Interview by David Kendall (1997)

Seven Sisters, London's N15, will probably find its way into a Harrison narrative, if it hasn't already. The clogged thoroughfares and near empty residential roads, with their dusty-windowed conversions, seem estranged from the city's heart. The trim stone walls of the small church look almost obscene next to the chaos of the rest of the street's styles and ages, all of which are dominated by the sort of cash-for-space aesthetics which permanently invite the wrecking crew.

I'm not a fan of North London, nor am I an unreserved fan of the work of M John Harrison: Climbers and The Course of the Heart failed to light my mind in the way In Viriconium did, or some of his best short stories; the epitome of fantastical fiction, 20th century versions of The Tales of Hoffman, balanced between tragedy and the macabre. And then there's his approach to the transformation of the self, exhibited in Signs of Life, his recent novel.

How much of Signs of Life was a kind of mythology of the 80s, with its fast cars and money scams?
It has its roots in a desire to comment on that while it was happening, as it were. It was conceived in the very late 80s/early 90s, an extension on the comment made on that in Course of the Heart - a direct extension really. Cars being the key, BMW being the key symbol. Also, it seemed to be the ideal social medium in which to talk about transformation.

Which was very much an 80s thing.
But also - genetics being what it is now and presumably will be in the future, and California being what it is - something still current. Self-transformation is one of the key icons of the late 20th century.

Isn't there an element of Thatcherism as well? The individual is responsible for him or herself, and it's up to you what you make of yourself - literally in the case of Signs of Life.
Yes. This whole idea that there's nothing else left but self-transformation. The idea that the world is somehow sorted, and therefore we can begin on ourselves, I've always seen as a Californian thing because it came out of there in the late 60s. It's been around a lot longer than Thatcherism or Reaganism, or any of the new manifestations of that. It's always fascinated me. I've felt it in myself, and I think we all feel it. I began to write fiction of this type when I was 15 years old, out of the much more open, and honest, and desperate urge that the world be something different from what it was - and I be something different from what I was. I think SF and fantasy are the ideal - it's self-transformative fiction. It's an early attempt at virtual transformation of yourself.

I think if you look at 30s, 40s and 50s fiction in America, particularly at early 50s sf, there was a huge urge to self-transform. Look at Alfred Bester. Bester clearly has a social conscience and Tiger Tiger clearly has global implications, but it's also about the desperate urge to be more than you are.

Wasn't Bester an exception to the rule?
I don't think so. If you look at that whole block of sci-based fiction - all that telepathic, telegenic, teleportatory kind of fiction - it's all about transcending the mere human. I think that's a very strong urge in both writers and readers of this kind of fiction. And I've always commented on that in my fiction, right from the early 70s; a kind of meta-critical comment on that.

In the 80s there was a difference in attitude to bodily changes, especially in horror rather than science fiction - in An American Werewolf in London, films like that - and, for the first time, the transformation was pleasurable.

As you say, it still had to be shown going wrong. Although Clive Barker always refuses to do that and shows the ecstasy of that kind of transformation with glee and delight. I know he believes that - however awful the experience, full of awe, awe inspiring - you go with the transformation.

Exactly. Clive has said to me that, to an extent, that's why he loves California and LA: because, to go back to this again, that's the place where the whole idea of self-transformation - into whatever you happen to be underneath, be it good or bad, monstrous or beautiful, or both - was first invented.

With your transformations in Signs of Life, that's a failure for Isobel, isn't it?

Yes. I think there are two roads to self-transformation: there's an apparently easy one, and a difficult one. The apparently easy one is cosmetic transformation. We live in a wannabe society. We're taking on, often, just the visual impression of the thing you want to be, and that's what Isobel opts for.

I think it is exactly that. I also find it sad and tragic because the second way, which is much more fulfilling, is to work bloody hard at making yourself what you want to be. Isobel's change is really fairly simple - simple for someone who takes the easier road.

She buys a cosmetic transformation from a guy who's clearly into selling cosmetic transformation. She doesn't become a bird; she does grow some feathers. She doesn't fly in any sense, literal or metaphorical.

Clearly she's very driven. Driven enough to excoriate herself: in that sense, to have an apparently very deep transformation. But is growing feathers any more of a physiological insult, as it were, than having liposuction?

All of these things require a certain amount of commitment, but in the end only cause a superficial change. To an extent the book is about that, and it is about a lot more than that. What I wanted to say with Isobel was: here's someone who's not gone the distance. She's gone a long way, and I admire her for going that far, which is why I wanted to write a tragedy of transformation.

