Niall Harrison

@niallharrison.bsky.social

2736 Followers 1101 Following

reader, critic, fan, he/him

A stack of books, spine out, bottom to top: Eco-Travel by Michael Cronin; Sublimation by Isabel J Kim; The Coffin of Honey by Geoffrey D Morrison; A Return to Self by Aatish Taseer; The Language of Liars by SL Huang; The War of Time by Alejo Carpentier; Plastic Prism Void by Violet Allen; Eurotrash and Air, both by Christian Kracht; Earth 7 by Deb Olin Unferth; and Hush Now, Canary by Mustafa Khalid
By their epigraphs shall ye know them. Munir Hachemi’s second novel The Mulai (2023, tr. Julia Sanches) has six, which is extremely generous, and between them they give a clear sense of the type of writer Hachemi is, and the type of novel that will follow. They include quotes from: a postapocalyptic science fiction novel by Raphael Pinedo that I don’t believe has been published in English; Borges; the TV series Raised by Wolves, in which two androids raise humans in an isolated colony; a short novel about colonialism and memory, The Witness by Juan José Saer; an untranslated work by Héctor Libertella that seems to be an experimental novel, or a theory-fiction hybrid; and last but not least The Dispossessed by Ursula K. Le Guin. They speak to a story that will be intensely political and analytical, by a writer whose interests range across popular and academic culture, science fiction and literary fiction. The Mulai is short, unsentimental, and unashamedly conceptual, to the point of sometimes being quite difficult reading; but I suspect it is going to stay with me.
A stack of books, spines out, bottom to top: In Other Worlds exhibition book by Liam Young; The Wreck by Lizzy Stewart; The Given World by Melissa Harrison; The World Bank and The Market of Seleukia by Jan Morris; The Ultraviolet Catastrophe by Susan Finlay; Fabrications by Zachary Mason; City of Rats by Copi tr. Kit Schluter; The Killing of a Chestnut Tree by Oliver K Langmead; Love Chronicles of the Octopodes by Karen An-Hwei Lee; The Jaguar's Roar by Micheliny Verunschuk tr. Juliana Barbassa; Centrefolding by Kirsty Dunlop; Before the Rocket by Loranne Vella tr. Kat Storace; The Oldest Bitch Alive by Morgen Day; and Planet City ed. Liam Young.
Covers of Greyhound by Joanna Pocock, Penance by Eliza Clark, and Landscapes by Christine Lai
Covers of Loss Protocol by Paul McAuley; One Leg on Earth by 'Pemi Aguda; Electric Shamans at the Festival of the Sun by Mónica Ojeda; Sublimation by Isabel J Kim
Cover of The Illuminated Man by Christopher Priest and Nina Allan
Cover of The End of Everything by M John Harrison
Covers of six books: Event Horizon by Balsam Karam; Animal Spiral by Luis Othoniel Rosa; The Illuminated Man by Christopher Priest & Nina Allan; On the Calculation of Volume IV by Solvej Balle; What We Are Seeking by Cameron Reed; The End of Everything by M John Harrison
A copy of Electric Shamans at the Festival of the Sun by Mónica Ojeda, being held up outside in sunlight; the cover art is a volcanic eruption as it might have been rendered by Van Gogh, in temperature-gradient colours from yellow through red and purple to blue.
A picture of six books standing on a bookshelf, spine out: Forms by Caroline Levine; The End of Everything by M John Harrison (sprayed edges not shown); The White Desert by Luis Lopez Carrasco tr. Rosalind Harvey; Europe After the Rain by Alan Burns; The Illuminated Man by Anindita Ghose; Jaw Filler by Maz Murray & Charlie Markbreiter
Copies of two novels by Knut Faldbakken, cover out: plain green edition of Sweetwater and plain black edition of Twilight Country.
Shortlist for the 2026 Ondaatje Prize for writing with a sense of place: A House for Miss Pauline by Diana McCaulay, Greyhound by Joanna Pocock, Helm by Sarah Hall, Saraswati by Gurnaik Johal, The Benefactors by Wendy Erskine, and The Finest Hotel in Kabul by Lyse Doucet
More Budrys: "Only Keith Laumer, of all those pressed into service as shills by Terry Carr, speaks an undeniable truth about The Two-Timers, an Ace Science Fiction Special. “Smoothly written, immensely readable,” he says correctly. “Painfully good,” says Harlan Ellison. “A damned fine book,” says Lester. No. No. It is a reasonably well told narrative about a man who wants so much to bring the dead back into his arms that he succeeds in crossing time, where he does indeed find his beloved—in his own arms, he being still married to her in that parallel world."
