Mantichore 12

““Undoing the mechanisms”: Genre Expectation, Subversion & Anti-Consolation in the Kefahuchi Tract Novels of M. John Harrison”…………..….....11

3, No 4 (WN12)

Two Interviews with Gavin L. O’Keefe…………..24 Mantichorus: Mailing Notes…………………..……29

Mantic

Notes

(Pronunciation:'man-tik. Etymology: Greek mantikos, from mantis : of, relating to the faculty of divination; prophetic).

_____________________________________ A Contribution by Leigh Blackmore for the Sword & Sorcery & Weird Fiction Terminus (Dec 1, 2008 mailing), & Esoteric Order of Dagon (Feb 2, 2009 mailing) amateur press associations. Leigh Blackmore, 78 Rowland Ave, Wollongong, NSW 2500. Australia. Email: [email protected] Wikipedia entry: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leigh_Blackmore Official Website: Blackmausoleum – http://members.optusnet.com.au/lvxnox/

In Memoriam: Ted Wykes (28.4.1921-22.11.2008) Ted Wykes, OAM, was a well-known cricket umpire, and my father-in-law. See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ted_Wykes. A video about his career is available from http://www.filmbuff.com.au/ted.html _____________________________________

Contents this issue Mantic Notes…………………………………….……1 Books By My Bedside……………………………….5 “Speech” from Spores from Sharnoth launch…….5 “Critical Survey re: the Writing of M. John Harrison”……………………………………….……….7

It’s difficult (as usual) to encapsulate the last few months’ activities in a short space. I deferred my Journalism degree after my first session this year, having completed a year and a half of it, in order to concentrate on finishing my Creative Writing degree. All was going well until in late September personal disaster struck; I was admitted to hospital with a strangulated hernia, necessitating emergency surgery. I was in hospital for around a week – it would have been shorter except that some secondary infection from the surgery had to be dealt with. While there, I wrote and dictated over the phone to Danny Lovecraft the Acknowledgments for my book of weird poetry, Spores from Sharnoth & Other Madnesses, which was reaching publication stage. I needed two further weeks off uni to recover, which meant I had to scramble like hell to deliver all my due assignments before the end of session – but while healing up from the surgery I managed it, including helping to continue to edit and publish Tide magazine, whose fifth annual issue was launched in October. (The mag included “Leaving Town”, a recent short story by me. Its publication made the local rag, The Wollongong Advertiser, with a photo of my editing class. Woohoo!) For my 3rd Year Contemporary Theory course I had to write a 4000 word mini-thesis. I chose to write on M. John Harrison, and include here both the Critical Survey I had to prepare, and the minithesis itself, which I hope some readers will enjoy. Having reached the stage of doing Honours next year, I will be able (finally) to choose my own topics to write about. My proposal (which has been accepted) is, for my critical work, to write a thesis on Terry Dowling’s Tom Tyson/Rynosseros; for my creative component, I will be working on a 25,000 word self-contained segment of my long-mooted Pre-Raphaelite novel, Ghosts in the House of Life.

On the Labour Day weekend in October, just able to walk around again without too much pain, I attended Conflux 5 convention in Canberra with Graham and Margi. As welling as hanging out with lots of cool fans, writers and publishers, Margi and I appeared again on various panels discussing horror and fantasy (a particularly enjoyable one for me was the panel on Fantasy in Poetry, chaired by Danny Lovecraft and with James Doig). I also had fun on the Fifty Minutes of Fear reading, where I read an extract from my unpublished horror story “By Their Fruits.” (Marty Young, however, awarded the darkest story award to a dead writer from one of James Doig’s anthologies!) As usual, we bought numerous new books at the various signings, and there was a launch for my Spores from Sharnoth, which delightedly inscribed for various purchasers.

L-R: Danny Lovecraft, Leigh Blackmore, Margaret Lovecraft of P'rea Press, Oct 2008 at Conflux 5 (ignore date, set wrongly on camera!).

L-R: Danny Lovecraft, Leigh Blackmore, launching Spores from Sharnoth, Conflux 5.

Signing Spores from Sharnoth at the mass signing, Conflux 5.

I should express here my gratitude to all who helped create Spores from Sharnoth – David E. Schultz for his design, Gavin O’Keefe for his cover art, S.T. Joshi for his foreword, and Margaret and Danny Lovecraft for their tireless work in bringing the book into being. (Dead Reckonings, the US journal, has reviewed Spores as follows. I can’t resist quoting the review in full: LEIGH BLACKMORE. Spores from Sharnoth and Other Madnesses. Sydney, Australia: P’rea Press, 2008. xvii, 56 pp. $15.00 (Australian) tpb. [ISBN 978-0-980465-2-4] “This remarkable little book of verse at once establishes Blackmore as one of the leading weird poets of our time, fit to be mentioned with the likes of Bruce Boston, G. Sutton Breiding, Ann K. Schwader, and others. Although containing homages to, and imitations of, the work of H. P. Lovecraft, Clark Ashton Smith, Arthur Machen, and other weird titans, the smooth-flowing lyricism, the plangent symbols and metaphors, and the sense of place—the Australia of both the near and the distant past—are all Blackmore’s own. Chiefly a bibliographer and critic, Blackmore reveals penetrating insight into the authors to whom he pays tribute and an understanding of the metrical precision that sets them apart from the lazybones free verse that too often clutters our poetry journals. The final sestet of “Terror Australis”—a splendid threesonnet evocation of the horrors down under—can only be quoted: “Antipodean nightmares strange and bleak / Fill dreamers’ minds with eerie visions dire, / That fill their souls with recondite desire / And draw them on to leer and shout and shriek. / Oppressed and tortured, baneful and malign, / With their grim fate Australians must entwine.”

Well, that completely blew me away! I also just learned that the collection has received a very favourable (by James Doig) in Black No 3, where it is called “an excellent collection by…one of Australia’s leading talents in weird fiction” (thanks James, although I’d hardly compare myself to such talents as Rick Kennett,

Terry Dowling and Rob Hood, whose weird collections should be on every serious horror collector’s shelf) and concludes” One can say of Blackmore as Lovecraft once said of Clark Ashton Smith: “none strikes the note of cosmic horror so well.””. Exalted company indeed! A couple of photos from the launch are included here; I wish I had room here to include them all our Conflux 5 photos, but you can see more at my Flickr stream: http://www.flickr.com/photos/hadit93/

L-R: Jack Dann, Liz Argyll, Leigh Blackmore, Margi Curtis at Conflux 5.

Conflux Fifty Minutes of Fear reading: L-R back James Doig, Rob Hood, Front: Andrew McKiernan, Shayne Jiraiya Cummings, Leigh Blackmore.

Oh, and a plug – there are less than 50 copies remaining of the 100 copy first printing as I write, so secure yours by emailing P’rea Press: [email protected]. I include here the short speech I gave at the launch. Margi also ran our traditional Conflux workshop on magick – this year on “Dream Magick”, since the convention’s theme was Dreaming. I was a bit surprised that there wasn’t more HP Lovecraft content in the panels, since ostensibly the theme was also about the 1920’s and 1930’s in horror and sf. Margi and I also celebrated our fifth anniversary of being together (having met at the first Conflux). Graham explored many sights of Canberra and helped us with ‘roadying’ our gear. I sold various books through the auction which helped fund some of our purchases. I also got to meet with Liz Gorinsky, an associate editor from new York’s Tor Books, and made a couple of pitches based on ideas cooked up by myself and colleague

Chris Sequeira. We have sent her a package post-convention, and shall see whether that contact leads to anything of note. ***In general family news, my stepson Rohan has found a flat in Camperdown, an inner-city Sydney suburb. Graham moved many of his possessions up to Sydney recently. We hope this will be a good start to his newfound independence; and this week he will turn 20. I was honoured by a visit from my brother Kent, who passed through Wollongong from Sydney on his way to Kiama for a holiday; the only one of my blood family to have visited me since I moved down here close on five years ago. My long-time colleague Chris Sequeira, wife Jacqui & daughter Valentina (now five!) also visited in early November. Margi finished her 12 weeks work experience with the local TAFE library and has continued finishing her library diploma, under great strain due to the state of her health. In a couple of weeks there should be some relief for her when she finishes and can relax somewhat. Graham has had supervision of HSC exams to contend with, and also the fact that his father is terminally ill with cancer. (Graham’s dad Ted died, surrounded by family, yesterday 21 November 2008; I have made this issue a memorial issue to him). Our occult group has shrunk somewhat to a small but dedicated core of practitioners and we continue to meet monthly for ritual. At home, our major innovation has been the installation of a woodburning combustion heater which serve as well through many future winters. The third “Black Cauldron” column on witchcraft and magic by myself and Margi appeared in Issue 3 of Black: Australia’s Dark Culture magazine, out in October across Australia. We’re enjoying being regular staffers, and the magazine seems to be proving a success. Margi and I will also be conducting interviews with some of Australia’s foremost occult practitioners for forthcoming issues. I haven’t been able to write much fiction lately, though a new mainstream story “The Roomer” was written for my 3rd year Advanced Prose Class and I will submit it shortly. It’s primarily influenced by James Kelman, a writer I much admire. I also sent a batch of stories for a proposed collection to a New York publisher though I’m yet to hear of their fate. I had one poem “Sound of Now” published (twice) – in print in Tertangala, and online at www.Australianreader.com. My radio play, which I had expected to air during October on ABC National, was held until the second batch, apparently now for broadcast in March next

year. Over the last year or so I’ve been teaching myself to play guitar, and have worked up quite a repertoire of songs (covers) to entertain myself with, though my technique needs a lot of improvement. I just submitted a Mythos tale to ST Joshi’s Black Wings anthology although I knew the book was nearly full, but regrettably my tale was too ‘traditional’ in its use of Mythos tropes for ST’s more lateral approach; at his suggestion I have re-submitted to Robert M. Price. Tentacles crossed! ***Ben Szumskyj has announced that he will be stepping back from running the SSWFT apa, hence I have come on board to act as Official Editor for that organisation as of 2009. (Don’t forget to check the SWWFT blogspot online guys – there are new updates there, and please send me your news of doings and publications for inclusion there!). Phillip A. Ellis will be taking the reins of the already well-established Studies in Australian Weird Fiction, which I shall continue to assist in editing along with Phillip and James Doig. I’ve also just completed a 9000 word article titled “The Twisted World Inside Our Skulls: The 1950s Crime and Suspense Novels of Robert Bloch” for Ben Szumskyj’s forthcoming book of Bloch criticism from McFarland Press, Robert Bloch: The Man Who Collected Psychos. During the meanwhilst (to quote Monty Python), I have a couple of novel manuscripts to assess, which will keep me busy for a few weeks of summer break. After that will be a major proofreading job on a new book edited by Meredith Jones, for whom I did a similar job last year. I am also applying for a job as administrator of the South Coast Writers’ Centre here in the Illawarra, which I hope I might be able to fulfil while I do Honours next year at uni. It’s only a six month contract while the current administrator is on maternity leave; but I may not get the job, so best not wax lyrical about that yet. Fred Phillips, fellow EOD/SWWFT member, has appointed me Provost for Wollongong and Dependencies NSW Australia in his Ancient and Honourable Order of the Drowned Rat, a convocation of bibliomaniacs who will hunt for the book in its native habitat in any weather. I believe I join a number of other apa members in holding a post in this distinguished bibliophilic organisation… Lastly, I had a minor skin cancer taken off my left arm a couple of days ago; have to get the stitches out in ten days or so. And so life goes on – a mixed bag…

Books by My Bedside Reading in the last few months was mainly confined to texts I had to read for class. Since finishing session I’ve reread Thomas Ligotti’s wonderful Noctuary, and Barry Humphries’ equally wonderful autobiography Life as Me. Books that I have in a pile next to my bed, (started and not finished due to continual distractions of study), include King’s Everything’s Eventual; From Fatigue to Fantastic (on chronic fatigue and fibromyalgia, from which Margi suffers); Fivefold by Nathan Burrage; Introduction to Magic by Julius Evola; Deep Future by Eric Brown; Lovecraft’s The Horror in the Museum & Other Revisions; the Cthulhu meets Holmes anthology Shadows Over Baker Street; The Einstein Intersection by Samuel R. Delany; 100 European Horror Films edited by Stephen Jay Schneider; Year’s Best Australian SF & Fantasy 4, edited by Congreve & Marquadt, Dark Crimes edited by Ed Gorman; Dark Rosaleen (unpublished bio of Rosaleen Norton by Keith Richmond); Thylacine (unpublished novel by Steve Proposch and Jan Scherpenhuizen); Silent Children by Ramsey Campbell; and The Voudun Gnostic Workbook by Michael Bertiaux. Hopefully I’ll finish most of these over the summer break. We haven’t been out to the movies for months, and our current DVD player is broken, so the only movies I’ve seen have been while going through our old VHS collection and culling it. Last night, for instance, I watched Dumb and Dumber, which I’d never seen; I was entertained by its mindlessness. I have a bunch of DVD’s waiting to be viewed when our player is repaired or replaced, including such gems as Larry Cohen’s Q, and a Hammer I’ve never seen, Brides of Dracula.

