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There are two M. John Har­ri­son novels that you should read, more or less imme­di­ately, if you haven’t. The Cen­tauri Device and Light. It’s an invest­ment though, since Cen­tauri Device is only avail­able in a Gol­lancz (UK) SF Mas­ter­works edi­tion, so if you’re inter­ested, read his story Tourism here, or in your copy of years best SF 22, which of course you own. If you like that, then the invest­ment is worth it. That said, some people have hated the story and then loved the books, so your mileage may vary. It doesn’t really matter, though, because if you don’t love M. John Har­ri­son, you’re a bad person. Fun­da­men­tally and with­out question.

I’d read _​Light_​ before, a couple of years ago, on the strength of a rec­om­men­da­tion by some­one, though I can’t recall who, although it was prob­a­bly Jeremy Lassen, book pimp and co-​​owner of [Night­shade Books](http://nightshadebooks.com). Cheated a little, and bought the UK edi­tion cheap out of Canada, since it wasn’t coming out here for ages. I thought that it was great then, but the qual­i­ties of the book didn’t really stick with me that first time. I kept rec­om­mend­ing the book to people who would never read it unless I loaned it to them, which, I think, is how I lost my first copy. It’s out there some­where, unless I got it from the library. That time period is a bit hazy with bore­dom and frus­tra­tion. In any case, I bought it again the other day with­out hes­i­ta­tion. Har­ri­son both is and isn’t one of my favorite writ­ers, but mostly is. He writes about losers, mostly, and not the cute, cuddly kind that you can feel well about when they make good at the end, such as you might find in vin­tage Gibson and Ster­ling. Most of the people in his novels are sad fig­ures with mas­sive flaws as vis­i­ble and obvi­ous as sup­pu­rat­ing sores, who gen­er­ally manage to fuck up every­one around them in the long run, both their friends and their ene­mies, and in Harrison’s work, these cat­e­gories are ter­ri­bly fun­gi­ble. So, losers, kicked around by forces that they can nei­ther affect nor ulti­mately com­pre­hend and being pushed towards some end that we cannot see or antic­i­pate, with the reader barely stuck in place by a mix­ture of charis­matic char­ac­ter­i­za­tion and the sick fas­ci­na­tion that rivets your atten­tion to an acci­dent in progress. It sounds a lot like the over­ar­ch­ing themes of the cyber­punks, really and would be fairly flat at this point were not Har­ri­son one of the better writ­ers work­ing today.

It’s inter­est­ing to com­pare the two books side by side. They were writ­ten in more or less the same milieu about twenty nine years apart. Har­ri­son has writ­ten little else in this par­tic­u­lar set­ting, but I think that he must think about it, now and then, because the uni­verse that we wander into in The Cen­tauri Device is rough, still a little just off the rack, and the world in Light is an old but sturdy thing, many-​​patched and full of details and utterly com­fort­able to wear. Device is told through a smudged lens, its nar­ra­tor utterly reli­able but whose deep sym­pa­thies his char­ac­ters and for the story that he’s telling come through very clearly. Light doesn’t avail itself of unre­li­able tech­niques either, and it’s nar­ra­tive voice couldn’t be more neu­tral, but it almost seems as if the back­ing behind the story has slipped, the ontol­ogy under­neath itself become unre­li­able. You might think that I’m speak­ing of Dick­ian onto­log­i­cal riffs, but it isn’t really that. Real­ity in Light is just as banal as in the phe­nom­e­nal uni­verse, it’s just less… con­crete. By look­ing, you find, even if what you’re look­ing for wasn’t there to be dis­cov­ered when you started look­ing. It seems to me to be quan­tum theory taken as both nar­ra­tive ethos and as a force deeply tied to the observer, whomever there is to observe. Every method of going faster than light is pos­si­ble, if you try it. The uni­verse spawns anx­ious, grand­moth­erly ghosts from our unease and gawky aliens from our frus­tra­tion at our own awk­ward­nesses. The three inter­lock­ing sto­ries tease the reader, worry at their own coher­ence con­stantly. The uni­verse is tired and out­sider­ish, more than will­ing to play these nasty little jokes endlessly.

The Cen­tauri Device is full of poetic graces and the inten­tion­ally harsh enjamb­ments of sense words with exquis­itely mis­tuned mod­i­fiers that the cyber­punks would later call ‘crammed prose’. There’s an excite­ment to it, a sense that there are new things to be done here, on this par­tic­u­lar overtrod path. It’s a young man’s book and a book mired deep in the cold war, one pri­mary tenet being that there’s a third nation of the sick and the tired who are weary of the war which is their envi­ron­ment entire. This doesn’t, I think, decrease its rel­e­vance, for all that the Cold War has been over for all of my adult life. There’s always a mas­sive con­flict with which you are periph­er­ally involved that and you yearn for it to be over, no matter which side pre­vails. Backed up by the strength of the writ­ing and the a sci­ence fic­tional back­ground which refuses to take itself seri­ously. And it’s funny. I mean, what more can you ask for?

Light is a dif­fer­ent matter entirely. You’ll laugh, sure, but there’s a grim­ness here that a few laughs cannot over­come. The char­ac­ter in Device were more lov­able losers than the ones here, with the pos­si­ble excep­tion of Chi­nese Ed. A sense of fatal­ism and inevitabil­ity over­hangs and cannot be dis­lodged. You get the feel­ing that when a char­ac­ter is less that well rounded, that it is inten­tional. They’re flat because they have noth­ing more to offer the world than they offer their reader. They are simply what they are and it isn’t enough. The writ­ing, which is always impor­tant to con­sider, when you’re speak­ing of Har­ri­son, because his plots do not alway enliven and his char­ac­ters, while well limned, make you want to be sick most of the time, the writ­ing is more under­stated, with­out the shim­mer and the bounce and it doesn’t force your atten­tion here and there, but you never forget that it’s there. By ‘modern’ stan­dard of mimetic writ­ing, I sup­pose that it’s some­thing of a fail­ure, because occa­sion­ally you’ll find your­self pulled out of the story and forced to re-​​read a line or or a choice phrase just because it’s so good. But I’ve never held with the theory that writ­ing should be a pane through which a scene is viewed. That par­tic­u­lar pile of horse­shit has led to more boring writ­ing about imag­ined affairs than I care to recall, and I gen­er­ally shy away from main­stream lit­er­ary fic­tion. Writ­ing should suit the story and Light man­ages this effort­lessly and admirably.

Both books have warts, and their sub­ject matter isn’t exactly what many people will pick up for plea­sure read­ing. They’re quite weird in a lot of ways, and their gaze is obses­sive. They’re worth read­ing, though, with­out any sort of doubt at all. I rec­om­mend them to every­one (although a lot of people are stopped dead by the first chap­ter of Light, but you should press on). They are not art that com­forts, but they can be learned from.