M. John Harrison

M. John Harrison
Born	Michael John Harrison 26 July 1945 (1945-07-26) Rugby, Warwickshire
Occupation	Writer
Nationality	British
Period	1966—Present
Genres	Science fiction, fantasy, literary fiction
Notable award(s)	1989 Boardman Tasker Prize 2002 J. Tiptree Jr. Award 2007 Arthur C. Clarke Award 2007 Philip K. Dick Award
www.mjohnharrison.com

Michael John Harrison (born 26 July 1945), known primarily by his pen name M. John Harrison, is an English author and critic. His work includes the Viriconium sequence of novels and short stories, (1982), Climbers (1989), and the Kefahuchi Tract series which begins with Light (2002). He is widely considered one of the leading stylists in modern fantasy and science fiction. He currently resides in London.

Early years

Harrison was born in Rugby, Warwickshire in 1945. In an interview with Zone magazine, Harrison says "I liked anything bizarre, from being about four years old. I started on Dan Dare and worked up to the Absurdists. At 15 you could catch me with a pile of books that contained an Alfred Bester, a Samuel Beckett, a Charles Williams, the two or three available J.G. Ballards, On the Road by Jack Kerouac, some Keats, some Alan Ginsberg, maybe a Thorne Smith. I've always been pick 'n' mix: now it's a philosophy. ("Disillusioned by the Actual: An Interview with M. John Harrison" by Patrick Hudson, [4]).

According to the jacket blurb of his first novel, he was treated to a technical education which didn't stick; he worked at various times as a groom (North Warwicks Hunt), a teacher, and a clerk for a masonic charity outfit; his hobbies included dwarfs, electric guitars and writing pastiches of H.H. Munro. .

His first short story was published in 1966 by Kyril Bonfiglioli at Science Fantasy magazine, on the strength of which he moved to London. He there met Michael Moorcock, who was editing New Worlds magazine. In 1970, Harrison scripted comic stories illustrated by R.G. Jones for such forums as Cyclops (Underground Comic Magazine) and Finger. . An illustration by Jones appears in the first edition of Harrison's The Committed Men (1971), published when he was living in "the least trendy part of Camden".

The New Wave science fiction movement

From 1968 to 1975 he was literary editor of the New Wave science fiction magazine New Worlds. He was central to the New Wave movement which also included writers such as Norman Spinrad, Barrington Bayley and Thomas M. Disch. As reviewer for New Worlds he often used the pseudonym "Joyce Churchill" and was trenchantly critical of many works and writers published under the rubric of science fiction.

Amongst his works of that period are three stories utilising the Jerry Cornelius character invented by Michael Moorcock. (These stories do not appear in any of Harrison's own collections but do appear in the Nature of the Catastrophe and New Nature of the Catastophe published under Moorcock's name.) Other early stories appearing as from 1966, featured in anthologies such as such as New Writings in SF edited by John Carnell, and in magazines such as Transatlantic Review and the Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction.

The Committed Men (1971) (dedicated to Michael Moorcock and his wife Hilary Bailey) is set in 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. A few bizarre communities try to maintain their structure in a chromium wilderness linked by crumbling motorways. But their rituals are meaningless cliches mouthed against the devastation. Only the roaming bands of hippie-style situationists have grasped that the old order, with its logic, its pseudo-liberalism and its immutable laws of cause and effect, has now been superseded. 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 - a seacrh of the committed men for the tribes of mutants.

Harrison later moved to Manchester and was a regular contributor to New Manchester Review (1978–79). David Britton and Michael Butterworth of Savoy Books employed him to write in their basement, commissioning what eventually became the novel In Viriconium.

His early novels, the dystopian The Committed Men, The Pastel City and the revisionist space opera The Centauri Device have been reprinted several times. The latter was included in the SF Masterworks series, though Harrison is reputedly not fond of it. His work is profoundly leftist and committed to depicting alienated characters in the world of late Capitalism. Indeed, in interviews, M. John Harrison has described himself as an anarchist, and Michael Moorcock wrote in an essay entitled "Starship Stormtroopers" that, "His books are full of anarchists -- some of them very bizarre like the anarchist aesthetes of The Centauri Device."

Between 1976 and 1986 he lived in the Peak District, where his interest in rock climbing led to the autobiographical novel Climbers (1989), the first novel to receive the Boardman Tasker Prize for Mountain Literature. Harrison also ghost-wrote the autobiography of one of Britain's best rock climbers, Ron Fawcett (Fawcett on Rock, 1987, as by Mike Harrison). Harrison has repeatedly affirmed in print the importance of rock climbing for his writing as an attempt to grapple with reality and its implications, which he had lost sight of while writing fantasy. The difference in his approach can be observed in the stylistic differences between the first novel of the Viriconium sequence The Pastel City and the second, A Storm of Wings.

