““Undoing the mechanisms”: Genre Expectation,
Subversion & Anti-Consolation in the Kefahuchi
3, No 4 (WN12)
A Contribution by Leigh Blackmore for the
Sword & Sorcery & Weird Fiction Terminus
(Dec 1, 2008 mailing), & Esoteric Order of
Dagon (Feb 2, 2009 mailing) amateur press
associations.
Leigh Blackmore, 78 Rowland Ave,
Wollongong, NSW 2500. Australia.
Email: lvxnox@gmail.com
Wikipedia entry:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leigh_Blackmore
Official Website: Blackmausoleum –
http://members.optusnet.com.au/lvxnox/
In Memoriam: Ted Wykes (28.4.1921-22.11.2008)
Ted Wykes, OAM, was a well-known cricket
umpire, and my father-in-law. See:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ted_Wykes. A video
about his career is available from
http://www.filmbuff.com.au/ted.html
_____________________________________
Contents this issue
Mantic Notes…………………………………….……1
Books By My Bedside……………………………….5
“Speech” from Spores from Sharnoth launch…….5
“Critical Survey re: the Writing of M. John
Harrison”……………………………………….……….7
Tract Novels of M. John Harrison”…………..….....11
Two Interviews with Gavin L. O’Keefe…………..24
Mantichorus: Mailing Notes…………………..……29
Mantic Notes
(Pronunciation:'man-tik. Etymology: Greek mantikos,
from mantis : of, relating to the faculty of divination;
prophetic).
_____________________________________
It’s difficult (as usual) to encapsulate the last
few months’ activities in a short space. I
deferred my Journalism degree after my first
session this year, having completed a year and
a half of it, in order to concentrate on finishing
my Creative Writing degree. All was going
well until in late September personal disaster
struck; I was admitted to hospital with a
strangulated hernia, necessitating emergency
surgery. I was in hospital for around a week –
it would have been shorter except that some
secondary infection from the surgery had to be
dealt with. While there, I wrote and dictated
over the phone to Danny Lovecraft the
Acknowledgments for my book of weird
poetry, Spores from Sharnoth & Other Madnesses,
which was reaching publication stage. I needed
two further weeks off uni to recover, which
meant I had to scramble like hell to deliver all
my due assignments before the end of session –
but while healing up from the surgery I
managed it, including helping to continue to
edit and publish Tide magazine, whose fifth
annual issue was launched in October. (The
mag included “Leaving Town”, a recent short
story by me. Its publication made the local rag,
The Wollongong Advertiser, with a photo of my
editing class. Woohoo!) For my 3rd Year
Contemporary Theory course I had to write a
4000 word mini-thesis. I chose to write on M.
John Harrison, and include here both the
Critical Survey I had to prepare, and the mini-
thesis itself, which I hope some readers will
enjoy. Having reached the stage of doing
Honours next year, I will be able (finally) to
choose my own topics to write about. My
proposal (which has been accepted) is, for my
critical work, to write a thesis on Terry
Dowling’s Tom Tyson/Rynosseros; for my
creative component, I will be working on a
25,000 word self-contained segment of my
long-mooted Pre-Raphaelite novel, Ghosts in the
House of Life.
On the Labour Day weekend in October, just
able to walk around again without too much
pain, I attended Conflux 5 convention in
Canberra with Graham and Margi. As welling
as hanging out with lots of cool fans, writers
and publishers, Margi and I appeared again on
various panels discussing horror and fantasy (a
particularly enjoyable one for me was the panel
on Fantasy in Poetry, chaired by Danny
Lovecraft and with James Doig). I also had fun
on the Fifty Minutes of Fear reading, where I
read an extract from my unpublished horror
story “By Their Fruits.” (Marty Young,
however, awarded the darkest story award to a
dead writer from one of James Doig’s
anthologies!) As usual, we bought numerous
new books at the various signings, and there
was a launch for my Spores from Sharnoth,
which delightedly inscribed for various
purchasers.
L-R: Danny Lovecraft, Leigh Blackmore, Margaret
Lovecraft of P'rea Press, Oct 2008 at Conflux 5
(ignore date, set wrongly on camera!).
L-R: Danny Lovecraft, Leigh Blackmore, launching
Spores from Sharnoth, Conflux 5.
Signing Spores from Sharnoth at the mass signing,
Conflux 5.
I should express here my gratitude to all who
helped create Spores from Sharnoth – David E.
Schultz for his design, Gavin O’Keefe for his
cover art, S.T. Joshi for his foreword, and
Margaret and Danny Lovecraft for their tireless
work in bringing the book into being. (Dead
Reckonings, the US journal, has reviewed Spores
as follows. I can’t resist quoting the review in
full:
LEIGH BLACKMORE. Spores from
Sharnoth and Other Madnesses. Sydney,
Australia: P’rea Press, 2008. xvii, 56 pp. $15.00
(Australian) tpb. [ISBN 978-0-980465-2-4]
“This remarkable little book of verse at once
establishes Blackmore as one of the leading weird
poets of our time, fit to be mentioned with the likes
of Bruce Boston, G. Sutton Breiding, Ann K.
Schwader, and others. Although containing homages
to, and imitations of, the work of H. P. Lovecraft,
Clark Ashton Smith, Arthur Machen, and other
weird titans, the smooth-flowing lyricism, the
plangent symbols and metaphors, and the sense of
place—the Australia of both the near and the distant
past—are all Blackmore’s own. Chiefly a
bibliographer and critic, Blackmore reveals
penetrating insight into the authors to whom he pays
tribute and an understanding of the metrical
precision that sets them apart from the lazybones free
verse that too often clutters our poetry journals. The
final sestet of “Terror Australis”—a splendid three-
sonnet evocation of the horrors down under—can
only be quoted: “Antipodean nightmares strange and
bleak / Fill dreamers’ minds with eerie visions dire, /
That fill their souls with recondite desire / And draw
them on to leer and shout and shriek. / Oppressed
and tortured, baneful and malign, / With their grim
fate Australians must entwine.”
Well, that completely blew me away! I
also just learned that the collection has received
a very favourable (by James Doig) in Black No
3, where it is called “an excellent collection
by…one of Australia’s leading talents in weird
fiction” (thanks James, although I’d hardly
compare myself to such talents as Rick Kennett,
Terry Dowling and Rob Hood, whose weird
collections should be on every serious horror
collector’s shelf) and concludes” One can say of
Blackmore as Lovecraft once said of Clark
Ashton Smith: “none strikes the note of cosmic
horror so well.””. Exalted company indeed!
A couple of photos from the launch
are included here; I wish I had room here to
include them all our Conflux 5 photos, but you
can see more at my Flickr stream:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/hadit93/
L-R: Jack Dann, Liz Argyll, Leigh Blackmore, Margi
Curtis at Conflux 5.
Conflux Fifty Minutes of Fear reading: L-R back
James Doig, Rob Hood, Front: Andrew McKiernan,
Shayne Jiraiya Cummings, Leigh Blackmore.
