A Conversation with M. John Harrison, Author of the Award-Winning Nova Swing
5:05 PM PDT, September 27, 2007
 Earlier this year, M. John Harrison's Nova Swing won the Arthur C. Clarke Award for best science fiction novel, as reported here. This month Nova Swing is being published in North America by Bantam Spectra. Over the last thirty-plus years, Harrison has published some of the most challenging, honest, and, quite frankly, beautiful fiction in the English language. Books like Light (winner of the Tiptree Award), Viriconium (collecting all of his Viriconium stories), and the definitive collection Things That Never Happen have demonstrated Harrison's range and his subtlety. I spoke with Harrison via email earlier this month to hear more about the new novel and his other projects. Amazon.com: You've returned to the same setting as Light with Nova Swing, but Nova Swing isn't really a sequel, right? M. John Harrison: It's a kind of companion piece. It's less sprawling than Light. It could be read independently but there's some interplay, which you would miss if you hadn't read the other book. I wanted to revisit the genetically-modified servants and entertainers--the prostitutes, gladiators, rickshaw girls and gun-kiddies--and show them as more human than some of the human beings. A key element I wanted to extend from the first book was the idea of human behaviour as code, further undermining conventional ideas we have of personality, character and consciousness. I liked the idea of a kind of life based on complex algorithms which can run themselves on any platform. The Kefahuchi Code is imagined as preceding physics in some way. Reality is just another substrate it can run on. Amazon: If a reader came up to you and asked you what Nova Swing was about, what would you say? M. John Harrison: It's about being a meme and not knowing it. The set-up is this: we are on one of the Beach planets. A generation--perhaps two--after Ed Chianese took his ship The Black Cat off the Beach and into the Kefahuchi Tract, part of the Tract has fallen to earth in a city called Saudade. It's a zone of the unreliable. It's infected with K-code: or maybe it is K-code, the wrong physics loose in the universe. Everyone is drawn to the "event site" like moths to a flame, from failed entradista Vic Serotonin to middle class tourist Elizabeth Keilar; from Vic's friend Pauli DeRaad, ex vacuum commando and all-round Earth Military Contracts factotum, to Lens Aschemann the dissociated police detective. They're all looking for something their lives don't show them. But for everyone who goes in, something new and weird is coming out... Amazon.com: You've written novels with contemporary settings, novels that mix the contemporary and SF, like Light, and then something like Nova Swing, which is all set in the future. What is it that attracts you to the SF element? M. John Harrison: SF is an opportunity to have an intense relationship with your own imagination. It's a kind of drive-by poetry, trashy and addictive; it's fun. After that, for me, it's an opportunity to explore that kind of imaginative artefact from inside, and use a little camped-up contemporary science as a way of generating new metaphors around my typical obsessions. While I agree with almost everything that Geoff Ryman and the Mundanes say about SF, I can't join them because I find it impossible to assign different levels of plausibility to acts of the imagination. If you limit yourself on the grounds that faster-than-light travel isn't "realistic," you might as well go whole hog and write only fiction set on the street where you live; if you limit yourself to that, you might as well go whole hog and write nothing but nonfiction; if you limit yourself to that, you might as well go whole hog, admit that writing is not the real world--and can't even successfully represent the real world--and give it up altogether. I'd be happy to do that, and indeed I've already done all of those things more than once in the last forty years. But if you're going to write SF in the first place, why not lie back, admit it's a farrago, and enjoy it ? I think there's a great deal to be gained from revaluing and enjoying the distinction between the invented and the real. As long as you maintain that, SF's a great genre. Amazon.com: When you start a new novel, is it easier every time because you've got more experience each time? [Note Harrison's blog entry on this topic.--Ed.] M. John Harrison: If you were trying to solve the same problems every time, I think it would get easier. But if you can maintain a complex relationship with who you are, and always let form show you what you could say (rather than going the rationalist route of selecting a form that fits the things you already expect to be saying), the next book will always be a challenge. Whatever you do, it's hard to escape your typical subject matter and obsessions. The main thing is to look for situations in which you can make bad decisions, otherwise you're writing from a template. Amazon.com: You read and review a lot of novels for English media. What's most disappointed you and/or most surprised you in a good way recently? M. John Harrison: I didn't enjoy House of Meetings. I thought Amis's need to add literary value obscured the human facts of the Gulag. By the opposite token, Dave Eggers' What Is the What is one of the most powerful and affecting books I've read, precisely because he doesn't let his own needs and abilities overshadow the work the book is doing. Though I was a bit sniffy with it in the Times Literary Supplement, I really rather enjoyed my encounter with The Dictator and the Hammock, by Daniel Pennac. Pennac is as intrusive an author as Amis, but that's part of the contract: you don't read him, you have a lively argument with him then lose your temper because he was gaming you all along. Someone else who is gaming you, in a different way, is Chuck Palahniuk. I adored Rant, though I found its voice a bit overpowering by the end. Apart from the Eggers, the books I've liked most recently haven't been books I've reviewed: Ali Smith, The Accidental; Houellebecq's Atomised [The Elementary Particles in the US]; The Mistress's Daughter by AM Homes. Amazon.com: What projects are you working on now? M. John Harrison: I'm writing a collection of short stories. I'm foraging about in the set-up for the next novel, trying to set enough limits for it to be writeable. I've been blogging at Uncle Zip's Window. (That turned out to be a project in itself.) I recently wrote some stories for Barbara Campbell's web-based durational performance 1001 Nights Cast; and, along with Tim Etchells, Deborah Levi, Jo Randerson, and Richard Maxwell, generated text for a performance by Kate McIntosh (Loose Promise), which premieres in Berlin later this year. The 1001 Nights rules encourage you to write quickly, relinquish control of the product, give up the obsessive write/rewrite cycle. Challenging for someone like me. --Jeff
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About this blog
Mix one part casual anthropologist with two parts avid reader, add the occasional culinary inspiration and a penchant for haiku, and what you end up with is Anne Bartholomew. When she's not working her way through the books on her nightstand, Anne tests new recipes and wishes she could write like Billy Collins.
