Genre Expectation, Subversion and Anti-Consolation in the Kefahuchi Tract Novels of M. John Harrison

WRIT329: CONTEMPORARY THEORY Leigh Blackmore

WRIT329: CONTEMPORARY THEORY AND THE PRACTISING WRITERAssessment TaskNo 4: mini-thesisWordcount: 4000 wordsStudent Name: Leigh BlackmoreStudent Number (3061577)

“Undoing the mechanisms”:Genre Expectation, Subversion

and Anti-Consolation in theKefahuchi Tract Novels of

M. John Harrison.

“The idea is not to get a cosy ride. Why would you want that?”

– (M. John Harrison, “Disillusioned by the Actual, 5.)

Dr Joshua Lobb of 34


“I was starting to explore how far you could push fictional

structures, in particular those of fantasy, before they fell over and

became something else. I was interested in undoing the

mechanisms by which popular fiction manages space and time”.

– M. John Harrison (interview by Cheryl Morgan)

Introduction

M. John Harrison’s Kefahuchi Tract duology consists of Light

(2002; co-winner 2002 James Tiptree Memorial Award for Best SF

Novel) and Nova Swing (winner 2007 Arthur C. Clarke Award and

the 2008 Philip K. Dick Award for Best SF Novel). In this mini-

thesis I argue that Harrison’s novel sequence formally subverts

notions of the sf/fantasy and crime genres as “escapist”, in order to

revitalise them as valid literary forms. First I will briefly discuss

some definitions of science fiction (hereinafter abbreviated as ‘sf’)

and fantasy, and discuss the concepts of “consolatory fantasy” and

“escapism”, and define the subgenre of “space opera.” I will then

discuss the way Harrison views genre to delineate his subversive

approach in Light and Nova Swing, since I assert M. John Harrison

remakes/redefines genre sf as these texts constantly undercut

genre expectations. My argument will then focus on three principle

techniques used by Harrison – his vigorous resistance of cliché; his



insistence on a hyper-real style; and his literary use of

uncertainty/quantum theory. I will use thematic and rhizomatic

methodologies to interrogate how these techniques play out in the

novels. I will also examine the notion of aporia and absence in both

novels, and touch on their problematic treatment of women’s roles.

(I feel it’s important to at least point to the need for a feminist

analysis, although a thorough one requires a separate paper). I will

demonstrate that Harrison, more concerned with writing about

people than hi-tech hardware, can both work within and redefine

the ‘constraints’ of genre sf.

Definition of sf/fantasy ;“Escapism” and “Consolatory fantasy”; Genre Expectation; “Space opera”.

Defining sf is no easy task – Wolfe (Critical Terms, 108-12)

provides four pages worth of definitions, and monographs have

been written on the subject (see, e.g., Freedman). Edward James

writes: “sf constitutes a bundle whose contents are constantly

changing, from decade to decade, from critic to critic, and from

country to country.” (James, 1) and “sf is a label that can be applied

to everything from heavy philosophy to invading meatloaf.” (James,

2). 1

Parrinder calls fantasy “ a branch of the historical romance in

which nostalgia for a lost age of individualism is accentuated by the

evocation of a quasi-feudal world of sorcerers and kings.”



(Parrinder, xv). “Consolatory fantasy” is a term describing certain

types of genre fiction (“commercial,” “generic” or “normative”

fantasy/sf ) which fulfil an obvious purpose, i.e., to provide the

reader with a secondary world (i.e., a diegetic time-space

continuum) into which they can “escape” while reading the book.

The sf/fantasy genre has therefore generally been seen as

“escapist”, therefore seductive but not “respectable.” Some

theorists don’t see this escapism as a pejorative, but as cathartic –

for instance, JRR Tolkien (see Kelly). According to Wolfe,

consolation was Tolkien’s term in “On Fairy Stories” (1947) for the

effect of the happy ending/Eucatastrophe -- one of four principal

functions of fairy stories, along with Fantasy, Recovery and Escape.

(Wolfe, Critical Terms, 21). Escape is, says Wolfe, “popularly (and

loosely) used to describe the appeal of much fantastic literature,

and referring to the presumed function of such literature as a kind

of psychological safety valve.” (Wolfe, Critical Terms, 31). 2

SF is frequently deprecated as a sub-par (because populist)

fiction. I challenge this notion generally and assert that the novels

by Harrison under examination prove otherwise. I submit that in

fact, modern sf and fantasy can displays an extreme theoretical and

narrative sophistication, as exemplified in in the work of writers

such as Harrison. 3



‘Space opera’, a subgenre of sf, is usually viewed as “a

melodramatic adventure-fantasy involving stock themes and

settings…evolved on the flimsiest scientific basis.” (Parrinder, 25).

