REVIEW: “Halfway Up and Halfway Down and Nowhere At All” by Juliet Kemp

Review of Juliet Kemp, “Halfway Up and Halfway Down and Nowhere At All”, Luna Station Quarterly 25 (2016): Read online. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman.

Content note: death.

This story explored a darker side of magic and magic use, drawing analogies with drugs and drug use. Mali doesn’t approve of Nick’s getting mixed up with that sort of stuff — but when he turns up dead on her doorstep, she’s not going to let her friend’s death go unavenged. Of course, nothing is ever as easy as that, and the more Mali protests against the use of magic, the more inevitable her own use of it is. This was a pretty dark story, all in all.

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REVIEW: “Stiff” by Kellie Coppola

Review of Kellie Coppola, “Stiff”, Luna Station Quarterly 25 (2016): Read online. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman.

This is one of those stories that starts off ordinary and mundane, where you read for awhile wondering where the speculative element will slide in, and then when it finally does, it makes you smile. Despite the mention of aliens in the opening sentence, this isn’t an alien story. It’s rather a story about the titular Stiffs, and I found it to be a clever and unusual take on some traditional tropes.

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REVIEW: “Science & the Arts” by M. John Harrison

Review of M. John Harrison, “Science & the Arts”, in Settling the World: Selected Stories 1970-2020, with a foreword by Jennifer Hodgson (Comma Press, 2020): 165-171 — Purchase here. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman. (Read the review of the anthology.

In this story, Harrison’s mastery of character creation is on full display. He understands how to select details that turn words on a page into real persons; this is the first story I’ve read that features as a central character a woman with chronic pain that had — two years previously — landed her in a mental institution until they realised that, oh, wait, it wasn’t all in her head, it was the result of a botched surgery. The story opens introducing us to her (her name is Mona), and reading this was both a sucker punch and a validation. Here is someone who knows that this happens to women, and isn’t going to pretend it doesn’t. Mona is an artist, one half of the titular pair. The other, the scientist, is the narrator, and Harrison gets him bang on the money too — “I said that I had got around that in the 1970s by presenting my own opinions as quotations from other people which seemed to authorise them for me until I had enough confidence to present them as my own” (p. 168) so neatly encapsulates a trick that I’m sure many an early career scientist will either recognise or read and be like “oh, wow, that’s a great idea.” There’s nothing terribly flashy or daring in this story, and that’s what gives it so much of its charm.

(Originally published in the Times Literary Supplement, 2003.)

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REVIEW: “A Young Man’s Journey to Viriconium” by M. John Harrison

Review of M. John Harrison, “A Young Man’s Journey to Viriconium”, in Settling the World: Selected Stories 1970-2020, with a foreword by Jennifer Hodgson (Comma Press, 2020): 141-163 — Purchase here. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman. (Read the review of the anthology.)

Two things the title invites the reader to ask: Who is the young man, and where (or what) is Viriconium? Neither question is answered explicitly. Is the young man the narrator? Or is it the Dr. Petromax that he meets in his search for Viriconium? Viriconium itself, we are told, is a place that we all want, but “it is the old that want it most” (p. 142). Half the interest in the story is trying to piece together what (or where) Viriconium is, so I shan’t say anything more about it.

This story was told at a more languid pace than some of the others in this collection, and the framework of one person reporting what another person has told him meant I found myself regularly flipping back to remind myself to whom these experiences belonged. I’d peg this one as “good” but not “phenomenal”, like some of the other stories in the anthology are.

(First published in Interzone, 1985.)

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REVIEW: “The Machine in Shaft Ten” by M. John Harrison

Review of M. John Harrison, “The Machine in Shaft Ten”, in Settling the World: Selected Stories 1970-2020, with a foreword by Jennifer Hodgson (Comma Press, 2020): 127-139 — Purchase here. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman. (Read the Review of the anthology.

