Most Popular Books by M. JOHN HARRISON

EMPTY SPACE is a space adventure. We begin with the following dream: An alien research tool the size of a brown dwarf star hangs in the middle of nowhere, as a result of an attempt to place it equidistant from everything else in every possible universe. Somewhere in the fractal labyrinth beneath its surface, a woman lies on an allotropic carbon deck, a white paste of nanomachines oozing from the corner of her mouth. She is neither conscious nor unconscious, dead nor alive. There is something wrong with her cheekbones. At first you think she is changing from one thing into another - perhaps it''s a cat, perhaps it''s something that only looks like one - then you see that she is actually trying to be both things at once. She is waiting for you, she has been waiting for you for perhaps 10,000 years. She comes from the past, she comes from the future. She is about to speak... EMPTY SPACE is a sequel to LIGHT and NOVA SWING, three strands presented in alternating chapters which will work their way separately back to this image of frozen transformation.

In M. John Harrison’s dangerously illuminating new novel, three quantum outlaws face a universe of their own creation, a universe where you make up the rules as you go along and break them just as fast, where there’s only one thing more mysterious than darkness. In contemporary London, Michael Kearney is a serial killer on the run from the entity that drives him to kill. He is seeking escape in a future that doesn’t yet exist—a quantum world that he and his physicist partner hope to access through a breach of time and space itself. In this future, Seria Mau Genlicher has already sacrificed her body to merge into the systems of her starship, the White Cat. But the “inhuman” K-ship captain has gone rogue, pirating the galaxy while playing cat and mouse with the authorities who made her what she is. In this future, Ed Chianese, a drifter and adventurer, has ridden dynaflow ships, run old alien mazes, surfed stellar envelopes. He “went deep”—and lived to tell about it. Once crazy for life, he’s now just a twink on New Venusport, addicted to the bizarre alternate realities found in the tanks—and in debt to all the wrong people. Haunting them all through this maze of menace and mystery is the shadowy presence of the Shrander—and three enigmatic clues left on the barren surface of an asteroid under an ocean of light known as the Kefahuchi Tract: a deserted spaceship, a pair of bone dice, and a human skeleton. Praise for Light “Uproarious, breath-taking, exhilarating . . . This is a novel of full spectrum literary dominance. . . . It is a work of—and about—the highest order.”—Guardian “An increasingly complex and dazzling narrative . . . Light depicts its author as a wit, an awesomely fluent and versatile prose stylist, and an SF thinker as dedicated to probing beneath surfaces as William Gibson is to describing how the world looks when reflected in them. . . . SF fans and skeptics alike are advised to head towards this Light.”—Independent “Light is a literary singularity: at one and the same time a grim, gaudy space opera that respects the physics, and a contemporary novel that unflinchingly revisits the choices that warp a life. It’s almost unbearably good.”—Ken MacLeod, author of Engine City

Set in the unique world first featured in the award-winning Light, here is a story of love, murder, and intergalactic noir on the razor’s edge of the imagination, as envisioned by the incomparable M. John Harrison. Not far from Moneytown, in a neighborhood of underground clubs, body-modification chop shops, adolescent contract killers, and sexy streetwalking Monas, you’ll find the Saudade Event Site: a zone of strange geography, twisted physics, and frightening psychic onslaughts. Vic Serotonin is an illegal “travel agent” into and out of Saudade. His latest client is a woman as unpredictable as the site itself—and maybe as dangerous. She wants a tour inside Saudade just as a troubling new class of biological artifacts have started leaving—living algorithms that are transforming the “real” world in unsettling ways. Pursued by a detective intent on collaring him for his illegal tours, and hunted by a gangster convinced that the travel agent has infected him with a rogue artifact, Vic must make one final trip as the universe around him rapidly veers toward viral chaos.

