M. John Harrison

Surprising and grand, I'm always thrilled and amazed when I get to read a serious SF about the soft and squishy underbelly of the universe. The world-building and the span of time and the characterizations are tops, too. The writing is actually pretty spiffy, too, with very clever idea-connections between every chapter and deep mirroring going on, not to mention a thousand and a half great SF ideas and themes running around and deepening the tale.

I would never have read this if Gaiman hadn't show more selected it for our notice, honestly, and that's a real shame because it's pretty damn high in not only literary quality and style, but also all the little things that make up a very memorable tale. Virtual reality, post-cyberpunk, dreams and alternate dimension-spaces, and broken physics. That's some great stuff, let me tell you. It's broken in terms of how certain particular math-branches see it, but each alien race manages to make a full math proof that disproves all the others and yet EVERYTHING works. It reminds me of all the alien races in Brin's Uplift saga with so many ways to break space, including the ones that Believe and then Make. :) Quantum Awesomeness.

Quantum mechanics in SF can be rather streamlined and silly, sometimes, but then we get works like this that don't focus so much on descriptions of how it works or any small engineering applications, but instead become a grand world-building exercise of what happens to so many alien species (and human) when they simply want to know why or what a portion of deep space is doing when it goes very wrong.

The Kefahuchi Tract. How many aliens and now humanity has broken themselves trying to understand what is happening there? Go in, and never come back out. Anything that can be imagined or tried, from super smart races to BDOs have been thrown at it, and every race fails. Humanity is in the process of it's greedy drive to understand and crack open its secrets, too.

We have three characters that run square up against some sort of entity called the Shrander. One is a modern physicist that also happens to be a serial murderer. One is an odd adventurer and virtual slacker from the future, and another is a heavily modded female captain of one of the really *broken* alien physics crafts that travel in 14 dimensions, with four of time, and all of the tales are pretty amazing.

Lots of sex, too. Not gratuitous, but it is part of the theme and it works very well, literarily, into the final message. Things are quite dark, but there is also light. :)

This is a novel that should be very welcome to hardcore Space Opera fans who love Iain M Banks, Reynolds, and some of the wilder and weirder authors of Science Fiction. It's not for the faint of heart, either. It's rich, rich, rich with ideas. :) I can't wait to read the rest of the trilogy, now! show less

I was here once before, but that was in a different life, a life where I was only a reader, not a writer of science fiction. Now I see the Kefahuchi Tract with new eyes. The fantastic details, magical, metaphorical physics, and techno-poetic prose are dazzling, bringing to life within me a jealous monster. Harrison tows some of his suns into Radio Bay with alien technology. I use a devil to move stars into my Cluster. Harrison says, “suddenly everything was out of the bag: every idea show more anyone had ever had about the universe was available, operating, and present.” That is my “spiritual universe”, my “heaven.” So, sometimes we think the same thoughts, but his language is light-years ahead of mine. But as the Shrander says, “Don’t be naive, Steady Eddy. You can’t stay still in this life. You go on or you go down. What’ll it be?” It’ll be, read more of Harrison’s books, follow his ion trail. show less

M. John Harrison's 2020 novel The Sunken Land Begins to Rise Again is firmly in the trajectory established by his earlier books The Course of the Heart and Signs of Life. Like them, it delivers an unsettling sense of a universal sacrament only partially accessible to human understanding.

The principal male character Shaw never has his given name established. His doddering mother calls him by various names that he rejects, and he once insists to her that he is Alex "to test her" (25). The show more principal female character Victoria has a surname that "was either Norman or Nyman, at that point Shaw wasn't sure which" (4), and it continues to oscillate throughout the book: Nyman in relationship to him and Norman when she is the subject of a more independent account. Shaw is in his fifties, Victoria in her forties, and both seem to be in the throes of aimless self-redefinition. For most of the book they are apart, and their interactions are more expressive of their individual dilemmas than any genuine perception of or care for one another.

Some exterior cultural objects assume outsized proportions in the story. Charles Kingsley's Victorian fairytale The Water Babies serves as something like The King in Yellow or The Necronomicon. There is also a significant painting: Bocklin's Sea Idyll (1887), which Harrison eventually describes in some detail, but which seemed significant enough to drive me to the 'net for a digital image more than a hundred pages earlier. Both of these are bound up in a larger theme of disturbing aquatic kinship, one that evokes Lovecraft's "Shadow Over Innsmouth" without the rustic insularity.

Also, unlike the imaginary "Arkham country," Harrison's story includes an itinerary of actual places that reflect a vivid psychogeographic sensibility. I considered at one point using the 'net for maps and street views to trace the various explicit place references scattered through the book (presumably more transparent to readers from England), but I didn't want to interrupt my reading pace for that purpose. I did afterwards give myself a virtual tour of Mortlake Cemetery.

My comparanda in this review have all been from the weird horror genre, but I'm not sure that I would classify this book as horror. Perhaps weird unease would be more to the point. Its concern with atavistic resurgence somewhat mirrored Lafferty's The Devil Is Dead, but with greater uncanniness and without the epic sensibility that Lafferty brought to the concept. Harrison's story is resolutely quotidian for all of its irruptive strangeness. That gives it an extra dimension of menace. show less

Like the titular heart, some kind of crossing point or median between earth and heaven, or the rose which is the book's principal motif and the obsession of its narrator, or the attar, the heart of the rose which haunts his dreams, this book seems to circle around itself, to be composed of oblique approaches to some unspeakable central truth or mystery. This is what the narrator, his two student friends, and the ridiculous Aleister Crowley-a-like magician Yaxley supposedly broke through to show more in the catastrophic occult ritual which they spend the rest of their lives barely able to retrospectively understand. Some kind of historical turning point, which I took to be an analogue of the fall of Constantinople, that casts ripples backwards and forwards in time fucking things up randomly as it goes. Pam's haunted by a pair of levitating copulators, Lucas by a grim dogged midget... these are weird enough, but it's Harrison's numinous prose, his intense feel for colour and texture and scent, the deeply experiential nature of his writing, that does most to convey a sense of just how alien and awful and indescribable real magic might be if it existed. Alright, I'll say it, it's Lovecraftian, this wary obsessional circling around the heart of a matter too weighty to portray except indirectly and too mind-obliterating to assay a description of. show less