Empty Space: A Haunting

M. John Harrison

2012 • 324 pages

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Average rating4

EMPTY SPACE is a space adventure. We begin with the following dream: An alien research tool the size of a brown dwarf star hangs in the middle of nowhere, as a result of an attempt to place it equidistant from everything else in every possible universe. Somewhere in the fractal labyrinth beneath its surface, a woman lies on an allotropic carbon deck, a white paste of nanomachines oozing from the corner of her mouth. She is neither conscious nor unconscious, dead nor alive. There is something wrong with her cheekbones. At first you think she is changing from one thing into another - perhaps it's a cat, perhaps it's something that only looks like one - then you see that she is actually trying to be both things at once. She is waiting for you, she has been waiting for you for perhaps 10,000 years. She comes from the past, she comes from the future. She is about to speak... EMPTY SPACE is a sequel to LIGHT and NOVA SWING, three strands presented in alternating chapters which will work their way separately back to this image of frozen transformation.

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Featured Series

3 primary books

#3 in Kefahuchi Tract

Kefahuchi Tract is a 3-book series with 3 released primary works first released in 2002 with contributions by M. John Harrison.

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David

M John Harrison is an author you either get, or don't. To me he is one of the finest writers alive today. The breadth of his imagination is staggering.

Empty Space is the third and final (?) book in the Kefahuchi Tract trilogy that began with Light, continued with Nova Swing and concludes here. Characters from both previous books reappear as he weaves a story set in the far future with one set in present day earth. For me this has the edge over Nova Swing precisely because of that duality. The story of Anna Waterman and her fragile mental health provides an emotional counterpoint to the science fiction noir of the far future travails of the crew of Nova Swing, a nameless, dangerous policewoman and a mysterious government agent.

The whole thing hinges on the mystery of the Tract itself and an enigmatic object called The Aleph. No one really knows what this is. There's the Nova Swing on a wild goose chase, collecting parts of a travelling carnival. There are strange events, even stranger characters and a plot that is so hard to summarise it isn't worth my while attempting to so so!

But it is the hallucinatory text that grabs you. Harrison describes a future mired in “bad psychics”, the direct result of the effects of the Kefahuchi Tract. His prose is full of disturbing imagery. Even the Anna Waterman chapters have a dreamlike quality to them, her disordered life affecting both her estranged daughter and her psychiatrist. In the end you are left wondering whether the whole thing was a figment of her imagination. It is an ambitious, enthralling novel.

You may hate it. I thought it was wonderful.

August 18, 2013