There's an almost impossibly extended sequence of mindfuckery and mysticism toward the end that I'm not sure I fully grasp. But whatever: Harrison is smart and sly enough to slip in a few self-referential asides about ungraspability. I was left feeling, I dunno, spun around, ravished, awed despite a predictability or two. The question of whether the language of intentionally impenetrable postmodern space opera is really the best medium for this sort of thing nagged me a bit. As shaped by Harriso...

As a rule, the only information you can trust in the Daily Mail is the price on the front. But on the cover of this book is a quote from them, proclaiming Empty Space "SF at its most astounding" - an entirely accurate assessment. And what better way to establish, even before the first page, an uneasy mood, a sense of a world where basic laws of the universe fold, warp or decay? Harrison's tired, clunky near future, and the grotty grandeur of a 25th century which has found new vices but no new vi...

Finally finished - this book was so strange that it's hard to say what was it exactly about. Still confused after the ending...

In his blogs, Harrison often states that the act of writing is a quest for identity, a means for him to understand himself in this world. So, Empty Space essentially is the psyche of Harrison himself, laid out as visceral as neon entrails left in the garden at dusk. He crafts tantalizing clues, slight references to inspirations, influences, and secret obsessions. A viewpoint is rehashed out between multiple characters, and the emergent property is of disassociation. Everyone's trying to find the...

Empty Space is – after Light and Nova Swing – the third installment in M. John Harrison’s Kefahuchi Tract trilogy. Nobody who has read the previous volumes (and I strongly recommend doing so before tackling this one) will expect any major reveals or a neat tying-up of loose threads from this, but even so, the lack of closure here is quite amazing, and I for one can not discern any reason why the author should not continue the series, should he feel so inclined.Having said that, I should

The book equivalent of a miles Davis fusion jazz solo. Stunning.

Harrison is a real rollercoaster of a writer for me. I absolutely loved the previous book in the series, but this one I couldn’t make heads or tails of. So, finally, here I am, about a third of the way in, and I give up. The thing is, it’s been a while since I read the previous book. Characters reappear, and I vaguely remember their names, but nothing more. Things happen, described in detail in Harrison’s beautifully dense prose. But then it gets so dense that from reading session to reading ses...

The perfect formula for the opposite of a best seller in America:1) it sounds British2) has a very good vocabulary3) has some scifi words4) doesn't skimp on the violence (or weird sex)5) unlikeable charactersIt's as immediately unappealing as I remember Light being (which I didn't finish). Whenever he makes a comparison in his descriptions, I just shrug and go "I don't know what that is". A lot of people respect him, so I'll keep plugging. I've read 2 chapters. Some of the chapters are in the pr...

This book is difficult, complex, and ingenious--maybe maybe not Harrison's best, but almost definitely his most ambitious. Especially over the first 100 pages, I struggled with it in a way I haven't with a text in a long time: even aside from his prose (which is pretty much flawless), this is a novel so itself, so full of empty space (on every level), that a lot of the time it felt impossible to put together; Harrison somehow managed to create something intensely imagist and strange while still

Glorious ending to the Kefahuchi Tract trilogy. I've never read better literature on the unknownness of the universe and of the human being.How I'll love to write the review of the entire trilogy for Galileo!

Better than Nova Swing; not as good as Light (but what is?) If Light is full of the "sparks in everything," and Nova Swing is about boundary states, then Empty Space focuses on the nothingness that separates people, places, and times - the "gutters" between two panels in a comic. The subtitle is "a haunting," and the book is certainly haunting.

The finale to Harrison’s trilogy is as confounding, obtuse, and beautiful as the rest of the series. His prose is crafted so impeccably and relentlessly it is hard to resist chewing over each line and word choice (it is also very discouraging for the amateur writer) and occasionally losing the plot. But with Harrison you know you are going to read it again, soon I might restart the trilogy and see how they work together. His imagery, imagination, and prose are on such a level that they put much

This trilogy has been constantly interesting and nicely off kilter. You won't find much explicitly explained but instead an atmosphere of weirdness and slight dissociation from what we know as reality.In common with the 1st book 3 plot lines run in parallel and there's an underlying sense of humour to it all. In places reminiscent of JG Ballard which is saying something as his style is famously distinctive. In pl

This book focuses equally hard on both the inner space of the mind trapped in the quantum foam of the universe where neither time nor cats can be extricated, and upon the vastness of space that is slowly, inextricably showing us all that we don't quite fit in it and it wants to tell you, slowly, exactly why... by transforming us all.Of course, we really oughtn't take it personally. After all, every other alien race had to discover it for themselves and probably went mad in the attempt to make se...

This book ... It is brilliant, utterly f****ng brilliant, but I also did not understand one bit of it, and it took me forever to get through. Harrison is clearly not interested in telling fun or even compelling stories – in fact, he's so decidedly not interested in these things that he manages to make anyone who ever claimed a story need be fun or compelling an illiterate idiot.Not sure if he's right about that, of course (or rather, I'm pretty sure that there's something profoundly wrong with t...

One of my favourite SF books ever is Nova by Samuel R. Delany, and Harrison's Kefahuchi Tract trilogy reminds me so much of Delany. The sense of a wild frontier, crazy characters caught up in a maelstrom of events in a dark and unredictable universe, where nothing is as it seems and everyone is damaged in one way or another.A lot of modern SF seems sanitised and focused on technology; Harrison's 'singularity without an event horizon' is dirty, smelly, sexy, and filled with danger and dangerous /...

Well that was an experience.

2 Stars Empty Space is the third book in the Empty Space Trilogy by M. John Harrison. I tried to make it through. I tried hard. All three of these books are tough and demanding reads that need focus to be clear. What a tough book this one was. I realized after days of reading(I am not a slow reader) that I was only at 41% and I couldn't tell you anything about what I had muddled through up to that point. It was time for me to call it. I was frustrated while trying to read this one, probably too

Why can't the world that concerns us be a fiction and why does it need an author? I suppose you could read Empty Space as a standalone novel, though it makes [somewhat] more sense when you've previously immersed yourself in the trilogy's two brilliant opening acts: the tripartite tales of grungy, multi-physics miracles in a 25th century depressingly continued from our own era—and in the latter of which a disturbed serial killer scientist is molding that very future in his vision-worked hands—

Empty Space is easily the hardest SF I've ever read, in both senses of the word. It is also my first M. John Harrison I've ever read. It might not have been the wisest place to start, but it hasn't put me off reading more Harrison as I loved his prose and the challenges his writing poses to the reader. This book was hard work for me as hard SF isn't something my mind processes easily and I'm proud that I finished it and I found it very much worth the work as in the end the puzzle pieces fell tog...