Algis Budrys writing about reviewing in February 1969; not specifically about debuts, although it was attached to a review of a second novel: The Two Timers by Bob Shaw. "Come on. If you praise a mediocre book, because you want to sell more copies, or because you like writing blurb copy, or because you sincerely believe the writer deserves good things, what you are doing is helping to perpetuate the book’s errors. You stand in danger of encouraging a writer you like to inject cosmic SF elements into a human story, to that story’s inevitable diminution of impact. You stand in danger of encouraging a man to think of gimmicks, of driving him directly into the arms of a seductive way of life in which things are made so pleasanly flattering that one loses the guts to actually put out any unusual work. The process is plain to see, and always has been. And where it starts, and who it starts with, is not in the obviously sycophantic and ponderous extravagances that every interesting new writer encounters and can recognize; it starts with the well-intentioned distortions of those he respects and who often wish him well"
Gif of two people in NASA style spacesuits dancing energetically; a clip from the video for Public Service Broadcasting's song "Gagarin"
Actually I: Back cover of All My Love by Agnes Lidbeck states "Meanwhile the country around them changes" and "Freedoms are curtailed" without stating where or when the story is set.
Two books on a black table: a hardback of The Savage Landscape by Cal Flyn and a paperback of Animal Spiral by Luis Othoniel Rosa
4x4 arrangement of the covers of books longlisted for The 2026 RSL Ondaatje Prize: A Granite Silence by Nina Allan A House for Miss Pauline by Diana McCaulay Big Time by Jordan Prosser Enchanted Ground: Growing Roots in a Broken World by Steven Lovatt Frogs For Watchdogs by Seán Farrell Greyhound by Joanna Pocock Helm by Sarah Hall Is a River Alive? by Robert Macfarlane Lifelines: Searching for Home in the Mountains of Greece by Julian Hoffman Love, Sex & Frankenstein by Caroline Lea Saraswati by Gurnaik Johal The Benefactors by Wendy Erskine The Finest Hotel in Kabul: A People's History of Afghanistan by Lyse Doucet The Whispers of Rock by Anjana Khatwa Theory & Practice by Michelle de Kretser Goonie by Michael Mullen
Screenshot of an exchange between Richard Morgan ("The reason I've waded into this thread is that I see a very real danger of a portion of SF/F - what we might call the literary end - becoming so enamoured of its own purity that it fractions itself off and treats the remainder with exactly the same contempt that the mainstream literati now treat all SF") and M John Harrison ("I don't want that, Richard. I don't want what you want. I resent it. I've had it stuffed down my throat for nearly forty years. It's the boring old received wisdom of the genre") from the New Weird discussions in the early 2000s
A copy of Jan Morris: A Life by Sara Wheeler. The cover is red at the top and bottom, with the subtitle in large pale block letters, sandwiching a photo of Morris with her feet up in front of a bookcase.
Short clip (a few seconds) of the Rabbit Hole edition of Red Sword being tilted in the light to show off the foiling on the cover.
Two editions of Red Sword by Bora Chung: the UK edition from Honford Star trans. Anton Hur, and the revised Korean edition from Rabbit Hole books. Both covers are predominantly white, with a foiled blade cutting through; the blades are different on the two covers.
A copy of On The Calculation of Volume IV by Solvej Balle
Photo of a hand-made convention badge "ribbon" (actually cross-stitch) that says "I'm making fetch happen" but with "fetch" crossed out and replaced with "slipstream".
Five non-fiction books about SF and fantasy published in early 2026, arranged spine-out: The Illuminated Man by Christopher Priest and Nina Allan; Considering the Female Man by Farah Mendlesohn; The Recollections by Christopher Priest; Imagination and Evolution: A Truer History of Science Fiction by John J Pierce; and Trace Elements by Jo Walton and Ada Palmer
UK 90s copies of Foundation, Foundation & Empire and Second Foundation by Isaac Asimov, with a sine piece of cover art that splits across the three books, showing the infinite city sprawl of Trantor, with enormous centrepiece buildings rising up to be the focal point of each cover. I should know who the artist is, but have forgotten, and the editions do not say.
Photo of four books of reviews and criticism by Gary K Wolfe, laid out flat to show their covers: Evaporating Genres, Soundings: Reviews 1992-1996, Bearings: Reviews 1997-2001, and Sightings: Reviews 2002-2006.
Photo of part three of Splinter by Adam Roberts, written in future tense. "This vision, as it goes on, will have a much greater sense of something controlling it..."
Screenshot of an excerpt of Ali Smith's novel Winter that is written in the future tense. "Back in London a few days into the new year, Art will be lying in bed..."
First let me explain. Some of you have expressed a certain bewilderment at the tone I take; the occasional bursts of disrespect, the sometimes sly and illucid asides. “What is he trying to say?” they ask, thus betraying the fact we never speak of—that a review column these days must first of all be a vehicle for a philosophy of literature, and only secondarily a guide to my ideas on how your book money should be spent.
