i'm trying very hard not to read Abigail Nussbaum's review of Nova Swing over at Strange Horizons. it isn't that i don't like her reviews; although i have disagreed with a lot of her opinions and analyses, it isn't because any of it was not done with intelligence, and i actually enjoy reading opinions at variance with my own. that said, however, and although i realize it may seem disingenuous for me to be doing my own review-type things at on an other life and then go on to say this, here i go anyway: i actually think that reading M. John Harrison is best done with as fresh a set of eyes as you can manage to get yourself before dipping in; Ms Nussbaum may have tainted the experience of reading Signs of Life for me with this really old review over on her blog, Asking the Wrong Questions. knowing where the story was going killed part of the pleasure for me, not because 'i knew where it was going' but because it made me too impatient to get through everything else to see how it happens or how Mr Harrison handles the weirder material--M. John Harrison's works, you see, need to be savored 'held in the mouth like a flower' to paraphrase a favorite line of mine from The Last Unicorn (no relevance, just felt like throwing that in); of course, with an M. John Harrison book, that's never more than a tiny jag on the tip of the iceberg, and i still look forward to the time i feel my eyes have been 'refreshed' enough to go back.
normally i like to know what i'm getting into with the books i read, but i find there is no better guide to and through Mr Harrison's fictions than the narrator he chooses himself to tell the story. it may sound like disingenuous grape thingies, but that fact honestly makes me glad that the particular edition of Things That Never Happen i got my grubby little fingers on does not have China Mieville's introduction.
i really ought to stop here, as all this is really the sort of thing that i ought to put up in on an other life (look, i had Fun With Prepositions! and Vowels!) and not here, but let me just add: M. John Harrison writes fiction that is not afraid to make you think rather than necessarily feel. and while his works fall outside the boundaries of any genre, it's one of the things i feel really good genre SF should be brave enough to do as well.
oh, and one more definitely final thing before i get to work: given that in my mind the single greatest trick a writer can pull is to convince a reader that a story can be written in absolutely no other way, whether or not said reader actually likes the chosen style, M. John Harrison is absolutely brilliant.
phew. that was a bloody ramble. and i haven't even had me coffee yet.
No comments:
Post a Comment