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A review by viragohaus
Empty Space: A Haunting by M. John Harrison
4.0
I confess that there were whole passages in Empty Space where I had no clue just what was going on.
Part –but only part- of my confusion was down to the fact that this is the concluding volume in a trilogy of books Harrison commenced in 2002 with ‘Light’ and continued with 2006’s ‘Nova Swing’, neither of which I have read.
But there’s also a graceful inexplicableness at the core of Harrison’s syntax and story, something Gary K. Wolfe calls an “elegant precision about indeterminacy”.
It is at times is solid, vividly corporeal but then slips between the electrons at the edge of physics into something beyond. This discomforting experience never suggests sloppiness as Harrison has a firm hand on this expansive material at all times. The subtitle here ‘A Haunting’ is not just a feint at ghost stories and uncaused causation; it is also circles down to a perplexing and satisfying conclusion: we haunt ourselves in the traces.
Part –but only part- of my confusion was down to the fact that this is the concluding volume in a trilogy of books Harrison commenced in 2002 with ‘Light’ and continued with 2006’s ‘Nova Swing’, neither of which I have read.
But there’s also a graceful inexplicableness at the core of Harrison’s syntax and story, something Gary K. Wolfe calls an “elegant precision about indeterminacy”.
It is at times is solid, vividly corporeal but then slips between the electrons at the edge of physics into something beyond. This discomforting experience never suggests sloppiness as Harrison has a firm hand on this expansive material at all times. The subtitle here ‘A Haunting’ is not just a feint at ghost stories and uncaused causation; it is also circles down to a perplexing and satisfying conclusion: we haunt ourselves in the traces.