Empty Space: A Haunting

Kefahuchi Tract #3

by M. John Harrison

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.

Genres: Science Fiction, Fiction, Space Opera, Speculative Fiction, Cyberpunk, Audiobook, Science Fiction Fantasy

315 pages, Kindle Edition

First published January 1, 2012

About the author

aka Gabriel King (with Jane Johnson)

Michael John Harrison, known for publication purposes primarily as M. John Harrison, is an English author and literary critic. His work includes the Viriconium sequence of novels and short stories, Climbers, and the Kefahuchi Tract trilogy, which consists of Light, Nova Swing and Empty Space.

Reviews

[Bradley · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book focuses equally hard on both the inner space of the mind trapped in the quantum foam of the universe where neither time nor cats can be extricated, and upon the vastness of space that is slowly, inextricably showing us all that we don't quite fit in it and it wants to tell you, slowly, exactly why... by transforming us all.

Of course, we really oughtn't take it personally. After all, every other alien race had to discover it for themselves and probably went mad in the attempt to make sense of it, just like we are.

Space and time are unimaginably big and empty. Shouldn't that give us a clue?

This is space opera to a much larger degree than the second book and arguably more than the first, although the first book in the trilogy had the joys of extremely interesting scenes being seen for the first time, while the third kinda felt like a travelogue of odd transformations taking the form of quantum viruses and macro horrors, and all the while, it always seems to boil down to sex in one fashion or another.

I can't even begin to describe to you how many times the characters enter a scene needing to pull up their underwear or pull it down or otherwise be the act of disrobing or finding others doing so. It's almost always sexual, and the way the author pulls it off is not unconsciously and it actually serves a huge purpose. We've been seeing it occur all the time throughout all three novels and it always has some sort of element that is either ordinary or transformative, and usually always becomes a scene of ultimate joy or transcendent experience. The same is true for when the explorer enters the anomaly or how he never wanted to leave again or even when Anna finds herself locked in the quantum foam for 10,000 years.

The mirroring between the first and the last book in the trilogy is rather fantastic, but only in retrospect.

In actual fact, this book is almost the equivalent of James Joyce's Ulysses. Her long final scene is reminiscent of a daydream that eventually always returns to sex, but in this case, things are very, very weird and dare I say it: More Complex. This book deserves quite a bit of close and careful reading and no one will deny the excellent passages studded throughout it.

I read somewhere that the book lends itself to an interpretation that it was all a dream, but I have to disagree. It is our reality that most resembles the dream. Quantum physics, itself, is not reconcilable with the macro universe we perceive, and yet it is much more valid than our solid reality. We might be able to make certain assumptions and wild conjectures about consensual realities and observation, but Harrison never gives us a clear and pat answer, only the brokenness of the inner (the quantum) and the outer (the perceivable reality).

I might even posit that the fact that all these alien species managed to specialize their own brands of physics so far and the fact that each brand is exclusive to all the others is a glaring clue as to the theme of the books. All these different physics invalidated each other. And yet, as long as the aliens believed their higher maths, their brands of FTL always worked.

In our breakneck desires to unlock the anomaly, we did so because we believed we could, that it would bring us happiness. The more people that got caught up in the dream, the larger the dream and the more area it transformed, and it was whole areas of the Earth. In the third book, the base desire, almost as powerful as sex, itself, is transforming other colonies, too. And in the heart of it, the one person that is still outside of the actual breech, we have the half-woman half-cat surfer of many-dimensions and the surfer of her own mind, perhaps for eternity. Half in the quantum and half in the perceivable reality.

I mention all of this because the book got under my skin and it does NOT make any of this plain to us. Instead, it goes along being clever and idea-rich and surprising and dreamlike and super post-cyberpunk and super high-physics spaceships with adventure. And it happens to make many subtle points, besides.

To say that I'm impressed is kinda an understatement. This is a serious work. All three of these novels are serious works.

Never let anyone tell you that Science Fiction can't be literary and deep while at the same time being flashy, exploratory, and crude, because it can, and it can do it with SCIENCE. :)

[Szplug · Rating 5 out of 5]

Why can't the world that concerns us be a fiction and why does it need an author?

