This was the spiritual successor to Roadside Picnic that I have always wanted.

(...)This was another successful Harrison for me – and like his latest The Sunken Land Begins To Rise Again, one that I will probably reread in the coming decade, just as I will reread Light. Now that I think of it, I guess I’ll enjoy Light even more now that I have a better grip on what Harrison tries to do with his books. I might even read Swing's last 50 pages again tonight – expect no update here however, it will be a private affair. Nova Swing is recommended, 4.5 stars – caveats below. I’ll...

Cyberdrunk.Wow.Any trendy genre is doomed to become desperately uncool in time. Take cyberpunk, bless it. That self-consciously wired sci-fi stepchild ended up making the journey from envelope-pushing early-80s edginess to nothing more than fodder for mid-90s straight-to-video stodge. But hey, it's not cyberpunk's fault. It heralded the age of information overload, but now that we're sliding down the infolanche for real, it can seem as naive as a 1950's World's Fair. A lot of its concerns - styl...

I had slightly higher expectations for this novel simply because I was blown away by all the awesome ideas that he managed to stuff into Light, and don't get me wrong, he continues the trend beautifully and a lot more cohesively from Vic's PoV, a travel agent that sometimes takes chumps to the Kefahuchi Tract, or at least to what has become of it after it descended to, and transformed, huge portions of Earth.To be clear, this means that the laws of what should or should not be possible have been...

I realised about quarter of the way through that this novel was basically an extended love letter to the Strugastky's Roadside Picnic. So I read it as such. It's also crossed with Chandler esque noir vibes that work much of the time but fail occasionally. Harrison's prose is as stylised and pleasing as in Light.

I don't know how this won the Arthur C. Clark Award and the Phillip K. Dick Award and was a finalist for the John W. Campbell Award. I really don't. The narrative jumps around without much warning, to the point where you're not sure what character's being talked about or whether it's the past, present, or future. It uses a terse pseudo noir narration that makes all that worse by cutting out words that would help the reader figure that kind of thing out. Characters react to things in ways that of...

I love the science fiction of M. John Harrison, which he writes in burnished steel, elegantly and smoothly detailing heartbreak and loss, perversion and excess, etching rapid, brutal violence with the same casual ease he tosses off bar-stool patter between mean-street acquaintances and gene-spliced miscreants. I have yet to come across another writer who can so vividly—yet matter-of-factly—describe the interplay between multidimensional mathematics and quantum exoticness in ultra-technology, whi...

Amazing achievement here, as Harrison pulls off the almost impossible feat of seamlessly blending hard sci-fi, cyberpunk, noir crime, homage to Strugatskys/Tarkowsky, while doing what all the best literature does i.e. cast light on essential human themes - in this case the yearning/struggle for meaning/place/happiness. Easiest 5 Stars I've awarded in a while.

This guy crafts sentences like Turner paints, there is an ethereal quality to almost every paragraph. Like I think, oh I got that, then only to realise after reading it for the third or fourth time, nope I don't. It's like trying to read a book comprised of poetry. One of my favourite and most sublime sentences is this 'Between them and the sea; and the horizon somewhere past the tremendous roll of surf, like a crease in a piece of paper the colour of doves'. It's a challenging book to read cos

Not as good as 'Light', but I love Harrison's literary style applied to speculative fiction themes.

Nova Swing - M. John Harrison's mix of Space Opera, Steampunk, Cyberpunk, Biopunk, New Wave, New Weird, Alien Invasion, Parallel Worlds and Retro Futurism to create his own unique literary brew. Wow! What a blastoff. Signature M. John Harrison since, after all, he told an interviewer he's the type of author who could see no good reason why you couldn't combine genres and do all types of fiction at once, the type of author who uses literary fiction to undercut sf and sf to undercut literary ficti...

Nova Swing is a lament. A Greek tragedy. A choir comes, holds the Gods as its witnesses and tells the sorrows and misfortunes which befell the hero. No heroic deed, no fatal clench from destiny, no suspense or tension is necessary. Only this joined presence of a choir, a hero, a place.The place is Saudade, the sorrow, the nostalgia, the longing for something gone. Ask a Portuguese to translate Saudade and he will baulk. There is something holy in this word, something so deeply rooted into the Po...

An SF "noir" type of thing. Full of atmosphere although sometimes lacking in forward momentum.This whole Kefahuchi Tract mystery advanced technology shtick obviously references Roadside Picnic and the solipsistic feel of it reminds of some of Steve Erickson work

(My review of this book is much longer than Goodreads' word-count limitations. Find the entire essay at the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com].)Regular readers know that I've been in a bit of a special situation for the last month, in that by random luck I was able to track down at my local library five of the ten twelve(!) science-fiction books nominated this year for either the Philip K Dick Award or the Hugo Award; added to my review of Charles Stross' Halting Sta...

Two stars means 'It was OK' according to goodreads which really sums up 95% of this novel. I'm not going to go to town on this review. In fact, it's more of a personal reminder or a general overview of why I didn't quite dislike it, but certainly didn't rate it at all. So here it is then. This is the story of an anomaly or part of it anyway that basically drops off the main anomaly and causes a kind of rent or tear through to somewhere else. Predictably, things come through from that side and pe...

The whole debate, which is mostly due to the 20th century publishing industries insidious pollution of our intellectual market, of whether or not Sci-Fi is trash or literature is best summed up by the Ted Sturgeon quote, “Yes 95% of it is trash, but 95% of everything is trash.” But what dyed in the wool science fiction books of recent times match masterpieces of contemporary literature for tone, symbolism, meaning, intelligence, and ferocity? On this short shelf I would place Gene Wolfe’s Fifth

Marvelous novel which is set in a sea/space-port intersected by the Kefahuchi Tract. Now, that I've reread Light and read Nova Swing, it's, finally, the time for Empty Space, the conclusion of Kefahuchi Tract trilogy.

4 Stars Nova Swing book two in the Light series by M John Harrison was bound to come up short when compared to the brilliance of the first book Light. This was exasperated for me as I read this one immediately following my read of it. One thing that they both share in common is the brilliant writing of M John Harrison. His books are literary and verbose and they deserve a wide audience..... ""You must be careful of me, Vic. I'm not really here.""Nova Swing is a much smaller scoped story that tak...

I read this for three reasons:1. I figured it would be best to read it after Light, seeing as they occupy the same universe;2. To move it from the traveling library into the Massachusetts semi-permanent library; and3. So that I could have three books in a row on my Read shelf with cats on the cover.The third reason was actually the deciding point, and if I knew where it was I'd consider rereading The Schrödinger's Cat Trilogy for a try at four books featuring cats on the cover. (Or maybe Tailcha...