Search Worlds Without End

When the English journalist named Cave visits the island of Autotelia, he finds the dockyards of the old harbor gentrified and the island's famous ruins a tourist attraction. When he gets to know the alluring Julia Vicente, a former film actress, he discovers her life has been marked by the childhood disappearance of her brother. Was she guilty of his death, or was it an accident after all? As Cave's life grows entwined with hers, he tries to answer these questions, while his new lover seems determined to perpetuate the mystery.

This story originally appeared as a Kindle Single. It can also be found in the anthology The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year: Volume Eight (2014), edited by Jonathan Strahan. The story is included in the collection You Should Come With Me Now: Stories of Ghosts (2017).

Nebula Award nominated novella. It originally appeared in the anthology Under the Wheel (1987), edited by Elizabeth Mitchell. It can also be found in Tor Double #25: Fugue State/The Death of Doctor Island (1990, with Gene Wolfe).

Mick Rose runs a sometimes illegal courier service to the genetics industry. His lover Isobel is dissatisfied - she wants to be more beautiful. When she takes a new DNA-based genetic treatment, Mick finds out more than he wants to know about the goods his firm has been carrying.

Sturgeon Award nominated short story. It originally appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, July 1999. The story can also be found in the anthologies The Year's Best Science Fiction: Seventeenth Annual Collection (2000), edited by Gardner Dozois, and The Very Best of Fantasy & Science Fiction: Volume 2 (2014), edited by Gordon Van Gelder. It is included in hte collections Travel Arrangements: Short Stories (2000) and Things That Never Happen (2002).

John Truck was to outward appearances just another lowlife spaceship captain. But he was also the last of the Centaurans - or at least, half of him was - which meant that he was the only person who could operate the Centauri Device, a sentient bomb which might hold the key to settling a vicious space war.

M. John Harrison's classic novel turns the conventions of space opera on their head, and is written with the precision and brilliance for which is famed.

In a bleak present-future Britain, mounting radiation levels have brought about widespread deformity and a catastrophic collapse of society. The crazed and cancered remnants of the population are bent upon stamping out abnormality with messianic zeal. But those few who look beyond their own, doomed struggle for survival know that only a mutant version of mankind CAN survive in this poisoned environment.

The new humanity must be preserved - whatever the cost.

Table of Contents:

• 9 - The Machine in Shaft Ten
• 21 - The Lamia and Lord Cromis
• 42 - The Bait Principle
• 48 - Running Down
• 85 - The Orgasm Band
• 92 - Visions of Monad
• 106 - Events Witnessed From a City
• 113 - London Melancholy
• 131 - Ring of Pain
• 138 - The Causeway
• 150 - The Bringer with the Window
• 159 - Coming from Behind

Shaw had a breakdown, but he's getting himself back together. He has a single room, a job on a decaying London barge, and an on-off affair with a doctor's daughter called Victoria, who claims to have seen her first corpse at age fourteen.

It's not ideal, but it's a life. Or it would be if Shaw hadn't got himself involved in a conspiracy theory that, on dark nights by the river, seems less and less theoretical...

Meanwhile, Victoria is up in the Midlands, renovating her dead mother's house, trying to make new friends. But what, exactly, happened to her mother? Why has the local waitress disappeared into a shallow pool in a field behind the house? And why is the town so obsessed with that old Victorian morality tale, The Water Babies?

As Shaw and Victoria struggle to maintain their relationship, the sunken lands are rising up again, unnoticed in the shadows around them.

Over the last thirty years, M. John Harrison has been inspiring readers and writers alike across the world. His return to science fiction in 2002 with the magnificent space opera LIGHT was a monumental triumph, shortlisted for every major award in the genre. He combines brilliant storytelling with complex plots and evocative, mesmerising writing. THINGS THAT NEVER HAPPEN is M. John Harrison's definitive collection of short fiction, twenty-four dazzling stories of science fiction and fantasy; the perfect introduction to one of Britain's most brilliant writers.