I suppose you could read Empty Space as a standalone novel, though it makes [somewhat] more sense when you've previously immersed yourself in the trilogy's two brilliant opening acts: the tripartite tales of grungy, multi-physics miracles in a 25th century depressingly continued from our own era—and in the latter of which a disturbed serial killer scientist is molding that very future in his vision-worked hands—that comprise Light ; together with the Chandler dipped in a bottle of mescaline mysteries of Nova Swing , wherein the evolving human identity of that same futuristic sprawl, bio-engineered and virtually-addicted, upon a planet called Saudade and its dripped block of uncanny, surreal, gene-splicing reality courtesy of the Kefahuchi Tract, was brilliantly explored. Harrison, a chronicler of dysfunction and unhappiness and darkling desolation without peer, inventively sprayed high-tech maneuvers and body-altering bio-mech tailoring across the page, his words roiling in a tactile sense of exotic particles and radiated energy; while the human beings spread across a vast galactic civilizational explosion, ever aware of the event-horizonless singularity coined as the Kefahuchi Tract and its unknown-but-uncanny influence upon space-faring intelligence, current and past, which hung like a stellar-brushed Damoclean sword atop the void, tended on as we are apt to: trading, fighting, scheming, fucking, despairing, maneuvering, failing, killing; with that well-worked and -worn condition we label love still managing to survive, even in the most curious of instantiations, when bruised bodies and stained spirits had somehow managed to align themselves correctly. In the most gorgeous of language, postmodern but pure, Harrison depicted grit and decay and a pervasive sense of entropy at work even amidst an immense stellar expanse where the proof of scientific magic was visible from near every quarter—a less misanthropic Houellebecq, a less cynical Ballard, a less cruel Nabokov, though combining some of the best elements of all three.

Those two previous works were fantastic in their own way—but it's my opinion that they've been excelled with the closer, this fucking amazing bit of tautly-constructed and intelligently-unfolded business that takes that triple storyline structure from the first, and neo-noir elements—however winking—from the second, and collides them with a wholly new strain of imploded vision in the break for home. Characters from both prior books take centre stage herein—Aschemann's enigmatic, identityless Assistant tailored to the degree she's barely human; Fat Antoyne, Liv Hula, and Irene the Mona from the seedier sidebars of Nova Swing; R.I. Gaines, mysterious EMC agent-at-large and schemer-extraordinaire as [one] man behind [one] curtain; and, in what I felt was the most exquisitely portrayed performance, Anna Waterman, itchy and maturity-starved and/or -stretched former wife of kinked killer Michael Kearney, now aged and on her own in a London running down from globally spread economic woes at a time not too far from our own present, dealing with her loneliness, estranged daughter, infelicitous feline James, and a marked proclivity for observing her summerhouse burst into multi-hued flames accompanied by the showers of sparks that once set Kearney to quivering murderousness. A discovery in the twenty-fifth century of an überenigmatic alien artifact in the shape of a single human tear, in [apparently] slumbering existence for a million years, reveals Planck-level glimpsed linkages with the overamped and unloved Assistant on Saudade—caught up in investigating a bewildering pair of killings committed under the auspices of the mortsafe cargo being hauled in Antoyne, Liv, and Irene's interstellar transport—while it also begins to emerge that dear old Anna, drifting between bemused psychologist, taxed daughter, and young neighbourhood cock, is still bearing Michael's original titanium drive, which possesses some manner of connexion with that stunning sobbing intelligence afloat within a condensed emergent space that defies all known varieties of human-delimited physics.

There's so much to love about this novel: the gnosticism initiated through an acceptance of fear and isolation and sheer inadequacy, in which an instantiation of our time-based, enchained human materiality pierces the spacetime barriers to find union with the alien god of old, the originary creative spirit wherein true love abides—though the result of this time-and-space starved embrace is [necessarily] unknown. The cat—ever present in the works of this author—serves its own whiskery purpose, introducing bestial nature and the caprice of chance, two states directly antipodal to this alleged deity who knows naught, at heart, of flesh and its [ill] fortunes; while the drive is a brick of the information, matriced and mathematical, that propels human technology and human culture and, really, the universe itself. It's in how Harrison carefully removes the veils along the path to this time-shedding interposition of now and then which so markedly impresses. Then there's the casual genius with which the technological marvels four centuries from now are described, the manner in which a conversation about kitsch between Antoyne and the elusive Renoko have a metafictive timber to how the author does his bit. The Postmodern Ironisation discussed, a turn, begun in the twentieth century, to when what was once considered trash began to be admired as kitsch, is replete with digs at science fiction's lowered position on the scale of literary accomplishment, as well as a driving engine behind the grime and decadent feel for the galactic environment in which Empty Space transpires. Notwithstanding that humanity, via a combination of reverse-engineering from salvaged alien treasures and metastasized conceptional systems of physical science, has managed to conquer the oceanic void between the stars, expanding its civilization to thousands of systems, the beings who comprise that spread are depressingly familiar descendants from our own neon-lighted times. The ability to radically alter the physical makeup, look, strength, the very purpose of one's body is inevitably pursued for the sport of killing, overpowering, or fucking—and even that latter, displayed in one casual sexual connexion after another, could not be presented with less passion, less of a sense of losing oneself in another, finding pleasures beyond that of commingling fluids until sleep separates. Even when Pearlant/Pearlent—the prospective reader should be extremely attentive to the spelling changes in Empty Space, for what I first deemed to be annoyingly sloppy proofing quickly stood revealed as entirely intentional—that sublime, crystalline tear become ghost-fleshed poetry in motion, is being portrayed in all of her aeon-poised splendor, it's for purposes so anodyne, so banally predictable in light of our own sanguinary recent century, that it wrenches. And speaking of which—war does intrude, abruptly and out of the blue, vaporizing whole planets and their populations, sparking streams of refugees without ruffles, but always as a scene-initiator, an affect to explosively punctuate the other episodes of this tale—a most human one, at that.

