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 MichaelMOORCOCK. 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 narrativediscontinuities 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 theruins 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 sciencefantasy 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 bothsurreal and topographically exact, so that an orthodox tale of alien INVASION becomes a series of bleak tableaux vivants as witnessed throughthe insectoid perceptions of the invaders. In Viriconium (1982; vt The Floating Gods 1983 US), the final novel of the sequence, is far moreabstract, 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 atale 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 longingenacts 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.

   See also: CITIES; ENTROPY; DISASTER; NEW WRITINGS IN SF; PERCEPTION.