In the end she does come out with what she wanted. What we mustn't forget about Isobel is she does get what she wants. One of the textual throwaways in the book is that, as she's being driven back to the clinic at the end, at high speed, one of the shops she passes is called 'What She Wants'. There are comments like that all through to switch you on to that. She does get what she wants, and she's the only person in the book who does: everybody else fails in their dream and again, to the extent that the book is about that, it's about how clutching to a fraction of even a sad dream is better than nothing.

Yes. Choe rejects his. Essentially, his dream is so appallingly needy that he has to ignore it because he can't bear to face it.

Exactly. He jumps ship on it again and again. He dumps that very literal metaphor at the end, to hide it from himself.

He's a very typical M John Harrison narrator. He's somewhat more involved in the text than prior versions of himself. Certainly he learns some very bitter things - he didn't really have a dream until he met Isobel, and by the time he'd learnt that's what a dream was he'd lost it. I think my narrators are very complex because they are very self-deceiving.

I don't think they want to. It seems very clear to me that they hide most of themselves, often from themselves as well. China is as deeply implicated in the illegal dumping as Choe, but he has these kind of pathetic middle class stopping points, as it were; he won't become a gangster. He says no to gangsterism. He says to Choe, 'We never did anything like that,' and Choe's response is, without saying it, 'We did things just as sad.' I think, like most of my narrators, certainly for the last three books, China is very self-deceiving, very unreliable: I think you have to be constantly questioning him.

I think China is the standard M John Harrison narrator - and he's always got to be taken with a pinch of salt. When you read the book you have to read past him. You have to question everything he says. I always signal in the book, really as often as possible, that the reader should be questioning this guy. He may seem to be blunt, simple, unmotivated; to be just telling the story, to be moral. I don't think he is. I think he's up to the hilt in it. His attitude to Isobel, for instance, is extremely possessive. He's willing to help her to fly but not if that means it liberates her - so he has to be called to court for that, if nothing else, at the end.

I do believe a book should have a very moral ending. Since there's no one who's untainted in most of my books, most people get some kind of comeuppance, and China's is the loss of Isobel. He can't expect to have Isobel: on the other hand she can't expect to have him and what she wants.

I think people have to be very careful how they define things, these days especially. If you buy an ideological package, and pursue it, you have to expect that there are other people in the world who say: 'Well, that's great. I hope you get what you want, but I'm afraid you'll have to count me out.'

I think that's something we're all going to learn in the early part of the next century. If everybody's free, everybody can say no - it's as simple as that. Everyone can say yes but everyone can say no. And if the China Roses of the world are romantics who don't want to buy a modern version of women, they don't have to. We don't have to buy an ideological picture. I've always been anti-ideology and pro-personal choice. To the extent that we can be non-ideological, we could argue over that for a billion years. As we did in the 80s.

I think you should float about for 20 years, and after 20 years you should have some ideas of your own; even if, as you say, they're only picked and mixed. They should, with modifications due to catastrophes that occur to you, be your own ideas, which you try to forge through the world with.

Yes. They were designed for that precise function - I always use my books to talk to myself as well as the audience, and they were designed to have that dialogue on my behalf. I'd been having it all the way through the 80s, and am still. There's a Choe side to me, a China Rose side to me, and many other sides.

Yes, and I know a lot of Choes. I have been a Choe myself when the opportunity presented itself. I adore all that stuff: I can see clearly the pros and cons of that character as a basis for existence - risk-taking. Forget the cost of everything else: the ecstasy of being driven. People forget that. Poor old China is driven in this rather dull way. I spent ten years as a completely driven rock climber - not necessarily a good rock climber, I wouldn't say I was a good rock climber - but I was very, very committed. It's a flimsy purpose in life but it is a purpose. I admire every surfer in the universe.

When I can. I've got a physiological inner ear problem at the moment, but I've got some medication which looks as if it's beginning to work, so I've started to practice again. I do hope to get back to climbing, but I also hope that the layoff I've had will have blunted the need to do it to that obsessive extent.

Never worked for me. You work with the fear. I think you have to work with it, even if working with it compartmentalises it, so you can hear it shrieking away in its cupboard somewhere while you get on with the job. Indeed, sometimes its you who's shrieking away in a cupboard while something else gets on with the job, probably your autonomic nervous system. I like the fear. I do it to get shriekingly frightened because that makes me very excited and produces all sorts of fun chemicals.