Oh, and a plug – there are less than 50
copies remaining of the 100 copy first printing
as I write, so secure yours by emailing P’rea
Press: DannyL58@hotmail.com. I include here
the short speech I gave at the launch. Margi
also ran our traditional Conflux workshop on
magick – this year on “Dream Magick”, since
the convention’s theme was Dreaming. I was a
bit surprised that there wasn’t more HP
Lovecraft content in the panels, since ostensibly
the theme was also about the 1920’s and 1930’s
in horror and sf. Margi and I also celebrated
our fifth anniversary of being together (having
met at the first Conflux). Graham explored
many sights of Canberra and helped us with
‘roadying’ our gear. I sold various books
through the auction which helped fund some
of our purchases. I also got to meet with Liz
Gorinsky, an associate editor from new York’s
Tor Books, and made a couple of pitches based
on ideas cooked up by myself and colleague
Chris Sequeira. We have sent her a package
post-convention, and shall see whether that
contact leads to anything of note. ***In general
family news, my stepson Rohan has found a
flat in Camperdown, an inner-city Sydney
suburb. Graham moved many of his
possessions up to Sydney recently. We hope
this will be a good start to his newfound
independence; and this week he will turn 20. I
was honoured by a visit from my brother Kent,
who passed through Wollongong from Sydney
on his way to Kiama for a holiday; the only one
of my blood family to have visited me since I
moved down here close on five years ago. My
long-time colleague Chris Sequeira, wife Jacqui
& daughter Valentina (now five!) also visited in
early November. Margi finished her 12 weeks
work experience with the local TAFE library
and has continued finishing her library
diploma, under great strain due to the state of
her health. In a couple of weeks there should
be some relief for her when she finishes and
can relax somewhat. Graham has had
supervision of HSC exams to contend with,
and also the fact that his father is terminally ill
with cancer. (Graham’s dad Ted died,
surrounded by family, yesterday 21 November
2008; I have made this issue a memorial issue
to him). Our occult group has shrunk
somewhat to a small but dedicated core of
practitioners and we continue to meet monthly
for ritual. At home, our major innovation has
been the installation of a woodburning
combustion heater which serve as well through
many future winters. The third “Black
Cauldron” column on witchcraft and magic by
myself and Margi appeared in Issue 3 of Black:
Australia’s Dark Culture magazine, out in
October across Australia. We’re enjoying being
regular staffers, and the magazine seems to be
proving a success. Margi and I will also be
conducting interviews with some of Australia’s
foremost occult practitioners for forthcoming
issues. I haven’t been able to write much fiction
lately, though a new mainstream story “The
Roomer” was written for my 3rd year Advanced
Prose Class and I will submit it shortly. It’s
primarily influenced by James Kelman, a writer
I much admire. I also sent a batch of stories for
a proposed collection to a New York publisher
though I’m yet to hear of their fate. I had one
poem “Sound of Now” published (twice) – in
print in Tertangala, and online at
www.Australianreader.com. My radio play,
which I had expected to air during October on
ABC National, was held until the second batch,
apparently now for broadcast in March next
year. Over the last year or so I’ve been teaching
myself to play guitar, and have worked up
Books by
quite a repertoire of songs (covers) to entertain
myself with, though my technique needs a lot My Bedside
of improvement. I just submitted a Mythos tale
to ST Joshi’s Black Wings anthology although I
Reading in the last few months was mainly
knew the book was nearly full, but regrettably
confined to texts I had to read for class. Since
my tale was too ‘traditional’ in its use of
finishing session I’ve reread Thomas Ligotti’s
Mythos tropes for ST’s more lateral approach;
wonderful Noctuary, and Barry Humphries’
at his suggestion I have re-submitted to Robert
equally wonderful autobiography Life as Me.
M. Price. Tentacles crossed! ***Ben Szumskyj
Books that I have in a pile next to my bed,
has announced that he will be stepping back
(started and not finished due to continual
from running the SSWFT apa, hence I have
distractions of study), include King’s
come on board to act as Official Editor for that
Everything’s Eventual; From Fatigue to Fantastic
organisation as of 2009. (Don’t forget to check
(on chronic fatigue and fibromyalgia, from
the SWWFT blogspot online guys – there are
which Margi suffers); Fivefold by Nathan
new updates there, and please send me your
Burrage; Introduction to Magic by Julius Evola;
news of doings and publications for inclusion
Deep Future by Eric Brown; Lovecraft’s The
there!). Phillip A. Ellis will be taking the reins
Horror in the Museum & Other Revisions; the
of the already well-established Studies in
Cthulhu meets Holmes anthology Shadows Over
Australian Weird Fiction, which I shall continue
Baker Street; The Einstein Intersection by Samuel
to assist in editing along with Phillip and James
R. Delany; 100 European Horror Films edited by
Doig. I’ve also just completed a 9000 word
Stephen Jay Schneider; Year’s Best Australian SF
article titled “The Twisted World Inside Our
& Fantasy 4, edited by Congreve & Marquadt,
Skulls: The 1950s Crime and Suspense Novels
Dark Crimes edited by Ed Gorman; Dark
of Robert Bloch” for Ben Szumskyj’s
Rosaleen (unpublished bio of Rosaleen Norton
forthcoming book of Bloch criticism from
by Keith Richmond); Thylacine (unpublished
McFarland Press, Robert Bloch: The Man Who
novel by Steve Proposch and Jan
Collected Psychos. During the meanwhilst (to
Scherpenhuizen); Silent Children by Ramsey
quote Monty Python), I have a couple of novel
Campbell; and The Voudun Gnostic Workbook by
manuscripts to assess, which will keep me busy
Michael Bertiaux. Hopefully I’ll finish most of
for a few weeks of summer break. After that
these over the summer break. We haven’t been
will be a major proofreading job on a new book
out to the movies for months, and our current
edited by Meredith Jones, for whom I did a
DVD player is broken, so the only movies I’ve
similar job last year. I am also applying for a
seen have been while going through our old
job as administrator of the South Coast Writers’
VHS collection and culling it. Last night, for
Centre here in the Illawarra, which I hope I
instance, I watched Dumb and Dumber, which
might be able to fulfil while I do Honours next
I’d never seen; I was entertained by its
year at uni. It’s only a six month contract while
mindlessness. I have a bunch of DVD’s waiting
the current administrator is on maternity leave;
to be viewed when our player is repaired or
but I may not get the job, so best not wax
replaced, including such gems as Larry
lyrical about that yet. Fred Phillips, fellow
Cohen’s Q, and a Hammer I’ve never seen,
EOD/SWWFT member, has appointed me
Brides of Dracula.
Provost for Wollongong and Dependencies
NSW Australia in his Ancient and Honourable
Order of the Drowned Rat, a convocation of
bibliomaniacs who will hunt for the book in its
native habitat in any weather. I believe I join a Speech:
number of other apa members in holding a
post in this distinguished bibliophilic
SPORES FROM SHARNOTH
organisation… Lastly, I had a minor skin LAUNCH (CONFLUX 5)
cancer taken off my left arm a couple of days © Leigh Blackmore 2008
ago; have to get the stitches out in ten days or
so. And so life goes on – a mixed As well as being a poet, I’m a
bag… magician. I practice magic in the ceremonial
tradition of the Western Mysteries. What that
means I haven’t time to go into here and now,
but I have always seen the art of my writing as
being intimately connected with the art of my
magic. Magic, of course, is sometimes referred
to as the Royal Art. Clive Barker, for one, has
used this connection of magic and writing in
his series titled “The Art”.
The Latin word cantare means to sing.
An incantation therefore implies both magic
and music, a connection that has always
pleased me as I pursued both my writing and
my magical interests. And so a poem is a song,
an incantation, a spell.