Speech: SPORES FROM SHARNOTH LAUNCH (CONFLUX 5) © Leigh Blackmore 2008 As well as being a poet, I’m a magician. I practice magic in the ceremonial tradition of the Western Mysteries. What that means I haven’t time to go into here and now,

but I have always seen the art of my writing as being intimately connected with the art of my magic. Magic, of course, is sometimes referred to as the Royal Art. Clive Barker, for one, has used this connection of magic and writing in his series titled “The Art”. The Latin word cantare means to sing. An incantation therefore implies both magic and music, a connection that has always pleased me as I pursued both my writing and my magical interests. And so a poem is a song, an incantation, a spell. The idea of poetry being an incantation, a song, is also one of the reasons I adhere in much of my work to older forms, and a Romantic sense of language. To quote from a poet I greatly admire, the California Romantic and weird fiction writer Clark Ashton Smith: “As to my own employment of an ornate style, using many words of classic origin and exotic colour, I can only say that [it] is designed to produce effects of language and rhythm which could not possibly be achieved by a vocabulary restricted to what is known as “basic English”. A style composed of words of Anglo-Saxon origin tend to a spondaic rhythm, which by some mysterious law reproduces the atmosphere of ordinary life. An atmosphere of remoteness, vastness, mystery and exoticism is more naturally evoked by a style with an admixture of Latinity, lending itself to more varied and sonorous rhythms, as well as to subtler shades, tints and nuances of meaning.” Smith, indeed, titled one of his poetry collections Spells and Philtres – for he recognised that poetry is magic, and magic is poetry. He also referred to poetry as a “gesture towards the infinite”- a definition I particularly like. Much of the poetry of the icons of weird literature to whom I have been devoted – the romanticism of Shelley and Keats; Edgar Allan Poe, with his weird verse that still rings the note of terror just as his tales do; Donald Wandrei with his “Sonnets of the Midnight Hours”, each inspired by a particular dream of Wandrei’s; HP Lovecraft, with his sonnet sequence “The Fungi from Yuggoth”, unique in the English language for its concentrated themes of the macabre within an extended and linked poetic sequence; and Clark Ashton Smith, with his epic “The Hashish Eater” and his numberless poems of cosmic exoticism and strange beauty; Smith’s predecessor, George Sterling, almost unknown today, but one of the immortals of strange verse, particularly for his epics “The Wine of Wizardry” and “The

Testimony of the Suns”– much of this poetry has flavoured mine, and I confess that this makes it old-fashioned in the eyes of some. Yet my natural voice when I turn to the writing of weird verse is that of the formal and to the stately, that of the structured forms such as the sonnet. I have even gone so far as to utilise that most neglected of forms, the prose poem. Like Smith, I favour a language grounded not so much in the senses as in the imagination. This doesn’t mean that I have been ignorant of modernist or indeed postmodernist developments in poetry. T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound and the great imagist poets; the Beat poets, including William Burroughs and others who favour the playing of games with language, with the short-circuiting or abandonment of old forms, have also had their influence on me, and at least some of the poems in this collection are in what one might call modernist forms. None of this is to claim that my work ranks with that of the poets I mention. I’m talking about them only to give you some idea of the context in which Spores from Sharnoth may be placed. The genre of weird verse is a narrow one, and in the twentieth century there are only a few writers of this genre whose names would spring to the lips – Joseph Payne Brennan, Richard L. Tierney, Leah Bodine Drake, Lin Carter amongst them. Many of the weird poets of worth await full rediscovery – one thinks for instance of the Texan weirdist Lilith Lorraine, or the California Romantic Nora May French. My collection is a humbler affair than the work of any of these. The sequence Spores from Sharnoth was written in direct hommage to Lovecraft’s Fungi from Yuggoth, and is only half the length of Lovecraft’s sequence, though I intend progressively adding to it. Of the other individual poems, some are taken from a wider body of work which includes love lyrics and song lyrics. But they have all been chosen on the basis of their fantasy or weird element for this collection. Read: “Recall”; “The Bibliotaph” I’d particularly like to thank Danny and Margaret Lovecraft for their work in bringing

the collection into being. It was Danny’s enthusiasm which prompted the collecting of these verses, many of which had been published in small magazines but awaited proper collection. Danny and Margaret did an estimable job of editing the collection in consultation with me, and as we worked through old poems together we found many in need of revision here and there, so I owe them a debt for the touching up which has made this the best version of my weird poetry that there could be. Danny and Margaret have also been responsible for reawakening my interest in poetry after a lapse of some years. I’d also like to thank my partners Graham and Margi for their support. Without their help and guidance my life would be much the poorer, and Margi’s experience and knowledge as a published poet has also contributed to improving the work in this collection. I’m humbled that recognised writers such as Darrell Schweitzer, Richard Tierney and the critic S.T. Joshi have seen fit to comment favourably on this poetic work of mine, which I really see as a small subset of my larger work in fantastic and weird fiction. It gives me great pleasure to see the poems collected in a handy volume, and I do hope that anyone who is interested in fantastic poetry will purchase a copy, thus repaying the time and investment that P’rea Press has put into producing it. If I can circle back to Clark Ashton Smith again – you can tell I like him, can’t you? – I’d like to conclude by talking briefly about why one would write fantastic poetry. Well, why shouldn’t we? Is imaginative poetry somehow inferior? Must writing stress the human elements of experience over the supernatural? Smith said “I think that the current definition or delimitation of what constitutes life is worse than ridiculous. Anything that the human imagination can conceive of becomes thereby a part of life, and poetry such as mine, properly considered, is not an ‘escape;’ but an extension.” And Smith also said “it is partly because of the shifting, unstable ground on which the thing called realism stands, that I regard pure, frank fantasy as a more valid and lasting artexpression of the human mind.” I couldn’t have put it better myself.

Critical Survey re: the Writing of M.[ichael] John Harrison. © Leigh Blackmore 2008 In this survey I will examine the range of writings about Harrison’s writing in general, although my mini-thesis will focus primarily on his two most recent novels. I feel it is important to assess how Harrison’s writing career has been seen to date. This will help me focus on relevant readings in my own minithesis on his work. Harrison has been seen primarily as a genre science-fiction and fantasy writer; most critical essays on his work have appeared in science fiction encyclopedias. His work has been read most often as absurdist and grotesque; as uncommonly (for his genre) concerned with the topographical; and as progressively performing a subversion/deconstruction of the fantasy/science fiction genre. He has also often been seen as a postmodernist, occasionally as an important supernaturalist, and also as a realist and modernist. His themes of pessimism and compassion have often been commented on. To a lesser extent he has been read as a neoGothicist or a practitioner of “literary fantasy.” There is a plethora of interviews with Harrison and reviews of his work on the internet. Many of them have eventuated since the publication of Light (Gollancz, 2002), a novel seen by many critics as a triumphal return to sf and perhaps to its predictable genre tropes, after his ‘absence’ from the genre while writing the stories that comprise such collections as Travel Arrangements (Gollancz, 2000) and Things That Never Happen (Gollancz, 2004). Most readings of Harrison’s work in these recent reviews, (too numerous to be quoted here), focus on his use of science fiction. While reading him as a superb genre practitioner, they tend to neglect aspects of his work that deliberately undermine genre expectations. Similarly with regard to reviews of Light’s sequel, Nova Swing (Gollancz, 2007). Unfortunately, I have not yet been able to consult the important compilation Parietal Games which collects all Harrison’s own critical work together with essays on him by various hands. Earlier critics have more accurately identified Harrison’s concern with the subversion of the fantasy genre. McAuley asserts that with his second novel “he was able to experiment with, and reify, the escapist

imagery and childish refusal to confront the world (as he sees it) of much contemporary fantasy.” (McAuley, 271). McCauley also comments on Harrison’s “sarcasms on the traditional role of the hero in fantasy” (McAuley, 271) . Furthermore, McAuley identifies the paralysis of characters by their pasts in A Storm of Wings and In Viriconium (in which a plague of despair creeps across the city), as “an implicit criticism of fantasy fiction itself” (McAuley, 271), and asserts that the stories in Viriconium Nights “make quite plain Harrison’s view of the relationship between fantasy and the world, and his disdain for those decadent forms of high fantasy which imitate and heighten only selected aspects of the world” (McAuley, 255) and concludes that “we miss his fierce lessons on reading the real and the fantastic at our peril.” (McAuley, 272). Clute asserts that the central arguments of Harrison’s fantasy include the propositions that: “the worlds of fantasy are a distortion and denial of reality; and that those who inhabit or imagine those worlds…are themselves creatures whose grasp on reality is dreadfully frail.” And that for Harrison “escapism is bondage.” (Clute and Grant, 453) Many critics have read Harrison’s work as fitting the tradition of the Absurd or the Grotesque. George Kelley, for example, reads the Viriconium sequence as absurdist science fiction, particularly In Viriconium, which he asserts “goes beyond black humour into a coma of despair” and Viriconium Nights which he sees as almost “directionless.” He also comments on the black humour in Harrison’s “most accessible” sf novel, The Centauri Device (Doubleday, 1974), calling Harrison “a brilliant stylist whose work captures the grotesque and the decadent in vivid, absurd images.” (Kelley, 422). Joel Lane also asserts that Harrison’s absurd themes bind readers “in supernatural images which are at once grotesque and awesome.” Lane divides the “lyrical” Harrison (the Viriconium stories) from the “bleak and realistic” Harrison (his supernatural stories). (Lane, 254). Hughes comments that “the world of The Pastel City is decadent and weary; the action is often completely ludicrous” (Hughes, 2). These readings are accurate for Harrison’s early experimental short stories, and his early novels. But Harrison himself has stated “Since 1980 I have turned away from the extreme absurdism of The Pastel City and A Storm of Wings – with their stress on the failure of, and the fear of, action” and asserts that in more

recent work he engages with “a moderate existentialism” which seems to “share ground in the concept of the ‘accented moment-sign’ or moment-of-being.” (Harrison, “Comments” in Pederson, 421). Topographical readings have been popular with critics, because Harrison’s work is unusually rich in detailed topographical observation, both in his genre fantasy and his emphatically non-fantasy novels such as Climbers (1989). Cawthorn and Moorcock read Harrison’s The Pastel City topographically and psychologically, declaring that in it “the relationships between the landscape and psyche…become a personal interaction, each reshaping the other” (Cawthorn & Moorcock, 188). Hughes points out that “much of his fine eye for landscape can be traced to his love of the hardy outdoor life.” (Hughes, 2). Pringle comments on Harrison’s “excellent knowledge of geology and topography (his wastelands are depicted with a seasoned fell-walker’s eye” (Pringle, Modern Fantasy, 202). Clute (Enyclopedia of Science Fiction, 547 comments on the “topographical exactness” of A Storm of Wings, and the similar “utter exactitude” of the landscapes in the later Viriconium stories and asserts “the reality of things seen comes, in the end, to be the only reality to which Harrison will give allegiance.” (Clute, 548) Linked to his notions of subverting genre fantasy is the idea that Harrison is a postmodern writer. Rob Latham, for instance, considers that Harrison’s Viriconium sequence, a sword-and–sorcery sequence that is set in “the hallucinatory labyrinth of the contemporary city” and the eponymous urban dreamland, “flirts with postmodern ambiguities”. While Latham sees the first book in the sequence, The Pastel City (NEL, 1971) as a fairly straightforward adventure story, he considers that the subsequent volumes – A Storm of Swings (Sphere, 1980), In Viriconium (Gollancz, 1982), and Viriconium Nights (Ace, 1984; rev. Gollancz, 1985) “skirt the metafictional terrain of Borges and Calvino in their exploration of delirious mindscapes, the shifting maze of a deliquescent far future.” (Latham, 519). Harrison himself has identified the Viriconium sequence as “an unashamed postmodern fiction of the heart, out of which all the values we yearn for most have been swept precisely aside so that we will try and put them back again (and, in that attempt, look at them afresh.)” (Harrison, “What it Might Be like…”, 1).