Yes. You get through it each time. That's why you do climbs that are harder and harder, or more dangerous. Each time you conquer something, each time you come through, it's harder to get the chemical rush. You need to be a bit more scared next time, and the combination of emotions that you can feel at a crux on a climb are better than the best drugs I've ever had.

I haven't done many drugs, but they didn't strike me or impress me compared with some of the chemicals I've produced 50 feet up in the air when I thought I was going to fall on my elbow. I write partly to get to the bottom of that in myself - to understand. Not so much to understand why I do it, but to describe precisely what I get out of it. Choe is a further exploration of that.

Do you think you got closer to describing that with Signs of Life than before?

No. I think the closest I've ever got, and the closest I ever will, is Climbers. Climbers was a direct examination of the process, but Choe is a more amusing and lively expression of it for the reader.

You seem to have altered your prose style in Signs of Life: much freer, less dense, but still complex.

That was the idea - to write a much more accessible book that maintained the concerns and hopefully maintained the density. Prose density got easy for me in the end, and I thought: if I can do that there's no need to keep doing it, I may as well try something else that's challenging - because I always like to do something different in a book. I thought, okay, let's have a look at what we can do with the prose. After 20 or 30 years of trying to make it as dense as possible, let's see if we can lighten it out a bit. And ever since the late 80s I've been very interested in hard-boiled and 90s noir - so I thought I'd shift the prose a little bit in that direction.

Ellroy obviously. James Lee Burke I liked when I first read him, but either he went off or I went off him. I find him a bit too lyrical, possibly because I'm trying to move away from lyricism myself. Also I don't believe him. I think that lyricism does what my narrators do: I've got a feeling that the narrator is superbly unreliable - whether deliberately so I don't know. There's a taint of hypocrisy there, but he can write beautifully. My favourite of the older, established authors is Charles Willeford. My favourites of his are the later Hoke Moseley books - because there he's got a prose that is in double opposition to those literary antecedents and that customised package. It's just dead flat, almost a non-prose - very common man - almost as if it had been written by a man whose only experience in writing has been police reports. But that guy's life is so ordinary and there are these outcrops of horror into it. It's brilliant.

Hoke Moseley is just like my hero because he's so ordinary, so normal. And it's so funny too: there are these long matter of fact pieces of dialogue; he's always giving his daughters advice about sex, and it's so wrong. Very comic. I can't understand why they haven't been filmed. [Save Miami Blues, George Armitage's 1990 film of the book of that name.] Of the new writers, I especially like Daniel Woodrell, who over here comes out in No Exit Press; The Ones You Do by him is a hell of a book; it's so funny and brilliantly written.

Yes, but you have to understand that they're an influence that's coming in laterally, and attempting to meld with 30 years of other influences. I never buy any kind of totalising system, I'm not going to start writing hardboiled, and neither would I want to write a completely hardboiled prose. It's just that it looked like an interesting way to take my prose, and see what would happen to it, basically. It's also an interesting way to take that narrator, seeing as I share this idea of a first person narrator. Hardboiled, almost in perpetuity, has a first person narrator with degrees of alienation. There's that fantastic series of books by Wilson Tucker, who wrote in the 50s about a cop whose partner had died because he was screwing someone when he shouldn't have been: and he's so consumed with guilt that he spends all of the three or four books building a wall. At the beginning of each book he's building this wall and he doesn't want the case - he wants to build his wall, and he wants it to be perfect. And you think, yeah, that's alienation. So I'm binding that to earlier influences like Elizabeth Taylor, HE Bates and Lawrence Durrell: they're all so totally different from one another anyway. Pick and mix is absolutely the key to everything in the world, but especially to writing.

I feel deeply at home with that. I can't say I ever felt at home with any previous decade, to the extent that decades are that distinct. I like this whole idea of over-determination as it were.

I don't know. I believe that it's almost impossible to do it at the time. I think you need some hindsight to do this kind of categorising, and I would rather be doing it now and then five years later look back and say, 'Oh wow this is so 90s' - with a frisson of shame even.

I have a problem. Past 50 you start to harden up and, however you try to remain flexible and to be open to input, it's difficult. It's probably physiological. I also have the problem that while I loathed, and still loathe, the ideology of the 80s, I had the nicest time of my life then. Not because of that ideology or because it was the 80s, but because of personal circumstance. So I find it hard to see what the 90s might be. My own 90s are something else; they're going to be a time during which I have to reassess what I am, simply through having too much fun in the 80s, as it were.

