Chris Foss cover art for The Machine in Shaft Ten and Other Stories by M. John Harrison, reprinted in Future Life, July 1979.

M. John Harrison - Wish I Was Here

Bruce Pennington, 'The Pastel City', ''Science Fiction Monthly'', Vol. 1, #1, 1974 Source

Perhaps the worst discovery of all is that you don’t even have to be very good at something to ache from missing it.

— M. John Harrison, in Nina Allan's Wish I Was Here by M John Harrison review – a masterly ‘anti-memoir (The Guardian, May 12, 2023)

Wish I Was Here is a masterpiece. Formally inventive, constantly surprising, M John Harrison has written an archaeology of fragments that shivers with wholeness. As always with M John Harrison, you're never quite sure what you're reading or where it will take you next.

There are only a few certainties: that it will surprise you, sometimes astound you, and leave you profoundly changed. Late style is when the people who have all your life jumped in front of you waving their arms - No! Careful! - jump out one more time to encourage you to run them down, and this time you do. M. John Harrison has produced one of the greatest bodies of fiction of any living British author, encompassing space opera, speculative fiction, fantasy, magical and literary realism. Every book is subversive of genre and united by restless intelligence, experimentation and rebelliousness of spirit.

This is his first memoir, an 'anti-memoir', written in his mid-seventies with aphoristic daring and trademark originality and style, fresh after winning the Goldsmiths Prize in 2020. Many of our most prominent younger writers now recognise him as the most significant British writer of his generation. He is 'brilliantly unsettling' (Olivia Laing), 'magnificent' (Neil Gaiman), 'one of the best writers of fiction currently at work in English' (Robert Macfarlane).

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‘Wish I Was Here’ Captivates

'Wish I Was Here' is the perfect way to get to know M. John Harrison #scifi #memoir #review

If you’re familiar at all with M. John Harrison and his writing then you know that his imagination and style are captivating and singular. When you read a Harrison story you know it’s a Harrison story, unequivocally. Reading his newly released ‘anti-memoir’ you know it can only belong to M. John Harrison and no one else. Wish I Was Here (2023) is a sharp and revealing trip into the mind of one of…

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WISH I WAS HERE - M. John Harrison (2023)

“How do you know what to say before you know how to say it?” I’ve read most of Harrison’s 21st century output, and loved it all – aside from Empty Space, which I DNFed at 60%, and resulted in a fairly lengthy analysis that might interest you if you’re interested in theorizing about literature, genre, deconstruction and science fiction. I always mean to read something of his 20th century work –…

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A 'memoir' which totally subverts the genre! @shinynewbooks @mjohnharrison

I’m very happy to share with you today a new review I have up on Shiny New Books! The title in question is a new release from a long-term favourite author of mine, M. John Harrison; he’s made numerous appearances on the Ramblings with his individual and unique works, but here he moves into new territory. The book is called “Wish I Was Here”, and the subtitle of “An Anti-Memoir” should give a hint…

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Michael Whelan ‘The Floating Gods’ by M John Harrison (1982)

The Beatles arrive in Nassau, February 1965

THE BEATLES: GET BACK + text posts

ummm doodles. some cowboy harrison and some. john. yeah

Massive amounts of what happens to you will happen via invisible and/or unparsable causal chains. Much of life, you will never know what happened to you at all, let alone to anyone else. Much of what goes on around you, you will never even notice. Though causes are everywhere present and dependable, the search for causality is to welter around looking for explanations you can’t have, using epistemologies and ontologies at best provisional. Why waste time, especially in fiction? Let’s have some representation in fiction for everyone who, without knowing it, puzzles through their lives in what used to be called 'a dream'. Because that is all of us. Solipsism, narcissism, self-involvement seem like useful words for it. Not so. They come loaded with the meaningless judgements of a past that believed clear, discoverable chains of events were not only a feature of life, but a feature you had a responsibility to consciously engage with. They thus suffer catastrophic failure when required to describe the act of wandering through thick fog in a country you have already failed to recognise as both foreign and war-torn, in a condition of mild irritation because you’re thinking about something else. I'm not sure life is a dream. But if your attempts to map it don't feel like one, you may be making a serious error about what being awake actually is, or where and in what conditions it is carried out.

M. John Harrison, Wish I Was Here

the restless thrum of art, like the ghostly flight of the barn owl glimpsed at dusk

"File an observation until its context is lost, then treat it as a found object. Something to be misappropriated from yourself, something levered out of its authentic moment. The notes know there are only inauthentic moments, and moments are all we have,” Harrison reminds himself in one of his notebooks... Wish I Was Here does triumphantly is to capture the feeling of living in the 21st century with all its anxieties. Against the uncertainty, the writing; the restless thrum of art, like the ghostly flight of the barn owl glimpsed at dusk, wondrous and self-defining and defiant.

— Nina Allan, Wish I Was Here by M John Harrison review – a masterly ‘anti-memoir (The Guardian, May 12, 2023)

Virginia Governor DILFs

Mark Warner, Tim Kaine, Ralph Northam, Chuck Robb, Terry McAuliffe, Douglas Wilder, Bob McDonnell, Colgate Darden, Gerald Baliles, Jim Gilmore, Westmoreland Davis, John N. Dalton, J. Lindsay Almond, Albertis Harrison, John S. Battle, William M. Tuck, James Hubert Price, George Allen, Thomas B. Stanley, Linwood Holton, Mills Godwin, Glenn Youngkin

Remember when Dhani and GM found a tape with a guitar solo George did for here comes the sun and everyone was like :O cause hello? New Beatles guitar solo, so far unheard of??????? and GM was rocking out to the Cello? Classic George Martin