The idea of poetry being an incantation, a song,
is also one of the reasons I adhere in much of
my work to older forms, and a Romantic sense
of language. To quote from a poet I greatly
admire, the California Romantic and weird
fiction writer Clark Ashton Smith:
“As to my own employment of an ornate
style, using many words of classic origin and exotic
colour, I can only say that [it] is designed to
produce effects of language and rhythm which could
not possibly be achieved by a vocabulary restricted
to what is known as “basic English”. A style
composed of words of Anglo-Saxon origin tend to a
spondaic rhythm, which by some mysterious law
reproduces the atmosphere of ordinary life. An
atmosphere of remoteness, vastness, mystery and
exoticism is more naturally evoked by a style with
an admixture of Latinity, lending itself to more
varied and sonorous rhythms, as well as to subtler
shades, tints and nuances of meaning.”
Smith, indeed, titled one of his poetry
collections Spells and Philtres – for he
recognised that poetry is magic, and magic is
poetry. He also referred to poetry as a “gesture
towards the infinite”- a definition I particularly
like.
Much of the poetry of the icons of
weird literature to whom I have been devoted –
the romanticism of Shelley and Keats; Edgar
Allan Poe, with his weird verse that still rings
the note of terror just as his tales do; Donald
Wandrei with his “Sonnets of the Midnight
Hours”, each inspired by a particular dream of
Wandrei’s; HP Lovecraft, with his sonnet
sequence “The Fungi from Yuggoth”, unique in
the English language for its concentrated
themes of the macabre within an extended and
linked poetic sequence; and Clark Ashton
Smith, with his epic “The Hashish Eater” and
his numberless poems of cosmic exoticism and
strange beauty; Smith’s predecessor, George
Sterling, almost unknown today, but one of the
immortals of strange verse, particularly for his
epics “The Wine of Wizardry” and “The
Testimony of the Suns”– much of this poetry
has flavoured mine, and I confess that this
makes it old-fashioned in the eyes of some. Yet
my natural voice when I turn to the writing of
weird verse is that of the formal and to the
stately, that of the structured forms such as the
sonnet. I have even gone so far as to utilise that
most neglected of forms, the prose poem. Like
Smith, I favour a language grounded not so
much in the senses as in the imagination.
This doesn’t mean that I have been
ignorant of modernist or indeed postmodernist
developments in poetry. T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound
and the great imagist poets; the Beat poets,
including William Burroughs and others who
favour the playing of games with language,
with the short-circuiting or abandonment of
old forms, have also had their influence on me,
and at least some of the poems in this collection
are in what one might call modernist forms.
None of this is to claim that my work
ranks with that of
the poets I mention.
I’m talking about
them only to give
you some idea of
the context in
which Spores from
Sharnoth may be
placed. The genre
of weird verse is a
narrow one, and in
the twentieth
century there are
only a few writers of this genre whose names
would spring to the lips – Joseph Payne
Brennan, Richard L. Tierney, Leah Bodine
Drake, Lin Carter amongst them. Many of the
weird poets of worth await full rediscovery –
one thinks for instance of the Texan weirdist
Lilith Lorraine, or the California Romantic
Nora May French.
My collection is a humbler affair than
the work of any of these. The sequence Spores
from Sharnoth was written in direct hommage to
Lovecraft’s Fungi from Yuggoth, and is only half
the length of Lovecraft’s sequence, though I
intend progressively adding to it. Of the other
individual poems, some are taken from a wider
body of work which includes love lyrics and
song lyrics. But they have all been chosen on
the basis of their fantasy or weird element for
this collection.
Read: “Recall”; “The Bibliotaph”
I’d particularly like to thank Danny and
Margaret Lovecraft for their work in bringing
the collection into being. It was Danny’s
enthusiasm which prompted the collecting of
these verses, many of which had been
published in small magazines but awaited
proper collection. Danny and Margaret did an
estimable job of editing the collection in
consultation with me, and as we worked
through old poems together we found many in
need of revision here and there, so I owe them
a debt for the touching up which has made this
the best version of my weird poetry that there
could be. Danny and Margaret have also been
responsible for reawakening my interest in
poetry after a lapse of some years.
I’d also like to thank my partners
Graham and Margi for their support. Without
their help and guidance my life would be much
the poorer, and Margi’s experience and
knowledge as a published poet has also
contributed to improving the work in this
collection.
I’m humbled that recognised writers
such as Darrell Schweitzer, Richard Tierney
and the critic S.T. Joshi have seen fit to
comment favourably on this poetic work of
mine, which I really see as a small subset of my
larger work in fantastic and weird fiction. It
gives me great pleasure to see the poems
collected in a handy volume, and I do hope
that anyone who is interested in fantastic
poetry will purchase a copy, thus repaying the
time and investment that P’rea Press has put
into producing it.
If I can circle back to Clark Ashton
Smith again – you can tell I like him, can’t you?
– I’d like to conclude by talking briefly about
why one would write fantastic poetry. Well,
why shouldn’t we? Is imaginative poetry
somehow inferior? Must writing stress the
human elements of experience over the
supernatural? Smith said “I think that the
current definition or delimitation of what
constitutes life is worse than ridiculous. Anything
that the human imagination can conceive of becomes
thereby a part of life, and poetry such as mine,
properly considered, is not an ‘escape;’ but an
extension.” And Smith also said “it is partly
because of the shifting, unstable ground on which
the thing called realism stands, that I regard pure,
frank fantasy as a more valid and lasting art-
expression of the human mind.”
I couldn’t have put it better myself.
Critical Survey re: the Writing
of M.[ichael] John Harrison.
© Leigh Blackmore 2008
In this survey I will examine the range
of writings about Harrison’s writing in general,
although my mini-thesis will focus primarily
on his two most recent novels. I feel it is
important to assess how Harrison’s writing
career has been seen to date. This will help me
focus on relevant readings in my own mini-
thesis on his work.
Harrison has been seen primarily as a
genre science-fiction and fantasy writer; most
critical essays on his work have appeared in
science fiction encyclopedias. His work has
been read most often as absurdist and
grotesque; as uncommonly (for his genre)
concerned with the topographical; and as
progressively performing a
subversion/deconstruction of the
fantasy/science fiction genre. He has also often
been seen as a postmodernist, occasionally as
an important supernaturalist, and also as a
realist and modernist. His themes of pessimism
and compassion have often been commented
on. To a lesser extent he has been read as a neo-
Gothicist or a practitioner of “literary fantasy.”
There is a plethora of interviews with
Harrison and reviews of his work on the
internet. Many of them have eventuated since
the publication of Light (Gollancz, 2002), a
novel seen by many critics as a triumphal
return to sf and perhaps to its predictable genre
tropes, after his ‘absence’ from the genre while
writing the stories that comprise such
collections as Travel Arrangements (Gollancz,
2000) and Things That Never Happen (Gollancz,
2004). Most readings of Harrison’s work in
these recent reviews, (too numerous to be
quoted here), focus on his use of science fiction.
While reading him as a superb genre
practitioner, they tend to neglect aspects of his
work that deliberately undermine genre
expectations. Similarly with regard to reviews
of Light’s sequel, Nova Swing (Gollancz, 2007).
Unfortunately, I have not yet been able to
consult the important compilation Parietal
Games which collects all Harrison’s own critical
work together with essays on him by various
hands.
