michael Moorcock, J.G. Ballard, Thomas M. Disch, Brian Aldiss and others.  The stories in this collection begin in that period (1970) and continue through to 2020.

Overt sci-fi themes are few and instead we have stories of the lost and the outsider, people trapped by circumstance and made free in the same way presenting the bizarre and the mundane as two sides of the same coin.  In a previous review of one of his books - the only other one of his I've read - I commented on the the Robert Aickman like nature of the story and here again I can feel the venerable writer's presence - most notably in 'Running Down'.

Not everything here worked for me.  I discovered I was generally less enamoured of the earlier and perhaps more obviously science fiction stories ('The Machine in Shaft 10', 'The Causeway') and more of the strangely human later stories ('Doe Lea', 'Cicisbeo') but truthfully this is a collection littered with gems.  A vibrant and colourful selection of stories that speak to and from the heart.

Buy it here - UK / US.

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The Sunken Land Begins to Rise Again

M. John Harrison
Gollancz

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.

From his unlovely and lonely bedsit Shaw lives a life of dislocation and vague disinterest.  His life is stalled and he has little interest in restarting it.  A chance meeting in a graveyard nets him a new job delivering mysterious but seemingly mundane parcels around the country, attending séances and answering the phones on a barge-cum-office for a one man publisher / website.

Meanwhile, Shaw's occasional lover Victoria has taken up residence in her deceased mother's house in the Midlands where she meets a cafe owner with a fondness for water and the strange group that make up her (Pearl's) extended family.

Essentially we are treated to two views of a series of events as enigmatic as any Robert Aickman story and throughout I couldn't shake the feeling that what I was reading was a 21st century British reinvention of Lovecraft's Innsmouth stories as strange, aquatic beings slowly populate the land.  It's far less straightforward than that though as Harrison avoids explanatory clichés and amidst the strangeness tells a very human story of obsessions, of strained and confused personal interactions and of the difficulties of communication in a time when it is essentially easier than ever to reach out but perhaps harder than ever to be heard and understood.

Buy it here - UK / US.

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If you enjoy what we do here on Wyrd Britain and would like to help us continue then we would very much welcome a donation towards keeping the blog going - paypal.me/wyrdbritain

Affiliate links are provided for your convenience and to help mitigate running costs.