The other thing is that it's selective and it's the result of a million different loops.

Do we? I don't.

Through the media, that's the thing. The media is a multiple looping process: we agree to make fantastically broad generalisations and to loop into agreement with one another about what they might have been. But I have a theory, which I kind of half put forward to myself, that the 80s weren't the 80s at all - the 80s were recognition of where the 70s had led. Given that there might be a kind of lag, or hindsight, then the 90s might be a recognition of where the 80s led. And implicit in that is the moment that you recognise this, you feel a frisson of shame because a lot of the 80s was not about being venture capitalists - it was about the guilt of discovering you were a venture capitalist, and that this was doing the most appalling things to other people and the world.

And it was such fun. That's why the vampire image was so powerful in the 80s - it was this wonderful sad, tragic discovery they made about each other. 'Oh God, I have to suck the blood of others to live.' A very Thatcherite metaphor.

Exactly, and again that's what Signs of Life is about. It's certainly about the narrator, who doesn't discover this because he never admits it to himself: the reader discovers this, and any fellow feeling you might have felt with the narrator, I hope, has gone by the end of the book. The same as the narrator in The Course of the Heart: by the end of it I would hope you were not as sympathetic to him as you might have been when you started out. But I wonder - 60s, 70s, 80s, 90s - what's it going to look like in 200 years time when they get a real perspective on it? Differences which we see to be huge will be minimal.

Do you follow the New Worlds writers?

Not really. I think calling the thing 'the new wave' - and we understood this even then - was bit like calling something 'the 80s'. Actually, we knew then that we were 10 or 15 disparate authors who, for our own purposes, and for other people's descriptive purposes, had come under that umbrella for a temporary period. I think once we'd all juiced it, got the goodness out of it, we went to the four winds and did our own thing. As writers tend to do. I think writers are extremely individualistic - certainly writers of my generation. I don't really want to be collaborative.

What do you think you gained from your time at New Worlds?

A lot of fun for a start. It gave you a fantastic sense of being part of something that was radical, determined and extremely fun and interesting to do. The good thing about it was that it opened up possibilities for a lot of people: you could be what you were. But then I found that it rather dampened that down having opened the door. There were ideological problems, and I knew it was time to move on by the mid-to-late 70s. I was getting interested in rock climbing, as a major metaphor of my life. Because of that, I knew I had to be able to do whatever I wanted to do - so it was time to split then. It seemed to be important to get away somewhere quiet and listen to exactly what was going on in my own head, so that I could leap forth as the M John Harrison rather than an M John Harrison. Around that time, from the late 70s to the early 90s was a major flowering of what I am personally, as a writer and a human being.

What I wrote before was a combination of sf, the new wave, some ideologies from the 60s and a bit of me. From In Viriconium - and particularly in the short stories from 'Running Down' [collected in The Ice Monkey] onwards - that's Mike Harrison you're getting.

I like the latter two, In Viriconium and Viriconium Nights because, in those, I finished deconstructing sword and sorcery - especially in the short stories.

I don't think anybody [else] thought it [deconstructing sword & sorcery] was worth it. I think it is, because the way I chose to deconstruct it was to take it back to its mythic and folkloric origins and do a double deconstruction. No deconstruction is worth it unless you do two at once, one to deconstruct the other. I love those stories and the novel In Viriconium - it's a beautiful piece of work. I'm not blowing my own trumpet: I didn't write anything in those days unless it astonished me, and some of those short stories really astonished me. I would sit there for ages thinking: bloody hell, what's all this?

I thought of that as total freedom. We've been promised this whole century total literary and artistic freedom for the individual and, for me, those stories were very, very close to it. I could take elements from anywhere I wanted and combine them in any way I wanted. I could do that with intellectual properties, with art, with everything. And, at the same time, take everything I was using to pieces in front of the reader and also admit that was what I was doing. Those stories even start with little lectures to the reader about deconstruction.

That's the other thing; you've got to have people hitting each other on the heads with swords because that's what it's about. You have to say the whole Pastel City sequence was a movement towards that. There wasn't a sudden liberation, I worked hard to get to that. Just as much work was done in The Pastel City itself and, particularly, A Storm of Wings - that's a very pivotal book in that series. All that was part of the flowering of my own personality. I don't think you can separate the two, or at least I'm not comfortable with that. Any given writing is a beacon and it just flashes your initials.