The Viriconium sequence

Harrison's fantasy sequence centring on the ficitious city of Viriconium consist of stories and novels written between 1971 and 1984. Viriconium is known as the Pastel City. Boith universal and particular, the city has a shifting topography and history, and is sometimes known under names such as 'Uroconium'. The Viriconium sequence, influenced in its imagery by the poems of T.S. Eliot, consists of three novels and various short stories; its most complete published version is the 2005 omnibus simply titled Viriconium which includes all three connected novels and most of the short stories (t excludes some stories such as "Lamia Mutable"). The graphic novel The Luck in the Head adapts one of his short works set in the sequence.

The novel In Viriconium was nominated for the Guardian Fiction Prize in 1982.

In the story "Viriconium Knights", the elderly swordsman Osgerby Practal is defeated in a duel by Ignace Retz, an unpopular servant of the Queen. Practal uses a power knife, a relic of previous times when high technology was used, but which is now ill understood; the badly-functiong power knife gives off floating motes which harm the wielder. (In this, Harrison invents his own variant of Moorcock's soul-draining magic swords in the Elric stories). The Queen is the grotesque Mammy Vooley, whose "body was like a long ivory pole about which they had draped the faded purple gown of her predessor. On it was supported a very small head which looked as if had been partly scalped, partly burned, and partly starved to death in a cage suspended above the Gabelline Gate. One of her eyes was missing. She sat on an old carved wooden throne with iron wheels, in the middle of a tall limewashed room that had five windows." . Retz has ambitions to seek treasure in the broad wastes south and west of Viriconium, and petitions the Queen to allow him to keep the power knife so he may defend himself against his enemies. When she refuses, he uses the knife to cut off her hand, and flees, hunted through the city by various factions of "aristocratic thugs" such as the Locust Clan and the Yellow Paper Men. Taking refuge in the house of an old man who shows him a strange tapestry, he beholds various visions of himself, seemingly at different periods in the city's history, before trying to steal a metal eagle from the old man's room. The metal eagle comes to life, attacking him, and Retz barely escapes. Later, he finds himself on a wasteland where some men are trying to bury a body with a fish-mask on its head. Retz steals the clothes and mask from the body and continues on his way.

"Lords of Misrule", narrated in the first person by Harrison's continuing character Lord Cromis, deals with Cromis's visit to a country house where the Yule Greave, formerly a fighter with the Feverfew Anschluss faction of Viriconium, and his wife, live with their young servant Ringmer. An unidentified enemy is gradually encroaching on the country lands and Cromis appears to be surveying their progress. During his visit, he is shown one of the ancient and highly-decorated Mari - a version of the Mari Lwyd - used by the people in the 'mast horse ceremony', which Ringmer's father used to operate.

"Strange Great Sins" is the story of the weak and silly man Baladine Prinsep, who falls fatally in love with the ballet dancer Vera Ghillera. The story is told at one remove through the memories of his nephew, an unnamed sin eater, and through those of his mother and of the singer Madame de Maupassant. In this story the motif of the Mari Lwyd is central.

Later work

Subsequent novels and short stories, such as The Course of the Heart (1991) and "Empty" (1993), were set between London and the Peak District. They have a lyrical style and a strong sense of place, and take their tension from characteristically conflicting veins of mysticism and realism. The Course of the Heart deals in part with a magical experiment gone wrong, and with an imaginary country which may exist at the heart of Europe, as well as Gnostic themes.

The novel Signs of Life (1996) is a romantic thriller which explores concerns about genetics and biotechnology amidst the turmoil of what might be termed a three-way love affair between its central characters.

Harrison has frequently used the Tarot as a motif in his work, as in Viriconium Nights (which is divided into sections named after cards of an imaginary Tarot) and in his story The Horse of Iron (and How We Can Know It and Be Changed by It Forever)".

Beginning with The Wild Road in 1996, he co-wrote four linked fantasies about cats with Jane Johnson, under the pseudonym "Gabriel King".

Harrison won the Richard Evans Award in 1999 (named after the near-legendary figure of UK publishing) given to the author who has contributed significantly to the SF genre without concomitant commercial success.

In 2003 Harrison was on the jury of the Michael Powell Award at the Edinburgh International Film Festival.

His science fiction novel Light was co-winner of the James Tiptree, Jr. Award in 2003. Its sequel, Nova Swing (2006), won the Arthur C. Clarke Award in 2007 and the Philip K. Dick Award in 2008.

Harrison has collaborated on several short stories with Simon Ings, and with Simon Pummel on the short film Ray Gun Fun (1998). His work has been some by some as forming part of the movement dubbed the New Weird, along with writers such as China Mieville, though Harrison himself resists being labelled as part of any literary movement.

He recently provided material for performance by Barbara Campbell (1001 Nights Cast, 2007, 2008) and Kate McIntosh (Loose Promise, 2007).

