#mjohnharrison — Public Fediverse posts

““The strangenesses are multiplying… though the world before they began was already a strange place, so often it’s difficult to know if an event falls into the category of the old, ordinary strangenesses or the new, extraordinary variety.”*…

In a review of five recent books, Robert Baskin considers the genre of “weird fiction”…

On Tuesday, April 29, 2003, the British science fiction and fantasy writer M. John Harrison [accomplished author, Booker judge, and long-list nominee this year] asked a question on Third Alternative magazine’s messageboard: “The New Weird. Who does it? What is it? Is it even anything?” This incited a taxonomic fury, as writers, fans, and amateur scholars attempted to define this new subgenre. Harrison eventually offered his own definition; the New Weird, like stories published in the namesake early twentieth-century pulp magazine Weird Tales, is a mix of “horror, sf, and fantasy,” with an emphasis on the horror…

[Baskin usess the books in question to review the genre’s history (Poe, Lovecraft, Edith Wharton [!]) and its current state (Miéville, VanderMeer, et al.); he concludes…]

… So why read this shit? Why reissue it? 

Weird fiction is a literature of crisis. The main narrative move of every important Weird fiction story is the Weird intrusion, the appearance of the new and wrong object or sensation or practice that does not belong. These intrusions challenge and endanger the protagonist’s sense of metaphysical stability. In the King in Yellow, the Weird intruder is the titular play—the madness of the text refuses to remain on the page. China Miéville argues that this awareness of crisis makes Weird Fiction uniquely open to interpretation: a “leeway for readings against the ideological grain is part of what makes Weird Fiction such an ongoingly fascinating field.” The Weird is not just a literature of fear and repulsion; it also always includes wonder and attraction. “The Shadow Over Innsmouth” – Lovecraft’s contribution to the Weird Mount Rushmore – depicts the state’s extermination of a group of racially ambiguous New Englanders who made the mistake of breeding with fishy foreigners. Despite this, the story ends in sublime ambiguity [spoiler for a nearly century-old story to follow]. The protagonist, who has spent the rest of the story in hateful terror of the Innsmouth locals, discovers that he is one of them, and in my favorite passage in all of Lovecraft, decides to go to the sea with his cousin and embrace The Weird: “We shall swim out to that brooding reef in the sea and dive down through black abysses to Cyclopean and many-columned Y’hanthlei, and in that layer of the Deep Ones we shall dwell amidst wonder and glory for ever.” What was once feared is now cause for exultation. The move between terror and wonder recurs throughout the Weird corpus—if you’re attuned to its Weird frequencies…

A literature for our times: “‘We Shall Dwell Amidst Wonder and Glory For Ever’: On Weird Fiction,” from @clereviewbooks.bsky.social.

* Salman Rushdie, Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights

###

As we engage extremity, we might recall that i was on this date in 1946 that Santa Claus Land, the world’s first themed amusement park, opened in Santa Claus, Indiana…

In 1941, Louis J. Koch visited the town of Santa Claus in Indiana. He found it sad that some children would visit this town eager to meet Santa only to find that he was not there. This fueled his desire to create a Santa Claus Land park where kids could see Santa any time of the year. Due to World War II, construction didn’t begin until August 1945.

The park opened on this day in 1946 with free admission, a toy shop, toy displays, a restaurant, a few rides and of course the jolly old elf himself. Later, a deer farm was added.

In 1955, a new section, Pleasureland (now known as Rudolph’s Reindeer Ranch) was added. As the park grew, the focus of the park grew as well focusing on families rather than just children.

By 1984, the park added a Halloween and a Fourth of July section to the park and changed its name to Holiday World. In 1993, the Koch family added the Splashin’ Safari Water Park. In 2006, during the park’s 60th anniversary, Holiday World added a Thanksgiving section.

– source

source

Happy birthday to the incomparable British writer #MJohnHarrison, born #OTD in 1945. His books are in almost constant rotation here, and it’s no exaggeration to say I’d probably see the world in a very different way were it not for his work.

Yes, I have multiple editions of The Course of the Heart. Can you ever have *too many* editions of one of the greatest novels ever written?

Many happy returns, Mike!