Earlier critics have more accurately
identified Harrison’s concern with the
subversion of the fantasy genre. McAuley
asserts that with his second novel “he was able
to experiment with, and reify, the escapist
imagery and childish refusal to confront the
world (as he sees it) of much contemporary
fantasy.” (McAuley, 271). McCauley also
comments on Harrison’s “sarcasms on the
traditional role of the hero in fantasy”
(McAuley, 271) . Furthermore, McAuley
identifies the paralysis of characters by their
pasts in A Storm of Wings and In Viriconium (in
which a plague of despair creeps across the
city), as “an implicit criticism of fantasy fiction
itself” (McAuley, 271), and asserts that the
stories in Viriconium Nights “make quite plain
Harrison’s view of the relationship between
fantasy and the world, and his disdain for
those decadent forms of high fantasy which
imitate and heighten only selected aspects of
the world” (McAuley, 255) and concludes that
“we miss his fierce lessons on reading the real
and the fantastic at our peril.” (McAuley, 272).
Clute asserts that the central arguments of
Harrison’s fantasy include the 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.” And that for Harrison “escapism is
bondage.” (Clute and Grant, 453)
Many critics have read Harrison’s
work as fitting the tradition of the Absurd or
the Grotesque. George Kelley, for example,
reads the Viriconium sequence as absurdist
science fiction, particularly In Viriconium,
which he asserts “goes beyond black humour
into a coma of despair” and Viriconium Nights
which he sees as almost “directionless.” He
also comments on the black humour in
Harrison’s “most accessible” sf novel, The
Centauri Device (Doubleday, 1974), calling
Harrison “a brilliant stylist whose work
captures the grotesque and the decadent in
vivid, absurd images.” (Kelley, 422).
Joel Lane also asserts that Harrison’s
absurd themes bind readers “in supernatural
images which are at once grotesque and
awesome.” Lane divides the “lyrical” Harrison
(the Viriconium stories) from the “bleak and
realistic” Harrison (his supernatural stories).
(Lane, 254). Hughes comments that “the world
of The Pastel City is decadent and weary; the
action is often completely ludicrous” (Hughes,
2). These readings are accurate for Harrison’s
early experimental short stories, and his early
novels. But Harrison himself has stated “Since
1980 I have turned away from the extreme
absurdism of The Pastel City and A Storm of
Wings – with their stress on the failure of, and
the fear of, action” and asserts that in more
recent work he engages with “a moderate
existentialism” which seems to “share ground
in the concept of the ‘accented moment-sign’ or
moment-of-being.” (Harrison, “Comments” in
Pederson, 421).
Topographical readings have been
popular with critics, because Harrison’s work
is unusually rich in detailed topographical
observation, both in his genre fantasy and his
emphatically non-fantasy novels such as
Climbers (1989). Cawthorn and Moorcock read
Harrison’s The Pastel City topographically and
psychologically, declaring that in it “the
relationships between the landscape and
psyche…become a personal interaction, each
reshaping the other” (Cawthorn & Moorcock,
188). Hughes points out that “much of his fine
eye for landscape can be traced to his love of
the hardy outdoor life.” (Hughes, 2). Pringle
comments on Harrison’s “excellent knowledge
of geology and topography (his wastelands are
depicted with a seasoned fell-walker’s eye”
(Pringle, Modern Fantasy, 202). Clute
(Enyclopedia of Science Fiction, 547 comments on
the “topographical exactness” of A Storm of
Wings, and the similar “utter exactitude” of the
landscapes in the later Viriconium stories and
asserts “the reality of things seen comes, in the
end, to be the only reality to which Harrison
will give allegiance.” (Clute, 548)
Linked to his notions of subverting
genre fantasy is the idea that Harrison is a
postmodern writer. Rob Latham, for instance,
considers that Harrison’s Viriconium sequence,
a sword-and–sorcery sequence that is set in
“the hallucinatory labyrinth of the
contemporary city” and the eponymous urban
dreamland, “flirts with postmodern
ambiguities”. While Latham sees the first book
in the sequence, The Pastel City (NEL, 1971) as a
fairly straightforward adventure story, he
considers that the subsequent volumes – A
Storm of Swings (Sphere, 1980), In Viriconium
(Gollancz, 1982), and Viriconium Nights (Ace,
1984; rev. Gollancz, 1985) “skirt the
metafictional terrain of Borges and Calvino in
their exploration of delirious mindscapes, the
shifting maze of a deliquescent far future.”
(Latham, 519). Harrison himself has identified
the Viriconium sequence as “an unashamed
postmodern fiction of the heart, out of which
all the values we yearn for most have been
swept precisely aside so that we will try and
put them back again (and, in that attempt, look
at them afresh.)” (Harrison, “What it Might Be
like…”, 1).
 Harrison, a writer who as a both a
critic and a novelist is acutely aware of literary
theory, has said “Any child can see that the
map is not the ground…Viriconium
manipulates map-to-ground expectations to
imply a depth that isn’t there.” (‘What It Might
Be Like…”, 2). For a critic such as Rob Latham,
Harrison is engaging with modernity rather
than postmodernity. Latham has identified the
stories gathered in The Machine in Shaft Ten
(Panther, 1975) and The Ice Monkey (Gollancz,
1983) as often bordering on supernatural
horror “in their evocation of an entropic
modernity.” He cites the classic tale “Running
Down” (in New Worlds 8, ed Hilary Bailey
[Sphere, 1975]) as an example, saying it
“literalized the thermodynamic metaphor in its
portrait of a hapless misfit who erodes and
destroys everything he touches.” (Latham,
519).
Many critics have observed Harrison’s
specific thematic concerns with pessimism and
compassion. Lane sees these qualities in
Harrison’s earliest novel The Committed Men,
which is “a grim, sardonic post-apocalyptic
narrative” in which several key Harrison
themes emerge: “quests, rituals, relics,
madness.” Lane comments that “Harrison’s
irony mediates between the bleak pessimism
on the surface of his writing and the
compassion at its heart” (Lane, 255). Lane
further asserts that The Course of the Heart “is a
brilliant use of supernatural themes to explore
human mortality and loss. It portrays a heaven
as corruptible and arbitrary as the world.”
(Lane, 255). Harrison, one of the most cogently
self-aware critics of his own work, has asserted
that “My fiction is concerned with the inability
of people to feel ordinary emotions, or to
communicate them successfully to one another;
their efforts to maintain identity in the face of
abstract systems and idealistic social structures;
and their perception of themselves as live
individuals in a meaningless, contingent
universe.” (Harrison, “Comments”, 421)
Another extension of Harrison’s
thematic concerns with pessimism/compassion
is his exploration of the linkages between
emotional and physical wastelands. Latham
identifies Harrison’s novel, which concerns the
aftermath of a magical ritual gone wrong, The
Course of the Heart (Gollancz, 1992) as
positioning Harrison as a major author of
supernatural horror, especially in its depiction
of the nameless narrator “whose aching midlife
crisis points up the spiritual emptiness and
deadened perception of secular modernity.”
(Latham, 519). He calls this novel “one of the
finest examples of neo-Gothic literature in
contemporary British literature.” (Latham, 520).
While Latham is perhaps the only critic to
position Harrison as a neo-Gothicist - (he sees
some of Harrison’s works, although overtly
science fiction, such as the desolate post
apocalypse tale The Committed Men
(Doubleday, 1971) and Signs of Life (Gollancz,
1997), a grim satire of biotechnology, as being
“redolent with a bleak and morbid atmosphere
that verges on the Gothic” (Latham, 519) )–
Harrison’s work indeed straddles the
boundaries between fantasy, science fiction,
horror and mainstream, and Latham’s is a valid
reading.
