M. John Harrison
M. John Harrison
Michael John Harrison, known for publication purposes primarily as M. John Harrison, is an English author and literary critic. His work includes the Viriconium sequence of novels and short stories,, Climbers, and the Kefahuchi Tract trilogy which consists of Light, Nova Swingand Empty Space. He is widely considered one of the major stylists of modern fantasy and science fiction, and a "genre contrarian". The Times Literary Supplement described him as 'a singular stylist' and the Literary Review called him 'a...
NationalityEnglish
ProfessionAuthor
Date of Birth26 July 1945
Every moment of a science fiction story must represent the triumph of writing over world-building.
I've never been to the Himalayas, and I'm not really interested in them. I'm more interested in a dirty old quarry in Lancashire, and by god, they can be dirty.
A good ground rule for writing in any genre is, start with a form, then undermine its confidence in itself. Ask what it's afraid of, what it's trying to hide - then write that.
Writing's like gambling. Unpredictable and sporadic successes make you more addicted, not less.
World-building numbs the reader's ability to fulfill their part of the bargain because it believes that it has to do everything around here if anything is going to get done. Above all, world-building is not technically necessary. It is the great clomping foot of nerdism. It is the attempt to exhaustively survey a place that isn't there.
Stories pass the experienced world back and forth between them as a metaphor, until it is worn out. Only then do we realize that meaning is an act. We must repossess it, instant to instant in our lives.
What is literature, and why do I try to write about it? I don’t know. Likewise, I don’t know why I go on living, most of the time. But this not knowing is precisely what I want to preserve. As readers, the closest way we can engage with a literary work is to protect its indeterminacy; to return ourselves and it to a place that precludes complete recognition. Really, when I’m reading, all I want is to stand amazed in front of an unknown object at odds with the world.
I think it's undignified to read for the purposes of escape. After you grow up, you should start reading for other purposes
Everyone loves a mysterious country.
Writings like gambling. Unpredictable and sporadic successes make you more addicted, not less.
Manufacture dooms in your head and you will go mad. Reality is incontravertible. Also, it will not be anticipated.
Dreamworlds can maintain themselves only as glimpses. Once the writer transports the reader across the threshold, nothing that was promised can be delivered. What was ominous becomes ordinary; what was bizarre, quotidian. Unless you simply keep upping the ante, piling on the bullshit, the only way to revive things is to switch perspectives as quickly as you can.
Perception of a state is not the state.
Budapest is a prime site for dreams: the East’s exuberant vision of the West, the West’s uneasy hallucination of the East. It is a dreamed-up city; a city almost completely faked; a city invented out of other cities, out of Paris by way of Vienna — the imitation, as Claudio Magris has it, of an imitation.