For at its corrupted and coruscating heart, Empty Space is, like all of Harrison's fictions, a love story—though one that sees this highest and most irrational constituent of the range of emotive humanity warped, twisted, refracted, reflected, and generally brought unto the point of dissipation under the gravitational pull of loneliness, fear, and the instability of, and incapacity for, our efforts to effect a stabilized picture of what we are, in our own eyes and those of whom we most wish to see us in a certain slant of light. Love in a Time of Chaos might have made a suitable alternate title—for even Irene the Mona, tailored by skilled hands to look and feel the part of a joyously expressive and sensuously tactile lover, stands revealed as damaged goods, her love for Antoyne not only repaid in silence or stammered grunts of supposed requiting, but unreal on its own terms—though it, and his, doubtless exist. The only thing perduring about her frail existence is the deep and fascinated appeal the stars hold for her—the promise of so much empty space wherein that sense of being forever adrift from other beings, of having bruisable flesh in a civilization machine-worked to the gills, might be assuaged. In the author's hands, our individual and collective being serve as paint being brushed across spacetime's canvas, giving form to a representation of which we are part, though its—and, hence, our—ultimate function remains alien to our understanding; whilst, simultaneously, the Kefahuchi Tract—that vast, variegated cosmic smear across velvet blackness, that naked singularity that ever more comes to take on the appearance of a titanic twinkling eye, leaking its strangeness without upon humanity's galactic spread like so many ionic tears—appears to be plucking parts from our physical, mental, and spiritual makeup to add to, and alter, a bizarre, energy-formed schematic whose purpose might be of evolving and changing its abstract immensity through our voluntary and involuntary input even as it works memes of transition upon the overawed beings its has seemingly brought to that very point; a symbiotic relationship not so much in the vein of God and subject, but rather as two conceptions of dimension-formed life become [necessarily] fractured and mad under the unyielding pressure of loneliness and unknowability within infinity, even as that marred status instills a yearning and exuberant passion for a closer entwining of two striving impulses via exploration, insemination, copulation, and miscegenation. What of Seria Mau Genlicher, who calls to van Sant from the eternal void—from one angle a stellar angel whose feathered alae catch and burnish comsic rays, and another a ringed halo of particulate energy, the constitutive matter of the universe made sentient and set as sentinel of her vacuum demesne? Her longed for reemergence as swooping pearlescent ghost was one of the most starkly affecting panels of all that Harrison brought before my anticipating eye.

So that's where this lengthy paen to verbiage ends: five stars, for despite the fact Harrison's wild imagination, dystopian drive, and grittily casual preference for, and skill in working with, the baser elements of our human clay—and its attendant effect towards turning characters into characteries—makes for an ultimately depressing and discomfiting fictive immersion, this concluding novel is a beautiful work of haunting vision and existential longing and cosmic strangeness, all cross-purposed working and singularity energizing against the forward marching arrow of time and a striving, within the ugly necessity of our daily routine—and biological tinkering and scarring in an effort to alleviate its buckling pressure—to find something outside of ourselves that not only explains the summed elements of what we are, but helps us understand our relation with the rebarbative and radiant theater of infinite expanse—at both spatial and temporal extremes—in which we are expected to perform. What's more, there's no escaping the truth that Icarus flights are ever tempered when humour abounds within the wax awaiting unbinding—and here Harrison's wry spear thrusts ever pierce the gathering metro-polluted gloom. The language of Empty Space is precise and potent, choking even as it irradiates, and the subtleties in relation to genre references, the previous two volumes, and memes of entropic expansion, identity decay, and timeless interrelation means that the reader must provide her full attention to every page that something vital not be overlooked or elided—but that dedication reaps enormous aesthetic, aethereal, and substantive rewards. The Kefahuchi Tract is such a supernal concept that I fervently hope Harrison will yet return and mine its xenospatial quantum conundrums for another book or three.