Contrary to this, I argue that in this subgenre writers such

Harrison are doing some of the most exciting and challenging work

in literature.

How Harrison views genre. “Consolatory fantasy” and “Anti-Consolation”.

“I think it’s undignified to read for the purposes of escape.

After you grow up, you should start reading for other purposes. You

should have a more complicated relationship with fiction than

simple entrancement. If you read for escape you will never try to

change your life, or anyone else’s”. – M. John Harrison (interview

with Cheryl Morgan)

There is no room here to detail the 1960’s British New Wave

sf movement, of which Harrison was the ideologue; though

Harrison helped construct what Parrinder calls its “tone of

knowingness and literary sophistication, with an almost obligatory

commitment to formal experiment.” (Parrinder, 17). However,

Harrison has expressly repudiated the idea of fantasy as nostalgia.

4 In Harrison the tension between genre expectation and his

subversion of it arises because he resists the idea of genre. 5



Harrison has said: “I’m for the melting pot. I think we should all

write fiction, we shouldn’t call it anything except “fiction,” and it

shouldn’t be promoted in categories.” (Harrison, interview with

Cheryl Morgan). 6

Harrison has consistently expressed detestation of

“consolatory fantasy,” vide Roy, 7 a tendency in his work which I

term “anti-consolation”. In promulgating his “anti-consolatory” sf,

Harrison argues that in recoiling from the complexities of industrial

civilisation, we should not seek refuge in the pastoral, the simpler,

supposedly more meaningful way of life conceived by writers of

“normative” fantasy to exist in the past.

The textual impulses of Harrison’s work since the 1960’s,

then, use sf as a particular discourse which is not escapist but

suggests possibilities for the real world. His undermining of

normative fantasy can be traced via the trajectory from his

somewhat middle-of-the-road The Pastel City (1971) through his

heavily deconstructed The Luck in the Head (1991) to Light and

Nova Swing, in which he continues to redefine sf’s function via

generic vehicles while bringing to bear an acute consciousness of

genre shortcomings and technical possibilities. Light is

unqualifiedly space opera, embracing genre trappings (it has, after

all, a spaceship on the cover); yet its themes and techniques, I

contend, transcend the standard sf formulas. Nova Swing is more

accurately a hybrid space opera/ noir crime novel, yet

demonstrates similar thematic concerns. Harrison consistently



evinces a discomfort with the escapist conventions of this sort of sf:

“Once you have understood escapist fiction and the culture of

escape you begin to go further back and ask what it is they’re

based on. What they’re based on is desire.” (Harrison, interview

with Cheryl Morgan). I posit that this concern with desire enables

an authorial focus on what the real world might be, as opposed to

what the characters think they value, which is a dreamlike,

misguided notion about the real world’s nature. Harrison,

appreciating that people need to be more than they are, in these

texts examines how that plays out – the self-deceptions that, for

instance, lead Vic Serotonin to take Elizabeth Kielar into the Event

Zone, where she transforms horribly:

“At night she ran aimlessly back and forth across the faces of the dunes.

It was hard to say at what point she became something else. This thing – pivoted

sharply at the hips so that it could walk on all four limbs with the palms of its

hands flat on the ground, its head too small and streamlined, somehow, to

accommodate the great blue candid cartoon human eyes – called Vic’s name until

he put his hands over his ears and went inside.” (Nova Swing, 213-14.)

Harrison’s themes in these novels become, rather than the

‘escapism’ of which fantasy is often accused, cogently realistic,

concerned with the fantasies we all live with: dreams, desires,

wish fulfilments, power fantasies. 8

Harrison’s Subversive Techniques



Harrison says: “while remaining highly aware of the mainstream, [I’m]

trying to utilize elements from both sides…from fantasy and horror as well…to

make something personal, something that exists at the conjunction of a lot of

different sets at once”. (Harrison, “No Escape” , 69). His wish to

subvert and transgress sf genre tropes is predicated on the attitude

that “prior to any act of reading, we already live in a fantasy world constructed

by advertising, branding, news media, politics and the built or prosthetic

environment…As a result, the world we live in is already a ‘secondary creation’.”

