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HARRISON, M(ICHAEL) JOHN
(1945- ) UK writer and rock-climber, closely identified in the 1960s with
NEW WORLDS, where he published his first sf story, "Baa Baa Blocksheep",
in 1968, and for which he later wrote some of the best tales using the
Jerry Cornelius template, or icon, from the series created by Michael
MOORCOCK. He also wrote considerable criticism for NW, usually as Joyce
Churchill, and served for some time as its literary editor. Typical work
from this period was assembled in The Machine in Shaft Ten and Other
Stories (coll 1975), which reveals its NEW-WAVE provenance in narrative
discontinuities and subheads after the fashion of J.G. BALLARD. His first
novel, The Committed Men (1971; rev 1971 US), is an impressive post-
HOLOCAUST story set in a fractured England, centring physically on the
ruins of the motorways, and generating a powerful sense of entropic
dismantlement. His third, The Centauri Device (1974 US), is a
significantly disgruntled SPACE OPERA, perhaps his least successful book,
and one which demonstrates MJH's persistent discomfort with the escapist
conventions of this sort of sf. Unsurprisingly, the doomsday device of the
title duly blows up the Galaxy.As the first volume of his Viriconium
sequence, though much simpler than later instalments, his second novel,
The Pastel City (1971), is of greater interest. It is a FAR-FUTURE science
fantasy set on a bleak Dying Earth, whose description plays on
SWORD-AND-SORCERY imagery, though nothing happens of a magical nature.
Viriconium itself is both the land - conveyed with a growing capacity to
portray in words the physical world - and the city at the end of time
which dominates it. The second volume of the sequence, A STORM OF WINGS
(1980 US), rewrites its predecessor in language whose intensity is both
surreal and topographically exact, so that an orthodox tale of alien
INVASION becomes a series of bleak tableaux vivants as witnessed through
the insectoid perceptions of the invaders. In Viriconium (1982; vt The
Floating Gods 1983 US), the final novel of the sequence, is far more
abstract, rendering the fin de siecle transports of its plot in language
of a fixating painterly density. The UK versions of the stories assembled
as Viriconium Nights (coll 1984 US; much rev 1985 UK) - and later brought
together with In Viriconium as Viriconium (omni 1988) - focus even more
intensely upon the task of seeing their dying landscapes with utter
exactitude, so that the inhabitants of the city present their failed
artistries in terms less and less reassuring to any sense that they are
able to inhabit a fantasy world; this sense of the closing of the world
was intensified in The Luck in the Head (1983 Interzone text alone, as
MJH; text rev as graph 1991) with Ian MILLER, which darkly re-viewed a
tale from the UK collection. The reality of things seen comes, in the end,
to be the only reality to which MJH will give allegiance in the sequence;
all else is unearned.The central lesson to be extracted from his work -
that any personal escape from the world must be earned by attending to
that very world, for only when self and city and rockface are seen with
true sight do we know what it is we wish to leave - is reiterated in most
of the stories assembled in The Ice Monkey and Other Stories (coll 1983),
some of which are sf tales of a striking and obdurate coldness, and in The
Course of the Heart (1992), where a partial fulfilment of the longing
enacts a stringent penalty. In Climbers (1989), an associational novel
about rock-climbing, the lesson is driven home with something like
ferocity. The protagonists of this book are losers and obsessives, and the
land they climb is dreadful with the weight of being; in a sense,
therefore, the book truly defines the end of the Viriconium sequence and
the preceding sf tales, because for MJH the only difference between the
lords and ladies in science fantasy and climbers clinging to a rock in the
real world is that the latter know where they are. [JC]Other works:
Fawcett on Rock (1987) as by Ron Fawcett, nonfiction