REVIEW: “Prelude” by Sian M. Jones

Review of Sian M. Jones, “Prelude”, Luna Station Quarterly 25 (2016): Read online. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman.

I love stories that play around with what personal technology will be like in the future — instead of laptops and mobile phones, there’ll be personal robots and chip implants and holo-vision. Yet these sorts of stories can often struggle to say or do anything new. Jones managed to hit the sweet spot, combining realistic technological developments with a unique twist, with the added bonus of really, really likeable characters, and a bit at the end that made me gasp and then made me cry. Thumbs up!

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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: “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: “Settling the World” by M. John Harrison

Review of M. John Harrison, “Settling the World”, in Settling the World: Selected Stories 1970-2020, with a foreword by Jennifer Hodgson (Comma Press, 2020): 1-26 — Purchase here. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman. (Read the Review of the anthology.

This was a great piece to open the anthology with: Reading it you cannot escape the clear and certain knowledge that this is a piece by a master craftsman. Every single part about this story was perfectly developed and perfectly placed, and left me hungering for more. After reading this story, I knew I was going to love the rest of what was to come.

(First published in The New Improved Sun, 1975).

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REVIEW: Settling the World: Selected Stories 1970-2020 by M. John Harrison

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

I’ll admit: Prior to receiving a request from the press to review this collection, I had not heard of M. John Harrison. My personal route through SFF has been rather idiosyncratic, and has missed out pretty much all of the “classic” SF authors. This made the opportunity to read a retrospective collection of Harrison’s stories — spanning 50 years — rather more desirable, not less, because it gave me an opportunity to fill a gap in my education. For that, I must comment on how useful I found Jennifer Hodgson’s interesting foreword to the collection; it says almost nothing of Harrison’s biography or history, but focuses more on the experience of reading his stories, and the way in which they reflect the world we inhabit and our experiences within it. Coming ignorant to Harrison and his work, Hodgson’s foreword piqued my interest and whetted my appetite, and set the stage for reading this excellent collection.

In these stories we find many repeated themes, as Hodgson highlights: The theme of dissatisfaction with how things have turned out; the theme of never knowing enough; the theme of always being just outside of things. Some of the stories focus on questioning reality; in others, the reality is so different from our own and yet it is taken for granted. Most of the stories contain at least one of these aspects; many of them contain more. This makes them exceptionally accessible: Even the weirdest of weird science fiction in them is not enough to make the stories themselves unfamiliar or strange, while sometimes the most mundane and ordinary of settings turn out to be home to the strangest and weirdest of stories.

Reading the collection was edifying, and I don’t mean this to be pejorative. I learned a lot about ways people look at the world; but I also learned a lot about the craft of writing stories, because even though I liked some stories better than others (usually the older ones I found more effective than the newer ones), there is no doubt that Harrison is a master of his craft, and one cannot help but marvel at what he has produced.

As is usual, the stories will be reviewed individually, and we will link the reviews back here when the are posted.

Sara L. Uckelman18 Comments

REVIEW: “Dream Catcher” by Natasha Burge

Review of Natasha Burge, “Dream Catcher”, Luna Station Quarterly 26 (2016): Read online. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman.

Content note: Reference to mass suicide.

Sometimes an implausible premise makes for a great story; otherwise, the premise is so implausible that my struggle to suspend my disbelief interferes with any enjoyment I might have taken in the story. Alas, the premise in this story as of the latter type.

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REVIEW: “Halfway Through the Dark” by Alexis Ames

Review of Alexis Ames, “Halfway Through the Dark”, Luna Station Quarterly 43 (2020): Read online. Reviewed by Sara L. Uckelman.

This was a wonderfully cosy steampunk mystery, which I enjoyed a lot. The characters felt rich and familiar, as if this was but one episode in a series of stories. I’m now interested to see if Ames has written about Kate and David before, or if she’ll write about them again in the future!

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