(Harrison, “Worldbuilding”, 3)

I contend that both Light and Nova Swing subvert elements

of crime fiction as well as of sf. In Light, Ed Chianese, in his virtual

reality tank, lives out a fantasy as a Chandleresque private eye, a

gumshoe with an eye for ‘dames’. Nova Swing was aptly termed by

some reviewers “space noir.” 9 In the novel, someone carries out

murders, tattooing the victims. Detective Lens Aschemann,

dedicated to combating ‘Site crime’ (people who extract artefacts

from the Event Zone) also seeks to solve his wife’s murder.

Harrison subverts crime genre convention (largely predicated on

mystery-solving) by providing no solution to the tattoo murders or

to the murder of Aschemann’s wife. For Harrison, the world is not

solvable, either in ‘reality’ or in fiction. Light and Nova Swing are

political – by subverting genre expectations attached to sf and

crime, Harrison shows that fantasy needn’t be an evasion by which

we are content to have the world made for us. By dismantling sf’s



discourse from within, I suggest, he amplifyies and extends the

effects available to it.

Harrison continually manipulates reader expectations of sf.

Light, for instance, deals in part with gene-splicing, a ‘cool’

technology that could serve as decorative narrative window-

dressing; but Harrison refuses to prettify it:

“On the face of it, Uncle Zip was solid. He dealt with the passing trade;

cultivars for pleasure, sentient tattoos, also any kind of superstitious hitch and

splice, like ensuring your firstborn gets the luck gene of Elvis…In the lab,

though, he cut for anyone. He cut for the military, he cut for the shadow boys. He

cut for viral junkies, in for the latest patch to their brain disease of choice. He

didn’t care what he cut, or who he cut as long as they could pay.” (Light, 47).

Light’s region of The Tract known as The Beach functions as

an ironic and subversive metaphor. To “go on the beach and relax”

– Harrison never wants to do that.

Resistance of Cliché: Realism and Anti-Consolation in SF/Fantasy

“I still believe that sf needs to be radically changed from the

inside by people who will not compromise. [I] am still committed to

a concept of non-compromise with mediocrity.” (Harrison, “The

Last Rebel”, 7).

Mainstream critics’ genre expectations say sf is too often

plot-driven, with minimal characterisation. But in these texts it

operates differently due to Harrison’s crucial concerns with



characterisation and fluidity of genre. I assert that Harrison’s

determined resistance of cliché in them produces original,

sophisticated effects. Moreover, both these novels are about the

rejection of lived experience. 10 Harrison depicts characters who

are wounded in their sexual and emotional cores, who have chosen

safety over experience, the virtual over the actual. Because

Harrison disbelieves in heroes, he draws characters in these novels

who subsist on the need for a dream rather than engage with real

life. 11 Such characterisations play against the heroic stereotypes of

many sf/fantasy genre novels, bringing the reader in touch with

fresh (though uncomfortable) realistic characters. 12

Furthermore, all are culturally and emotionally displaced,

living a prolonged adolescence which can be read as symptomatic

of Western culture’s parlous condition, with its cultural

imperialism, and dreams of self-transformation through commodity

acquisition. Light and Nova Swing implicitly criticise this Western

fantasy culture, where our choice is

obsessive. 13

In Light, Harrison does utilise some standard sf genre tropes

-- ”standard-issue fantasy-kit devices” (Green) -- ‘Big Dumb

Objects’ (alien artefacts), faster-than-light travel, spaceship battles

– but his resistance of cliché is demonstrated through his

subversive use of modernist narrative techniques including

recursion (discussed further on p. 9).



Genre fiction has an imperative to closure which Harrison

defies; Iain Banks has aptly referred to this as “closure-denying

restraint.”(Banks, ‘Into the 10th dimension”). Both Light and Nova

Swing end on an ‘open’ , ‘unresolved’ note. In Light, the humans

all die and the Shrander poses unanswerable questions in the

almost metaphysical closing chapter. In Nova Swing, the Event

Zone’s mystery remains unsolved, and although some of the

characters leave Saudade, most finish with their fantasies of

“mapping” the Zone unfulfilled. Thus we can continue to read both

texts rhizomatically, mining them for further subtexts which,

however, will never lead to an ultimate ‘resolution’.

Hyper-real style in Light and Nova Swing

“I see no technical distinction between the world-building of

the representational writer – the travel writer or memoirist – and

the worldbuilding of the fantasist.” (Harrison, “Worldbuilding”, 1).

Harrison’s attention to detail in these novels is painterly,

verging on “hyper-real,” whether what he describes is confronting,

painful, ugly or beautiful. In Light, the specificity of his observation

is visible in the exactingly captured settings, and in imagistic

scenes which Harrison has referred to as “accented moment-signs”

(Harrison, “The Last Rebel”, 9) such as the meticulously-described

coin spinning on its edge (Light, 78) to the descriptive detail which



portrays for us the disturbingly fantastic creature known as the

Shrander: “Whatever drove him like this to the waste ground of life had, by the

age of eight, Already made Kearney vulnerable to the attention of the Shrander.