A magnificent city existing on the ringes of the past, and on the brink of destruction, Viriconium Available to American readers for the first time, this landmark collection gathers four groundbreaking fantasy classics from the acclaimed author of Light. Set in the imagined city of Viriconium, here are the masterworks that revolutionized a genre and enthralled a generation of readers: The Pastel City, A Storm of Wings, In Viriconium, and Viriconium Nights. Back in print after a long absence, these singular tales of a timeless realm and its enigmatic inhabitants are now reborn and compiled to captivate a whole new generation. Praise for M. John Harrison’s Viriconium “The world that Harrison depicts is intricate and authentic, peopled with a multitude of strange yet lifelike characters—a combination which serves to make his richly imagined empire of Viriconium feel very real indeed. . . . This omnibus collection from the author of Light is canon-reading for those who wish to know the genre''s roots, as well as the heights, to which it can aspire.”—Kirkus Reviews (starred review) “Brilliant, beautiful, and absolutely essential reading. The breadth of vision and imagination alone in these books is unparalleled. It is truly one of a kind and will continue to haunt you in the best possible way for years.”—Jonathan Carroll, author of White Apples “Harrison’s Viriconium sequence is the jewel in the crown of 20th-century fantasy, a work that proves irrefutably that fantastic literature can be Art with a capital A, holding its own alongside the very finest writing of our time, or any other.”—Elizabeth Hand, author of Mortal Love “M. John Harrison is a true master of English prose. He possesses the eye of a painter, the ear of a bard, and a rigorous and playful intellect. The Viriconium novels and stories are infused with a haunting genius that never falters.”—K.J. Bishop, author of The Etched City

John M. Harrison delivers an extraordinary, genre-bending novel that weaves together mythology, sexuality, and the troubled past and present of Eastern Europe. It begins on a hot May night, when three Cambridge students carry out a ritualistic act that changes their lives. Years later, none of the participants can remember what exactly transpired; but their clouded memories can''t rid them of an overwhelming sense of dread. Pam Stuyvesant is an epileptic haunted by strange sensual visions. Her husband Lucas believes that a dwarfish creature is stalking him. Self-styled Sorcerer Yaxley becomes obsessed with a terrifyingly transcendent reality. The seemingly least effected participant in the ritual (who is haunted by the smell of roses) attempts to help his friends escape the torment that has engulfed their lives. Skyhorse Publishing, under our Night Shade and Talos imprints, is proud to publish a broad range of titles for readers interested in science fiction (space opera, time travel, hard SF, alien invasion, near-future dystopia), fantasy (grimdark, sword and sorcery, contemporary urban fantasy, steampunk, alternative history), and horror (zombies, vampires, and the occult and supernatural), and much more. While not every title we publish becomes a New York Times bestseller, a national bestseller, or a Hugo or Nebula award-winner, we are committed to publishing quality books from a diverse group of authors.

"One of our greatest and most original living writers sets out the perils of the writing life with joyful provocation in this "anti-memoir." M. John Harrison has produced one of the greatest bodies of fiction of any living British author, encompassing space opera, speculative fiction, fantasy, and magical and literary realism. But is there even an M. John Harrison and if so, where do we find him? This is the question the author asks in this memoir-as-mystery, turning for clues to forty years of notetaking: "A note or it never happened. A note or you never looked." Are these notebooks records of failed presence? How do they shine a light on a childhood in the industrial Midlands, a portrait of a young artist in counterculture London, on an adulthood of restless escape into hill and moorland landscapes? And do they tell us anything about the writing of books, each one so different from the last that it might have been written by another version of the author? With aphoristic daring and laconic wit, this anti-memoir will fascinate and delight. It confirms M. John Harrison still further in his status as the most original British writer of his generation."--

John Truck was to outward appearances just another lowlife spaceship captain. But he was also the last of the Centaurans, or at least half of him was, which meant that he was the only person who could operate the Centauri Device, a sentient bomb which might hold the key to settling a vicious space war. M. John Harrison''s classic novel turns the conventions of space opera on their head, and is written with the precision and brilliance for which is famed.

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 who so believe in them, characters who spend their lives hunting for, and haunted by, clues and maps that speak to the possibility of somewhere else. This selection of stories, drawn from over 50 years of writing, bears witness to that desire for difference: whether following backstreet occultists, amateur philosophers, down-and-outs or refugees, we see our relationship with ‘the other’ in microscopic detail, and share in Harrison’s rejection of the idea that the world, or our understanding of it, could ever be settled.