#SpeculativeFiction #WeirdFiction #ScienceFiction #LiteraryFiction #Books #Bookstodon @bookstodon

"The enigmas of reality,” he explains, “as in, say, quantum mechanics, aren’t the real mysteries any more. The real mysteries are what the fuck we’ve done to the world, why we did it, and what epistemology we used to perform this act of vandalism.”
Conveying bafflement without sacrificing readability"
Enjoying this interview after finishing 'The End of Everything' (best way round, I reckon - and strapline feels irrelevant)
#MJohnHarrison
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2026/jun/21/m-john-harrison-if-we-met-a-real-alien-wed-have-no-clue-what-they-thought

I finished M. John Harrison’s new novel The End of Everything the other day and have been musing about what it is—and what it isn’t—ever since.

Absurd and beautiful, full of fractured and fragmented images, it tells of a world that has lost itself and the people who are lost within it, perhaps even lost beyond its fragile bounds. The story is unsettling in many ways, and it’s in the book’s most mundane elements that the greatest upset and confusion dwells. I don’t know, and don’t need to know, what the exact nature of the catastrophe is. Somehow, that doesn’t seem to be the point of it. And that might just be the most uncanny and disturbing aspect of all.

I love Mike’s work, and the way he writes—like absolutely no one else does; I feel he is one of our finest writers of the late 20th and early 21st centuries. And I love this novel. It is mysterious and profound, and profoundly unnerving in the best possible way. I’ll read it again soon, as I do with all of his books.

Novel of the year for me, no question.

#MJohnHarrison #TheEndOfEverything #SpeculativeFiction #ScienceFiction #ExceptItsNotScienceFiction #LiteraryFiction #Bookstodon @bookstodon

Summer reading. I left a place for the new #MJohnHarrison…
#Bookstodon #SummerReading #TheEndOfEverything

@LillyHerself

I could imagine Harrison felt that his creativity is best served by a life free of micro interactions on our micro-conversation site. Our great loss as Fedizens, but very likely our gain as his grateful readers. It is not for us mortals to tell the Gods how they speak to us. :-)

(If I can find a late-enough night train back home from London, I might just manage to attend his conversation session at Foyles on 21 July.)

#MJohnHarrison

To say I’m excited about the impending publication of the new novel, The End of Everything, by M. John Harrison would be something of an understatement.

“Phillip Tennent makes his living at the tideline, collecting artefacts that wash up from the Channel. It's been years since the crisis changed everything, but its exact nature remains obscure. Government barely functions, the seas are full of new creatures, Europe has been mislaid. It feels like the end.

Now Phillip has fished out of the water an object he can't keep. A creature that keeps changing. An artefact he must take inland, before it destroys everything he thinks he knows.”

I love that cover design, the sickly way the “Everything” in the title collapses towards the bottom of the page, a metaphor for decay, runoff, entropy or perhaps something much worse.

As another (connected) Mike once asked “What is the exact nature of the catastrophe?”

#MJohnHarrison #TheEndOfEverything #SpeculativeFiction #Books #Bookstodon @bookstodon

@brood

Yes, sadly M John Harrison has closed his account. On his blog he made a statement on 6 January that he has disconnected from Bluesky and Mastodon.

I don't think this has anything to do with Mastodon specifically, it seems he just wants to focus on his writing. He also has disabled comments on his blog entries. May the greater calm be conducive to his writing.

I fully understand this decision, though for us here it's a real loss. I loved his posts, they made a difference. It felt he belonged here.

I share your sense of loss.

#MJohnHarrison

https://ambientehotel.wordpress.com/page/2/

@mjohnharrison

"... so I know how those churns feel: out of one's time."

#MJohnHarrison #time

@mjohnharrison

Thank you, M John Harrison, for this blog post. As ever, surprising and slightly disorienting, and thus also in a twisted way very re-assuring.

On seeing architecture and making sense of it:

"I don’t know what I’m looking at in any sense–architecturally, historically, in terms of economics, occupation, lifestyles, materials technology and the layers of technique that every extension or roof repair or repurposing of a stable block has demanded. When you are neither Meades or Pevsner, you have to make the best of the glaringly vacant space of your viewpoint; your illiteracy. In fact I wouldn’t want to do anything else. But the older I get the more I’m forced to admit slyly the difficulties of this position; & I regret that I never learned what I needed to."