It swam with the little fishes in the shadow of the willow, just as it had sorted the

stones on the beach when he was two. It informed every landscape. Its attentions

had begun with dreams in which he walked on the green flat surface of canal

water, or felt something horrible inhabiting a pile of Lego bricks... The Shrander

was in all of that. (Light, 27). It is the specificity of these details, not

simply his economic word choice, that enables the reader to

discover what Harrison considers the deep truth about life.

Another example from Light, as Kearney visits a Kilburn

house:

“Inside nothing had changed. Nothing had changed since the 1970s and nothing

ever would. The walls were papered a yellowish colour like the soles of feet. Low

wattage bulbs on timers allowed you twenty seconds of light before they plunged

the stairs back into darkness. There was a smell of gas outside the bathroom,

stale boiled food from the second rooms, Then aniseed everywhere, coating the

membranes of the nose. Near the top of the stairwell a skylight let in the angry

orange glare of the London night.” (Light, 193).

Such grim descriptive setting, couched as direct reportage,

undercuts the sf genre expectation of every space opera being

filled with shiny spacecraft and easily digestable sf ‘props’.

Nevertheless, despite his rigorous hyper-realism, his prose’s

particularity, Harrison still attends to big themes – sexuality as an

outworking of characters’ fantasy lives; the implications of genetic

engineering; the complexity of both exterior and interior space. I

posit that his focus on the intensely personal through hyper-real



description and dialogue enables him to illuminate also the

intensely universal:

“She challenged him: ‘What good’s your life been? Honestly, Michael:

what good has it been?’

Kearney took her by the shoulder as if to shaker her; looked at her

instead. Began to say something ugly; changed his mind.

‘You’re being ridiculous. Go home.’

She set her mouth.

‘You see? You can’t answer. You haven’t got an answer.’ “ (Light, 211-

12).

Quantum theory as a Rhizome in the Kefahuchi Tract Novels

“I always construct in parallel and opposite. It’s a classic 20th

century technique which I got from Katherine Mansfield. You explore

your themes by constructing sets of analogies and homologies. The

uncertainties of quantum mechanics were perfect for that.” – M. John

Harrison (interview with Cheryl Morgan).

Rhizomatic theory states that the critic always inhabits the

argument. Similarly, an observer always inhabits the quantum

experiment, and observation of a quantum state always changes

the outcome. I suggest Harrison’s narrative in these texts is itself

rhizomatic, primarily due to the use of quantum theory metaphors

which spread throughout the texts like Deleuze and Guattari’s

rhizomes, connecting each narrative and thematic point to each



other point. (Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus).

Furthermore, both novels draw on earlier stories of Harrison’s,

chunks of text showing up here via different “pathways” and

contexts, like rhizomatic roots with tendrils extending throughout

his oeuvre. 14 Such rhizomatic and recursive ploys lend these

narratives a Chinese-box-like effect, echoes of previous incidents

and imagery working to knot Harrison’s oeuvre together.

The formal structure of both novels depends on interweaving

strands which can be considered akin to narrative DNA. 15 This

narrative stranding functions as a metaphor reminding the reader

that science underpins the diegesis. Harrison appreciates that the

reality we know emerges from quantum broth; therefore the

universe is neither fixed nor dependable. Quantum metaphors

make this explicit by providing the textual substrate. Liv Hula’s bar

in Nova Swing is called The Black Cat White Cat, refeferencing the

Schrödinger’s Cat theory and linking the book back to Kearney’s

quantum experiments, the White Cat sentient spaceship and the

Black Cat spaceship that Ed Chianese piloted into the Tract’s heart

at Light’s end. The quantum indeterminacy imagery helps

metafictionalise Harrison’s text, forcing the reader to ask “is this

fiction or is this happening to me as the reader? Or am I

constructing it from the text?”

“Who knew how many of those cats there were? Another thing, you never

found so much as a tabby among them, every one was either black or white.

When they poured out the zone it was like a model of some chaotic mixing flow in



which, though every condition is determined, you can never predict the outcome.

Soon they filled Straint in both directions, bringing with them the warmth of

their bodies, also a close, dusty but not unpleasant smell.” (Nova Swing, 13).