[Gerhard · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of my favourite SF books ever is Nova by Samuel R. Delany, and Harrison's Kefahuchi Tract trilogy reminds me so much of Delany. The sense of a wild frontier, crazy characters caught up in a maelstrom of events in a dark and unredictable universe, where nothing is as it seems and everyone is damaged in one way or another.

A lot of modern SF seems sanitised and focused on technology; Harrison's 'singularity without an event horizon' is dirty, smelly, sexy, and filled with danger and dangerous / weird people, creatures and ... things. And if you think I am describing the Culture by Iain Banks, definitely not. Kefahuchi is the red light district, ground zero, three-ring circus and exclusion zone that the Culure never had. It is the true frontier.

I really loved Empty Space. It is a truly crazy read that puts its plot in a blender and then gets impatient if the reader fails to pay attention. It is best to just immerse yourself in this and go with the flow; you will soon hit the rapids.

Much of the intellectual, moral and philosophical rigour of SF is now concentrated in the sub-genre of space opera, with writers like Iain Banks, Alastair Reynolds, Paul McAuley, John C. Wright and, of course, M. John Harrison (Peter Hamilton is a self-conscious throwback to the Golden Age of SF space opera).

Harrison is the most poetic and eccentric of this disparate collection of writers, but I hasten to add it depends on personal choice, and whether or not you prefer the experimental side of SF or the more conventional genre-grounded output.

Anyone who writes about quantum cats so convincingly is pretty special.

[Mason · Rating 5 out of 5]

“The thing about life is that if you get it wrong you can’t go back. There were two kinds of people, he said: those who lived their life in the prolonged moment of panic in which they first realised this- they have no idea where the door is now, let alone how to get it open if they could find it and who therefore spent their lives thrashing about in what he called the disorder of hearing it click shut behind them. The other kind, after a single awful pang, one fast look back, decide to make the best of whatever happens next. Those people go on he finished: They’re still hoping for something good.”

Back in 2020 when I had returned to reading(what else did we have to do?) I began a serious metamorphosis that would mold me into the person I am. It started with practicing things such as meditation, and yoga. Then that snowballed into a love for philosophy and the study of high literature. Reading was a way for me to entertain myself while simultaneously aiding me in the question I have dedicated myself to which is “What the hell is going on”. I gradually started moving towards the SF genre as I felt it applied the most to my way of thinking and how I generally go about my personal philosophy. Upon completing the Kefahuchi Tract I can confidently say this is the culmination of all the ideas that swirl through my head on a daily basis.

I want to preface by saying that this review is going to be all-encompassing of the whole trilogy rather than just empty space. These 3 novels are not separate but rather 3 tales set in the version of our universe that Harrison so masterfully created. We as humans are always drawn to the unknown because the unknown leaves the possibility for answers. This is why many look to the cosmos as a place where we may find the meaning behind it all. Where the reason for our toils and sadness may come to light. In Harrisons' version, we have explored it all. We have mastered countless amounts of physics, can traverse light years as easily as blinking an eye, etc. Yet every character we have encountered in these books has always given off hints of melancholy, confusion, and a sense of not knowing oneself. Now why would that be when they are living in a universe they have mastered? Surely the answers to their questions have been around for centuries. The answer is unfortunately no and this is the brilliance of Harrison that I did not appreciate for so long. When you read him you want him to expand upon these huge ideas regarding physics and a black hole without an event horizon(yes you heard me correctly). When he doesn't do this you sit back annoyed, wondering what was all that for? The key to understanding Harrison is not focusing on the ideas but on the simplicity of it all between the science. Whether we master our universe or not, human emotions will always still reside in it. Love, hate, sadness, lack of purpose, confusion, loss, etc. These are things that you cannot measure, parts of a human that cannot be plugged into a computer with the concrete answer coming out the other end. This is why, dare I say Harrison is an anti SF author. It is so easy to get wrapped up in the scientific complexity of our universe that we do not focus on the human elements that are forever unsolvable.