Some critics have preferred to read
Harrison’s work as “high” or “literary fantasy”,
a reading which positions him squarely within
the formulaic genre but which accords him a
distinguished place in it. David Pringle, for
example, has distinguished between Harrison’s
earlier works, (such as the Viriconium
sequence , which are seen as relatively
conventional genre fantasies – although Pringle
sees a development from the mere “colour and
action” of The Pastel City through the “lush,
involuted fantasy” of A Storm of Wings to the
“slimmer, harder, sparer” writing of In
Viriconium) and the later non-Viriconium books
such as The Course of the Heart and Signs of Life
which are seen as “equally brilliant but still
demanding – literary fantasies of a high order”)
(Pringle, 146)
In conclusion, I see using a
combination of approaches as the most
productive reading. Though Harrison has
chosen to work within the field of fantasy and
science fiction, he has redefined it from within,
and thus a reading which recognises both the
tropes of fantasy and his subversions of it
(postmodern, modernist, topographical,
existentialist and otherwise) would be valid in
order to give Harrison his due. There are some
obvious gaps in the ways Harrison has been
read – for instance, there has been no
comprehensive feminist reading of his work,
which is lamentable given that many of his
works involve female characters who are ill or
verging on madness. In my mini-thesis I want
to more fully explore the ways in which
Harrison has subverted the fantasy genre, but I
would like to incorporate some feminist
readings to address the imbalance in the works
of previous critics.
 Best Novels. NY: Peter Bedrick Books, 1988, pp.
201-03.
Bibliography. -- (ed). “M. John Harrison” in his The
Ultimate Enyclopedia of Fantasy: The Definitive
Cawthorn, James and Michael Illustrated Guide. London: Carlton, 1998, pp.
Moorcock. “M. John Harrison, The Pastel City” 146-47.
in their Fantasy: The Best 100 Books. NY: Carroll
and Graf, 1988, pp 187-88.
Clute, John. “M(ichael) John
Harrison” in John Clute and John Grant (eds) .
The Encyclopedia of Fantasy. London: Orbit, 1997, “’Undoing the mechanisms’:
pp 453-54. Genre Expectation, Subversion &
-- “M(ichael) John Harrison in John
Clute and Peter Nicholls (eds). The Encyclopedia Anti-Consolation in the
of Science Fiction. London: Orbit, 1993, pp. 545- Kefahuchi Tract Novels of
46.
M. John Harrison.”
Harrison, M. John. “Comments” in
Jay P. Pederson, (ed) The St James Guide to
Science Fiction Writers (4th edition). Detroit, MI: © Leigh Blackmore 2008
St James Press, 1996, pp. 421-22.
-- “What It Might be Like to Live in “The idea is not to get a cosy ride. Why would you
Viriconium.” Online at want that?”
http://www.fantasticmetropolis.com/i/viroconi – (M. John Harrison, “Disillusioned by the
um/ Actual, 5.)
-- Parietal Games: Critical Writings by
and on M. John Harrison. London: Science
Fiction Foundation, 2005. This volume collects
Harrison’s reviews work between May 1968
and Sept 2004; it also includes critical essays by
Rob Latham, Graham Sleight, Rjurik Davidson,
Graham Fraser, Mark Bould, John Clute and
Farah Mendlesohn.
Hughes, Rhys. “Climbing to
Viriconium: The Work of M. John Harrison”.
Online at
http://www.fantasticmetropolis.com/i/harrison/
full/
Kelley, George. “M(ichael) John
Harrison” in Jay P. Pederson, (ed) The St James
Guide to Science Fiction Writers (4th edition).
Detroit, MI: St James Press, 1996, pp. 421-22.
Lane, Joel. “M (ichael) John Harrison”
in David Pringle (ed). The St James Guide to
“I was starting to explore how far you
Horror, Ghost and Gothic Writers. Detroit, MI: St could push fictional structures, in particular those of
James Press, 1998, pp. 252-54. fantasy, before they fell over and became something
Latham, Rob. “M[ichael] John else. I was interested in undoing the mechanisms by
Harrison” in S.T. Joshi and Stefan which popular fiction manages space and time”.
Dziemanowicz (eds). Supernatural Literature of – M. John Harrison (interview by Cheryl
the World: An Encyclopedia. Westport, CT: Morgan)
Greenwood Press, 2005 (3 vols), pp.519-20.
McAuley, Paul J. “M[ichael John Introduction
Harrison” in David Pringle (ed). The St James
M. John Harrison’s Kefahuchi Tract duology
Guide to Fantasy Writers. Detroit, Mi: St James,
consists of Light (2002; co-winner 2002 James
1996, pp 271-72.
Tiptree Memorial Award for Best SF Novel)
Pringle, David. “M. John Harrison A
and Nova Swing (winner 2007 Arthur C. Clarke
Storm of Wings” in his Modern Fantasy: The 100
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 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 amplifies
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, referencing 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.
Nevertheless, 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 Serotonin, around 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.
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McAuley, Paul J. “M[ichael John Harrison” in
David Pringle (ed). The St James Guide to
Fantasy Writers. Detroit, Mi: St James, 1996, pp
271-72.
Moorcock, Michael. Wizardry and Wild Romance:
A Study of Epic Fantasy.
London: Gollancz, 1988.
Morgan, Cheryl. “In Search of Viriconium”
[review of Parietal Games: Critical Writings by
and on M. John Harrison]. Online at:
http://www.emcit.com127.php?a=23 (Accessed
Oct 28, 2008)
Murray, Charles Shaar. “Light and death in the
24th century”. London Independent (Dec 9, 2002).
Online at:
http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qn4158/is_
20021209/ai_n12655651
(Accessed October 27, 2008)
Nussbaum, Abigail. Review of Nova Swing.
Online at:
http://www.strangehorizons.com/reviews/2006
/12/nova_swing_by_m.shtml
(Accessed Oct 27, 2008).
Parrinder, Patrick. Science Fiction: Its Criticism
and Teaching. London: Methuen, 1980.
Pringle, David. “M. John Harrison A Storm of
Wings” in his Modern Fantasy: The 100 Best
Novels. NY: Peter Bedrick Books, 1988, pp. 201-
03.
--(ed). “M. John Harrison” in his The
Ultimate Enyclopedia of Fantasy: The Definitive
Illustrated Guide. London: Carlton, 1998, pp.
146-47.
Roberts, Adam. Review of Light. Online at:
http://www.infinityplus.co.uk/nonfiction/lightr
ev.htm. (Accessed Oct 27, 2008).
Roy, James. “Steampunk – the new genre”
Online at:
http://www.jamesroy.com.au/steampunk.htm.
(Accessed Oct 27, 2008).
Sandner, David. Fantastic Literature: A Critical
Reader. Westport, CT: Praeger, 2004
Soyka, David. Review of Nova Swing. Online at:
http://www.sfsite.com/06b/ns250.htm.
(Accessed Oct 27, 2008).
VanderMeer, Jeff. Review of Light. Online at:
http://www.sfsite.com/10b/li138.htm.
(Accessed Oct 28, 2008)
Wolfe, Gary K. Critical Terms for Science Fiction
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-- Review of Light. Locus (Nov 2002).
-- Review of Nova Swing. Locus (Nov 2006).