The quantum world is also about choice. The texts’ imagery is

metaphorical of the many choices characters might make;

nonetheless, Harrison stresses that in the end life is about the

single choices they do make. Light’s repeating motif is: “all the

things it might be, the one thing it is”. Rhizomatically, both

characters and reader have to make choices in these texts; the

characters about their lives, the reader in determining whether

journey or end is more important. (Harrison suggests journey, by

resisting plot closure in both novels).

The Beach (a region of the Tract) also functions as a

metaphor for science as opportunism, as ‘beach-combing’. In

Light, the human race ‘beach-combs’ a string of worlds, selling

another race’s old rubbish for profit, expressing Harrison’s disdain

for current science as simply an entrepreneurial economic pursuit.

‘Hypermarket of the meaningless’: Absence and Aporia in Light and Nova Swing

“Most of my characters are morally dyslexic at best. They’re

designed to demonstrate a value by showing its absence. You aren’t

supposed to identify with them. Into the vacuum of their despair,

the reader is forced to put forth hope; into the vacuum of their



selfishness, care.” – M. John Harrison (interview with Cheryl

Morgan)

Harrison has described his work as “a deliberate intention to

illustrate human values by describing their absence” (Harrison,

“No Escape”), which provides a philosophical “gap” or “lacuna” in

his texts which ties in to his works’ central aporias16 . In Light, the

Kefahuchi Tract, a vortex of dark matter, operates as a site of

aporia, literally and metaphorically a site of Otherness and

unresolvability:

“The Kefahuchi Tract almost filled the sky, always growing as you

watched, like the genie raging up out of the bottle, yet somehow never larger. It

was a singularity without an event horizon, they said, the wrong physics lose in

the universe. Anything could come out of there, but nothing ever did. Unless, of

course, Ed thought, what we have out here is already a result of what happens in

there…” (Light, 237).

Light’s tortured, amoral Michael Kearney glimpsed reality on

another beach in our world: “Some shift of vision had altered his

perspective; he saw clearly that the gaps between the larger stones made the

same sorts of shapes as the gaps between the smaller ones. The more he looked,

the more the arrangement repeated itself. Suddenly he understood this as a

condition of things…there it would be, a boiling, inexplicable, vertiginous

similarity in all the processes of the world , roaring silently away from you in

ever-shifting repetitions, always the same, never the same thing twice. In that

moment he was lost.” (Harrison, Light, 13)

In discovering reality’s quantum nature, Kearney is caught in

the aporia of the world’s meaning, as well as perceiving the literal



“gaps” that exist between stones and molecules. The Shrander, too,

is a malignant being of sheer Otherness (though it is suggested it is

an aspect of Kearney’s warped fantasy life) whose presence in the

text operates via aporia, making the reader question the realities of

the basic narrative:

“He took in the tubby figure, the maroon wool coat with its missing

buttons; the head like a horse’s skull, the eyes like pomegranate halves.

‘Whoa!’ he said. ‘Are you real?’

He felt at himself with his hands. First things first.

‘Am I real?’ he said. “ (Light, 313)

This suggests Harrison uses aporia as a conscious strategy to

induce in the reader a sense of fantastic strangeness even while

using hyper-real description to provide authenticity. 17

In Nova Swing, the protean Event Site is a place where part

of the Tract fell to the ground in Saudade, a city or planet along

The Beach (a string of worlds near the Tract). The city’s name,

Saudade, echoes the concept of the Event Zone, for it means “a

nostalgia after things irretrievably lost”. The Event Zone is a place

of twisted physics, warped geography, psychic emanations; from it

emerge biological artefacts which emit the malignant “daughter-

code.” In the world of 2444 AD people are used to living with

otherness, but as the “daughter-code” spreads, infecting Paulie

DeRaad and others, the otherness in the world is further

highlighted:



“It was about eighteen inches long, and as the rag came off it seemed to

move. That was an illusion. Low-angle light, in particular, would glance across

the object’s surface so that for just a moment it seemed to flex in your hands…

He had no idea what it was. When he found it, two weeks before, it had been an

animal, a one-off thing no one but him would ever see, white, hairless, larger

than a dog…How it turned into from an animal into the type of object he finally

picked up, manufactured out of this wafery artificial substance which in some

lights looked like titanium and in others bone, he didn’t know. He didn’t want to

know.” (Nova Swing, 38).

The Event Zone operates in this text as an aporia, a locus of

Otherness, an ever-shifting literal/metaphorical variable hole in

Saudade around which all the characters revolve. The state of

puzzlement and doubt produced by the Zone, makes the characters

unsure of the Event Zone’s implications for their various lives.