Harrison, a writer who as a both a critic and a novelist is acutely aware of literary theory, has said “Any child can see that the map is not the ground…Viriconium manipulates map-to-ground expectations to imply a depth that isn’t there.” (‘What It Might Be Like…”, 2). For a critic such as Rob Latham, Harrison is engaging with modernity rather than postmodernity. Latham has identified the stories gathered in The Machine in Shaft Ten (Panther, 1975) and The Ice Monkey (Gollancz, 1983) as often bordering on supernatural horror “in their evocation of an entropic modernity.” He cites the classic tale “Running Down” (in New Worlds 8, ed Hilary Bailey [Sphere, 1975]) as an example, saying it “literalized the thermodynamic metaphor in its portrait of a hapless misfit who erodes and destroys everything he touches.” (Latham, 519). Many critics have observed Harrison’s specific thematic concerns with pessimism and compassion. Lane sees these qualities in Harrison’s earliest novel The Committed Men, which is “a grim, sardonic post-apocalyptic narrative” in which several key Harrison themes emerge: “quests, rituals, relics, madness.” Lane comments that “Harrison’s irony mediates between the bleak pessimism on the surface of his writing and the compassion at its heart” (Lane, 255). Lane further asserts that The Course of the Heart “is a brilliant use of supernatural themes to explore human mortality and loss. It portrays a heaven as corruptible and arbitrary as the world.” (Lane, 255). Harrison, one of the most cogently self-aware critics of his own work, has asserted that “My fiction is concerned with the inability of people to feel ordinary emotions, or to communicate them successfully to one another; their efforts to maintain identity in the face of abstract systems and idealistic social structures; and their perception of themselves as live individuals in a meaningless, contingent universe.” (Harrison, “Comments”, 421) Another extension of Harrison’s thematic concerns with pessimism/compassion is his exploration of the linkages between emotional and physical wastelands. Latham identifies Harrison’s novel, which concerns the aftermath of a magical ritual gone wrong, The Course of the Heart (Gollancz, 1992) as positioning Harrison as a major author of supernatural horror, especially in its depiction of the nameless narrator “whose aching midlife crisis points up the spiritual emptiness and deadened perception of secular modernity.”

(Latham, 519). He calls this novel “one of the finest examples of neo-Gothic literature in contemporary British literature.” (Latham, 520). While Latham is perhaps the only critic to position Harrison as a neo-Gothicist - (he sees some of Harrison’s works, although overtly science fiction, such as the desolate post apocalypse tale The Committed Men (Doubleday, 1971) and Signs of Life (Gollancz, 1997), a grim satire of biotechnology, as being “redolent with a bleak and morbid atmosphere that verges on the Gothic” (Latham, 519) )– Harrison’s work indeed straddles the boundaries between fantasy, science fiction, horror and mainstream, and Latham’s is a valid reading. Some critics have preferred to read Harrison’s work as “high” or “literary fantasy”, a reading which positions him squarely within the formulaic genre but which accords him a distinguished place in it. David Pringle, for example, has distinguished between Harrison’s earlier works, (such as the Viriconium sequence , which are seen as relatively conventional genre fantasies – although Pringle sees a development from the mere “colour and action” of The Pastel City through the “lush, involuted fantasy” of A Storm of Wings to the “slimmer, harder, sparer” writing of In Viriconium) and the later non-Viriconium books such as The Course of the Heart and Signs of Life which are seen as “equally brilliant but still demanding – literary fantasies of a high order”) (Pringle, 146) In conclusion, I see using a combination of approaches as the most productive reading. Though Harrison has chosen to work within the field of fantasy and science fiction, he has redefined it from within, and thus a reading which recognises both the tropes of fantasy and his subversions of it (postmodern, modernist, topographical, existentialist and otherwise) would be valid in order to give Harrison his due. There are some obvious gaps in the ways Harrison has been read – for instance, there has been no comprehensive feminist reading of his work, which is lamentable given that many of his works involve female characters who are ill or verging on madness. In my mini-thesis I want to more fully explore the ways in which Harrison has subverted the fantasy genre, but I would like to incorporate some feminist readings to address the imbalance in the works of previous critics.

Bibliography. Cawthorn, James and Michael Moorcock. “M. John Harrison, The Pastel City” in their Fantasy: The Best 100 Books. NY: Carroll and Graf, 1988, pp 187-88. Clute, John. “M(ichael) John Harrison” in John Clute and John Grant (eds) . The Encyclopedia of Fantasy. London: Orbit, 1997, pp 453-54. -- “M(ichael) John Harrison in John Clute and Peter Nicholls (eds). The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction. London: Orbit, 1993, pp. 54546. Harrison, M. John. “Comments” in Jay P. Pederson, (ed) The St James Guide to Science Fiction Writers (4th edition). Detroit, MI: St James Press, 1996, pp. 421-22. -- “What It Might be Like to Live in Viriconium.” Online at http://www.fantasticmetropolis.com/i/viroconi um/ -- Parietal Games: Critical Writings by and on M. John Harrison. London: Science Fiction Foundation, 2005. This volume collects Harrison’s reviews work between May 1968 and Sept 2004; it also includes critical essays by Rob Latham, Graham Sleight, Rjurik Davidson, Graham Fraser, Mark Bould, John Clute and Farah Mendlesohn. Hughes, Rhys. “Climbing to Viriconium: The Work of M. John Harrison”. Online at http://www.fantasticmetropolis.com/i/harrison/ full/ Kelley, George. “M(ichael) John Harrison” in Jay P. Pederson, (ed) The St James Guide to Science Fiction Writers (4th edition). Detroit, MI: St James Press, 1996, pp. 421-22. Lane, Joel. “M (ichael) John Harrison” in David Pringle (ed). The St James Guide to Horror, Ghost and Gothic Writers. Detroit, MI: St James Press, 1998, pp. 252-54. Latham, Rob. “M[ichael] John Harrison” in S.T. Joshi and Stefan Dziemanowicz (eds). Supernatural Literature of the World: An Encyclopedia. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2005 (3 vols), pp.519-20. McAuley, Paul J. “M[ichael John Harrison” in David Pringle (ed). The St James Guide to Fantasy Writers. Detroit, Mi: St James, 1996, pp 271-72. Pringle, David. “M. John Harrison A Storm of Wings” in his Modern Fantasy: The 100

Best Novels. NY: Peter Bedrick Books, 1988, pp. 201-03. -- (ed). “M. John Harrison” in his The Ultimate Enyclopedia of Fantasy: The Definitive Illustrated Guide. London: Carlton, 1998, pp. 146-47.

“’Undoing the mechanisms’: Genre Expectation, Subversion & Anti-Consolation in the Kefahuchi Tract Novels of M. John Harrison.” © Leigh Blackmore 2008 “The idea is not to get a cosy ride. Why would you want that?” – (M. John Harrison, “Disillusioned by the Actual, 5.)

“I was starting to explore how far you could push fictional structures, in particular those of fantasy, before they fell over and became something else. I was interested in undoing the mechanisms by which popular fiction manages space and time”.

– M. John Harrison (interview by Cheryl Morgan) Introduction M. John Harrison’s Kefahuchi Tract duology consists of Light (2002; co-winner 2002 James Tiptree Memorial Award for Best SF Novel) and Nova Swing (winner 2007 Arthur C. Clarke Award and the 2008 Philip K. Dick Award for

Best SF Novel). In this mini-thesis I argue that Harrison’s novel sequence formally subverts notions of the sf/fantasy and crime genres as “escapist”, in order to revitalise them as valid literary forms. First I will briefly discuss some definitions of science fiction (hereinafter abbreviated as ‘sf’) and fantasy, and discuss the concepts of “consolatory fantasy” and “escapism”, and define the subgenre of “space opera.” I will then discuss the way Harrison views genre to delineate his subversive approach in Light and Nova Swing, since I assert M. John Harrison remakes/redefines genre sf as these texts constantly undercut genre expectations. My argument will then focus on three principle techniques used by Harrison – his vigorous resistance of cliché; his insistence on a hyper-real style; and his literary use of uncertainty/quantum theory. I will use thematic and rhizomatic methodologies to interrogate how these techniques play out in the novels. I will also examine the notion of aporia and absence in both novels, and touch on their problematic treatment of women’s roles. (I feel it’s important to at least point to the need for a feminist analysis, although a thorough one requires a separate paper). I will demonstrate that Harrison, more concerned with writing about people than hi-tech hardware, can both work within and redefine the ‘constraints’ of genre sf.

Definition of sf/fantasy ;“Escapism” and “Consolatory fantasy”; Genre Expectation; “Space opera”. Defining sf is no easy task – Wolfe (Critical Terms, 108-12) provides four pages worth of definitions, and monographs have been written on the subject (see, e.g., Freedman). Edward James writes: “sf constitutes a bundle whose contents are constantly changing, from decade to decade, from critic to critic, and from country to country.” (James, 1) and “sf is a label that can be applied to everything from heavy philosophy to invading meatloaf.” (James, 2). 1

space continuum) into which they can “escape” while reading the book. The sf/fantasy genre has therefore generally been seen as “escapist”, therefore seductive but not “respectable.” Some theorists don’t see this escapism as a pejorative, but as cathartic – for instance, JRR Tolkien (see Kelly). According to Wolfe, consolation was Tolkien’s term in “On Fairy Stories” (1947) for the effect of the happy ending/Eucatastrophe -- one of four principal functions of fairy stories, along with Fantasy, Recovery and Escape. (Wolfe, Critical Terms, 21). Escape is, says Wolfe, “popularly (and loosely) used to describe the appeal of much fantastic literature, and referring to the presumed function of such literature as a kind of psychological safety valve.” (Wolfe, Critical Terms, 31). 2 SF is frequently deprecated as a subpar (because populist) fiction. I challenge this notion generally and assert that the novels by Harrison under examination prove otherwise. I submit that in fact, modern sf and fantasy can displays an extreme theoretical and narrative sophistication, as exemplified in the work of writers such as Harrison. 3 ‘Space opera’, a subgenre of sf, is usually viewed as “a melodramatic adventure-fantasy involving stock themes and settings…evolved on the flimsiest

scientific

basis.”

(Parrinder,

25).

Contrary to this, I argue that in this subgenre writers such Harrison are doing some of the most exciting and challenging work in literature.

How Harrison views genre. “Consolatory fantasy” and “Anti-Consolation”. “I think it’s undignified to read for the purposes of escape. After you grow up, you should start reading for other purposes. You should have a more complicated relationship with fiction than simple entrancement. If you read for escape you will never try to change your life, or anyone else’s”. – M.