TWO INTERVIEWS
WITH GAVIN L. O’KEEFE
There follow two interviews with illustrator
Gavin L. O’Keefe. I’ve known Gavin for a long
time, and the first interview was conducted
over twenty years ago; it has never been
published until now. (He may be aghast to see
it appear in print, and if so, I beg his
indulgence). A more recent interview was
conducted with Gavin by email some time ago
and I present it here. I think it is interesting to
see the two conversations side by side in order
to see how Gavin’s attitudes and interests may
have changed (or in some ways remained
constant) over time. I would love to present
some examples of Gavin’s illustrative work
here – have been meaning to do so for a long
time – may (with Gavin’s permission) manage
to do so in a future issue. Meantime, if the
following intrigues you, check out Gavin’s
cover art for various Ramble House books at:
http://www.ramblehouse.com/GavinGallery/G
avinOkeefe.htm
INTERVIEW 1
By Leigh Blackmore 31.5.1987
"One always prefers to the finished work the work one
is going to undertake, the work which still has the
beauty of the dream...One always hopes that
tomorrow's work will be better than yesterday's...It is
certainly the best picture because it contains all
possible pictures" (a blank canvas)- Gustav Dore
(quoted from Jerrold's 1891 biography in Joanna
Richardson's biography, p. 109).
"He was always to abide
in spirit with saints and gnomes and elves, and to live
more in the ideal world than in reality. He was always
to believe in illusions and to expect a miracle to
happen as soon as he set his heart on anything".
- Joanna Richardson, of Gustav Dore, p. 15
The above words seem as applicable to Gavin
O’Keefe as to Dore…
LB: How did you get started in the art
world? What made you start to draw?
GO: I used to draw as a kid, but never
seriously thought of doing any drawings to any
stories till probably about '84 or so, and that's I
think when I first started doing some - the
Lovecraft drawing " Dreams in the Witch House"
I remember from '84 and various others - but it
only started really slowly then because I still had
the music going but as soon as I left that I really
got into it. I still had some drawings from high
school that I'd done there.
LB: You did art at school?
GO: I did it as a subject in the HSC - I
had a very good art teacher. He used to give me
a lot of time and tell me about things and show
me how to do this or do that. He showed me
how to use oil paints and whatever - he would
listen to me and talk to me and encourage me.
LB: Is the instruction you got at school
what inspired you to start art in the first place?
GO: I think I was just interested all
along even during the music, in just drawing. I
think it was always at the back of my mind and
whereas I started he violin early and I was
constantly doing musical things and that at
school, it only ended up in Year 11 that I decided
I'd take up art because - well, I knew that was
one of the things I wanted to do. I always
thought that music was the thing - only after a
year or so in the orchestra did I decide that, no,
drawing was what I wanted to do.
LB: When you were at school studying
art, did that give you a lot of opportunity to
illustrate ideas that you had yourself, or were
you mainly doing exercises?
GO: Oh, no exercises at all - it was up to
us to do what we wanted to - but one day I just
happened to start drawing some of these Queen
songs - it just happened, there was no lead up to
it...and I really got into those particular drawings,
and it just interested me...
LB: All the illustrations in this collection
[VISIONS OF FAIRYLAND] are of a fantastic
nature. Is that a natural leaning you have,
towards fantastic illustration? Have you ever
been interested in doing realistic illustrations as
well?
GO: No, not really - I'm a great fan of
surrealism and I just like this 'non-real' look at
things - I like surrealist types of artwork. And I
find a lot of inspiration in fantasy literature and
fantasy music and I think this is just a
combination - that I'm inspired, I get images
from literature or from music, so I transpose
them via that surrealism into the final drawing.
But always realistic images are going to be
coming in, because...
LB: Your style in a way is a realistic
style - a graphic design sort of style, although
used in a surrealistic way.
GO: Yeah, I think this is the fight ,
between me sometimes thinking I should be
doing this realistically, to make live a notion born
in literature or in some music, to make it just a
visual thing. At the same time I want it to be
something that isn't real, that is a figment that
people will look at, that will become maybe an
image in their own heads. Often the surrealists
would give realistic properties to something that
has never existed - this is effective, and I guess I
will always have the two elements - the design
aspect, which is maybe not three-dimensional at
all, and the three-dimensional interwoven.
LB: What about the techniques that you
use in drawing?
GO: Well,, whereas I started off with
basically just using pens - Rotring pens in
different thicknesses - I've been starting to think
of a pen as merely one of many instruments with
which to apply ink to a piece of paper or
cardboard. And so I've been using found objects
like rocks, foam, bits of wood with the grain in
them, fingerprints - things like this - and
imprinting these patterns which are quite
interesting onto the paper almost in a way that
Max Ernst was using with his frottage on his
canvas - getting these natural shapes - and then I
usually incorporate them in a design that I do. So
therefore I've applied ink in a way that I choose,
but the mark has been up to the object I've had -
then I control the rest of the composition around
that, blend it in with it. So, it's analogous to
thinking of a pen, the tip of a pen, as merely
another found object that I can apply ink to page
and, just the same I can get a bit of wood and
scrape it along, and I've made a mark that is
characteristic to that type of point. So it's other
objects, not just limiting it to the thought of a
paintbrush or a pen...but I haven't left the pen
totally behind, because I still gain a lot of control
and it's easy to use, whereas these other things
take a bit of time to get used to...
LB: You mentioned Ernst as one artist
that influenced you in those sorts of techniques.
Are there any other techniques that you've been
inspired by in other artists?
GO: The surrealists' general idea - I
don't know their manifestos very well, but - the
general idea of combining elements that are
normally not seen together and thus bringing a
sense of shock or surprise is always, I think, a
good idea, and I've tried to use this in my
drawings.
LB: What about Beardsley - his
influence is fairly strong in the black and white
side of your work. .
GO: Yeah - the way that Beardsley is
remembered is that he was one of the first very
successful illustrators to be working to be
working at the time when line-block first came
in, where they photographed the artwork and
had it printed off, whereas before they had to
rely on woodcut and this sort of thing, And so he
was really able to do what he wanted to do, he
didn't have many bounds - and his approach to
design was totally different; although it was
influenced by people like Burne-Jones and
Whistler and medieval artists, yet there
developed, I think, a surrealism in his work,
which was not embraced very much at the time.
The design aspect is very different - it's very
stark.
LB: Some of the figures in some of your
illustrations seem to be comparable to
Beardsley's - especially that series of 'Freaks'
illustrations that aren't included in this collection.
Beardsley had a lot of grotesque figures.
GO: Yeah, his grotesques are really
strange. He was obviously profoundly
influenced by the idea or the image of an
embryo, and other various monsters - well, these
monsters would have been in circuses at the
time. He probably would have seen these, and he
was probably interested in their grotesqueness
and their monstrosity. And also these embryos,
these abortions, turn up in his drawings a lot.
There's a theory that he had sex with his sister
Mabel and that she had had an abortion and that
he'd seen this and that had influenced him...but I
was interested at one time with freaks after
reading Leslie Fiedler's book on freaks - this idea,
maybe its a parallel, thought, that human beings
are analogous to conventional landscape
paintings who - we think these are always
should be like this and never change and all of a
sudden are warped and become deformed as in
freaks or surrealist paintings...perhaps that's a
parallel there...but just the idea maybe that these
are different things, these are unknown things,
that nevertheless are living amongst us and we
have to come to terms with these sorts of things.
Maybe it's an interest in perhaps aliens from
literature...
LB: Do you think people see the
surrealist style these days as a freakish sort of art
form, or do you think it's more acceptable?
GO: I think it's more acceptable -
surrealist ideas - but in terms of making
something which seems real which we know
isn't real, I don't know if the general public has
come to terms with what the surrealists were
actually doing in the forties with their ideas
about combing these images and our mental
processes. I don't know about those more hard-
hitting things, but just in general graphic art, we
see a lot of strange surrealist images often in
advertising and various other things.
LB: I haven't seen all that many!
GO: Well, this eye-catching approach.