“The landscape continued to change, one moment residential and

deserted (though you saw women waiting expectantly at a corner in their best

clothes, they were gone as soon as you reached them); the next industrial and

derelict. Flares rose from something like a coking plant in the distance, but

everything close at hand was fallen down and overgrown. Old separation tanks

became shallow lakes, with mudbanks streaked a dark chemical maroon …It was

a hypermarket of the meaningless, in which the only mistake—as far as Vic could

discern – was to have shopping goals. (Nova Swing, 197-98).

The trafficking of alien artefacts, black market tourism, the

impinging strangeness of the Event Zone into the text’s narrative

space as well as into the city’s literal space, destabilise the

conventional functioning of a sf novel:



“…streets transposed on one another, everything laid down out of sync

one minute to the next. Geography that doesn’t work. There isn’t a single piece

of dependable architecture in the shit of it. You leave the route you know, you’re

done. Lost dogs, barking day and night. Everything struggling to keep afloat.”

(Nova Swing, 214).

The unresolvability of the text’s self-contradictory meanings

produces aporia. Whereas the Event Zone literally warps reality, its

impact on the characters warps the text, telling the reader there

are no easy answers. Selves are absorbed by the Other and spat out

again, but everything that goes in comes out changed. That’s not sf,

or fantasy, that’s life, Harrison is saying – it’s messy, complicated

and unresolved.

Gender Construction in Light and Nova Swing.

While Light won the Tiptree Award18, it veers close to

misogyny in its depiction of female characters. Kearney is a serial

killer of women, which plays to the dominant patriarchal discourse

of ‘power-over’ which often operates in popular fiction and film. A

less sexist way of utilising an unpleasant serial killer as a main

character would be to have Kearney killing men as well; but

Harrison has him kill only women. Indeed, all the characters

(including the females) in Light kill women.

Kearney’s wife Anna is a serial failed suicide. Very sick

women abound in Harrison’s fiction; he seems reluctant to question

this. 17 On a feminist reading, this may indicate an unconscious



misogyny on Harrison’s part. While the fact many of Harrison’s

male characters are also dysfunctional partially ameliorates the

distancing with which Harrison draws his female characters, it

does not produce a sense of gender role equality in these novels.

Harrison is well aware of feminism, so it would be inaccurate

to level accusations of gynophobia at these novels. 18 Nevertheless

some of his female characters are distinguishable mainly by their

Otherness; for instance, Light’s Seria Mau, whom Harrison has

said is based on a case of a woman with Borderline Personality

Disorder (Harrison, “No Escape”, 69). There can be no question

Harrison deliberately portrays her as a psychopath. Annie the

Rickshaw Girl in Light, though genetically modified, is probably the

character most sympathetically depicted. In Nova Swing, Barkeep

Liv Hula and Edith Bonaventure are play strong roles. evertheless,

the leading roles played by characters such as Elizabeth Kielar,

Nova Swing’s femme fatale, who wants Vic to take her into the

Zone, & has possibly originated there , produce a strong

implication that woman is eternally Other. 19



Conclusion

In conclusion, I must agree with Clute, who writes of

Harrison “The central lesson to be extracted from his work [is 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” (Clute,

Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, 548). In this essay I have

demonstrated by providing detailed evidence from the texts that

through constantly resisting cliché, bringing intense realistic

description to bear on fantastic subject matter and utilising

quantum theory as a powerful metaphoric device , Harrison

succeeds in his Kefahuchi Tract novels in reinvigorating a genre

too often thought (and sometimes actually) reductive and imitative.

Harrison’s themes of loss, hard-earned wisdom, and reclaiming the

alien from the everyday have been shown to be complex and non-

formulaic. Twisting the conventions, “undoing the mechanisms”,

provides Harrison a means to construct work which reinvigorates

sf/fantasy, allowing the reader to participate in worlds which

though at times unpleasant, difficult and uncomfortable, are

authentic and convincing though “fabulous”. He thus revitalises

these popular fiction genres as valid literary forms.



Notes

1: Some writers who have defined the sf genre stress the scientific over the human content, as J.O. Bailey (1947): “A narrative of an imaginary invention or discovery in the natural sciences and consequent adventures and experiences.” M. John Harrison, however, would prefer Theodore Sturgeon’s definition (1951): “A story built around human beings, with a human problem and a human solution, which would not have happened at all without its scientific content”. (Both quoted in Wolfe, Critical Terms). Most definitions of sf agree it is a subset of fantasy, with sf’s ground rules (in Wolfe’s words) “being those of the physical universe, while the ground rules of fantasy are considered to be limited only by internal consistency and not necessarily related to experience.”(Wolfe, Critical Terms, 108).