You still might ask yourself even after knowing this, what is the point of these books? The answer that I found is that they bring a sense of relief. I am not the only space nerd out there who gets obsessed with the infinite nature of the universe and believes somehow the purpose is out there. Infinity is scary though and obsessing over it all brings countless avenues for stress to creep into oneself. The acceptance that the answer is not out there, that we are blind and always will be is a beautiful thing in itself. I realize I am a young man(22 years old) and that my personal beliefs will constantly change throughout my life. But I thank M John. Harrison right now for opening my mind up and bringing me relief in the knowledge that I am lost. These novels are for a small percentage of the average SF reader, but if you read this review and felt some level of relation then I urge you to try them.

[Adam · Rating 5 out of 5]

The finale to Harrison’s trilogy is as confounding, obtuse, and beautiful as the rest of the series. His prose is crafted so impeccably and relentlessly it is hard to resist chewing over each line and word choice (it is also very discouraging for the amateur writer) and occasionally losing the plot. But with Harrison you know you are going to read it again, soon I might restart the trilogy and see how they work together. His imagery, imagination, and prose are on such a level that they put much science fiction (is there anyone else who writes in the genre recently that is comparable as a stylist, Wolfe, Mieville, Shepard, or Gibson?) and other fiction in its shadow. Jodorowsky and Lynch should have skipped Dune and waited for these books to adapt. Quantum physics, Gnosticism, and dream imagery mixed with cyberpunk, noir, depressing near future science fiction, and space opera for a dense, cinematic, and surreal nightmare.

[zxvasdf · Rating 5 out of 5]

In his blogs, Harrison often states that the act of writing is a quest for identity, a means for him to understand himself in this world. So, Empty Space essentially is the psyche of Harrison himself, laid out as visceral as neon entrails left in the garden at dusk. He crafts tantalizing clues, slight references to inspirations, influences, and secret obsessions. A viewpoint is rehashed out between multiple characters, and the emergent property is of disassociation.

Everyone's trying to find themselves a place in this world, from the codependent mona, the twink out assistant who drapes herself with names to be discarded with the necessity of a woman in a fitting room, the man at the edge of empty space in the face of the K-tract speaking with an alien voice in the void. Code as person, spread out in a pre-programmed routine gives opinions and remembers something stainless steel reflecting neon pink and green when it sleeps for the last time. A thin man who eats his anxieties like a fat man, and the man who walks through walls in estrangement with the love of his life. The great physicist's ex-wife who finds herself by becoming lost. A rocket captain coming unmoored from herself in the face of death. And life.

These vectors cross, echo away, and return in a tangled knot at the conclusion of Empty Space. You finish reading, your head buzzing, and you turn to pick up your copy of Light. You see dangling threads demanding to be connected by your yearning mind, little clues that fluoresce from Light, and Nova Swing. You get the feel you're not seeing the big picture just yet, that the narrative exists at a higher scale Harrison rewards the most diligent of readers.

For his biggest fans, Empty Space builds a void within, complete and entirely sucking when the final page is consumed. The worlds of New Venusport, Old Earth, and the tales of the boys from Earth are lit, knocking about in your head. And there's nothing more. And you think, "Hey, the Reborn Men of Viriconium sound familiar..."

[Tamahome]

The perfect formula for the opposite of a best seller in America:

1) it sounds British
2) has a very good vocabulary
3) has some scifi words
4) doesn't skimp on the violence (or weird sex)
5) unlikeable characters

It's as immediately unappealing as I remember Light being (which I didn't finish). Whenever he makes a comparison in his descriptions, I just shrug and go "I don't know what that is". A lot of people respect him, so I'll keep plugging. I've read 2 chapters. Some of the chapters are in the present day, and may be more relatable, and the future chapters are kind of exotic. Plus it's only 241 pages!

The Coode Street podcast just said it should have been nominated for a Hugo. I should read it, shouldn't I?

UPDATE:
Harrison was just on Coode St. He talked about how the novel had 'traps' that subverted your expectations, and it has black comedy that most reviewers miss. http://jonathanstrahan.podbean.com/20... Maybe I'll eat my broccoli and finish it.

[Carlex · Rating 4 out of 5]

Please, see the review on the blog: https://girotix.blogspot.com.es/2017/...

Podéis leer la reseña en el blog: https://girotix.blogspot.com.es/2017/...