Often there is something there that isn't
'supposed' to be there and so we look carefully,
and an advertiser's won if he makes someone do
that. Advertising is only a small thing - but I
suppose people really aren't used to the surrealist
thing - I suppose they usually associate it with a
cult sort of thing - perhaps science fiction or
fantasy...
LB: How do you see fantastic
illustration in terms of its effect on people? Do
you see your illustration as making a political
statement? Is your art something you want to
affect people in a tangible way, or do you want it
just to be entertainment?
GO: No, I want to affect people. It's a
great ambition that many writers or artists would
have, that they want to affect people's way of
living, and have them live a different way that
may be more beneficial for them. I would like to
see my artwork making people stop and look,
and thinking "Maybe this is different...maybe I
should think differently about this certain thing
in the future" - or at least make them stop and
wonder about something I've got in a drawing
such as "Oh, I didn't realise that rocks were like
that" or "I didn't realise that this real object could
look like this" or maybe just evoking a sense of
wonder like "I wonder if this could ever really
exist" - this kind of questioning, which I think is
really good for people to have - a constant
questioning...I suppose the superficial thing is I'd
like people to get an emotional response from my
drawings such as "That's funny" or "That's
horrible" or "That's awesome" or "I hate that" or "I
like that".
LB: There does seem to be a lot of
humour in your work as well as the element of
surprise and shock. Do you think the humour is
integral to all your work?
GO: No it's not. It depends often on
what I'm illustrating too. If I'm doing Lovecraft,
humour is not going to enter into it very much
because it's not the feeling in his work, that's
running through, it's going to be more a sense of
dread or horror or fear - whereas with Sheckley,
humour's running all the way through it and he's
often resting on it; but there is at the same time
surreal images so you get this blend...I'm really
governed by the fact that I mostly want to be
faithful to what I'm illustrating.
LB: But there's a fine line between
what's funny and what's horrible sometimes. If
something's grotesque it can be verging on the
laughable.
GO: Yeah, that's very true - like with
Magritte, who I love very much as well - a lot of
his, if not all of his paintings are based on the
idea of combining elements that are usually not
together, but in a 'realistic' way, so that you end
up with something that's going to shock you -
but a lot of these are really funny because they're
just so unimaginable, they're just strange and so
you laugh at them - such as the shoes where the
ends of the toes are turning into human toes -
this sort of thing, it's quite funny, really.
LB: Humour can be a defence
mechanism sometimes - if people don't know
how to react, they laugh.
GO: Yeah, as a kind of escape from a
confrontation with the unknown. Yeah, I think
so. My humour mainly only comes in where I see
it is allowable from the original source.
LB: Where do you see your work going
in the next few years? I know you want to move
into book illustration professionally if possible.
GO: I'll continue to do non-
commissioned illustrations to anything that I see
as being an interesting sort of image. I see
illustration as being really important to certain
literature, especially literature that has not been
illustrated before, simply because it's an
interesting marriage, and often brings to life the
whole thing.
LB: We’ve talked before about the fact
that not many illustrated books seem to be
published these days, apart from children's
books. Would you like to be part of a revival in
illustrated literature?
GO: Very much so. I'd like to see
illustrations coming back into paperback fiction,
and because I'm interested in fantasy and science
fiction, I'd like to see these books with
illustrations, I mean even a frontispiece is
meaningful to the whole thing, and I think
illustration is a decoration, it's elaboration - it can
also bring a different dimension into the whole
work... I think it’s worth doing and I think
people love drawings. Children love drawings
and that's why children's books proliferate, but I
don't see why adults should let their feelings
change. I’d like to see a lot more Lovecraft
illustration appearing in print and I don't say that
just because I've illustrated Lovecraft, but
because his literature, I find, is very inspiring to
me - that's one thing I'd love to see happen.
LB: There have been a lot of
illustrations of Lovecraft's work over the years in
fan magazines and that sort of thing but a lot of
them seem to be incapable of capturing the
atmosphere that Lovecraft evoked. Is that one of
the challenges you feel with Lovecraft?
GO: Yes, exactly, I think someone like
Virgil Finlay, in Weird Tales, and other magazines
was doing this very well. Yes, I feel it as a
challenge to try and evoke that sense of wonder
visually that is happening in a text but creating
something new to go with that.
LB: When you do a piece of work, do
you visualise the whole thing from the outset, or
does it take shape as it goes along?
GO: Usually I've got a fixed idea about
what the central subject is going to be in the
drawing. As it goes along, the detail will start to
grow, and the ideas will start to come in - new
elements that I feel will be beneficial to the
subject. It is a growing process.
LB: You've illustrated songs as well as
stories. What inspires you about - for instance -
King Crimson?
GO: King Crimson is a really interesting
band musically because of the amount of
expression they put into their music. But not only
that - I'm especially interested in their early lyrics
, from Pete Sinfield, which are especially
surrealistic - quite allegorical really - some of
them are quite gothic in their imagery...There are
certainly a lot of other songs in there that I'd like
to illustrate - quite imaginative lyrics. It's not just
the lyrics - it's the atmosphere of the song, what
kind of feeling it evokes in me. Some of them are
funny, some of them are deadly serious.
LB: Is it the fact that the early King
Crimson especially are a kind of rock/classical
crossover?
GO: I hate any kind of barriers like this
- labels being given to bands - King Crimson is
'art/rock' because they have classical influences,
but I see this as more a superior form of rock just
on the general scale, but it's just another form of
music. They call it art-rock but if you compare it
to Motorhead you'll see that in Motorhead there's
no louds and softs, it's basically the one
monotonous volume whereas in King Crimson
or Yes, there are delicate phrases and then there
are heavy statements - all these different
variations such as you find in Tchaikovsky
symphonies etc. ...it's saying things in sensitive
ways, it's keeping you interested, it's making you
feel many things during the course of the piece.
The impact it has on me makes me want to
illustrate it.
LB: You were saying earlier that when
you were doing particular illustrations, you often
listen to music or even that the piece of music
you happen to be listening to at the time might
influence how the work goes.
GO: I suppose in a sense there are three
parties working when I'm doing a drawing -
there's the original work from which I'm getting
all my images, and then there's me who's doing
the drawing and then there's music, because I
always have the music playing - it must become
part of the creative process.
INTERVIEW 2
CAPTURING
ESSENCE:
THE ART OF
GAVIN L.
O'KEEFE
Interviewed by
Leigh Blackmore
31.7.2007
LB: What do
you see the role of the
Australian book illustrator as being?
GO: I can only speak for myself, being
by default Australian and an illustrator. I have no
idea about Australian illustrators and what they
do.
LB: What training have you had in your
profession?
GO: Self-training.
LB: There is obviously some difference
between commissioned work for publishers and
non-commissioned work you are inspired to do.
How do you approach these disparate areas of
work?
GO: I’m lucky enough these days not to
be commissioned to illustrate for commercial
publishers; such work in the past was more
trouble than it was worth. I often wondered why
they asked me to do such-&-such a job when
they were never happy with it. I would have GO: Yes, I like to experiment at every
thought that an illustrator is commissioned opportunity. There’s always something else to
because his or her work is admired. (I’m try. Gives an edge to every project.
referring here to Australian commercial LB: What projects are you interested in
publishers.) being involved in?
LB: Have there been specific areas of GO: The projects I’m currently
literature which have drawn you to work on interested in are those initiated by my American
illustrations? Or perhaps particular authors? publisher Ramble House.