Quote from Locus review of Loss Protocol by Niall Harrison: In other words, Loss Protocol is a novel about the only world that is ever available to us. It is a gnarly, ornery piece of work, one that I sense has not given up all of its secrets on a first read, but here is my preliminary conclusion: I think the absolute solidity of its initial realism is a kind of trap, an attempt to make you forget that you are reading a dream. But a dream it is, for Winters, for his author, and now for me, too.
A stack of 15 books, bottom to top: The Oak & The Larch by Sophie Pinkham; Seven by Joanna Kavenna; Glyph by Ali Smith; A Guardian and a Thief by Megha Majumdar; The Plague Dogs by Richard Adams; The Fortunate Fall by Cameron Reed; Monk & Robot by Becky Chambers; Rondo by Kazimierz Brandys; Penance by Eliza Clark; Friendly City by Sofia Samatar; AI 2041 by Kai-fu Lee and Chen Qiufan; Wild Dark Shore by Charlotte McConaghy; Perfection by Vincenzo Latronico; White Moss by Anna Nerkagi; and The Ultimate Threshold: A Collection of the Finest in Society SF edited by Mirra Ginsburg
Back cover of the ARC of The White Desert by Luis López Carrasco, which is quite text heavy so I'm afraid I'm not going to transcribe more than the first paragraph: "The story of a millennial couple facing life on an increasingly fragile planet and a stirring reflection on our place in the cosmos - for fans of Martin MacInnes and Samantha Harvey." I am very much a fan of both the named writers.
Gif of Eowyn in the film of The Two Towers saying "But you cannot be eighty!" to Aragorn.
A grid of nine book covers: Portalmania by Debbie Urbanski, A Granite Silence by Nina Allan, Red Sword by Bora Chung, Everything Will Swallow You by Tom Cox, Sea Now by Eva Meijer, Ice by Jacek Dukaj, Notes From A Regicide, Dream Hotel by Laila Lalami, and The Book of Records by Madeleine Thien
Three seated figures in front of a wall of books: Anne Thompson Melo (left), Eva Meijer (centre), and interviewer whose name I did not catch (right).
Three seated figures in front of a wall of books: Anne Thompson Melo (left), Eva Meijer (centre), and interviewer whose name I did not catch (right).
NYT notable 100 listing for A Guardian and A Third by Mesha Majumdar, which sounds great. "Set in the near future" and categorised as "literary fiction."
Flyer with details of the CFP for the "Women in SFF: Navigating Gender & Genre" conference taking place at Newcastle University, 11-12 June 2026
The 50 highest selling SFF titles of 2025; I am afraid I am not going to type out all fifty, but the top ten are six Sarah J Maas, three Rebecca Yarros and Alchemised by SenYinLu; the top placed non-Romantasy title is Katabasis by RF Kuang at 11; only two titles are science fiction, Hail Mary by Andy Weir at 28 and Dune by Frank Herbert at 48; and in addition to those two, there are three other books by men: The Rose Field by Philip Pullman (16), Wicked by Gregory Maguire (21) and The Devils by Joe Abercrombie (36).
Photo of a page of the ARC of Ice by Jacek Dukaj; the page has the sentence "space equivalent to 14 lines of type" repeated, er, 13 times.
A splayed-open copy of Ice by Jacek Dukaj, such that you can see that slightly more of the 1177 pages have been read.
ARC of Ice by Jacek Dukaj, all 1177 pages of it, sitting on a scales. It weighs in at approximately 1.2kg.
ARC of Ice by Jacek Dukaj, all 1177 pages of it. The title is rendered as black jagged text on a white background.
A pile of books. Top to bottom: Sympathy Tower Tokyo; Beautyland; Landscapes; The Immeasurable Heaven; Greyhound; Strange and Perfect Account from the Permafrost; Eros the Bittersweet; On the Calculation of Volume (I, but ideally at least II as well, assuming I enjoy I); Notes From A Regicide; The Place of Shells; Fantasy: A Short History; Death of the Author; The Dream Hotel; The North Road
A stack of books. Bottom to top: Portalmania by Debbie Urbanski; Sublimation by Isabel J. Kim; The Outspoken and the Incendiary by Terry Bisson; Harmattan Season by Tochi Onyebuchi; Designing Hope by Sarah Houseley; Tender by Lauren du Plessis; House of Day, House of Night by Olga Tokarczuk; Orphan Planet by Madeehah Reza; and The Carrying Capacity of Paradise by Deborah L Davitt
Copy of Portalmania by Debbie Urbanski. Cover shows an oval portal filled with stars on a green background, with a woman who to my eye looks to be styled in a mid-twentieth-century American fashion, half in and half out of the portal. Her expression treads a Mona Lisa-esque line between wonder and fear.
