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The Crisis

M JOHN HARRISON’S (pictured) science fiction focuses on landscape, alienation, the degrading of culture by money and the psychological fallout of economic decline.

His writing is elegant, complex and resistant to closure. His dispossessed characters experience flashes of illumination and collisions of the weird and the mundane.

I was hooked on Harrison after reading The Machine in Shaft Ten in the 1970s. Vivid and haunting, its closing line sums up his work: “We have no meaning – and thus, thankfully, no more illusions – left to lose.”

The Crisis
by M John Harrison

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