He has taught creative writing courses in Devon and Wales, focusing on landscape and autobiography, with Adam Lively and the travel writer James Perrin. Since 1991, Harrison has reviewed fiction and nonfiction for The Guardian, the Daily Telegraph, the Times Literary Supplement and the New York Times.

His short stories have appeared in magazines as diverse as Conjunctions ("Entertaining Angels Unawares", Fall issue 2002), the Independent on Sunday ("Cicisbeo", 2003), the Times Literary Supplement ("Science and the Arts", 1999) and Women's Journal ("Old Women", 1982). They were collected in Travel Arrangements (2000) and Things That Never Happen (2002).

In 2009, Harrison shared (with Sarah Hall (writer) and Nicholas Royle) the judging of the Manchester Fiction Prize.

On 6 June 2009, Harrison wrote on his official blog that he has three major works in progress. These are: "(a) a third Light novel, which will collide A.E. van Vogt with all sorts of other unlikely people" - this novel has been announced as Pearlant, for publication in April 2012; (b) "a collection of short stories, some of which will be voiced in a familiar way, some of which won’t;" and (c) "something I would describe as a literary seaside concept-horror novel if four-word descriptions weren’t a betrayal of everything I stand for…"

Style

Harrison is stylistically an Imagist and his early work relies heavily on the use of strange juxtapositions characteristic of absurdism. His work has been acclaimed by writers including Angela Carter, Neil Gaiman, China Miéville, and Clive Barker, who has referred to him as "a blazing original". In a Locus magazine interview, Harrison describes his work as "a deliberate intention to illustrate human values by describing their absence."

Many of Harrison's novels include expansions or reworkings of previously published short stories. For instance, "The Ice Monkey" (title story of the collection) provides the seed for the novel Climbers, the novel The Course of the Heart is based on his short story "The Great God Pan", and the story "Isobel Avens returns to Stepney in the Spring" is a short version of the story expanded as the novel Signs of Life.

Works

Fiction

Year	Title	Notes
1971	The Committed Men	Sf novel set in a post-apocalyptic Britain
	The Pastel City	First novel of the Viriconium sequence
1975	The Centauri Device	Stand-alone space opera
	The Machine in Shaft Ten	short story collection
1980	A Storm of Wings	Second novel of the Viriconium sequence, British Fantasy Award nominee, 1981
1982	In Viriconium	Third novel of the Viriconium sequence, published in the US as The Floating Gods. Nominated for the Guardian Fiction Prize. British Fantasy Award and Philip K. Dick Award nominee, 1983
1985	Viriconium Nights	short story collection
	The Ice Monkey	short story collection
1989	Climbers	winner of the Boardman Tasker Prize
1992	The Course of the Heart	novel
1996	Signs of Life	novel, British SF Award nominee, 1997; British Fantasy Award nominee, 1998
1997	The Wild Road	as Gabriel King, written in collaboration with Jane Johnson
1998	The Golden Cat	as Gabriel King, written in collaboration with Jane Johnson
2000	Travel Arrangements	short story collection
	The Knot Garden	as Gabriel King, written in collaboration with Jane Johnson
2001	Nonesuch	as Gabriel King, written in collaboration with Jane Johnson
2002	Light	co-winner of the 2002 James Tiptree, Jr. Award; British SF Award nominee, 2002; Arthur C. Clarke Award nominee, 2003
	Things That Never Happen	omnibus edition of The Ice Monkey and Travel Arrangements, plus some previously uncollected material
2005	Anima	omnibus edition of Signs of Life and The Course of the Heart. Its title gives a clue to the Jungian themes in Harrison's work.
2006	Nova Swing	Sequel to Light, Arthur C. Clarke and Philip K. Dick Awards winner, 2007; BSFA nominee, 2006; British Fantasy and John W. Campbell Awards nominee, 2007.

Graphic novels

Year	Title	Notes
1991	The Luck in the Head	A Viriconium story adapted in collaboration with illustrator Ian Miller, based on short story of the same name
2000	Viriconium	German language adaptation of In Viriconium, illustrated by Dieter Jüdt

Nonfiction

Year	Title	Notes
1987	Fawcett on Rock	as "Mike Harrison", ghostwritten autobiography of legendary British rock climber
2005	Parietal Games	edited by Mark Bould and Michelle Reid, compiles Harrison's reviews and essays from 1968 to 2004 as well as eight essays on Harrison's fiction by other authors

Critical essays

Leigh Blackmore. "Undoing the Mechanisms: Genre Expectation, Subversion and Anti-Consolation in the Kefahuchi Tract Novels of M. John Harrison." Studies in the Fantastic. 2 (Winter 2008/Spring 2009). (University of Tampa Press). [5]

External links

• mjohnharrison.com, M. John Harrison's official web site
• ambientehotel.wordpress.com, M. John Harrison's blog
• M. John Harrison at the Internet Speculative Fiction Database
• Infinity Plus interview with David Mathew
• "Climbing to Viriconium: The Work of M. John Harrison", by Rhys Hughes