Settling the World: M. John Harrison in conversation with Gary Budden @ Housmans Online
Housmans is pleased to welcome sci-fi supremo M. John Harrison to our first digital event in collaboration with indie publishers Comma Press and Influx Press.
Considered one of the most important stylists of modern fantasy and science fiction working today, and a pioneer of the New Wave, award-winning author M. John Harrison can count amongst his fans the likes of Neil Gaiman, Iain Banks and Robert Macfarlane.
Throughout his career, M. John’s writing has defied categorisation, building worlds both unreal and all-too real, overlapping and interlocking with each other. His stories are replete with fissures and portals into parallel dimensions, unidentified countries and lost lands.
His latest collection, Settling the World, is a selection of stories, drawn from 50 years of writing (1979-2020), follows backstreet occultists, amateur philosophers, down-and-outs or refugees, and explores our relationship with ‘the other’ in microscopic detail. What the characters have in common is they share in Harrison’s rejection of the idea that the world, or our understanding of it, could ever be settled.