Extract of John Clute writing about Doomsday Book by Connie Willis, from Look at the Evidence: "A bright quick mammal’s glitter suffused every single character in Connie Willis’s brilliant Doomsday Book, which won the Nebula this year (along with her “Even the Queen,” whose central debate about menstruation was hilarious but deeply unfair to Cyclists, whose representative got about as many words in as a liberal in Heinlein Country). But Doomsday Book, which seemed clearly to have been written in a state of love, set up no bogies to blow over. The thirteenth century country near Oxford to which the protagonist time-travels on a university assignment from the near future, though it has been criticized for a variety of historical inaccuracies, breathes all the same like another country of the heart. As the Black Death begins to transmogrify the culture she has inserted herself into, the protagonist slowly becomes a figure of almost mythic density, almost like some mythago in Robert Holdstock’s Wood, and her ultimate rescue, in the last sentences of the book, ends the novel like a song whose last note is all we came to hear."
Image of the comedian Eddie Izzard saying, "I grew up in Europe. Where the history comes from."
A gif of Giles (middle aged English white man from Buffy the Vampire Slayer) driving at night and, clearly irritated, muttering "Americans!" to himself.
Paragraph from Dream State by Eric Puchner: Charlie laughed again, then gave Garrett a look that seemed to say, merely, It’s late. Not in the day—it wasn’t even noon—but in a way that seemed to include the islands of slush, the mountains around them, the fact that they were standing there at all. He thought of the day they’d met in college, when the campus was encased in ice. Not a world under glass, but made of it.
Excerpt from a review of Moon Songs by Niall Harrison in the August 2025 issue of Locus magazine: "For different reasons, I don’t really need to tell you much about the next book, either. All I should need to tell you, in fact, is that Moon Songs: The Selected Stories of Carol Emshwiller is, as it sets out to be, an exemplary primer on the work of an extraordinary writer. Editor Matthew Cheney is clear in his aim and transparent in his methods, with the result that from a career of over 150 stories, the nineteen included here are the right ones for the task at hand. Moon Songs is representative of both the breadth of Emshwiller’s career and its peaks, and the selections have been sequenced into a book that works, with illuminating juxtapositions of stories written decades apart. It also becomes the best easily available text for these stories, cleaning up some typographical and layout issues that mar the otherwise essential two-volume The Collected Stories of Carol Emshwiller (Non Stop Press, 2011 and 2016). It is a scrupulous book, and it is recommended."
Cover of the Caption 2025 (Caption Rebirth) programme book: black and white art of a phoenix, with the convention name and tagine: Oxford's small press and indie comics festival
A stack of books acquired from Blackwell's in Oxford, top to bottom: Two Lights by James Roberts; Basilisk by Matt Wixey; No Straight Road Takes You There by Rebecca Solnit; We Hexed The Moon by Mollyhall Seeley; The Olcinium Trilogy by Andrej Nikoladis; Fair by Jen Calleja; Dealing With The Dead by Alain Mabanckou; and The Midnight Shift by Cheon Seon-ran
Coloured wooden beach huts at Blyth: one yellow with a white door, one red with a blue door.
Screencap of Harvey Dent from Christopher Nolan's The Dark Knight saying, "You either die a hero, or you live long enough to see yourself become the villain"; except "hero" has been replaced with "neophile" and "villain" has been replaced with "canoniser", in honour of today's iteration of the eternal debate about older SF vs SF of the now, canons, all that.
First paragraph of article "The New Nature Writing" by Jos Smith: "The rise of ‘The New Nature Writing’ as a cultural phenomenon in the UK has been one of the country’s most notable literary movements this century. There have been new prizes (The Wainwright Prize, The Nan Shepherd Prize), new journals and magazines (Archipelago, Earthlines), new websites (Caught by the River, The Clearing), new publishers like Little Toller, and there have even been new conservation organisations that owe a debt to the literature (Rewilding Britain, Action for Conservation). This has all contributed to an exciting and lively time for what Robert Macfarlane has called the “cultures of nature”. But it has not been without its uncertainties and controversies and at times it has felt like the New Nature Writing has raised more questions than it has answered."
A pile of books, bottom to top: Saraswati by Gurnaik Johal; New Story of the Stone by Wu Jianren; The Place of Shells by Mai Ishizawa; Exophony by Yoko Tawada; On Writers and Writing by Henry James; Late Star Trek by Adam Kotsko; Strange and Perfect Account from the Permafrost by Donald Niedekker; The Immeasurable Heaven by Caspar Geon; Newcastle, Endless by Alex Niven; Twenty Terrifying Tales From Our Technofeudal Tomorrow by William Kherbek
Google preview text of a Bookseller article about Olga Tokarczuk translations: "Antonia Lloyd-Jones will revise her existing translations of House of Day, House of Night and Primeval and Other Times..."
Gif of James T Kirk and Leonard 'Bones' McCoy nodding at each other.