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Settling the World: Selected Stories 1970-2020
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Throughout his career, M. John Harrison’s writing has defied categorisation, building worlds both unreal and all-too real, overlapping and interlocking with each other. His stories are replete with fissures and portals into parallel dimensions, unidentified countries and lost lands. But more important than the places they point to are the obsessions that drive the people w
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I read two of Harrison’s short stories and disliked one (or at least was ‘meh’ towards it: Dog People), but liked the other (Getting Out of There), and the liking of that story must have pushed me over the edge to get this book, a compilation of some of his short stories over a 50-year period.
Alas, not for me. 🙁
I should say why I did not care for the stories. His descriptions of people, the environment at hand, pretty much everything was really long-winded. Please get to the point. Most of the s ...more
Alas, not for me. 🙁
I should say why I did not care for the stories. His descriptions of people, the environment at hand, pretty much everything was really long-winded. Please get to the point. Most of the s ...more
On the grass banks at Brentwood & Corbets Tay, out of the grey central glare of the midnight carriageway, processions of the dead were glimpsed, shadowy and irritable, swaying down towards realities they thought they had been able to leave behind They were, as WG Sebald put it so succinctly, ‘usually a little shorter than they had been in life…’
(from Colonising The Future, 2020)
M John Harrison’s brilliantly unsettling novel The Sunken Land Begins to Rise Again was a worthy winner of the 2020 Go ...more
(from Colonising The Future, 2020)
M John Harrison’s brilliantly unsettling novel The Sunken Land Begins to Rise Again was a worthy winner of the 2020 Go ...more
'Settling the World' is an unsettling, intriguing, imaginative and surreal selection of stories that are decidedly well written.
Some are more engaging then others, especially the ones in the later half of the book.
Quite a few start with blunt sweeping statements that immediately pull you into the story, like the title story with '....the discovery of God on the far side of the moon...'
Some are realistic but slightly out of reality vignettes, while others play with that savage insane brush with u ...more
Some are more engaging then others, especially the ones in the later half of the book.
Quite a few start with blunt sweeping statements that immediately pull you into the story, like the title story with '....the discovery of God on the far side of the moon...'
Some are realistic but slightly out of reality vignettes, while others play with that savage insane brush with u ...more
The Course of the Heart is one of my all-time favourite novels, and I'm so glad that it led me to trying out M. John Harrison's short stories.
I love the uneasiness in the worlds that he creates: the sense that something in his characters' lives has gone off the rails and can't be made right again. There's a sense of global or personal apocalypse lurking just behind the veil of middle-class life, waiting to break through. Conversely, in his stories of apocalypse, there's the unsettling portrayal ...more
I love the uneasiness in the worlds that he creates: the sense that something in his characters' lives has gone off the rails and can't be made right again. There's a sense of global or personal apocalypse lurking just behind the veil of middle-class life, waiting to break through. Conversely, in his stories of apocalypse, there's the unsettling portrayal ...more
Harrison is simply the most extraordinary writer around, and this collection of stories is near perfect. A succession of driven oddbods inhabit the stories, searching for hidden worlds that rarely become visible, instead lurk mysteriously out of reach. The collision of the grubby, social realism with a new kind of weirdly prosaic fantasy is utterly enthralling, and if you don't already know, he writes like a dream - so good it's a mystery why he isn't collecting every prize going. Perhaps becaus
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My ratings story by story...
Settling the World *****
The Gift ***
I Did It **
Running Down *****
Land Locked **
Yummie ****
The Causeway ***
Colonising the Future **
The Machine in Shaft Ten ***
A Young Man's Journey to Viriconium ****
Science & the Arts ***
The Incalling ****
The Ice Monkey ****
The East ***
'Doe Lea' ****
Cicisbeo *****
The Crisis ***** ...more
Settling the World *****
The Gift ***
I Did It **
Running Down *****
Land Locked **
Yummie ****
The Causeway ***
Colonising the Future **
The Machine in Shaft Ten ***
A Young Man's Journey to Viriconium ****
Science & the Arts ***
The Incalling ****
The Ice Monkey ****
The East ***
'Doe Lea' ****
Cicisbeo *****
The Crisis ***** ...more
An irresistibly strange and haunting collection of stories. Holding the book is like holding a portal into liminal space, because that just about defines everything Harrison does. Between genres, between styles, between perspectives, between readings, meaning, landscapes.
The stories, even though selected from throughout Harrison's career, seemed to be seeping into one another at times too.
I learned very quickly that it is the sense of place and the atmosphere that is so impactful with his writ ...more
The stories, even though selected from throughout Harrison's career, seemed to be seeping into one another at times too.
I learned very quickly that it is the sense of place and the atmosphere that is so impactful with his writ ...more
To my taste, the best stories in the book are those in which the weird intrudes on the ordinary (in an Aickmanesque fashion), rather than those in which the premise is a strange science-fiction in itself. That said, Harrison's elliptical style makes even the sci-fi stories never less than intriguing. I'm looking forward to seeing how Harrison sustains the unsettling and disorienting mood in a novel-length narrative.
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Really one of my favorite living authors. I would say that these short stories tend to unsettle one, but that's not quite accurate. I think it's more that I got done with many of them and didn't have a quick, easy way to place them, to know what they were doing. And that doesn't happen too often. Among other things, there's a nice story in here, "I Did It," about a man who puts an axe in his face, that is among my new favorite of all time short stories.
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This wouldn't be my compilation of MJH's best short stories - I'd have liked more from 'Travel Arrangements'. Nevertheless, there are many wonderfully strange and disturbing pieces here. There's always a tension in MJH's work between the vulgar demands of 'plot' and the beautifully observed sociological, natural, and emotional details which surround it, and there are times when the latter overwhelms the narrative (sometimes, he's too poetic for his own good, though as his prose is so exquisite,
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Liminal stories from somewhere else that is not quite here but seem to exist here. The weird and the prosaic. Tarkovsky cinema scapes of decaying urban landscapes. It's all very unsettling in the world of M John Harrison. The world is a veneer on the surface of a shabby and over used and never fully explained series of twilight zones.
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Excellent, stories which often feel impossible, like there are basic rules slipping imperceptibly. The Crisis and The Gift were highlights for me.
The master
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Michael John Harrison, known for publication purposes primarily as M. John Harrison, is an English author and literary critic. His work includes the Viriconium sequence of novels and short stories, Climbers, and the Kefahuchi Tract trilogy, which consists of Light, Nova Swing and Empty Space. ...more
Michael John Harrison, known for publication purposes primarily as M. John Harrison, is an English author and literary critic. His work includes the Viriconium sequence of novels and short stories, Climbers, and the Kefahuchi Tract trilogy, which consists of Light, Nova Swing and Empty Space. ...more
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