GO: My original passion for literature
of a fantastic nature (i.e. Science-Fiction, Fantasy, LB: What
Horror) has grown to encompass the Crime recent projects have you
Fiction genre, particular of the ‘old school’. In worked on which you
terms of authors who have been especially found fulfilling?
inspiring to me in recent times, I would mention
Harry Stephen Keeler, Norman Berrow, Philip GO: All
José Farmer, Richard A. Lupoff, Ed Wood, and projects I’ve worked on
Fender Tucker – all authors published by Ramble for Ramble House.
House.
LB: Often the 'art' of book illustration
has been underrated. What are your views on the
importance and responsibility of the book
illustrator?
GO: I feel there’s as great a
responsibility in illustrating a book as writing it.
From the other side, the illustrator of today isn’t MANTICHORUS:
necessarily held in the same esteem as the
illustrator of yore. You may hear someone today MAILING NOTES
admiring a novel, but rarely would you hear
them waxing lyrical about the cover design.
I keep having this fanciful idea that because
LB: Is it possible to earn a good income
this zine goes to both SSWFT and the EOD, I
from such a specific field as illustration?
can make mailing comments for both apa in
GO: I believe some individuals earn a
every issue, but it never works out that way,
good income in the field, though there wouldn’t
partly for reasons of space; EOD has about 20
be many. Again, the illustrator of the 19th or early
active members per mailing. I’ve also stupidly
20th centuries was far more likely to make some
mislaid my copies of the last EOD mailing
kind of living for themselves.
(which I did read!) so I apologise to EOD
LB: You tend to specialize in very
members for not being able to comment on the
fine-line black and white drawings. Do you think
zines of last mailing. I promise to be better
that publishing trends weigh against your
organised in future! So, emcees on SWWFt’s
particular illustrative style?
last mailing only:
GO: ‘Publishing trends’, in the sense of
the mass-market commercial publishers, have
Nightmayericana: I used to love reading Karl
always weighed against my illustration style. I
Edward Wagner’s stuff and I’m a big Moorcock
don’t think it’s just down to the fine black-&-
fan but I didn’t realise there was an Elric story
white line work alone – there’s something about
by KEW; goes to show I should read what’s on
what I do that doesn’t appeal to commercial
my shelves, because I have Midnight Sun. That
publishers.
shooting sounds terrible. Your reflections on
LB: You seem to find inspiration in
cons disappearing remind me of how many
literary works by overseas writers. Are there
cons there used to be in Sydney; these days
Australian writers whose works you would like
there are none. In Australia we rely on
to illustrate?
Canberra, Melbourne and Perth for our cons.
GO: Possibly some of the older
The wealthy get to fly to Perth but those in
Australian crime fiction writers, such as Max
‘reduced circumstances’ such as I cannot make
Afford.
them; Conflux in Canberra is the usual fare.
LB: Would you describe your works as
Sercon: Ah, the theatre! Lucky you…You
experimental?
comment you have no idea why I don’t include
some of my poetry in the SSWFT or EOD –
well, neither do I. Perhaps I will, in future
issues. I suppose I hardly considered myself a
poet until I was persuaded to gather some of
my stuff; now people seem to like it – go figure.
View from Koshtra Belorn: Greatly enjoyed
your article on Blaylock. I haven’t read that
early trilogy of his, though I’ve read a few of
his, such as Land of Dreams. Also just acquired
13 Phantasms and Other Stories. I met Jennifer
Fallon once when I was running Collins
Bookshop in Sydney; didn’t find her very
personable, but her books certainly sell well.
Coin-op Open Casket Autopsy: Thanks for the
illos, good to see. “Utterly impoverished” – I
can relate!
Quill is Mightier Than the Sword: Glad to
hear the Bachelor of Theology is going well. As
you know, I’m a pagan; wonder if they’ll ever
offer a Bachelor in Pagan Studies lol☺. Enjoyed
the interview with Scott Allie. I wasn’t aware of
Codex Arcana (I don’t get out much) – must
track it down.
Hyperborean Exhalations: My God you read a
lot Martin! I’m pining because I can’t afford to
buy the new letters vols of Lovecraft such as
the Barlow and the 2-vol Derleth, nor vols 1 & 2
of the complete CAS poetry. Hope I win the
lottery! Thanks for all the other notes on things
to want and buy (grrr). Great travelogue about
your US trip. Enjoyed Freya’s humour in her
Top 10 movies. Glad my Poe essay made you
want to re-read EAP. You haven’t read all his
stories! Egad! Stop reading Bujold and Zahn,
and read the master!
When the Change-Winds Blow: As with you,
the idea of writing up Top Tens seems to have
slipped by me. Perhaps I can present mine in a
future issue. As a Birmingham ‘adopted son’,
did you ever like Electric Light Orchestra or
Black Sabbath who both hailed from there?
They are two of my favourite bands. Good luck
with the German. I have only rusty schoolboy
French and Latin. The Lugosi Dracula has a
charm all its own, despite the starchiness of the
stage-adapted screenplay (and the armadillos
on the steps of castle Dracula, always one of
my fave bits!) But you can’t beat Stoker’s book,
which is why I like Francis Ford Coppola’s
screen adaptation despite some of its heavy-
handedness in places.
Elegant Amusement: Enjoyed your essay on
“The Tempest”, which is my favourite
Shakespeare play simply because of its
predominance of supernatural elements. I have
an unpublished horror story (originally written
for the Arkham House anthology Nevermore;
needless to say not published there!) which
combines Shakespeare’s Prospero with the
Prince Prospero of Poe’s “Masque of the red
Death”. ‘Proto-weird literature’ is a good term.
Your heavy reliance on critics in this piece
makes me assume it was written for one of
your courses? Another fantastic (though
latently so) element in the play is the witch
Sycorax, imprisoned in the tree-trunk.
Opharion: Mark, I seem to have mislaid your
zine from this mailing. I do apologise! If I find
it I’ll try and comment next time. When I win
that lottery, I’ll buy your Ash-Tree Press books.
I look forward also to reading your
Wordsworth anthologies. Will you be doing
more for them?
Dalriadic Chronicles: Welcome o new
Emergency editor of SWFFT! Perry Grayson’s
The Black Druid? I don’t remember even seeing
this! Did I lose my mind? Maybe I kissed a
whole mailing for some reason. Grrr. (Just
checked my files, and can’t find any trace at all
of Mailing 30. I must have missed it. Hence all
these comments are probably way out of date.
Oh well). I take your point about academic
jargon in essays. The ironic part is that at
university they expect you to write using terms
from literary theory including narratology,
post-structuralism, deconstructionism and a
variety of other critical approaches. I must say I
agree with you that to say something in three
words is better than saying it in twenty; yet to
gain marks points in courses, one has to jump
through the hoops they dictate. So if I present
here material from any courses I’ve done, it
may well contain lit-crit ‘jargon’. Just let your
eyes glaze over…lol☺ I envy your access to TV
Twilight Zone marathons. Here in Australia
that old stuff never gets shown on TV (we only
have a few channels). One of my most
formative memories is having the shit scared
out of me when I was about nine, staying
overnight with a schoolfriend, and watching
Richard Matheson’s “Nightmare at 20,000
Feet”. The image of the thing on the wing, its
big blubbery lips pressed up against the
aircraft window when the protagonist opened
the curtain, gave me a horrible chill that I have
never forgotten. I blame it all on Matheson! I’m
also a big fan of the great Charles Beaumont,
whose work I infinitely prefer to that of
Bradbury. I was lucky to meet Beaumont’s
friend Bill Nolan in LA back in 1990…