Writing is about understanding who you are to the extent you can play with it: you can transform it. You can swim in your own personality and at the same time make that accessible, to a greater or lesser degree, to somebody else. That was the point: at the end of the 70s I suddenly became me.

Absolutely. That's a very good way of putting it, and for me that's an extremely pivotal statement. John Clute talks about it, wryly, in terms of me earning my own life and having to go through these appalling things that I go through. Each book, each story, liberates me into being Mike Harrison, and the process is on the verge of consciousness all the time. Sometimes I'm quite aware of what I'm doing. Other times it's an unconscious drive.

I don't see, frankly, any other point to writing except a commercial point. And even if you're a completely commercial writer you still do all this transformative stuff, and if you don't then you bloody well should do - why else are you writing? You either write to entertain readers or to find out who the fuck you are. And seeing as you do everything else in your life to find out who the fuck you are, then they should be webbed and braided together. Your life should be your work and vice versa. It sounds incredibly pompous but I don't care.

I'm trying to complete a collection of short stories because the crucial collection, The Ice Monkey, is quite old. Some of the stories are 20 years old or more, and so I've just about scraped together enough to publish a new one. I thought it was about time I did because I've changed a lot, done a lot of stuff people may not have seen.

I often test a novel by writing a short story first but I don't recognise the difference; to me a piece of work is a piece of work. I play all sorts of games around this. There's a short story called 'The Quarry', which actually appears as chapter eight in The Course of the Heart. To me, short stories and novels are pieces: the whole thing is this confused emotional dialogue I'm holding with myself, and I expect the reader to get caught up and confused by that as well.

I'm using the current collection of short stories to mark time. Signs of Life was very much a one-off: it's got my typical concerns but I'm not sure where those concerns will go now, how they modify next. I'm kind of waiting for something to happen to me in my life so I know. I'm always late with books, people say: 'Why haven't you finished?' And with Climbers it was, for a long time, that I'd never fallen off to the floor - and I remember saying: 'I haven't finished it because I'm waiting, I need to fall onto the floor.' I remember the publisher put his head in his hands at this point, thinking, will the fall be terminal. Luckily it wasn't but I do need to do these things. I don't know where it will go.

I'd love to write what I think of as a true romance: it wouldn't be this complicated thing we've been talking about, it would be a very simple - almost 50s style - romantic novel. I would do it very traditionally. But then I thought Signs of Life was going to be that when I started, so I don't know whether I'll ever do it like that.

I don't know. I don't think I'm ironic. I'm kind of multilayered, so ironic in that sense; but ironic in that old sense of maybe downgrading the subject matter you're writing about? I can't do that. I'm a romantic, I can't be ironic about romance, I feel it too much: I'm the Barbara Cartland of my genre. Not as prolific but certainly as sentimental. So I don't know where I'm going.

Oh, but I think that's essential to romance. The great romances are tragedies of communication really.

You're right to talk about irony but I'd have to find a different way. If you ask me about the 90s, I detect something amongst people who are not in the media, who are not in the communications business, who are not novelists, film-makers, critics - add to that list as you will. Among ordinary people, if you were able to find such a person, there's a distinct and growing impatience with layers of irony in texts. They would very much like to go back to feeling their own emotions. Deconstruction and irony are all very well but life is a different kettle of fish.

And without sounding too much like an existentialist, it's the only one you've got: you want to feel that the things that happen in it are the things that happen to you. Other peoples' commentary on them - the idea that we all go through roughly similar experiences and that an experience can be passed off and dumped on 'Oh that's just...' I find that offensive and I think a lot of other people do. The things that happen to me in my life are the things that happen to me in my life and, frankly, as far as I'm concerned Will Self can fuck off if he wants input into that. It's my life, not Will Self's life - it's not the life of a clever film-maker. Fuck it, I went through it and that's how it was. And while I'm aware there's a certain naiveté to that statement, I would still like to stick to something like that.

Precisely. Case histories that have bubbled up out of the heart of the personality, so I shall go in those directions. At the moment I want to do a vampire novel. I have a short story I used to test that a few years ago - called 'Empty' - in which almost everybody is some kind of vampire, but nobody actually bites anybody else.

The story in A Book of Two Halves [a football anthology; 'I Did It'] - does that lead anywhere else?