John Harrison (interview with Cheryl Morgan) Parrinder calls fantasy “ a branch of the historical romance in which nostalgia for a lost age of individualism is accentuated by the evocation of a quasi-feudal world of sorcerers and kings.” (Parrinder, xv). “Consolatory fantasy” is a term describing certain types of genre fiction (“commercial,” “generic” or “normative” fantasy/sf ) which fulfil an obvious purpose, i.e., to provide the reader with a secondary world (i.e., a diegetic time-

There is no room here to detail the 1960’s British New Wave sf movement, of which Harrison was the ideologue; though Harrison helped construct what Parrinder calls its “tone of knowingness and literary sophistication, with an almost obligatory commitment to formal experiment.” (Parrinder, 17). However, Harrison has expressly repudiated the idea of fantasy as

nostalgia. 4 In Harrison the tension between genre expectation and his subversion of it arises because he resists the idea of genre. 5 Harrison has said: “I’m for the melting pot. I think we should all write fiction, we shouldn’t call it anything except “fiction,” and it shouldn’t be promoted in categories.” (Harrison, interview

with Cheryl Morgan). 6 Harrison has consistently expressed detestation of “consolatory fantasy,” vide Roy, 7 a tendency in his work which I term “anticonsolation”. In promulgating his “anticonsolatory” sf, Harrison argues that in recoiling from the complexities of industrial civilisation, we should not seek refuge in the pastoral, the simpler, supposedly more meaningful way of life conceived by writers of “normative” fantasy to exist in the past. The textual impulses of Harrison’s work since the 1960’s, then, use sf as a particular discourse which is not escapist but suggests possibilities for the real world. His undermining of normative fantasy can be traced via the trajectory from his somewhat middle-of-the-road The Pastel City (1971) through his heavily deconstructed The Luck in the Head (1991) to Light and Nova Swing, in which he continues to redefine sf’s function via generic vehicles while bringing to bear an acute consciousness of genre shortcomings and technical possibilities. Light is unqualifiedly space opera, embracing genre trappings (it has, after all, a spaceship on the cover); yet its themes and techniques, I contend, transcend the standard sf formulas. Nova Swing is more accurately a hybrid space opera/ noir crime novel, yet demonstrates similar thematic concerns. Harrison consistently evinces a discomfort with the escapist conventions of this sort of sf: “Once you have understood escapist fiction and the culture of escape you begin to go further back and ask what it is they’re based on. What they’re based on is desire.” (Harrison, interview with Cheryl Morgan). I posit that this concern with desire enables an authorial focus on what the real world might be, as opposed to what the characters think they value, which is a dreamlike, misguided notion about the real world’s nature. Harrison, appreciating that people need to be more than they are, in these texts examines how that plays out – the self-deceptions that, for instance, lead Vic Serotonin to take Elizabeth Kielar into the Event Zone, where she transforms horribly: “At night she ran aimlessly back and forth across the faces of the dunes. It was hard to say at what point she became something else. This thing – pivoted sharply at the hips so that it could walk on

all four limbs with the palms of its hands flat on the ground, its head too small and streamlined, somehow, to accommodate the great blue candid cartoon human eyes – called Vic’s name until he put his hands over his ears and went inside.” (Nova

Swing, 213-14.) Harrison’s themes in these novels become, rather than the ‘escapism’ of which fantasy is often accused, cogently realistic, concerned with the fantasies we all live with: dreams, desires, wish fulfilments, power fantasies. 8

Harrison’s Subversive Techniques Harrison says: “while remaining highly aware of the mainstream, [I’m] trying to utilize elements from both sides…from fantasy and horror as well…to make something personal, something that exists at the conjunction of a lot of different sets at once”. (Harrison, “No Escape” , 69). His wish to subvert and transgress sf genre tropes is predicated on the attitude that “prior to any act of reading, we already live in a fantasy world constructed by advertising, branding, news media, politics and the built or prosthetic environment…As a result, the world we live in is already a ‘secondary creation’.” (Harrison, “Worldbuilding”, 3) I contend that both Light and Nova Swing subvert elements of crime fiction as well as of sf. In Light, Ed Chianese, in his virtual reality tank, lives out a fantasy as a Chandleresque private eye, a gumshoe with an eye for ‘dames’. Nova Swing was aptly termed by some reviewers “space noir.” 9 In the novel, someone carries out murders, tattooing the victims. Detective Lens Aschemann, dedicated to combating ‘Site crime’ (people who extract artefacts from the Event Zone) also seeks to solve his wife’s murder. Harrison subverts crime genre convention (largely predicated on mystery-solving) by providing no solution to the tattoo murders or to the murder of Aschemann’s wife. For Harrison, the world is not solvable, either in ‘reality’ or in fiction. Light and Nova Swing are political – by subverting genre expectations attached to sf and crime, Harrison shows that fantasy needn’t be an evasion by which we are content to have the world made for us. By dismantling sf’s discourse from within, I suggest, he amplifies and extends the effects available to it. Harrison continually manipulates reader expectations of sf. Light, for instance, deals in part with gene-splicing, a ‘cool’ technology that could serve as decorative narrative window-dressing; but Harrison refuses to prettify it:

“On the face of it, Uncle Zip was solid. He dealt with the passing trade; cultivars for pleasure, sentient tattoos, also any kind of superstitious hitch and splice, like ensuring your firstborn gets the luck gene of Elvis…In the lab, though, he cut for anyone. He cut for the military, he cut for the shadow boys. He cut for viral junkies, in for the latest patch to their brain disease of choice. He didn’t care what he cut, or who he cut as long as they could pay.”

(Light, 47).

Light’s region of The Tract known as The Beach functions as an ironic and subversive metaphor. To “go on the beach and relax” – Harrison never wants to do that.

Resistance of Cliché: Realism and Anti-Consolation in SF/Fantasy “I still believe that sf needs to be radically changed from the inside by people who will not compromise. [I] am still committed to a concept of noncompromise with mediocrity.”

use of modernist narrative techniques including recursion (discussed further on p. 9). Genre fiction has an imperative to closure which Harrison defies; Iain Banks has aptly referred to this as “closure-denying restraint.”(Banks, ‘Into the 10th dimension”). Both Light and Nova Swing end on an ‘open’ , ‘unresolved’ note. In Light, the humans all die and the Shrander poses unanswerable questions in the almost metaphysical closing chapter. In Nova Swing, the Event Zone’s mystery remains unsolved, and although some of the characters leave Saudade, most finish with their fantasies of “mapping” the Zone unfulfilled. Thus we can continue to read both texts rhizomatically, mining them for further subtexts which, however, will never lead to an ultimate ‘resolution’.

(Harrison, “The

Last Rebel”, 7).

Hyper-real style in Light and Nova Swing

Mainstream critics’ genre expectations say sf is too often plot-driven, with minimal characterisation. But in these texts it operates differently due to Harrison’s crucial concerns with characterisation and fluidity of genre. I assert that Harrison’s determined resistance of cliché in them produces original, sophisticated effects. Moreover, both these novels are about the rejection of lived experience. 10 Harrison depicts characters who are wounded in their sexual and emotional cores, who have chosen safety over experience, the virtual over the actual. Because Harrison disbelieves in heroes, he draws characters in these novels who subsist on the need for a dream rather than engage with real life. 11 Such characterisations play against the heroic stereotypes of many sf/fantasy genre novels, bringing the reader in touch with fresh (though uncomfortable) realistic characters. 12 Furthermore, all are culturally and emotionally displaced, living a prolonged adolescence which can be read as symptomatic of Western culture’s parlous condition, with its cultural imperialism, and dreams of selftransformation through commodity acquisition. Light and Nova Swing implicitly criticise this Western fantasy culture, where our choice is obsessive. 13 In Light, Harrison does utilise some standard sf genre tropes -- ”standard-issue fantasy-kit devices” (Green) -- ‘Big Dumb Objects’ (alien artefacts), faster-than-light travel, spaceship battles – but his resistance of cliché is demonstrated through his subversive

“I see no technical distinction between the world-building of the representational writer – the travel writer or memoirist – and the worldbuilding of the fantasist.”

(Harrison, “Worldbuilding”,

1). Harrison’s attention to detail in these novels is painterly, verging on “hyper-real,” whether what he describes is confronting, painful, ugly or beautiful. In Light, the specificity of his observation is visible in the exactingly captured settings, and in imagistic scenes which Harrison has referred to as “accented moment-signs” (Harrison, “The Last Rebel”, 9) such as the meticulously-described coin spinning on its edge (Light, 78) to the descriptive detail which portrays for us the disturbingly fantastic creature known as the Shrander: “Whatever drove him like this to the waste ground of life had, by the age of eight, Already made Kearney vulnerable to the attention of the Shrander. It swam with the little fishes in the shadow of the willow, just as it had sorted the stones on the beach when he was two. It informed every landscape. Its attentions had begun with dreams in which he walked on the green flat surface of canal water, or felt something horrible inhabiting a pile of Lego bricks... The Shrander was in all of that. (Light, 27). It is the specificity of these details, not simply his economic word choice, that enables the reader to discover what Harrison considers the deep truth about life. Another example from Light, as Kearney visits a Kilburn house: “Inside nothing had changed. Nothing had changed since the 1970s and nothing ever would. The walls were papered a yellowish colour like the soles of feet.

Low wattage bulbs on timers allowed you twenty seconds of light before they plunged the stairs back into darkness. There was a smell of gas outside the bathroom, stale boiled food from the second rooms, Then aniseed everywhere, coating the membranes of the nose. Near the top of the stairwell a skylight let in the angry orange glare of the London night.”

(Light,

193). Such grim descriptive setting, couched as direct reportage, undercuts the sf genre expectation of every space opera being filled with shiny spacecraft and easily digestable sf ‘props’. Nevertheless, despite his rigorous hyper-realism, his prose’s particularity, Harrison still attends to big themes – sexuality as an outworking of characters’ fantasy lives; the implications of genetic engineering; the complexity of both exterior and interior space. I posit that his focus on the intensely personal through hyper-real description and dialogue enables him to illuminate also the intensely universal: “She challenged him: ‘What good’s your life been? Honestly, Michael: what good has it been?’ Kearney took her by the shoulder as if to shaker her; looked at her instead. Began to say something ugly; changed his mind. ‘You’re being ridiculous. Go home.’ She set her mouth. ‘You see? You can’t answer. You haven’t got an answer.’ “

(Light, 211-12).

Quantum theory as a Rhizome in the Kefahuchi Tract Novels “I always construct in parallel and opposite. It’s a classic 20th century technique which I got from Katherine Mansfield. You explore your themes by constructing sets of analogies and homologies. The uncertainties of quantum mechanics were perfect for that.” – M. John Harrison (interview with Cheryl Morgan).

Rhizomatic theory states that the critic always inhabits the argument. Similarly, an observer always inhabits the quantum experiment, and observation of a quantum state always changes the outcome. I suggest Harrison’s narrative in these texts is itself rhizomatic, primarily due to the use of quantum theory metaphors which spread throughout the texts like Deleuze and Guattari’s rhizomes, connecting each narrative and thematic point to each other point. (Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus). Furthermore, both novels draw on earlier stories of Harrison’s, chunks of text showing up here via different “pathways” and contexts, like rhizomatic roots with tendrils extending throughout his oeuvre. 14 Such rhizomatic and

recursive ploys lend these narratives a Chinese-box-like effect, echoes of previous incidents and imagery working to knot Harrison’s oeuvre together. The formal structure of both novels depends on interweaving strands which can be considered akin to narrative DNA. 15 This narrative stranding functions as a metaphor reminding the reader that science underpins the diegesis. Harrison appreciates that the reality we know emerges from quantum broth; therefore the universe is neither fixed nor dependable. Quantum metaphors make this explicit by providing the textual substrate. Liv Hula’s bar in Nova Swing is called The Black Cat White Cat, referencing the Schrödinger’s Cat theory and linking the book back to Kearney’s quantum experiments, the White Cat sentient spaceship and the Black Cat spaceship that Ed Chianese piloted into the Tract’s heart at Light’s end. The quantum indeterminacy imagery helps metafictionalise Harrison’s text, forcing the reader to ask “is this fiction or is this happening to me as the reader? Or am I constructing it from the text?” “Who knew how many of those cats there were? Another thing, you never found so much as a tabby among them, every one was either black or white. When they poured out the zone it was like a model of some chaotic mixing flow in which, though every condition is determined, you can never predict the outcome. Soon they filled Straint in both directions, bringing with them the warmth of their bodies, also a close, dusty but not unpleasant smell.”

(Nova Swing, 13). The quantum world is also about choice. The texts’ imagery is metaphorical of the many choices characters might make; nonetheless, Harrison stresses that in the end life is about the single choices they do make. Light’s repeating motif is: “all the things it might be, the one thing it is”. Rhizomatically, both characters and reader have to make choices in these texts; the characters about their lives, the reader in determining whether journey or end is more important. (Harrison suggests journey, by resisting plot closure in both novels). The Beach (a region of the Tract) also functions as a metaphor for science as opportunism, as ‘beach-combing’. In Light, the human race ‘beach-combs’ a string of worlds, selling another race’s old rubbish for profit, expressing Harrison’s disdain for current science as simply an entrepreneurial economic pursuit.