[Andrew · Rating 4 out of 5]

Better than Nova Swing; not as good as Light (but what is?) If Light is full of the "sparks in everything," and Nova Swing is about boundary states, then Empty Space focuses on the nothingness that separates people, places, and times - the "gutters" between two panels in a comic. The subtitle is "a haunting," and the book is certainly haunting.

[Oscar · Rating 2 out of 5]

"Empty Space: A Haunting", tercera entrega de la trilogía Kefahuchi Tract de M. John Harrison, constituye una obra paradigmática del New Weird que entrelaza ciencia ficción, horror cósmico y una introspección psicológica de corte existencial, desplegada en dos ejes temporales: un futuro cercano en la Tierra, impregnado de un aura retrofuturista, y un porvenir distante en la región caótica del Kefahuchi Tract, un constructo cósmico que subvierte las categorías ontológicas y temporales. La narrativa se centra en Anna Waterman, una viuda inglesa cuya psique fragmentada se ve asediada por sueños recurrentes y fenómenos anómalos —como órganos de origen alienígena y un cobertizo que arde sin consumirse—, los cuales reverberan con su traumático pasado y el legado intelectual de su difunto esposo, Michael Kearney, un matemático vinculado a investigaciones en computación cuántica. En paralelo, en el futuro lejano, la Asistente (Pearlant), una entidad posthumana de ambigua ontología, se sumerge en la investigación de crímenes en Saudade City, conectados con un artefacto alienígena que desestabiliza la realidad. Su tentativa de comunicarse con el pasado, incluyendo a Anna, revela la porosidad temporal del Kefahuchi Tract. Otros personajes, como Toni Reno, Enka Mercury, Fat Antoyne y Impasse van Sant, orbitan en torno a este fenómeno, encarnando las tensiones entre lo humano y lo inhumano en un cosmos fracturado. Las tramas, impregnadas de un simbolismo denso, exploran el trauma, la disolución de la identidad y la confrontación con lo inefable, articuladas mediante una prosa poética, fragmentaria y deliberadamente elusiva.

"Empty Space: A Haunting", se erige como una obra de extraordinaria ambición intelectual que fusiona ciencia ficción especulativa, terror psicológico y experimentación literaria en un tapiz narrativo de complejidad desconcertante. La novela alterna entre un futuro cercano en la Tierra, donde Anna Waterman se enfrenta a sueños perturbadores y manifestaciones cósmicas que irrumpen en su existencia doméstica, y un futuro distópico donde la Asistente, una figura posthumana, indaga crímenes vinculados al enigmático Kefahuchi Tract, un fenómeno que disloca las nociones de tiempo y realidad. A través de una prosa lírica, cargada de resonancias poéticas y fragmentos disyuntivos, Harrison construye un universo donde lo humano y lo alienígena convergen en un caos metafísico, interrogando la fragilidad de la identidad, el peso del trauma y la imposibilidad de aprehender lo absoluto. La ambigüedad estructural y temática de la obra puede resultar desafiante, pero su riqueza simbólica y su atmósfera hipnótica recompensan al lector dispuesto a sumergirse en su opacidad. Dirigida a un público versado en ciencia ficción literaria y el New Weird, Empty Space demanda una lectura paciente y una apertura a lo abstracto.

[Sebastian · Rating 2 out of 5]

Harrison is a real rollercoaster of a writer for me. I absolutely loved the previous book in the series, but this one I couldn’t make heads or tails of. So, finally, here I am, about a third of the way in, and I give up.

The thing is, it’s been a while since I read the previous book. Characters reappear, and I vaguely remember their names, but nothing more. Things happen, described in detail in Harrison’s beautifully dense prose. But then it gets so dense that from reading session to reading session I can’t retain the plot lines in my feeble, tired brain. It all slips away. I have to struggle to reconnect people to names to events to places, over and over again, until the same feeble, tired brain gives up. Eyes glaze over, running mechanically over lines of text in a kind of blindsight while the brain is… elsewhere.

This may be brilliant stuff. Hell, Harrison is a brilliant writer, so it probably is. Just not for me, not right now.

[Alex Sarll]

As a rule, the only information you can trust in the Daily Mail is the price on the front. But on the cover of this book is a quote from them, proclaiming Empty Space "SF at its most astounding" - an entirely accurate assessment. And what better way to establish, even before the first page, an uneasy mood, a sense of a world where basic laws of the universe fold, warp or decay? Harrison's tired, clunky near future, and the grotty grandeur of a 25th century which has found new vices but no new virtues, were the perfect accompaniment to the week of the London dust storm and its "perpetual graininess in the air". As I finished the book this evening, attained some sort of resolution, the skies cleared. The dense firings of the prose make for the sort of text you could use for divination, though I'm not sure who would want any answer Empty Space could give them.