Wow. I will let these thoughts work themselves through my system.

#MJohnHarrison #architecture #MakingSenseOfThings

#NowRereading The Course of the Heart by #MJohnHarrison (in the new Serpent’s Tail edition published last week).

In the intensity and sapping misdirection of the current heatwave in the north of France, it seems as good a time as any to start to re-read one of my favourites of Mike’s novels. For all I know (and may soon discover) it may be the most auspicious of conditions in which to experience the book’s unsettling story.

#MJohnHarrison #TheCourseOfTheHeart #BritishNovels

I’ve been reading (and re-reading) a lot of @mjohnharrison’s work recently.

The presence of cats in many of his novels and short stories is such a pleasing thing: vectors of both strangeness and the mundane, these wondrous creatures stopping to stare at doorways into thin places and then cleaning their faces as though wiping away the dust of the world.

#MJohnHarrison #Cats

@mjohnharrison

Golly, one whole year to wait! Thank you for the teaser.

("Petrol coloured water" is such an evocative image.)

#MJohnHarrison #books #literature #TheEndOfEverything

@mjohnharrison

"but you already feel, somewhere in the back of your head, the whole contraption tipping & lurching toward a real structured thing. I love that feeling."

Creator's reward. Very precisely expressed.

#MJohnHarrison #writing #structurefinallyemerging #creativity #TheEndOfEveryThing

https://ambientehotel.wordpress.com/2023/08/08/next-book/

@mjohnharrison

Wow. Thank you, John, for this note of yours. I admit I was unaware of Raynor Winn, but your incisive comment made me hooked.

(I also shed a tear or two, but then I am the kind of person who cries easily, ask my daughters.)

#RaynorWinn #MJohnHarrison #homelessness #TheSaltPath #weareallhomelessinthisworld

BUFFO (1982)
Acrylic on Watercolor Board - 32" X 22"

Reading a novel by M. John Harrison always leaves me with the feeling that I've experienced some vivid, chaotic dream full of important but indecipherable symbols and images. 1/3

#fantasy #fantasyart #sff #illustration #mjohnharrison #viriconium

@mjohnharrison

"The whole point of a bedside notebook is that it encourages muddled yet possibly devastating communications from the unconscious."

"When this kind of stuff starts to happen fourteen days after you finish a book, you know your head is up & running again. The beauty of it is that you won’t know what it’s working on for months yet; & the beauty of that is its reliability."

Oh, "muddled yet possibly devastating communications from the unconscious", yes, if we find ways of channeling those, half the battle is won.

#MJohnHarrison

#creativity #imagination #TheUnconscious #CarlGustav

@mjohnharrison

Very well put.

"The phone is not smart enough to know–the artificial unintelligence is not smart enough to know–when to piss off & leave you alone. It has, in common with its inventors, no smarts for reading the room. Is there any way of communicating with these devices that goes: you will do this, this & this when I ask but you will never, ever, for any reason at all, do or talk to me ever again about doing anything else."

#MJohnHarrison #NoAI #computing #phones #DonNorman

@mjohnharrison

"He could not describe himself as lost, because he had never known where he was."

#dreams #MJohnHarrison

@mjohnharrison

"The adrenalin of first impressions can only be replaced by patience and a slow gaze."

#MJohnHarrison

@mjohnharrison

"You're like a cake now, you can't be unbaked: you'll never be returned to your separate ingredients."

A half-discomforting, half-reassuring truth, expressed in a simple unpompous image.

Always such powerfully re-orienting thoughts in your short blog posts! A constant reference point in my Fedireading.

#MJohnHarrison

@mjohnharrison

"Characterisation is an accumulation of scenes, as in life; it is revelatory, but only in the sense that what you’ve seen is all you’ll get. There’s no such thing as “out of character” behaviour. We only ever know the behaviour."

#writing #literature #character #MJohnHarrison

@mjohnharrison

Wow. Such a powerful manifesto against a writing that endows a main character with "main character energy".

I write, but not fiction, with efforts at creating "narrative" for the reader. And I read fiction. As reader and writer I feel that this manifesto takes me out of assumed safety. That must be a good thing.

"By enjoying main character energy in a 'story' you are able to revel in an agency you never had."

This goes so deep.

#MJohnHarrison #narrative #writing.#style