‘Hypermarket of the meaningless’: Absence and Aporia in Light and Nova Swing “Most of my characters are morally dyslexic at best. They’re designed to demonstrate a value by showing its absence. You aren’t supposed to identify with them. Into the vacuum of their despair, the reader is forced to put forth hope; into the vacuum of their selfishness, care.” – M. John

Harrison (interview with Cheryl Morgan) Harrison has described his work as “a deliberate intention to illustrate human values by describing their absence” (Harrison, “No Escape”), which provides a philosophical “gap” or “lacuna” in his texts which ties in to his works’ central aporias16 . In Light, the Kefahuchi Tract, a vortex of dark matter, operates as a site of aporia, literally and metaphorically a site of Otherness and unresolvability: “The Kefahuchi Tract almost filled the sky, always growing as you watched, like the genie raging up out of the bottle, yet somehow never larger. It was a singularity without an event horizon, they said, the wrong physics lose in the universe. Anything could come out of there, but nothing ever did. Unless, of course, Ed thought, what we have out here is already a result of what happens in there…”

(Light, 237). Light’s tortured, amoral Michael Kearney glimpsed reality on another beach in our world: “Some shift of vision had altered his perspective; he saw clearly that the gaps between the larger stones made the same sorts of shapes as the gaps between the smaller ones. The more he looked, the more the arrangement repeated itself. Suddenly he understood this as a condition of things…there it would be, a boiling, inexplicable, vertiginous similarity in all the processes of the world , roaring silently away from you in ever-shifting repetitions, always the same, never the same thing twice. In that moment he was lost.” (Harrison, Light, 13) In discovering reality’s quantum nature, Kearney is caught in the aporia of the world’s meaning, as well as perceiving the literal “gaps” that exist between stones and molecules. The Shrander, too, is a malignant being of sheer Otherness (though it is suggested it is an aspect of Kearney’s warped fantasy life) whose presence in the text operates via aporia, making the reader question the realities of the basic narrative: “He took in the tubby figure, the maroon wool coat with its missing buttons; the head like a horse’s skull, the eyes like pomegranate halves. ‘Whoa!’ he said. ‘Are you real?’ He felt at himself with his hands. First things first.

‘Am I real?’ he said. “

(Light, 313)

This suggests Harrison uses aporia as a conscious strategy to induce in the reader a sense of fantastic strangeness even while using hyper-real description to provide authenticity. 17

In Nova Swing, the protean Event Site is a place where part of the Tract fell to the ground in Saudade, a city or planet along The Beach (a string of worlds near the Tract). The city’s name, Saudade, echoes the concept of the Event Zone, for it means “a nostalgia after things irretrievably lost”. The Event Zone is a place of twisted physics, warped geography, psychic emanations; from it emerge biological artefacts which emit the malignant “daughtercode.” In the world of 2444 AD people are used to living with otherness, but as the “daughtercode” spreads, infecting Paulie DeRaad and others, the otherness in the world is further highlighted: “It was about eighteen inches long, and as the rag came off it seemed to move. That was an illusion. Low-angle light, in particular, would glance across the object’s surface so that for just a moment it seemed to flex in your hands… He had no idea what it was. When he found it, two weeks before, it had been an animal, a one-off thing no one but him would ever see, white, hairless, larger than a dog…How it turned into from an animal into the type of object he finally picked up, manufactured out of this wafery artificial substance which in some lights looked like titanium and in others bone, he didn’t know. He didn’t want to know.”

(Nova

Swing, 38). The Event Zone operates in this text as an aporia, a locus of Otherness, an ever-shifting literal/metaphorical variable hole in Saudade around which all the characters revolve. The state of puzzlement and doubt produced by the Zone, makes the characters unsure of the Event Zone’s implications for their various lives. “The landscape continued to change, one moment residential and deserted (though you saw women waiting expectantly at a corner in their best clothes, they were gone as soon as you reached them); the next industrial and derelict. Flares rose from something like a coking plant in the distance, but everything close at hand was fallen down and overgrown. Old separation tanks became shallow lakes, with mudbanks streaked a dark chemical maroon …It was a hypermarket of the meaningless, in which the only mistake—as far as Vic could discern – was to have shopping goals. (Nova Swing, 197-98).

The trafficking of alien artefacts, black market tourism, the impinging strangeness of the Event Zone into the text’s narrative space as well as into the city’s literal space, destabilise the conventional functioning of a sf novel: “…streets transposed on one another, everything laid down out of sync one minute to the next. Geography that doesn’t work. There isn’t a single piece of dependable architecture in the shit of it. You leave the route you know, you’re done. Lost dogs, barking day and night. Everything struggling to keep afloat.” (Nova Swing, 214). The unresolvability of the text’s selfcontradictory meanings produces aporia. Whereas the Event Zone literally warps reality, its impact on the characters warps the text, telling the reader there are no easy answers. Selves are absorbed by the Other and spat out again, but everything that goes in comes out changed. That’s not sf, or fantasy, that’s life, Harrison is saying – it’s messy, complicated and unresolved.

Gender Construction in Light and Nova Swing. While Light won the Tiptree Award18, it veers close to misogyny in its depiction of female characters. Kearney is a serial killer of women, which plays to the dominant patriarchal discourse of ‘power-over’ which often operates in popular fiction and film. A less sexist way of utilising an unpleasant serial killer as a main character would be to have Kearney killing men as well; but Harrison has him kill only women. Indeed, all the characters (including the females) in Light kill women. Kearney’s wife Anna is a serial failed suicide. Very sick women abound in Harrison’s fiction; he seems reluctant to question this. 17 On a feminist reading, this may indicate an unconscious misogyny on Harrison’s part. While the fact many of Harrison’s male characters are also dysfunctional partially ameliorates the distancing with which Harrison draws his female characters, it does not produce a sense of gender role equality in these novels. Harrison is well aware of feminism, so it would be inaccurate to level accusations of gynophobia at these novels. 18 Nevertheless some of his female characters are distinguishable mainly by their Otherness; for instance, Light’s Seria Mau, whom Harrison has said is based on a case of a woman with Borderline Personality Disorder (Harrison, “No

Escape”, 69). There can be no question Harrison deliberately portrays her as a psychopath. Annie the Rickshaw Girl in Light, though genetically modified, is probably the character most sympathetically depicted. In Nova Swing, Barkeep Liv Hula and Edith Bonaventure are play strong roles. Nevertheless, the leading roles played by characters such as Elizabeth Kielar, Nova Swing’s femme fatale, who wants Vic to take her into the Zone, & has possibly originated there , produce a strong implication that woman is eternally Other. 19

Conclusion In conclusion, I must agree with Clute, who writes of Harrison “The central lesson to be extracted from his work [is that] any personal escape from the world must be earned by attending to that very world, for only when self and city and rockface are seen with true sight do we know what it is we wish to leave” (Clute, Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, 548). In this essay I have demonstrated by providing detailed evidence from the texts that through constantly resisting cliché, bringing intense realistic description to bear on fantastic subject matter and utilising quantum theory as a powerful metaphoric device , Harrison succeeds in his Kefahuchi Tract novels in reinvigorating a genre too often thought (and sometimes actually) reductive and imitative. Harrison’s themes of loss, hard-earned wisdom, and reclaiming the alien from the everyday have been shown to be complex and non-formulaic. Twisting the conventions, “undoing the mechanisms”, provides Harrison a means to construct work which reinvigorates sf/fantasy, allowing the reader to participate in worlds which though at times unpleasant, difficult and uncomfortable, are authentic and convincing though “fabulous”. He thus revitalises these popular fiction genres as valid literary forms.

Notes 1: Some writers who have defined the sf genre stress the scientific over the human content, as J.O. Bailey (1947): “A narrative of an imaginary invention or discovery in the natural sciences and consequent adventures and experiences.”

M.

John

Harrison,

however,

would prefer Theodore Sturgeon’s definition (1951): “A story built around human beings, with a human problem and a human solution, which would not have happened at all without its scientific content”. (Both quoted in Wolfe, Critical Terms).

Most definitions of sf agree it is a subset of fantasy, with sf’s ground rules (in Wolfe’s words) “being those of the physical universe, while the ground rules of fantasy are considered to be limited only by internal consistency and not necessarily related to experience.”(Wolfe, Critical

Terms, 108). 2: Wolfe quotes C.S. Lewis’ comment (from his Experiment in Criticism, 1965) that ‘escape” is a criticism of the reader rather than the work, and many readers might well “escape” into realistic fiction. James comments on the perception of sf and fantasy as part of a range of popular fictions dealing with “escapism”: “fantasy draws its inspiration from mythology and folklore and from popular images of medieval or pre-industrial society, and often appeals to nostalgia and conservative values; much sf is concerned with the future and with the possibilities presented by scientific and technological change…you, the casual browser, might think of all these brands of popular fiction as escapism, and might think sf and fantasy were the most escapist of all…if you thought about it you might see that sf (and, to a lesser extent), because they deal with imaginative and thus alternatives to the real world, also frequently offer criticism of that world – may, in short, be much more subversive than anything else … marketed as ‘popular fiction’.

(James, 3).

3: In support of this view of sf’s aesthetic significance and its legitimacy as a branch of literature, Attebery writes: “Fantasy is a sophisticated mode of storytelling characterised by stylistic playfulness, selfreflexiveness, and a subversive treatment of established orders of society and thought. Arguably the major fictional mode of the late twentieth century, it draws upon contemporary ideas about sign systems and the indeterminacy of meaning and at the same time recaptures the vitality and freedom of nonmimetic traditions traditional forms such as epic, folktale, romance, and myth”. (Brian Attebery, “Fantasy as Mode, Genre, Formula” in Sander, 295).

4:

“I began to be able to articulate

my distaste for the whole idea of a past whose achievements are something to be mourned or copied”. (Harrison, interview with Cheryl

Morgan).

5: ”I’m rather against the impermeable boundaries of genre. I could never write a pure generic work.” M. John Harrison (interview by Marisa Darnel). John Clute writes: “The central argument of [Harrison’s] fantasy can be reduced to some fairly simple propositions: that the worlds of fantasy are a distortion and denial of reality; and that those who inhabit or imagine those worlds are themselves creatures whose grasp on reality is dreadfully frail. …Escapism is, for [Harrison], bondage”. (Clute, Encyclopedia of Fantasy, 453). 6:

Such a view situates Harrison’s work as straddling the boundaries between mainstream and genre fiction, and as fiction which seeks to break from formulaic notions of what sf is and can achieve. This is not to say Harrison is necessarily against ‘populist work’ (novels such as his The Centauri Device (1974) and the various novels comprising his ‘Viriconium’ sequence have been extremely popular and much reprinted; but he long ago condemned the ‘series mentality’ characteristic of modern fantasy publishing (Cawthorn, 188).

7:

“[Tolkien] wrote that the function of fantasy was 'consolation', thereby making it an article of policy that a fantasy writer should mollycoddle the reader. That is a revolting idea, and one, thankfully, that plenty of fantasists have ignored. From the Surrealists through the pulps - via Mervyn Peake and Mikhael Bulgakov and Stefan Grabinski and Bruno Schulz and Michael Moorcock and M. John Harrison and I could go on - the best writers have used the fantastic aesthetic precisely to challenge, to alienate, to subvert and undermine expectations.”

(Roy, “Steampunk”, italics mine). The notion of fantasy as subversive can be explored further in texts by Hume and Jackson (see Bibliography). Indeed, Hume and Jackson both deal more extensively with fantasy literature’s marginalisation due to its deliberate departure from ‘reality’; Hume argues fantasy is an impulse as significant as Plato and Aristotle’s mimesis. Jackson’s approach extends Tzvetan Todorov’s structural approach to fantasy to include aspects of psychoanalytic theory in order to define fantasy as a historically determined form whose ambiguities are seen as expressing cultural unease.

8:

“This is what we fantasy and sf writers should be writing about, because we know how to talk about the paradox of the successful escape, the failed escape, the drive to escape in the first place, the inadvisability of escape, the impossibility of escape, and so on”. (Harrison, ‘No Escape”, 7).

