io9: m. john harrison

The Books That Stick With You Long After You Read Them

Charlie Jane Anders — Fri, 23 Oct 2009 07:30:00 PDT

We're used to having snap judgments about books — especially if you're reviewing them, but even if you're just putting them aside and talking about them. But the best books often stick with you long after you've read them, and keep mutating in your consciousness months later, writes Graham Sleight in Locus Roundtable:

As I've mentioned here before, I'm gobsmacked - as we Brits say - with admiration for Greer Gilman's Cloud and Ashes. It's not a book I can claim to understand anything like fully and so, as in the past, I'll duck out of offering a full review. But individual bits of it, images or aspects of its use of language, keep coming back to me like depth-charge puns you only get three months after the fact. (The same is true of another great playing-with-language novel, Damon Knight's Humpty Dumpty: An Oval.)

And sometimes the stuff that stays with you is just plain weird, like the cliff made of earlobes in M John Harrison's otherwise seemingly mimetic Climbers, the description of the desert in Joanna Russ's "Bodies", or - perhaps my favorite piece of prose anywhere - the two pages about toothpaste tubes in Gravity's Rainbow. Nothing really links all of these examples, except that for me (an enormously subjective measure, I know) they stick with me.

One Author's List Of Quite Possibly Essential Science Fiction Includes William Gibson — And Event Horizon

Charlie Jane Anders — Thu, 14 May 2009 16:00:00 PDT

Vinconium and Light author M. John Harrison posted a list of "some interesting science fiction" that's been causing lots of discussion — it's not framed as a list of essential SF reading, or the greatest SF books of all time, just books that "turned [Harrison] on when he read them." And yet, it looks like a pretty great stab at a new SF canon, including somewhat neglected authors like Pat Cadigan and Justina Robson along with William Gibson and Samuel Delany. Most provocatively of all, he sneaks just a few movies in there, including some unlikely candidates like Flatliners and Event Horizon. The best thing of all about Harrison's list? It's almost certainly got some titles you haven't read yet on it. [Ambiente Hotel]

Your Personality Is Being Rewritten On The Fly

Charlie Jane Anders — Thu, 26 Mar 2009 11:42:06 PDT

Terri Schiavo was "the first celebrity posthuman," but posthumanism is coming for all of us, according to a group of science fiction writers who met to discuss the future of identity and media.

Writer Chris Nakashima-Brown just got back from a three-day colloquium on "parallel worlds" in Mexico, with Bruce Sterling, Linda Nagata, Mark Dery, Christopher Priest and M. John Harrison. Nakashima-Brown posted a tantalizing collection of soundbites about the Singularity, the economy and our posthuman future.

Among the choicest are Christopher Priest's claim that only speculative fiction novels really put the individual's choices at the center of the story: "Only in the modern speculative novel is responsibility the core, the argument, the message."

Bruce Sterling argues that celebrities, athletes and models will be the leading edge of posthumanism, but then he also says, "In the future, the poor will not be able to avoid becoming posthuman, because they just can't afford it."

And M. John Harrison says culture may already have collapsed, "and we may already be on the other side of it." Now, our personalities are being mediated through mass media. And the job of science fiction is to show how we're "compiling our personalities from moment to moment." The writer's task, says Harrison, is to "write about individuals who are constantly being mediated and re-mediated. Not alienated, but pureed." (Which sounds sort of Dickian to me.)

Nakashima-Brown's unreconstructed notes are a bit frustrating to read, but it sounds like it was a fascinating discussion, and just the bits you can read are thought-provoking.

Posthuman image from Anders Raytracing Page. [No Fear Of The Future]