2: Wolfe quotes C.S. Lewis’ comment (from his Experiment in Criticism, 1965) that ‘escape” is a criticism of the reader rather than the work, and many readers might well “escape” into realistic fiction. James comments on the perception of sf and fantasy as part of a range of popular fictions dealing with “escapism”: “fantasy draws its inspiration from mythology and folklore and from popular images of medieval or pre-industrial society, and often appeals to nostalgia and conservative values; much sf is concerned with the future and with the possibilities presented by scientific and technological change…you, the casual browser, might think of all these brands of popular fiction as escapism, and might think sf and fantasy were the most escapist of all…if you thought about it you might see that sf (and, to a lesser extent), because they deal with imaginative and thus alternatives to the real world, also frequently offer criticism of that world – may, in short, be much more subversive than anything else … marketed as ‘popular fiction’. (James, 3).

3: In support of this view of sf’s aesthetic significance and its legitimacy as a branch of literature, Attebery writes: “Fantasy is a sophisticated mode of storytelling characterised by stylistic playfulness, self-reflexiveness, and a subversive treatment of established orders of society and thought. Arguably the major fictional mode of the late twentieth century, it draws upon contemporary ideas about sign systems and the indeterminacy of meaning and at the same time recaptures the vitality and freedom of nonmimetic traditions traditional forms such as epic, folktale, romance, and myth”. (Brian Attebery, “Fantasy as Mode, Genre, Formula” in Sander, 295).

4: “I began to be able to articulate my distaste for the whole idea of a past whose achievements are something to be mourned or copied”. (Harrison, interview with Cheryl Morgan).

5: ”I’m rather against the impermeable boundaries of genre. I could never write a pure generic work.” M. John Harrison (interview by Marisa Darnel).

6: John Clute writes: “The central argument of [Harrison’s] fantasy can be reduced to some fairly simple propositions: that the worlds of fantasy are a



distortion and denial of reality; and that those who inhabit or imagine those worlds are themselves creatures whose grasp on reality is dreadfully frail. …Escapism is, for [Harrison], bondage”. (Clute, Encyclopedia of Fantasy, 453). Such a view situates Harrison’s work as straddling the boundaries between mainstream and genre fiction, and as fiction which seeks to break from formulaic notions of what sf is and can achieve.

This is not to say Harrison is necessarily against ‘populist work’ (novels such as his The Centauri Device (1974) and the various novels comprising his ‘Viriconium’ sequence have been extremely popular and much reprinted; but he long ago condemned the ‘series mentality’ characteristic of modern fantasy publishing (Cawthorn, 188).

7: “[Tolkien] wrote that the function of fantasy was 'consolation', thereby making it an article of policy that a fantasy writer should mollycoddle the reader. That is a revolting idea, and one, thankfully, that plenty of fantasists have ignored. From the Surrealists through the pulps - via Mervyn Peake and Mikhael Bulgakov and Stefan Grabinski and Bruno Schulz and Michael Moorcock and M. John Harrison and I could go on - the best writers have used the fantastic aesthetic precisely to challenge, to alienate, to subvert and undermine expectations.” (Roy, “Steampunk”, italics mine). The notion of fantasy as subversive can be explored further in texts by Hume and Jackson (see Bibliography). Indeed, Hume and Jackson both deal more extensively with fantasy literature’s marginalisation due to its deliberate departure from ‘reality’; Hume argues fantasy is an impulse as significant as Plato and Aristotle’s mimesis. Jackson’s approach extends Tzvetan Todorov’s structural approach to fantasy to include aspects of psychoanalytic theory in order to define fantasy as a historically determined form whose ambiguities are seen as expressing cultural unease.

8: “This is what we fantasy and sf writers should be writing about, because we know how to talk about the paradox of the successful escape, the failed escape, the drive to escape in the first place, the inadvisability of escape, the impossibility of escape, and so on”. (Harrison, ‘No Escape”, 7).

9: See, e.g., Anon, “Sci-fi prize for space-time rupture novel”. Indeed, Harrison’s US publishers Bantam-Dell have promoted it as such (Nova Swing trailer on YouTube).