9: See, e.g., Anon, “Sci-fi prize for spacetime rupture novel”. Indeed, Harrison’s US publishers Bantam-Dell have promoted it as such (Nova Swing trailer on YouTube). 10: On the way many of his characters reject lived experience and retreat into selfdestructive fantasy, and reflecting on how the writer can also (unless careful) be drawn into this way of thinking, Harrison has said “I don’t want to live in models, fictions, possibilities, alternate realities or multiverses: that’s for kiddies. I want to live and die as a human being in what is.”(Harrison, “No Escape”, 3) and “If you write a lot of fantasy and sf, it’s very easy to get divorced from the idea that you’re actually alive. It’s like doing a lot of computer games: you begin to forget that being alive has consequences.” (Harrison, “M. John Harrison:

No Escape”, 7). 11: In Light, Ed Chianese and Michael Kearney are deeply in denial , confused by their own rejection of adulthood. Anna Kearney wants to remain a child, as does Seria Mau, merging her neurobiology symbiotically with her K-ship in a bad dream of immortality. Ed lives out puerile fantasies in a sensory immersion (VR) tank. Kearney, terrified of his own knowledge of complexity, denies his own sexuality, becoming a serial killer who (in an explicit reference to Luke Rhinehart’s existentialist ideas) uses dice to make decisions. Although they can live in a VR tank as does Ed, or visit a ‘chop-shop’ where gene-tailoring will transform them into someone new, they cannot escape their dreams, their desires, their pasts. In Nova Swing, Vic Serotonin, running illicit tours into the Event Zone, is also trapped in unfulfilled dreams. Shady club owner/mobster Paulie DeRaad, with his marauding pack of raincoat-clad mercenary seven-year-old ‘gunkiddies’, is addicted to power-play fantasies, but is undone when an artefact from the Event Zone infects him. Emil Bonaventure, failed Event Zone explorer, is dying and will never fulfil his dream to solve the Zone’s secrets. 12: Certain themes in Nova Swing can be traced to the influence of Arkady and Boris Strugatsky’s sf classic Roadside Picnic, in which a young man spends his life risking his life in bizarre expeditions to remove and blackmarket artefacts from an alien visitation site; and I contend that by referencing superior and salient examples of the sf genre such as

Strugatsky’s, Harrison is emphasising his refusal of cliché. 13: Harrison has called this essentially “a politics of masturbation” (Harrison, interview with David Matthew, 2), clearly tying his subversive concerns in his fiction with thisworld politics. 14: In Light, the magician Sprake (from his story “The Incalling” and his novel The Course of the Heart) plays a crucial role Chapter 16. The many other examples include the stripped horse’s head, a symbol representing death and which here stands in for the creature known as the Shrander, which we have encountered in Harrison’s work from the Viriconium series to stories like “The Horse of Iron, How We Can Know it and be Changed By it Forever.” In Nova Swing, degrees of selfreferentiality include the reappearance of the melancholy detective Aschermann, from the story “The Neon Heart Murders”. The Event Zone disease recalls the citywide plague of Harrison’s novel In Viriconium (1982), and the toxic chemical dumps of Signs of Life (1997). 15: In Light, one strand deals with Michael Kearney in our own time; the other two strands deal with Seria Mau and Ed Chianese and how their fates intertwine to produce a powerful, optimistic conclusion. In Nova Swing, the narrative strands centre around Vic Serotonin, around Llens Aschemann and around the results on Paulie DeRaad of the Event Zone disease resulting from the artefact extracted from the Event Zone.

16:

Aporia is a rhetorical term “used in the theory of deconstruction to indicate a kind of impasse or insoluble conflict between rhetoric and thought. Aporia suggests the ‘gap’ or lacuna between what a text means to say and what it is constrained to mean.” (Cuddon, J.A. Penguin Dictionary of

Literary Terms. Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin, 2000, 4th ed). 17: The spatial region of The Beach, inhabiting the Tract’s edges, full of age-old abandoned alien technologies, also serves as an aporia, a symbol of absence and of disputed margins. 18: The Tiptree Award is named for James Tiptree Jr, the pseudonym of a feminist female sf writer (Alice Sheldon Bailey) who famously

kept her identity as a female writer secret for many years.

Mark Bould and Michelle Reid, eds, Parietal Games: Critical Writings By and On M. John Harrison (London: SFF, 2005).

17: “Since she comes up from very deep in my imagination , and I think that’s why I’m engaging with her, I find her difficult to explain except by writing her.” (Harrison, interview by Anon, at

Broderick, Damien. Review of Light. Locus (July 2004).

ph-uk online).

Cawthorn, James and Michael Moorcock. “M. John Harrison, The Pastel City” in their Fantasy: The Best 100 Books. NY: Carroll and Graf, 1988, pp. 187-88.

18: In an interview he remarks of one of his other novels: “I think that’s the beginning of a sort of post-feminist recognition that if we want relationships to work we have to negotiate”. (Harrison, interview with Cheryl Morgan). 19: The fact that the “wrong physics loose in the universe” known as K-code is also dubbed “daughter code” by failed Event Zone explorer Emil Bonaventure could be read as misogynistic. This perpetuates the sort of power relationships against which feminism speaks out, and may provide a field of research for future writers on Harrison to explore in more depth.

Cleaver, Fred. “Harrison may get his due.” (review of Light). Denver Post (26 Sept, 2004). Online at: http://www.denverpost.com/Stories/0,1413,36~ 26~2422372,00.html (Accessed Oct 28, 2008).

Anon. “Great SF and Fantasy Works by M. John Harrison”, online at: http://greatsfandf.com/AUTHORS/MJohnHarri son.php. (Accessed Oct 27, 2008).

Clute, John. “M(ichael) John Harrison” in John Clute and John Grant (eds) . The Encyclopedia of Fantasy. London: Orbit, 1997, pp 453-54. --“M(ichael) John Harrison in John Clute and Peter Nicholls (eds). The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction. London: Orbit, 1993, pp. 54546. --“10,000 Light years from home” (review of Nova Swing). The Guardian (Nov 11, 2006). Online at: http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2006/nov/11/ featuresreviews.guardianreview22. (Accessed Oct 27, 2008).

Anon. Review of Light. Online http://www.completereview.com/reviews/harrismj/light.htm. (Accessed Oct 27, 2008).

at:

Coyle, William (ed). Aspects of Fantasy: Selected Essays from the Second International Conference on the Fantastic in Literature and Film. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press,1986.

Anon. “Sci-fi prize for space-time rupture novel.” The Guardian (May 3, 2007). Online at: http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2007/may/03 /arthurcclarkeaward.awardsandprizes (Accessed Oct 27, 2008).

Cuddon, J.A. Penguin Dictionary of Literary Terms. Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin, 2000, 4th ed).

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Deighton, Jack. Review of Nova Swing. Online at: http://www.infinityplus.co.uk/nonfiction/novas wing.htm. (Accessed Oct 27, 2008). Deleuze, Gilles and Felix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus. London & New York: Continuum, 2004. Eve’s Alexandria [collective]. “A Woman walks into a bar…” (review of Nova Swing). Online at: http://evesalexandria.typepad.com/eves_alexan dria/2007/04/a_woman_walks_i.html. (Accessed Oct 27, 2008).

Foss, Karen A; Sonia K. Foss and Cindy L. Griffin (eds). Readings in Feminist Rhetorical Theory. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, 2004. Freedman, Carl. Critical Theory and Science Fiction. Hanover, NH: Wesleyan University Press, 2004. Gevers, Nick. Review of Light. Locus (Dec 2002). Green, Paul A. [review of Light]. Online at: http://www.culturecourt.com/Br.Paul/lit/Light MJH.html (Accessed Oct 28, 2008) Greenland, Colin. The Entropy Exhibition: Michael Moorcock and the British “New Wave” in Science Fiction. London: Routledge Kegan Paul, 1983. Harrison, M. John. -M. John Official Website: http://www.mjohnharrison.com/ (Accessed at various times from July-October 2008). -- “Comments” in Jay P. Pederson, (ed) The St James Guide to Science Fiction Writers (4th edition). Detroit, MI: St James Press, 1996, pp. 42122. --“Committed Man: M John Harrison” (interview by Nicholas Royle). Interzone (Aug 1997) --“A Conversation with M. John Harrison” (interview by Gabriel Chouinard). Online at: http://www.sfsite.com/12b/mjh142.htm. (Accessed Oct 27, 2008). --“A Conversation with M. John Harrison, author of the award-winning Nova Swing” (interview by Jeff [no last name given]). Online at: http://www.amazon.com/gp/blog/post/PLNKU 9IKGSQRRMJA (Accessed Oct 27, 2008). --“Disillusioned by the Actual: M. John Harrison” (interview by Patrick Hudson). Zone No 4. Also online at: http://www.zonesf.com/mjharrison.html. (Accessed Oct 27, 2008). --“Entrevista a M. John Harrison” (interview by Ignacio Illarregui and Arturo Villarubbia). Online at: http://www.cyberdark.net/portada.php?edi=6& cod=251. (Accessed Oct 28, 2008). --“The Last Rebel” (interview by Christopher Fowler). Foundation 23 (Oct 1981). -- Light. London: Gollancz, 2002.

--“M. John Harrison” (interview by http://www.phAnon). Online at: uk.co/post/EEFpFkuEhNhcyQAO.shtml. (Accessed Oct 28, 2008). --“M. John Harrison” (interview by Marisa Darnel). Online at: http://artistinterviews.com/literature/mjohnhar rison.htm (Accessed Aug 21, 2008). --“M. John Harrison” (interview by Paul Kincaid). Interzone 18 (1986) --“M. John Harrison” (interview by David Matthew). Online at: http://www.infinityplus.co.uk/nonfiction/intmj h.htm. (Accessed Oct 27, 2008). --“M. John Harrison” (interview by Cheryl Morgan). Online at: http://www.strangehorizons.com/2003/2003060 9/harrison.shtml (Accessed Oct 27, 2008). --“M. John Harrison – No escape” (interview, uncredited) . Abridged version at Locus online at: http://www.locusmag.com/2003/Issue12/Harris on.html (accessed Oct 27, 2008). Full version in Locus (Dec 2003) . --“M. John Harrison interview” (interview by David Kendall). The Edge No 7 (1998) -- Nova Swing. London: Gollancz, 2006. --Nova Swing trailer on YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ellliKPL7z M --‘Old, Mean and Misanthropic: An Interview with M. John Harrison “ (interview by Mark Bould in Mark Bould and Michelle Reid, eds, Parietal Games: Critical Writings By and On M. John Harrison (London: SFF 2005). -- Parietal Games: Critical Writings by and on M. John Harrison. London: Science Fiction Foundation, 2005. (This volume, edited by Mark Bould and Michelle Reid, collects Harrison’s critical and reviews work between May 1968 and Sept 2004; also includes critical essays on MJH by Rob Latham, Graham Sleight, Rjurik Davidson, Graham Fraser, Mark Bould, John Clute and Farah Mendlesohn.) -- “The Profession of SF 40: The Profession of Fiction .” Foundation 46 (Autumn 1989). --“Questions for M. John Harrison” (interview by anon). Online at: http://www.amazon.com/Nova-SwingGollancz-John-Harrison/dp/0575070277. (Accessed Oct 27, 2008). -- “What It Might be Like to Live in Viriconium.” Online at: http://www.fantasticmetropolis.com/i/viroconi um/. (Accessed Oct 27, 2008).