This anthology is a master-class in how to nail opening sentences. Just look at this:

Although I was later to become intimately involved with Professor Nicholas Bruton and the final, fatal events at the base of Shaft ten, I was prevented by a series of personal disasters from taking much interest in the original announcement of his curious discovery at the centre of the earth (p. 127)

Every single thing about this sentence is perfection. It’s pretty much an entire story in itself! Between this and the title, I’m already hooked: But when on the second page we are presented with the “what if” question underlying this story — what if humans found out they were being used as resources in exactly the same way they use the rest of the planet — there’s no escape. This is an excellent story, and every page of it will remind you of that fact. This is classic SF at its best.

(Originally published in New Worlds Quarterly, 1972, under the pseudonym Joyce Churchill.)

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REVIEW: “Colonising the Future” by M. John Harrison

Review of M. John Harrison, “Colonising the Future”, in Settling the World: Selected Stories 1970-2020, with a foreword by Jennifer Hodgson (Comma Press, 2020): 123-126 — Purchase here. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman. (Read the Review of the anthology.

This piece (I hesitate to even call it a “story”) was a bit to “literary” for my tastes. It is interesting to see how Harrison’s style developed and evolved over time; I have come to the conclusion that his earlier work is less pretentious than his later work, and hence I like the early stuff better.

(First published in Visions 2020.)

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REVIEW: “The Causeway” by M. John Harrison

Review of M. John Harrison, “The Causeway”, in Settling the World: Selected Stories 1970-2020, with a foreword by Jennifer Hodgson (Comma Press, 2020): 109-121 — Purchase here. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman. (Read the Review of the anthology.

What a strange story. I’m finding that a lot of Harrison’s stories are told at a curious level of remove whereby it’s almost as if the reader is expected to be close enough to already know a bunch of the background details, but in fact is far enough away that none of these gaps are ever filled in. Done poorly, this sort of gappiness can be extremely frustrating. But while this story was one where when I went back and reread the beginning after I’d reached the end and went “oh! I get it a bit more, now”, I didn’t have any of the usual frustration. Instead, as with many other stories in this volume, I found myself reading this with my writer’s brain whirring in the background, watching every step and every move to learn by observation of a master.

(First published in New Worlds Quarterly, 1971).

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REVIEW: “Yummie” by M. John Harrison

Review of M. John Harrison, “Yummie”, in Settling the World: Selected Stories 1970-2020, with a foreword by Jennifer Hodgson (Comma Press, 2020): 99-108 — Purchase here. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman. (Read the Review of the anthology.

What a strange combination of banal and surreal this was! It reminded me of a Kafka story, where you get pulled along with this growing sense of horror as everything that should be normal goes sideways.

(Originally published in The Weight of Words, 2017.)

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REVIEW: “Land Locked” by M. John Harrison

Review of M. John Harrison, “Land Locked”, in Settling the World: Selected Stories 1970-2020, with a foreword by Jennifer Hodgson (Comma Press, 2020): 95-98 — Purchase here. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman. (Read the review of the anthology.)

What a contrast this story was to the previous one! A fraction of its length, and entirely different. It bothered me, though, that in a story centered on two characters, one man, one woman, the man was named, and the woman was not.

(Originally published in Seen From Here, 2020).

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REVIEW: “Running Down” by M. John Harrison

Review of M. John Harrison, “Running Down”, in Settling the World: Selected Stories 1970-2020, with a foreword by Jennifer Hodgson (Comma Press, 2020): 55-93 — Purchase here. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman. (Read the Review of the anthology.

One thing I have really enjoyed about Harrison’s stories is the way that he highlights experiences that seem at once very specific and yet at the same time also familiar. In “Running Down”, this manifests in the opening of the story when the narrator, Egerton, explains his relationship with Lyall, his erstwhile university roommate. The details of their story seem utterly unique to them; and yet, the experience of mutually dislike between close friends is one that has happened more than once in my own life (it makes me wonder, now, whatever happened to my childhood bestfriend whom I moved away from age 10. She and I loathed each other more often than not). The deft way that Harrison does this is what makes his stories feel so real, even when — once you get more than a few pages in — you cannot escape the utter unreality of the story being told (especially when an unexpected personage turns up!).

(Originally published in New Worlds Quarterly 8).

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