![]() ![]() And the assistant has her own cases to solve, involving corpses slowly levitating towards the ceiling and a figure saying "My name is Pearlant and I come from the future." When higher powers than her hear that phrase, it triggers a scramble towards understanding an ancient device, made by long-dead people, on the edge of the Tract. In the far future, Vic Serotonin's former bar friends take a job collecting artefacts in the ship they bought when Vic disappeared artefacts from Sandra Shen's circus. Her summerhouse catches fire, but the fire is static and unsmoking. In the near future, Anna, Michael Kearney's damaged widow, is failing to deal with her demons. His trips into a place where "into" is meaningless brought him to the attention of the local detective, Aschemann, who bore an uncanny resemblance to the older Albert Einstein, and his unnamed assistant.Įmpty Space is again a form in triplicate. ![]() What followed was an ingenious literary mash-up of Tarkovsky and Chandler, with a seedy tour guide of the prohibited zone in Saudade (a brilliant choice of name: it is a Portuguese word on the limits of translation, meaning something like nostalgia for a past that never was) called Vic Serotonin. Nothing was set in our slice of time, and in the future, the Tract had fallen into a planet. Nova Swing was a horse of a different colour. How these disparate narratives created knots was part of the novel's immense charm how the resolutions to their stories were imperfect, glancing, and more hint than "ta-da!" was its genius. ![]() In the future, thanks in part to the Kearney-Tate equations, mankind has reached the stars and the novel swung between the story of a rogue K-Ship pilot trying to solve an alien puzzle-box that kept asking for one Dr Haends, and a virtual reality addict and former thrill-seeker, Ed Chianese, who was co-opted as a prophet in Sandra Shen's circus, and played a mean game of dice in his day. ![]() In "our" world, a talented physicist called Michael Kearney was revealed as a serial killer, whose murders were an attempt to elude or stave off the attentions of a thing called the Shrander – it appeared as a sort of horse's skull, with a body of rags, wrapped in an old woman's coat. Light was a macabre waltz, dancing between the pre-millennium present and two strands in the future. But while Light and Nova Swing shared certain elements – a future where "tailors" stitch and snip DNA to create whole bodies, where the career choice of an intelligent teenage anorexic is to be catheterised, vivisected, lobotomised and wired in to alien technology as the pilot and central processor of a K-Ship, and where above it all, the Kefahuchi Tract looms, "a singularity without an event horizon" which lets "the wrong physics loose in the universe" – they were very different kinds of novel. Empty Space is set in the same universe as Light, published in 2002 to the green-eyed delight of his peers, and its Arthur C Clarke award-winning successor, Nova Swing (2007). A word of warning: readers new to the work of M John Harrison should probably not make this their first foray into his poetic, angry and intellectually thrilling oeuvre and it would be both a waste and a folly if their first was also their only expedition with him. ![]()
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