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'Wish I Was Here is a masterpiece' Helen Macdonald, author of H is
for Hawk 'It will surprise you, sometimes astound you, and leave
you profoundly changed' Jonathan Coe, author of The Rotters' Club
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).
'Wish I Was Here is a masterpiece. Formally inventive, constantly
surprising, M John Harrison has written an archaeology of fragments
that shivers with wholeness. It's exquisite' Helen Macdonald,
author of H is for Hawk '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' Jonathan
Coe, author of The Rotters' Club '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).
Listed by the Guardian as one of the top 100 science fiction books
of the 21st century. 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 novel.
With a new introduction by M. John Harrison and a striking new
cover design from the artist Stanley Donwood, this acclaimed cult
novel sees human existence threatened by devastating climate
change. Water. Man's most precious commodity is a luxury of the
past. Radioactive waste from years of industrial dumping has caused
the sea to form a protective skin strong enough to devastate the
Earth it once sustained. And while the remorseless sun beats down
on the dying land, civilization itself begins to crack. Violence
erupts and insanity reigns as the remnants of mankind struggle for
survival in a worldwide desert of despair. Remarkable for its
prescience and the originality of its vision, The Drought is a work
of major importance from the early career of one of Britain's most
acclaimed novelists. This edition is part of a new commemorative
series of Ballard's works, featuring introductions from a number of
his admirers (including Ned Beauman, Ali Smith, Neil Gaiman and
Martin Amis) and brand-new cover designs.
'No one alive can write sentences like he can. He's the missing
evolutionary link between William Burroughs and Virginia Woolf'
Olivia Laing 'Among the most brilliant novelists writing today'
Robert Macfarlane 'Truly gets to the heart of that strange,
indefinable otherness of the wild northern landscape' Benjamin
Myers Retreating from the ruins of his marriage, Mike leaves London
for the wildness of the Yorkshire moors, where he falls in with a
group of climbers - a band of misfits and mavericks bound by the
pursuit of the unattainable: the perfect climb. Travelling from
abandoned urban quarries to misty, lichened crags, Mike discovers
an intensity of experience - a wash of pain, fear and excitement -
that causes the rest of his world to recede. Increasingly addicted
to the adrenaline, folklore and camaraderie of the sport, he begins
to lose his grip on the line between passion and obsession - at a
cost. With an introduction by Robert Macfarlane
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.
*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.
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The Chrysalids (Paperback)
John Wyndham; Introduction by M. John Harrison
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R275
R200
Discovery Miles 2 000
Save R75 (27%)
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Ships in 12 - 17 working days
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The disturbing post-apocalyptic novel The Chrysalids by John
Wyndham, author of The Day of the Triffids and The Kraken Wakes and
dramatised on BBC Radio 4. David Strorm's father doesn't approve of
Angus Morton's unusually large horses, calling them blasphemies
against nature. Little does he realise that his own son, and his
son's cousin Rosalind and their friends, have their own secret
abberation which would label them as mutants. But as David and
Rosalind grow older it becomes more difficult to conceal their
differences from the village elders. Soon they face a choice: wait
for eventual discovery, or flee to the terrifying and mutable
Badlands. . . The Chrysalids is a post-nuclear apocalypse story of
genetic mutation in a devastated world and explores the lengths the
intolerant will go to keep themselves pure. 'Perfect timing,
astringent humour. . . one of the few authors whose compulsive
readability is a compliment to the intelligence' Spectator 'Remains
fresh and disturbing in an entirely unexpected way' Guardian John
Wyndham Parkes Lucas Benyon Harris was born in 1903, the son of a
barrister. He tried a number of careers including farming, law,
commercial art and advertising, and started writing short stories,
intended for sale, in 1925. From 1930 to 1939 he wrote short
stories of various kinds under different names, almost exclusively
for American publications, while also writing detective novels.
During the war he was in the Civil Service and then the Army. In
1946 he went back to writing stories for publication in the USA and
decided to try a modified form of science fiction, a form he called
'logical fantasy'. As John Wyndham he wrote The Day of the
Triffids, The Kraken Wakes, The Chrysalids, The Midwich Cuckoos
(filmed as Village of the Damned), The Seeds of Time, Trouble with
Lichen, The Outward Urge, Consider Her Ways and Others, Web and
Chocky. John Wyndham died in March 1969.
In Viriconium, the young men whistle to one another all night long
as they go about their deadly games. If you wake suddenly, you
might hear footsteps running, or an urgent sigh. After a minute or
two, the whistles move away in the direction of the Tinmarket or
the Margarethestrasse. The next day, some lordling is discovered in
the gutter with his throat cut. Who can tell fantasy from reality,
magic from illusion, hero from villain, man from monster ... in
Viriconium? Published here for the first time in one volume, and in
the author's preferred order, are all the Viriconium stories,
originally published in four books: The Pastel City, A Storm of
Wings, In Viriconium and Viriconium Nights.
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 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.
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The Chrysalids (Paperback)
John Wyndham; Introduction by M. John Harrison
1
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R274
R222
Discovery Miles 2 220
Save R52 (19%)
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Ships in 9 - 15 working days
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'WATCH THOU FOR THE MUTANT!' It is many years since God sent the
Tribulation to punish the forebears for their sins, and in the
rural settlement of Waknuk David Strorm's father decries any and
all blasphemies against nature. Little does he realise that David
and his cousin Rosalind, have their own secret aberration which
would label them as mutants. But as they grow older it becomes more
difficult to conceal their differences from the village elders.
Soon they face a choice: wait for eventual discovery, or flee to
the terrifying and mutable Badlands. . . 'An outstanding success'
New York Times
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.
Years after Ed Chianese's fateful trip into the Kefahuchi Tract,
the tract has begun to expand and change in ways we never could
have predicted--and, even more terrifying, parts of it have
actually begun to fall to Earth, transforming the landscapes they
encounter.
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--not to mention the black and white cats that come
pouring out at irregular intervals.
Vic Serotonin is a "travel agent" into and out of Saudade. His
latest client is a woman who's nearly as unpredictable as the site
itself--and maybe just as dangerous. She wants a tour just as a
troubling new class of biological artifacts are leaving the
site--living algorithms that are transforming the world outside in
inexplicable and unsettling ways. Shadowed by a metaphysically
inclined detective determined to shut his illegal operation down,
Vic must make sense of a universe rapidly veering toward a virulent
and viral form of chaos...and a humanity almost lost.
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, 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.
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Viriconium (Paperback)
M. John Harrison
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R578
R515
Discovery Miles 5 150
Save R63 (11%)
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Ships in 10 - 15 working days
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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.
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