23 May 2023
Meet the legendary author of the anti-memoir Wish I Was Here.
– M. John Harrison created Wish I Was Here out of two hundred thousand words of notes taken over a period of roughly fifty years. ‘So there’s probably another book in the remaining one hundred & fifty thousand somewhere…’ he says.
– Neil Gaiman’s favourite work by M. John Harrison is the Viriconium sequence, which he calls ‘fascinating and delightful’ and for which he wrote the introduction for a U.S. edition.
– His most nominated and awarded novel is Nova Swing; It won the Arthur C. Clarke and Philip K. Dick Awards and was nominated for the British Science Fiction Award, the British Fantasy Award, and the John W. Campbell Award.
– One of his own favourite works of his is Climbers, a novel about his other passion—rock climbing—which was widely rejected by the climbing community.
– Though he has been labelled as ‘one of the restless fathers of modern S[ci-]F[i]’ by Robert Macfarlane and a foundational writer in the development of the New Weird, Harrison rejects stylistic categorisation—unsurprising for a self-identified anarchist.
Wish I Was Here comes out 25th May. Order yours here.