Table of Contents:

• Introduction: The Limits of Vision(aries) - (2002) - essay by China Miéville
• Author's Introduction - (2002) - essay
• Settling the World - (1975) - short story
• Running Down - (1975) - novelette
• The Incalling - (1978) - novelette
• The Ice Monkey - (1980) - short story
• Egnaro - (1981) - novelette
• The New Rays - (1982) - short story
• Old Women - (1984) - short story
• The Quarry - (1983) - short story
• A Young Man's Journey to London - (1985) - novelette
• The Great God Pan - (1988) - novelette
• Small Heirlooms - (1987) - short story
• The Gift - (1988) - novelette
• Suicide Coast - (1999) - short story
• The Neon Heart Murders - (2000) - short story
• Black Houses - (1998) - short story
• Science & The Arts - (1999) - short story
• The East - (1996) - short story
• The Horse of Iron and How We Can Know It and Be Changed by It Forever - (1989) - short story
• Gifco - (1992) - novelette
• Empty - (1995) - novelette
• Seven Guesses of the Heart - (1996) - short story
• I Did It - (1996) - short story
• Anima - (1992) - short story
• Isobel Avens Returns to Stepney in the Spring - (1994) - novelette
• Story Notes - (2002) - essay

This short story originally appeared on Amazon.com in 2004. It can also be found in the anthologies The Year's Best Science Fiction: Twenty-Second Annual Collection (2005), edited by Gardner Dozois, and Science Fiction: The Best of 2004, edited by Karen Haber and Jonathan Strahan.

Table of Contents:

• Old Women - (1984) - short story
• Small Heirlooms - (1987) - short story
• The Gift - (1988) - novelette
• The Horse of Iron and How We Can Know It and Be Changed by It Forever - (1989) - short story
• Gifco - (1992) - novelette
• Anima - (1992) - short story
• Empty - (1995) - novelette
• Seven Guesses of the Heart - (1996) - short story
• I Did It - (1996) - short story
• The East - (1996) - short story
• Suicide Coast - (1999) - short story
• The Neon Heart Murders - (2000) - short story
• Black Houses - (1998) - short story
• Science & The Arts - (1999) - short story

'What Wish I Was Here does triumphantly is to capture the feeling of living in the 21st century with all its anxieties... wondrous and self-defining and defiant' The Guardian

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. But is there even an M. John Harrison and where do we find him?

This is the question the author asks in this memoir-as-mystery, turning for clues to forty years of notebooking: 'A note or it never happened. A note or you never looked.'

M. John Harrison is a cartographer of the liminal. His work sits at the boundaries between genres--horror and science fiction, fantasy and travel writing--just as his characters occupy the no man's land between the spatial and the spiritual. Here, in his first collection of short fiction for over 15 years, we see the master of the New Wave present unsettling visions of contemporary urban Britain, as well as supernatural parodies of the wider, political landscape. From gelatinous aliens taking over the world's financial capitals, to the middle-aged man escaping the pressures of fatherhood by going missing in his own house... these are weird stories for weird times.

In M. John Harrison's dangerously illuminating new novel, three quantum outlaws face a universe of their own creation, a universe where you make up the rules as you go along and break them just as fast, where there's only one thing more mysterious than darkness.

In contemporary London, Michael Kearney is a serial killer on the run from the entity that drives him to kill. He is seeking escape in a future that doesn't yet exist—a quantum world that he and his physicist partner hope to access through a breach of time and space itself. In this future, Seria Mau Genlicher has already sacrificed her body to merge into the systems of her starship, the White Cat. But the "inhuman" K-ship captain has gone rogue, pirating the galaxy while playing cat and mouse with the authorities who made her what she is. In this future, Ed Chianese, a drifter and adventurer, has ridden dynaflow ships, run old alien mazes, surfed stellar envelopes. He "went deep"—and lived to tell about it. Once crazy for life, he's now just a twink on New Venusport, addicted to the bizarre alternate realities found in the tanks—and in debt to all the wrong people.

Haunting them all through this maze of menace and mystery is the shadowy presence of the Shrander—and three enigmatic clues left on the barren surface of an asteroid under an ocean of light known as the Kefahuchi Tract: a deserted spaceship, a pair of bone dice, and a human skeleton.

Years after Ed Chianese's fateful trip into the Kefahuchi Tract, the tract has begun to expand and change in ways we never could have predicted - and, even more terrifying, parts of it have actually begun to fall to Earth, transforming the landscapes they encounter.