Dave Callanan is a full-contact reader. A quick glance at him immersed in a book will always reveal the title's genre. He grins broadly with comedies, furrows his brow at dramas, and nervously bites his lip during thrillers. It's no surprise that even on a crowded bus, the seat next to Dave is rarely taken. Daphne Durham: Rarely seen without a book, she reads while walking to work, at red lights, and before the movie starts. She keeps a "just in case" book in her purse for emergencies (like an extra long line at the grocery store). Reading taste ranges from literature to pure trash. Jon Foro is not ogling you; he just wants to know what you're reading. A word freak since age six when he ordered his first Big Boy Book with a coupon clipped from the back of a Cheerios box ("Hardy Boys 53: The Clue of the Hissing Serpent"), Jon enjoys ancient history, literary stylists (Nabokov and Amis), true-life adventures & nature writing (Abbey, J.W. Powell), and books about bears. Lauren Nemroff insists on carrying her own bag (purse, suitcase, backpack, or beach bag). Not because she thinks chivalry is dead, but because it usually contains several pounds of books. The contents: new fiction, the latest art and photography books, mysteries and thrillers, a section of the Times book review, and a vintage Amazon bookmark (ca. 1998). Tom Nissley knew he wasn't like the other kids when they assigned Thomas Hardy's "Return of the Native" in 10th grade and he spent dreamy afternoons in Wessex with Clym Yeobright and Eustacia Vye (Eustacia Vye!) and then came back to school to find that everybody else thought it was "boring." Once called "the Cameron Crowe of the food world," Brad Thomas Parsons balances his pursuits equally between all-things literary and culinary. He has interviewed Mario Batali, Danny Meyer, Ina Garten, Anthony Bourdain, Giada De Laurentiis, and Marco Pierre White, along with Jon Stewart, Amy Sedaris, Don Rickles, Sarah Vowell, and Chuck Barris, among others. He is a regular guest on Tom Douglas' Seattle Kitchen where he offers commentary on trends in cookbooks and food lit. Other Contributors: Heidi Broadhead and Paul Hughes have just started raising their first child, Silas, amidst piles of well-loved books. In utero, the little guy heard a steady stream of plays (including Macbeth and King Lear more than once) and poetry (by the likes of Elizabeth Bishop and Frank O'Hara). Now Silas is more likely to have Entertainment Weekly, the Sunday New York Times, or some random blog post read aloud to him, as his parents try to catch up on sleep and rejoin the world. (Until he can read on his own--and hopefully not even then--Silas will not be exposed to the NYT Sunday Styles section.) Mike Smith reads a lot about geology, languages, and British history, and is working his way through an ad hoc self-made syllabus of British literature to cover up the gaps from his feckless undergrad days. As an adolescent he read way too much Robert E. Howard, Edgar Rice Burroughs, and Alistair Maclean. He is a staunch supporter of the Oxford comma. Jeff VanderMeer's sense of adventure is so strong that as a kid he hoped he’d lose his eye in a tragic accident so he could wear a pirate patch. Maybe that's why as an adult he likes fantasy, SF, horror, magic realism, slipstream, interstitial, and whatever-you're-calling-it- over-smokes-and-coffee-this-morning. An author inspired by everything from Nabokov through Hindu superhero comics and Hong Kong cult action films, he has been known to write about squid, frogs, and fungus. Once, he wanted to be a marine biologist, but only so he could putter around in tidal pools. |
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