A ''Book to Read in 2026'' in the Guardian, New Statesman, and Irish Times A Best New Book in the Daily Telegraph, iNews and New Scientist ''At once surreal, seductive, shrewdly funny and wholly terrifying'' Julia Armfield ''It will get deep into your bones'' Chris Power ''Harrison is without peer as a chronicler of the fraught, unsteady state we''re in'' Olivia Laing Phillip Tennent makes his living at the tideline, collecting artefacts that wash up from the Channel. It''s been years since the crisis changed everything, but its exact nature remains obscure. Government barely functions, the seas are full of new creatures, Europe has been mislaid. It feels like the end. Now Phillip has fished out of the water an object he can''t keep. A creature that keeps changing. An artefact he must take inland, before it destroys everything he thinks he knows. The End of Everything is a slyly satirical and unsettling post-apocalyptic adventure into the limits of human understanding from the peerless master of contemporary fiction.

*WINNER OF THE GOLDSMITHS PRIZE 2020* *A New Statesman Book of the Year* ''A mesmerising, mysterious book . . . Haunting. Worrying. Beautiful'' Russell T. Davis ''Brilliantly unsettling'' Olivia Laing ''A magificent book'' Neil Gaiman ''An extraordinary experience'' William Gibson Winner of the Goldsmiths Prize 2020, this is fiction that pushes the boundaries of the novel form. Shaw had a breakdown, but he''s getting himself back together. He has a single room, a job on a decaying London barge, and an on-off affair with a doctor''s daughter called Victoria, who claims to have seen her first corpse at age thirteen. It''s not ideal, but it''s a life. Or it would be if Shaw hadn''t got himself involved in a conspiracy theory that, on dark nights by the river, seems less and less theoretical... Meanwhile, Victoria is up in the Midlands, renovating her dead mother''s house, trying to make new friends. But what, exactly, happened to her mother? Why has the local waitress disappeared into a shallow pool in a field behind the house? And why is the town so obsessed with that old Victorian morality tale, The Water Babies? As Shaw and Victoria struggle to maintain their relationship, the sunken lands are rising up again, unnoticed in the shadows around them.

We''re running out of planet and we''re running out of patience. The party''s over and we''re looking for the door. But the exits are unmarked. The engines of the world are hidden from us. Ninety-six per cent of the universe is missing and the rest is stirred into motion by machinery that hides in plain sight. We''ve got to get out of this place - but how? Embracing everything from politics to polymorphism, physics & fantasy, Exit Strategies is your indispensable, (sometimes unreliable) guide to the escape tunnel. With a foreword by CERN physicist Michael Doser, and featuring stories by Jeff Noon, Kathleen Ann Goonan, and the best-selling fantasy writer Tad Williams, Exit Strategies looks for a back door to the universe over 150 pages. How much of the cosmos is real, how much an astronomer''s dream? And if we could escape from reality, what kind of utopia would we build for ourselves? Elsewhere in Exit Strategies, M. John Harrison meets a rising star of TV science, Hannu Rajaniemi considers what will happen when our books start reading us, and Claire Dean meets the artists bent on making J G Ballard''s Crystal World a reality. And in a special tribute, Adam Roberts considers the life, work and sheer sanity of the late, great Iain Banks. Every two months Arc maps the future through stories, features, essays and provocations from some of the world''s most celebrated authors from science fiction and beyond.

From the inner realms of humanity to the far reaches of space, these are the science fiction and fantasy tales that are shaping the genre and the way we think about the future. Multi-award winning editor Jonathan Strahan continues to shine a light on the very best writing, featuring both established authors and exciting new talents. Within you will find twenty-eight incredible tales, showing the ever growing depth and diversity that science fiction and fantasy continues to enjoy. These are the brightest stars in our firmament, lighting the way to a future filled with astonishing stories about the way we are, and the way we could be. Including stories by K J Parker, Neil Gaiman, Yoon Ha Lee, Joe Abercrombie, Sofia Samatar, Greg Egan, E Lily Yu, Geoff Ryman, M Bennardo, Ramez Naam, Ted Chiang, Priya Sharma, Richard Parks, Lavie Tidhar, Thomas Olde Heuvelt, Benjanun Sriduangkaew, Eleanor Arnason, Ian R Macleod, An Owomoyela, Karin Tidbeck, Madeline Ashby, Caitlin R Kiernan, Robert Reed, Ian Mcdonald, Val Nolan, M John Harrison, James Patrick Kelly and Charlie Jane Anders.