Not far from Moneytown, in a neighborhood of underground clubs, body-modification chop shops, adolescent contract killers, and sexy streetwalking Monas, you'll find the Saudade Event Site: a zone of strange geography, twisted physics, and frightening psychic onslaughts - not to mention the black and white cats that come pouring out at irregular intervals.

Vic Serotonin is a "travel agent" into and out of Saudade. His latest client is a woman who's nearly as unpredictable as the site itself - and maybe just as dangerous. She wants a tour just as a troubling new class of biological artifacts are leaving the site - living algorithms that are transforming the world outside in inexplicable and unsettling ways. Shadowed by a metaphysically inclined detective determined to shut his illegal operation down, Vic must make sense of a universe rapidly veering toward a virulent and viral form of chaosand a humanity almost lost.

One of science fiction’s premiere stylists, M. John Harrison has received abundant praise and awards for his wildly imaginative ideas and transcendent prose. Now he returns to the richly complex universe of Light and Nova Swing with a stunning new novel that braids three glittering strands into a tapestry that spans vast reaches of time and space.

In the near future, an elderly English widow is stirred from her mundane existence by surreal omens and visitations. Centuries later, the space freighter Nova Swing takes on an illegal alien artifact as cargo, with consequences beyond reckoning. While on a distant planet, a nameless policewoman tries to bring order to an event zone where ordinary physics do not apply, only to find herself caught up in something even stranger and more sublime...

A magnificent city existing on the fringes of the past, and on the brink of destruction, Viriconium -- With a foreword by Neil Gaiman.

Available to American readers for the first time, this landmark collection gathers four groundbreaking fantasy classics from the acclaimed author of Light. Set in the imagined city of Viriconium, here are the masterworks that revolutionized a genre and enthralled a generation of readers:

• The Pastel City
• A Storm of Wings
• In Viriconium
• Viriconium Nights

Back in print after a long absence, these singular tales of a timeless realm and its enigmatic inhabitants are now reborn and compiled to captivate a whole new generation.

In the distant future, a medieval system rises from the ruins of a technology that destroyed itself. Armored knights ride their horses across dunes of rust, battling for the honor of the Queen. But the knights find more to menace them than mere swords and lances. A brave quest leads them face to face with the awesome power of a complex, lethal technology that has been erased from the face of the Earth - but lives on, underground.

In the wasteland of a future world, the pastel city struggles in the grip of the sign of the locust.

Viriconium: the pastel city was the last bastion of the civilized world where Queen Methvet Nian ruled supreme. Now she watched, helpless, as the time of the locust became a monstrous reality, turning the inhabitants into hideous mindless insects. Cellur,the bird lord, emerged from his underground exile, the first to respond to the call. Soon he was joined by Tomb, the iron dwarf, and the first of the reborn men, Alstath Fulthor. They journeyed to the desolate plains of the north in search of the evil's source, only to encounter a paralysing menace that threatened to destroy their very minds....

Viriconium is an omnibus volume containing all the Viriconium stories, originally published in four books: The Pastel City, A Storm of Wings, In Viriconium, and Viriconium Nights.

The Pastel City of Viriconium was a temple of lost hope.

The gods had come down to frolic drunkenly in the gutters. Time had been stretched so thin as to lose its meaning. The pestilence had spread from the Low City to the High. And the last great artist sat in the plague zone where she waited for the end. Something had to be done. Ashlyme had to do it. And in that year of the apocalypse, he was the only man who dared.

First published in the UK as In Viriconium.

This new collection of stories returns us to the strange, haunting, mutable world of Viriconium and its citizens. A city of the imagination, a place in which the familiar and the utterly strange mingle together. Everything in Viriconium is subject to change.

Table of Contents:

• Author's Note - essay
• The Lamia and Lord Cromis - (1971) - novelette
• Lamia Mutable - (1972) - short story
• Viriconium Knights - (1981) - short story
• Events Witnessed From a City - (1975) - short story
• The Luck in the Head - novelette
• The Lords of Misrule - (1984) - short story
• In Viriconium - novella
• Strange Great Sins - (1983) - short story