I would love to go in that direction. I would just adore to go in that direction but that was a very intense piece of work, and I've a feeling you couldn't carry a reader with you for 10,000 words let alone 40-50,000. I was trying to explore how little you could write, and get over the most that you could. I hope I got an entire culture over in 1300 words or less. I would certainly like to write about those kinds of people, they've interested me a lot in the last few years. Mainly, I suppose, because I've been meeting more of them, and I tend to write about what's going on around me.

I've written some stuff recently set in London, but only because I'm living here, not because, like Iain Sinclair or Mike Moorcock, I'm interested in London or mythical cities. I love what they do, and I love the area they've cut out for themselves, the fantastic stuff they produce, but I only write about London because I live here. When I lived in Yorkshire I wrote about Yorkshire.

Yes. I'm working with a guy called Simon Puddle who does extraordinary animation for Channel 4. A short film with Simon Ings too. At the moment it has the working title of Ray Gun Fun. We're thinking of taking it into Jekyll and Hyde territory.

Yes. What I realised talking with Simon was that there are a limited number of tropes in the world, and they're like an empty glass which, at any given time, fills up with its own concerns. The vampire metaphor in the 80s is a perfect example. It served a purpose so there it was, ready to be used.

One of the problems that Simon located, is the original trope is about fear and disgust at your own sexuality. We can't do that now. There's very little to say in that direction now, because we're not disgusted with our sexuality anymore. So if we look at the trope as an empty glass, we have to find something from the 90s to fill it with.

Such as in Signs of Life - where you have the guilt at commercialism.

Yes. It may be we have to concentrate on the area of the transformation itself as the area of vitality, or maybe it's not ripe yet.

I don't really recognise the millennium. I think it's a false, syncopated structure, put over whatever is really there.

I think transformation is important, simply because we're going to be able to do lots more with it. In the end transformation is only control: it's a combination of understanding how things work, and then the desire and the ability to control how things work. I think that's a human thing that people have wanted to do. But for most of human history, apart from selective breeding and industrial revolution style technology, it's been in the context of dreams. More and more now, the content of dreams is coming out into the world and we can begin to control it - begin to be what we can imagine to be.

No. And there lies some of the interest in Jekyll and Hyde. Fear of what we might be is the limiter, but the cyberpunk of the 80s said that. I'm not sure that's something we need to talk about now. Once you admit you're scared of it, you stop being scared. A climbing metaphor comes to mind: the moment you give in and admit that the route is really very, very difficult - when you look up at the rest of it and think 'Oh god, I'm so frightened' - it's at that point that you're already starting to work out how to do it. The point at which the fear is its most intense is the point you're already beginning to think solutions.

As a species we have to face the fact that everything is up for grabs. A biochemist might laugh at what you or I think is possible, but sometimes what biochemists say is possible frightens me as a science fiction writer. We can do it now. We can push through and it will be horrible, evil and weird at the start. No doubt about it. It will scare people rigid, a lot of it will be purely bad and it will be done for money. It will be done to animals, as it were. That will be the beginning. We're already on the way.

We were saying earlier that looking back from 200 years hence, what they pick on as being the pivotal occurrences of our era we won't have recognised. I have a feeling that the universe is going to look like a completely different place in 50 years time, the cloned lambs will look exactly like the Wrights' biplane. Think of that: in just 50 years time we will have a level of ease with all this stuff - or the people alive then will - that we can't imagine now.

Publications

The Committed Men, published 1971

The Pastel City, 1971

The Centauri Device, 1974

The Machine in Shaft Ten & Other Stories, 1975

A Storm of Wings, 1980

In Viriconium, 1982

The Ice Monkey & Other Stories, 1983

Viriconium Nights, 1984

Climbers, 1989

The Course of the Heart, 1992

One graphic novel, The Luck in the Head (with Ian Miller), was published by Gollancz in 1991.

Signs of Life may still be available as a Flamingo paperback at £6.99. It was first published as a Gollancz hardback.

The Wild Road (1997), with Jane Johnson (as 'Gabriel King') is available in paperback from Arrow at £5.99. An animal novel (cats). Follow-ups are planned.

Harrison was Literary Editor for New Worlds from 1968 to 1975, and many of his book reviews and columns appeared in that time. Many of those issues can be found; try sending an sae/2 IRCs to Mike Don for the Dreamberry Wine book (& mags) SF catalogue at 233 Maine Road, Manchester, M14 7WG. He currently reviews fiction for the TLS, and has written for various other magazines.