10: On the way many of his characters reject lived experience and retreat into self-destructive fantasy, and reflecting on how the writer can also (unless careful) be drawn into this way of thinking, Harrison has said “I don’t want to live in models, fictions, possibilities, alternate realities or multiverses: that’s for kiddies. I want to live and die as a human being in what is.”(Harrison, “No Escape”, 3) and “If you write a lot of fantasy and sf, it’s very easy to get divorced from the idea that you’re actually alive. It’s like doing a lot of computer games: you begin to forget that being alive has consequences.” (Harrison, “M. John Harrison: No Escape”, 7).



11: In Light, Ed Chianese and Michael Kearney are deeply in denial , confused by their own rejection of adulthood. Anna Kearney wants to remain a child, as does Seria Mau, merging her neurobiology symbiotically with her K-ship in a bad dream of immortality. Ed lives out puerile fantasies in a sensory immersion (VR) tank. Kearney, terrified of his own knowledge of complexity, denies his own sexuality, becoming a serial killer who (in an explicit reference to Luke Rhinehart’s existentialist ideas) uses dice to make decisions. Although they can live in a VR tank as does Ed, or visit a ‘chop-shop’ where gene-tailoring will transform them into someone new, they cannot escape their dreams, their desires, their pasts. In Nova Swing, Vic Serotonin, running illicit tours into the Event Zone, is also trapped in unfulfilled dreams. Shady club owner/mobster Paulie DeRaad, with his marauding pack of raincoat-clad mercenary seven-year-old ‘gun-kiddies’, is addicted to power-play fantasies, but is undone when an artefact from the Event Zone infects him. Emil Bonaventure, failed Event Zone explorer, is dying and will never fulfil his dream to solve the Zone’s secrets.

12: Certain themes in Nova Swing can be traced to the influence of Arkady and Boris Strugatsky’s sf classic Roadside Picnic, in which a young man spends his life risking his life in bizarre expeditions to remove and black-market artefacts from an alien visitation site; and I contend that by referencing superior and salient examples of the sf genre such as Strugatsky’s, Harrison is emphasising his refusal of cliché.

13: Harrison has called this essentially “a politics of masturbation” (Harrison, interview with David Matthew, 2), clearly tying his subversive concerns in his fiction with this-world politics.

14: In Light, the magician Sprake (from his story “The Incalling” and his novel The Course of the Heart) plays a crucial role Chapter 16. The many other examples include the stripped horse’s head, a symbol representing death and which here stands in for the creature known as the Shrander, which we have encountered in Harrison’s work from the Viriconium series to stories like “The Horse of Iron, How We Can Know it and be Changed By it Forever.” In Nova Swing, degrees of self-referentiality include the reappearance of the melancholy detective Aschermann, from the story “The Neon Heart Murders”. The Event Zone disease recalls the citywide plague of Harrison’s novel In Viriconium (1982), and the toxic chemical dumps of Signs of Life (1997).

15: In Light, one strand deals with Michael Kearney in our own time; the other two strands deal with Seria Mau and Ed Chianese and how their fates intertwine to produce a powerful, optimistic conclusion. In Nova Swing, the narrative strands centre around Vic



Serontonin, aroudn Llens Aschemann and around the results on Paulie DeRaad of the Event Zone disease resulting from the artefact extracted from the Event Zone.

16: Aporia is a rhetorical term “used in the theory of deconstruction to indicate a kind of impasse or insoluble conflict between rhetoric and thought. Aporia suggests the ‘gap’ or lacuna between what a text means to say and what it is constrained to mean.” (Cuddon, J.A. Penguin Dictionary of Literary Terms. Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin, 2000, 4th ed).

17: The spatial region of The Beach, inhabiting the Tract’s edges, full of age-old abandoned alien technologies, also serves as an aporia, a symbol of absence and of disputed margins.

18: The Tiptree Award is named for James Tiptree Jr, the pseudonym of a feminist female sf writer (Alice Sheldon Bailey) who famously kept her identity as a female writer secret for many years.

17: “Since she comes up from very deep in my imagination , and I think that’s why I’m engaging with her, I find her difficult to explain except by writing her.” (Harrison, interview by Anon, at ph-uk online).

18: In an interview he remarks of one of his other novels: “I think that’s the beginning of a sort of post-feminist recognition that if we want relationships to work we have to negotiate”. (Harrison, interview with Cheryl Morgan).

19: The fact that the “wrong physics loose in the universe” known as K-code is also dubbed “daughter code” by failed Event Zone explorer Emil Bonaventure could be read as misogynistic. This perpetuates the sort of power relationships against which feminism speaks out, and may provide a field of research for future writers on Harrison to explore in more depth.



Bibliography of Works Consulted.

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Genre Expectation, Subversion and Anti-Consolation in the Kefahuchi Tract Novels of M. John Harrison

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