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Pusta Przestrzeń (2012)

by M. John Harrison(Favorite Author)

3.88 of 5 Votes: 3

languge

English

genre

Science Fiction

publisher

MAG

series

Kefahuchi Tract

review 1: Empty Space is the third and final book of Harrison’s Kefahuchi Tract trilogy, the first of which, Light, marked his return to science fiction after many years away. I’m not sure there’s any value in giving a précis of the plot, since in parts it’s wilfully opaque – as it has been throughout the entire the trilogy. Suffice it to say that some of the plot-threads from the preceding two novels do see some sort of resolution in this book. Harrison’s future is dirty and enigmatic, but it is also full of small inventive touches. The prose is like the roiling quantum foam of the strange physics it describes. Though the section set in the very near-future, featuring Anna Waterman, the widow of the physicist Michael Kearney from Light, reads more like the sort of lite... morerary fiction in which fantasy is injected sideways into the real world – much like Harrison’s earlier The Course of the Heart and Signs of Life; the narratives set on the worlds bordering the Kefahuchi Tract use the language of science fiction with a facility few genre writers can match. An alien installation, dubbed the Aleph, threads its way through the story, stitching together the various narratives as it manifests the strange physics emanating from the Tract. Strangely, though aliens are frequently mentioned in the book – and the tramp freighter Nova Swing’s cargo consists of mysterious alien “mortsafes” – they are entirely off-stage, or implied to have existed only in the deep past. Not every character is human, but the template of every character certainly is. Having finished Empty Space, but I can see the resolution and how it comes together, but I’m not entirely sure what has been resolved. It’s like the strange physics which informs the story – the effect is visible, the cause is unknowable and the process often seems to follow rules of its own. I think I shall have to reread all three books to get a real handle on it.
review 2: while Light remains perhaps the most astonishingly unbalancing of the books in the Empty Space Trilogy, this one is the most masterful, not only for itself - its substance and execution, the writing! the Writing! - but for the way it changes your understanding (or: enhances your misunderstanding, or lack of either) of the previous books. it's almost unfortunate that this is the third of a trilogy, and so can only be fully regarded in the context of those other books - otherwise, i would've liked to call this Harrison's Singular Masterpiece - but maybe that's all part of the program: Viriconium, after all, is best considered as a complex body of work consisting of more moving parts than you're potentially aware of at any given moment; each text in Things That Never Happen arguably builds on the others; The Course of the Heart, while possibly (next to this book & Climbers) the closest thing to something that might be called a Magnum Opus of Harrison's, is made exponentially better by being considered together w/ Signs of Life. w/c is all to say, on the strength of this book alone, in light of its relationship to the rest of the trilogy, & barely even glancing at the entire body of work already behind it, to my mind Harrison is the kind of writer whose work deserves the fidgety (pseudo? anti?) academic paranoid microscopic book-length essay + conference-level debate & examination reserved for the likes of, say, Pynchon. but, well: maybe that's just me. less

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