--“World-Building: Further Notes”. (Dec 21, 2007). Online at Uncle Zip’s Window (the M. John Harrison blog) at: http://uzwi.wordpress.com/wolrdbuildingfurther-notes/ (Accessed Oct 30, 2008) Hughes, Rhys. “Climbing to Viriconium: The Work of M. John Harrison”. Online at http://www.fantasticmetropolis.com/i/harrison/ full/. (Accessed Oct 27, 2008). Hume, Kathryn. Fantasy and Mimesis: Responses to Reality in Western Literature. London: Methuen, 1984. Jackson, Rosemary. Fantasy: the Literature of Subversion. London: Methuen, 1981. James, Edward. Science Fiction in the Twentieth Century. London: Oxford University Press, 1994. Kaveney, Roz. “Poet of decay gives voice to the doomed of a second-rate humanity” (review of Nova Swing). The Independent (9 Nov, 2006). Online at: http://www.independent.co.uk/artsentertainment/books/reviews/nova-swing-bym-john-harrison-423576.html. (Accessed Oct 27, 2008). Kelley, George. “M(ichael) John Harrison” in Jay P. Pederson, (ed) The St James Guide to Science Fiction Writers (4th edition). Detroit, MI: St James Press, 1996, pp. 421-22. Kelly, Tony. “Faith seeking Fantasy: Tolkien on Fairy Stories” at http://dlibrary.acu.edu.au/research/theology/ej ournal/Issue3/kelly.htm (Accessed Oct 27, 2008). Kincaid, Paul. [review of Parietal Games: Critical Writings by and on M. John Harrison]. Online at: http://www.strangehorizons.com/reviews/2006 /04/parietal_.shtml (Accessed Oct 28, 2008) Kleffel, Rick. Review of Light. Online at: http://www.trashotron.com/agony/reviews/200 2/harrison-light.htm. (Accessed Oct 28, 2008). Kurtz, Durstin. Review of Nova Swing. Online at: http://mumpsimus.blogspot.com/2007/10/novaswing-by-m-john-harrison.html. (Accessed Oct 27, 2008).

Lane, Joel. “M (ichael) John Harrison” in David Pringle (ed). The St James Guide to Horror, Ghost and Gothic Writers. Detroit, MI: St James Press, 1998, pp. 252-54. Latham, Rob. “M[ichael] John Harrison” in S.T. Joshi and Stefan Dziemanowicz (eds). Supernatural Literature of the World: An Encyclopedia. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2005 (3 vols), pp.519-20. McAuley, Paul J. “M[ichael John Harrison” in David Pringle (ed). The St James Guide to Fantasy Writers. Detroit, Mi: St James, 1996, pp 271-72. Moorcock, Michael. Wizardry and Wild Romance: A Study of Epic Fantasy. London: Gollancz, 1988. Morgan, Cheryl. “In Search of Viriconium” [review of Parietal Games: Critical Writings by and on M. John Harrison]. Online at: http://www.emcit.com127.php?a=23 (Accessed Oct 28, 2008) Murray, Charles Shaar. “Light and death in the 24th century”. London Independent (Dec 9, 2002). Online at: http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qn4158/is_ 20021209/ai_n12655651 (Accessed October 27, 2008) Nussbaum, Abigail. Review of Nova Swing. Online at: http://www.strangehorizons.com/reviews/2006 /12/nova_swing_by_m.shtml (Accessed Oct 27, 2008). Parrinder, Patrick. Science Fiction: Its Criticism and Teaching. London: Methuen, 1980. Pringle, David. “M. John Harrison A Storm of Wings” in his Modern Fantasy: The 100 Best Novels. NY: Peter Bedrick Books, 1988, pp. 20103. --(ed). “M. John Harrison” in his The Ultimate Enyclopedia of Fantasy: The Definitive Illustrated Guide. London: Carlton, 1998, pp. 146-47. Roberts, Adam. Review of Light. Online at: http://www.infinityplus.co.uk/nonfiction/lightr ev.htm. (Accessed Oct 27, 2008). Roy, James. “Steampunk – the new genre” Online at:

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TWO INTERVIEWS WITH GAVIN L. O’KEEFE There follow two interviews with illustrator Gavin L. O’Keefe. I’ve known Gavin for a long time, and the first interview was conducted over twenty years ago; it has never been published until now. (He may be aghast to see it appear in print, and if so, I beg his indulgence). A more recent interview was conducted with Gavin by email some time ago and I present it here. I think it is interesting to see the two conversations side by side in order to see how Gavin’s attitudes and interests may have changed (or in some ways remained constant) over time. I would love to present some examples of Gavin’s illustrative work here – have been meaning to do so for a long time – may (with Gavin’s permission) manage to do so in a future issue. Meantime, if the following intrigues you, check out Gavin’s cover art for various Ramble House books at: http://www.ramblehouse.com/GavinGallery/G avinOkeefe.htm INTERVIEW 1 By Leigh Blackmore 31.5.1987 "One always prefers to the finished work the work one is going to undertake, the work which still has the beauty of the dream...One always hopes that tomorrow's work will be better than yesterday's...It is certainly the best picture because it contains all possible pictures" (a blank canvas)- Gustav Dore (quoted from Jerrold's 1891 biography in Joanna Richardson's biography, p. 109).

"He was always to abide in spirit with saints and gnomes and elves, and to live more in the ideal world than in reality. He was always to believe in illusions and to expect a miracle to happen as soon as he set his heart on anything". - Joanna Richardson, of Gustav Dore, p. 15 The above words seem as applicable to Gavin O’Keefe as to Dore… LB: How did you get started in the art world? What made you start to draw? GO: I used to draw as a kid, but never seriously thought of doing any drawings to any stories till probably about '84 or so, and that's I think when I first started doing some - the Lovecraft drawing " Dreams in the Witch House" I remember from '84 and various others - but it only started really slowly then because I still had the music going but as soon as I left that I really got into it. I still had some drawings from high school that I'd done there. LB: You did art at school? GO: I did it as a subject in the HSC - I had a very good art teacher. He used to give me a lot of time and tell me about things and show me how to do this or do that. He showed me how to use oil paints and whatever - he would listen to me and talk to me and encourage me. LB: Is the instruction you got at school what inspired you to start art in the first place? GO: I think I was just interested all along even during the music, in just drawing. I think it was always at the back of my mind and whereas I started he violin early and I was constantly doing musical things and that at school, it only ended up in Year 11 that I decided I'd take up art because - well, I knew that was one of the things I wanted to do. I always thought that music was the thing - only after a year or so in the orchestra did I decide that, no, drawing was what I wanted to do. LB: When you were at school studying art, did that give you a lot of opportunity to illustrate ideas that you had yourself, or were you mainly doing exercises? GO: Oh, no exercises at all - it was up to us to do what we wanted to - but one day I just happened to start drawing some of these Queen songs - it just happened, there was no lead up to it...and I really got into those particular drawings, and it just interested me... LB: All the illustrations in this collection [VISIONS OF FAIRYLAND] are of a fantastic nature. Is that a natural leaning you have, towards fantastic illustration? Have you ever

been interested in doing realistic illustrations as well? GO: No, not really - I'm a great fan of surrealism and I just like this 'non-real' look at things - I like surrealist types of artwork. And I find a lot of inspiration in fantasy literature and fantasy music and I think this is just a combination - that I'm inspired, I get images from literature or from music, so I transpose them via that surrealism into the final drawing. But always realistic images are going to be coming in, because... LB: Your style in a way is a realistic style - a graphic design sort of style, although used in a surrealistic way. GO: Yeah, I think this is the fight , between me sometimes thinking I should be doing this realistically, to make live a notion born in literature or in some music, to make it just a visual thing. At the same time I want it to be something that isn't real, that is a figment that people will look at, that will become maybe an image in their own heads. Often the surrealists would give realistic properties to something that has never existed - this is effective, and I guess I will always have the two elements - the design aspect, which is maybe not three-dimensional at all, and the three-dimensional interwoven. LB: What about the techniques that you use in drawing? GO: Well,, whereas I started off with basically just using pens - Rotring pens in different thicknesses - I've been starting to think of a pen as merely one of many instruments with which to apply ink to a piece of paper or cardboard. And so I've been using found objects like rocks, foam, bits of wood with the grain in them, fingerprints - things like this - and imprinting these patterns which are quite interesting onto the paper almost in a way that Max Ernst was using with his frottage on his canvas - getting these natural shapes - and then I usually incorporate them in a design that I do. So therefore I've applied ink in a way that I choose, but the mark has been up to the object I've had then I control the rest of the composition around that, blend it in with it. So, it's analogous to thinking of a pen, the tip of a pen, as merely another found object that I can apply ink to page and, just the same I can get a bit of wood and scrape it along, and I've made a mark that is characteristic to that type of point. So it's other objects, not just limiting it to the thought of a paintbrush or a pen...but I haven't left the pen totally behind, because I still gain a lot of control and it's easy to use, whereas these other things take a bit of time to get used to...

LB: You mentioned Ernst as one artist that influenced you in those sorts of techniques. Are there any other techniques that you've been inspired by in other artists? GO: The surrealists' general idea - I don't know their manifestos very well, but - the general idea of combining elements that are normally not seen together and thus bringing a sense of shock or surprise is always, I think, a good idea, and I've tried to use this in my drawings. LB: What about Beardsley - his influence is fairly strong in the black and white side of your work. . GO: Yeah - the way that Beardsley is remembered is that he was one of the first very successful illustrators to be working to be working at the time when line-block first came in, where they photographed the artwork and had it printed off, whereas before they had to rely on woodcut and this sort of thing, And so he was really able to do what he wanted to do, he didn't have many bounds - and his approach to design was totally different; although it was influenced by people like Burne-Jones and Whistler and medieval artists, yet there developed, I think, a surrealism in his work, which was not embraced very much at the time. The design aspect is very different - it's very stark. LB: Some of the figures in some of your illustrations seem to be comparable to Beardsley's - especially that series of 'Freaks' illustrations that aren't included in this collection. Beardsley had a lot of grotesque figures. GO: Yeah, his grotesques are really strange. He was obviously profoundly influenced by the idea or the image of an embryo, and other various monsters - well, these monsters would have been in circuses at the time. He probably would have seen these, and he was probably interested in their grotesqueness and their monstrosity. And also these embryos, these abortions, turn up in his drawings a lot. There's a theory that he had sex with his sister Mabel and that she had had an abortion and that he'd seen this and that had influenced him...but I was interested at one time with freaks after reading Leslie Fiedler's book on freaks - this idea, maybe its a parallel, thought, that human beings are analogous to conventional landscape paintings who - we think these are always should be like this and never change and all of a sudden are warped and become deformed as in freaks or surrealist paintings...perhaps that's a parallel there...but just the idea maybe that these are different things, these are unknown things,

that nevertheless are living amongst us and we have to come to terms with these sorts of things. Maybe it's an interest in perhaps aliens from literature... LB: Do you think people see the surrealist style these days as a freakish sort of art form, or do you think it's more acceptable? GO: I think it's more acceptable surrealist ideas - but in terms of making something which seems real which we know isn't real, I don't know if the general public has come to terms with what the surrealists were actually doing in the forties with their ideas about combing these images and our mental processes. I don't know about those more hardhitting things, but just in general graphic art, we see a lot of strange surrealist images often in advertising and various other things. LB: I haven't seen all that many! GO: Well, this eye-catching approach. Often there is something there that isn't 'supposed' to be there and so we look carefully, and an advertiser's won if he makes someone do that. Advertising is only a small thing - but I suppose people really aren't used to the surrealist thing - I suppose they usually associate it with a cult sort of thing - perhaps science fiction or fantasy... LB: How do you see fantastic illustration in terms of its effect on people? Do you see your illustration as making a political statement? Is your art something you want to affect people in a tangible way, or do you want it just to be entertainment? GO: No, I want to affect people. It's a great ambition that many writers or artists would have, that they want to affect people's way of living, and have them live a different way that may be more beneficial for them. I would like to see my artwork making people stop and look, and thinking "Maybe this is different...maybe I should think differently about this certain thing in the future" - or at least make them stop and wonder about something I've got in a drawing such as "Oh, I didn't realise that rocks were like that" or "I didn't realise that this real object could look like this" or maybe just evoking a sense of wonder like "I wonder if this could ever really exist" - this kind of questioning, which I think is really good for people to have - a constant questioning...I suppose the superficial thing is I'd like people to get an emotional response from my drawings such as "That's funny" or "That's horrible" or "That's awesome" or "I hate that" or "I like that". LB: There does seem to be a lot of humour in your work as well as the element of