[Tudor Ciocarlie · Rating 5 out of 5]

Glorious ending to the Kefahuchi Tract trilogy. I've never read better literature on the unknownness of the universe and of the human being.

How I'll love to write the review of the entire trilogy for Galileo!

[Eoghann Irving · Rating 3 out of 5]

Empty Space is a challenging and frustrating book to read.

Certainly it doesn't help that it's the third part of a trilogy so you are rather thrown in at the deep end here. But that's certainly not the only reason.

The text of the book is thick. You can't skim this stuff. It's laden with meanings and inferences Skip a page and you will end up completely lost. That also means of course that if you put it down to do something else, it can take a while to immerse yourself in it again.

It's also a book that quite deliberately engages in mindfuckery. Not only are stories being told in two different time frames, but several of the characters seem to have a rather loose grip on their own reality. So half the time you're not entirely sure what is "real" and what is not.

I don't say this as criticism, rather to try and give you a feeling for the sort of book this is. It's neither a light or quick read. And in truth I'm not sure I entirely grasped everything that was going on.

There's definitely a bleak tone to the story with many of the characters seeming trapped in their lives rather than enjoying them. And while the central mysteries of the story are essentially resolved by the end, I couldn't honestly tell you what the point of it all was exactly.

Unlike many science fiction authors Harrison doesn't seem very interested in explaining the science that makes the background of his universe. Not that there's a shortage of science. We have time, and weird physics and all sorts of things. But it's the background while the characters are the foreground.

Harrison's language and choice at times seem deliberately provocative. Not only is there disturbing violence, there's also sexual imagery and some of that will seem disturbing as well. At other points his characters language is abruptly frank, which stands out from the stylized prose. I don't think this is accidental.

There is a lot to recommend about this book. It will most likely take you out of your comfort zone. The universe the characters live in is rich and deep. This is definitely adult science fiction.

From a purely technical perspective the rating should probably be 4 stars. If you enjoy stories that push limits and don't sit inside genre cliches then I think you may really like this book. Though you're probably better starting with the first in the trilogy.

But I just couldn't quite warm to the story so my personal rating is 3.

[Sushi (寿司) · Rating 2 out of 5]

Solitamente non do mai una stella che per me equivale a carta igienica. Ma non posso nemmeno dare tre stelle che equivale a lento e noioso. Via di mezzo due. Non solo è lento e noioso ma non si capisce niente. Fa pure venire sonno quindi se soffrite di insonnia ecco a voi il libro perfetto. Lo so è il terzo di una trilogia ma non è il primo libro che leggo non partendo dal numero uno. Poi dentro ci sono cose così assurde che a volte faccio fatica ad immaginarle e sono una persona con una grande immaginazione. Ripeto deludente ma gli Urania buoni sono davvero pochi.

[Paul Dembina · Rating 4 out of 5]

This trilogy has been constantly interesting and nicely off kilter. You won't find much explicitly explained but instead an atmosphere of weirdness and slight dissociation from what we know as reality.

In common with the 1st book 3 plot lines run in parallel and there's an underlying sense of humour to it all. In places reminiscent of JG Ballard which is saying something as his style is famously distinctive.

In pl

[Peter Dunn · Rating 3 out of 5]

Like many of M John Harrison stories there is a decent story here – or several stories but not really what you would call a plot. Unlike the pervious book in this trilogy, Nova Swing, those stories aren’t as effective enough to make up for the lack of plot but it is still a good read.

OK the Kefahuchi Tract MacGuffin imposes an increasing non-linear reality on the story which is interesting to start but it does in the end begin to edge into simply being annoying but that his exactly what M.John Harrison intends and we readers should have expected that.

The ending is bleak. I do like bleak. Bleak has its profound and often affecting place such as in Beckett , Ibsen, or even Shakespearean tragedy, but here it just wasn’t quite enough for me compared to Nova Swing. OK I get the innate pointlessness of everything M John Harrison wanted to get across, but couldn’t he have given us just a tiny bit more about what lay behind all those mortsafes and Kefahuchi Tract bound ships? No? I didn't really expect answers - but I still want them....

Really a three and a half stars from me.

[Jason · Rating 2 out of 5]

2 Stars

Empty Space is the third book in the Empty Space Trilogy by M. John Harrison. I tried to make it through. I tried hard. All three of these books are tough and demanding reads that need focus to be clear.