surprise and shock. Do you think the humour is integral to all your work? GO: No it's not. It depends often on what I'm illustrating too. If I'm doing Lovecraft, humour is not going to enter into it very much because it's not the feeling in his work, that's running through, it's going to be more a sense of dread or horror or fear - whereas with Sheckley, humour's running all the way through it and he's often resting on it; but there is at the same time surreal images so you get this blend...I'm really governed by the fact that I mostly want to be faithful to what I'm illustrating. LB: But there's a fine line between what's funny and what's horrible sometimes. If something's grotesque it can be verging on the laughable. GO: Yeah, that's very true - like with Magritte, who I love very much as well - a lot of his, if not all of his paintings are based on the idea of combining elements that are usually not together, but in a 'realistic' way, so that you end up with something that's going to shock you but a lot of these are really funny because they're just so unimaginable, they're just strange and so you laugh at them - such as the shoes where the ends of the toes are turning into human toes this sort of thing, it's quite funny, really. LB: Humour can be a defence mechanism sometimes - if people don't know how to react, they laugh. GO: Yeah, as a kind of escape from a confrontation with the unknown. Yeah, I think so. My humour mainly only comes in where I see it is allowable from the original source. LB: Where do you see your work going in the next few years? I know you want to move into book illustration professionally if possible. GO: I'll continue to do noncommissioned illustrations to anything that I see as being an interesting sort of image. I see illustration as being really important to certain literature, especially literature that has not been illustrated before, simply because it's an interesting marriage, and often brings to life the whole thing. LB: We’ve talked before about the fact that not many illustrated books seem to be published these days, apart from children's books. Would you like to be part of a revival in illustrated literature? GO: Very much so. I'd like to see illustrations coming back into paperback fiction, and because I'm interested in fantasy and science fiction, I'd like to see these books with illustrations, I mean even a frontispiece is meaningful to the whole thing, and I think

illustration is a decoration, it's elaboration - it can also bring a different dimension into the whole work... I think it’s worth doing and I think people love drawings. Children love drawings and that's why children's books proliferate, but I don't see why adults should let their feelings change. I’d like to see a lot more Lovecraft illustration appearing in print and I don't say that just because I've illustrated Lovecraft, but because his literature, I find, is very inspiring to me - that's one thing I'd love to see happen. LB: There have been a lot of illustrations of Lovecraft's work over the years in fan magazines and that sort of thing but a lot of them seem to be incapable of capturing the atmosphere that Lovecraft evoked. Is that one of the challenges you feel with Lovecraft? GO: Yes, exactly, I think someone like Virgil Finlay, in Weird Tales, and other magazines was doing this very well. Yes, I feel it as a challenge to try and evoke that sense of wonder visually that is happening in a text but creating something new to go with that. LB: When you do a piece of work, do you visualise the whole thing from the outset, or does it take shape as it goes along? GO: Usually I've got a fixed idea about what the central subject is going to be in the drawing. As it goes along, the detail will start to grow, and the ideas will start to come in - new elements that I feel will be beneficial to the subject. It is a growing process. LB: You've illustrated songs as well as stories. What inspires you about - for instance King Crimson? GO: King Crimson is a really interesting band musically because of the amount of expression they put into their music. But not only that - I'm especially interested in their early lyrics , from Pete Sinfield, which are especially surrealistic - quite allegorical really - some of them are quite gothic in their imagery...There are certainly a lot of other songs in there that I'd like to illustrate - quite imaginative lyrics. It's not just the lyrics - it's the atmosphere of the song, what kind of feeling it evokes in me. Some of them are funny, some of them are deadly serious. LB: Is it the fact that the early King Crimson especially are a kind of rock/classical crossover? GO: I hate any kind of barriers like this - labels being given to bands - King Crimson is 'art/rock' because they have classical influences, but I see this as more a superior form of rock just on the general scale, but it's just another form of music. They call it art-rock but if you compare it to Motorhead you'll see that in Motorhead there's

no louds and softs, it's basically the one monotonous volume whereas in King Crimson or Yes, there are delicate phrases and then there are heavy statements - all these different variations such as you find in Tchaikovsky symphonies etc. ...it's saying things in sensitive ways, it's keeping you interested, it's making you feel many things during the course of the piece. The impact it has on me makes me want to

illustrate it. LB: You were saying earlier that when you were doing particular illustrations, you often listen to music or even that the piece of music you happen to be listening to at the time might influence how the work goes. GO: I suppose in a sense there are three parties working when I'm doing a drawing there's the original work from which I'm getting all my images, and then there's me who's doing the drawing and then there's music, because I always have the music playing - it must become part of the creative process.

INTERVIEW 2 CAPTURING ESSENCE: THE ART OF GAVIN L. O'KEEFE Interviewed by Leigh Blackmore 31.7.2007 LB: What do you see the role of the Australian book illustrator as being? GO: I can only speak for myself, being by default Australian and an illustrator. I have no idea about Australian illustrators and what they do. LB: What training have you had in your profession? GO: Self-training. LB: There is obviously some difference between commissioned work for publishers and non-commissioned work you are inspired to do. How do you approach these disparate areas of work? GO: I’m lucky enough these days not to be commissioned to illustrate for commercial publishers; such work in the past was more trouble than it was worth. I often wondered why they asked me to do such-&-such a job when

they were never happy with it. I would have thought that an illustrator is commissioned because his or her work is admired. (I’m referring here to Australian commercial publishers.) LB: Have there been specific areas of literature which have drawn you to work on illustrations? Or perhaps particular authors? GO: My original passion for literature of a fantastic nature (i.e. Science-Fiction, Fantasy, Horror) has grown to encompass the Crime Fiction genre, particular of the ‘old school’. In terms of authors who have been especially inspiring to me in recent times, I would mention Harry Stephen Keeler, Norman Berrow, Philip José Farmer, Richard A. Lupoff, Ed Wood, and Fender Tucker – all authors published by Ramble House. LB: Often the 'art' of book illustration has been underrated. What are your views on the importance and responsibility of the book illustrator? GO: I feel there’s as great a responsibility in illustrating a book as writing it. From the other side, the illustrator of today isn’t necessarily held in the same esteem as the illustrator of yore. You may hear someone today admiring a novel, but rarely would you hear them waxing lyrical about the cover design. LB: Is it possible to earn a good income from such a specific field as illustration? GO: I believe some individuals earn a good income in the field, though there wouldn’t be many. Again, the illustrator of the 19th or early 20th centuries was far more likely to make some kind of living for themselves. LB: You tend to specialize in very fine-line black and white drawings. Do you think that publishing trends weigh against your particular illustrative style? GO: ‘Publishing trends’, in the sense of the mass-market commercial publishers, have always weighed against my illustration style. I don’t think it’s just down to the fine black-&white line work alone – there’s something about what I do that doesn’t appeal to commercial publishers. LB: You seem to find inspiration in literary works by overseas writers. Are there Australian writers whose works you would like to illustrate? GO: Possibly some of the older Australian crime fiction writers, such as Max Afford. LB: Would you describe your works as experimental?

GO: Yes, I like to experiment at every opportunity. There’s always something else to try. Gives an edge to every project. LB: What projects are you interested in being involved in? GO: The projects I’m currently interested in are those initiated by my American publisher Ramble House. LB: What recent projects have you worked on which you found fulfilling? GO: All projects I’ve worked on for Ramble House.

MANTICHORUS: MAILING NOTES I keep having this fanciful idea that because this zine goes to both SSWFT and the EOD, I can make mailing comments for both apa in every issue, but it never works out that way, partly for reasons of space; EOD has about 20 active members per mailing. I’ve also stupidly mislaid my copies of the last EOD mailing (which I did read!) so I apologise to EOD members for not being able to comment on the zines of last mailing. I promise to be better organised in future! So, emcees on SWWFt’s last mailing only: Nightmayericana: I used to love reading Karl Edward Wagner’s stuff and I’m a big Moorcock fan but I didn’t realise there was an Elric story by KEW; goes to show I should read what’s on my shelves, because I have Midnight Sun. That shooting sounds terrible. Your reflections on cons disappearing remind me of how many cons there used to be in Sydney; these days there are none. In Australia we rely on Canberra, Melbourne and Perth for our cons. The wealthy get to fly to Perth but those in ‘reduced circumstances’ such as I cannot make them; Conflux in Canberra is the usual fare. Sercon: Ah, the theatre! Lucky you…You comment you have no idea why I don’t include some of my poetry in the SSWFT or EOD –

well, neither do I. Perhaps I will, in future issues. I suppose I hardly considered myself a poet until I was persuaded to gather some of my stuff; now people seem to like it – go figure. View from Koshtra Belorn: Greatly enjoyed your article on Blaylock. I haven’t read that early trilogy of his, though I’ve read a few of his, such as Land of Dreams. Also just acquired 13 Phantasms and Other Stories. I met Jennifer Fallon once when I was running Collins Bookshop in Sydney; didn’t find her very personable, but her books certainly sell well. Coin-op Open Casket Autopsy: Thanks for the illos, good to see. “Utterly impoverished” – I can relate! Quill is Mightier Than the Sword: Glad to hear the Bachelor of Theology is going well. As you know, I’m a pagan; wonder if they’ll ever offer a Bachelor in Pagan Studies lol☺. Enjoyed the interview with Scott Allie. I wasn’t aware of Codex Arcana (I don’t get out much) – must track it down. Hyperborean Exhalations: My God you read a lot Martin! I’m pining because I can’t afford to buy the new letters vols of Lovecraft such as the Barlow and the 2-vol Derleth, nor vols 1 & 2 of the complete CAS poetry. Hope I win the lottery! Thanks for all the other notes on things to want and buy (grrr). Great travelogue about your US trip. Enjoyed Freya’s humour in her Top 10 movies. Glad my Poe essay made you want to re-read EAP. You haven’t read all his stories! Egad! Stop reading Bujold and Zahn, and read the master! When the Change-Winds Blow: As with you, the idea of writing up Top Tens seems to have slipped by me. Perhaps I can present mine in a future issue. As a Birmingham ‘adopted son’, did you ever like Electric Light Orchestra or Black Sabbath who both hailed from there? They are two of my favourite bands. Good luck with the German. I have only rusty schoolboy French and Latin. The Lugosi Dracula has a charm all its own, despite the starchiness of the stage-adapted screenplay (and the armadillos on the steps of castle Dracula, always one of my fave bits!) But you can’t beat Stoker’s book, which is why I like Francis Ford Coppola’s screen adaptation despite some of its heavyhandedness in places. Elegant Amusement: Enjoyed your essay on “The Tempest”, which is my favourite Shakespeare play simply because of its predominance of supernatural elements. I have an unpublished horror story (originally written for the Arkham House anthology Nevermore; needless to say not published there!) which

combines Shakespeare’s Prospero with the Prince Prospero of Poe’s “Masque of the red Death”. ‘Proto-weird literature’ is a good term. Your heavy reliance on critics in this piece makes me assume it was written for one of your courses? Another fantastic (though latently so) element in the play is the witch Sycorax, imprisoned in the tree-trunk. Opharion: Mark, I seem to have mislaid your zine from this mailing. I do apologise! If I find it I’ll try and comment next time. When I win that lottery, I’ll buy your Ash-Tree Press books. I look forward also to reading your Wordsworth anthologies. Will you be doing more for them? Dalriadic Chronicles: Welcome o new Emergency editor of SWFFT! Perry Grayson’s The Black Druid? I don’t remember even seeing this! Did I lose my mind? Maybe I kissed a whole mailing for some reason. Grrr. (Just checked my files, and can’t find any trace at all of Mailing 30. I must have missed it. Hence all these comments are probably way out of date. Oh well). I take your point about academic jargon in essays. The ironic part is that at university they expect you to write using terms from literary theory including narratology, post-structuralism, deconstructionism and a variety of other critical approaches. I must say I agree with you that to say something in three words is better than saying it in twenty; yet to gain marks points in courses, one has to jump through the hoops they dictate. So if I present here material from any courses I’ve done, it may well contain lit-crit ‘jargon’. Just let your eyes glaze over…lol☺ I envy your access to TV Twilight Zone marathons. Here in Australia that old stuff never gets shown on TV (we only have a few channels). One of my most formative memories is having the shit scared out of me when I was about nine, staying overnight with a schoolfriend, and watching Richard Matheson’s “Nightmare at 20,000 Feet”. The image of the thing on the wing, its big blubbery lips pressed up against the aircraft window when the protagonist opened the curtain, gave me a horrible chill that I have never forgotten. I blame it all on Matheson! I’m also a big fan of the great Charles Beaumont, whose work I infinitely prefer to that of Bradbury. I was lucky to meet Beaumont’s friend Bill Nolan in LA back in 1990…