What a tough book this one was. I realized after days of reading(I am not a slow reader) that I was only at 41% and I couldn't tell you anything about what I had muddled through up to that point. It was time for me to call it. I was frustrated while trying to read this one, probably too much going on around me this hot summer time. Maybe I will try again another day.

One high note is that I realized how much Harrison and his style have in common with another favorite author of mine, China Mieville. High level writing. A huge command of the English language. And of course an imagination that is slightly askew from the norm...great stuff!

[Angus McKeogh · Rating 2 out of 5]

The first installment of the K tract series of novels, Light, was confusing but intriguing. The second book, Nova Swing, was full of cool ideas and read more like a traditional cyberpunk sort of affair. I found this last book, Empty Space, to be utterly confusing and just not comprehensible. I’ll admit to probably not being smart enough to “get it”. But it included lizard people, a long-lost explorer presumed dead emerging from the tract, unresponsive, dead, and/or murdered individuals floating incomprehensibly above the floor, some horse-trading involving the Nova Swing, two-foot long penises, seemingly gratuitous sex, and adult genitalia attached to childlike bodies exuding from the walls. And that’s just part of it. I just didn’t get it, but it wasn’t so boring or uninteresting as to keep me from reading on. So just average. And perhaps a reread at a later date.

[Kyle Muntz · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is difficult, complex, and ingenious--maybe maybe not Harrison's best, but almost definitely his most ambitious. Especially over the first 100 pages, I struggled with it in a way I haven't with a text in a long time: even aside from his prose (which is pretty much flawless), this is a novel so itself, so full of empty space (on every level), that a lot of the time it felt impossible to put together; Harrison somehow managed to create something intensely imagist and strange while still remaining the great realist of SF. Like a lot of his books, this is one is bleak, cold, sometimes even unpleasant, but it's sublime and visionary as well.

[Rprice23 · Rating 4 out of 5]

The book equivalent of a miles Davis fusion jazz solo. Stunning.

[J. · Rating 2 out of 5]

Beautiful prose. But I had no idea what was going on.

[Ania · Rating 2 out of 5]

Finally finished - this book was so strange that it's hard to say what was it exactly about. Still confused after the ending...

[Andrin Albrecht · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book ... It is brilliant, utterly f****ng brilliant, but I also did not understand one bit of it, and it took me forever to get through. Harrison is clearly not interested in telling fun or even compelling stories – in fact, he's so decidedly not interested in these things that he manages to make anyone who ever claimed a story need be fun or compelling an illiterate idiot.
Not sure if he's right about that, of course (or rather, I'm pretty sure that there's something profoundly wrong with that stance), but how do you contradict a man who handles words like M. John Harrison?
For absence of plot (there are traces of several, of course, one of them involving a spaceship transporting a cargo of enigmatic boxes from planet to planet, another the wife of "Light" protagonist Michael Kearney walking through a faintly dystopian contemporary London, and then another one about floating corpses and ghosts, but they are really just individual threads among many, many others), "Empty Space" thrives on pure images. There is something addictive to that: for large parts of this, you might have absolutely no clue what's going on, where exactly you are or why the characters behave the way they do, but somehow from all of this confusion arises a summer house blazing with immobile flames, or a beautiful daredevil being quite unbothered by the lower half of his body torn to shreds, or a giant feathered woman surrounded by eels, and they are as vivid as anything. Surrealist paintings, connected by tonal motifs, the semantic fields of the words they contain, or oblique resonances with the nature of writing and Science Fiction. They don't make any strictly narrative sense, and if you go looking for one none the less, you will quite simply despair. If you manage to lean back, let the language wash over you and take the images as they come, trusting that there is some kind of sense to it all that simply no one except the author will get, then you might find much to admire here.
Admire in the sense in which you admire Beckett, Pynchon, or a Xenakis symphony. This is a book that makes you work hard, and I finished it not being sure if that work was a waste of my time, or if I should go back, re-read it once, twice, sentence by sentence, until I can actually see all the intricate patterning and the cross-references that went into this ... Consider, if you will, this paragraph:

"Beneath the cliffs half a mile distant, the ocean fumed and danced. No one knew why. It wasn't a temperature thing. It was some less mundane kind of physics. Spray hung in thousand-foot prismatic curtains, full of strange colours: filmy pink, lime sherbert, weird metallic blue light through which seagulls could be seen diving and gyring ecstatically. On the very edge of the cliff above, placed to take advantage of the deep pre-human strangeness of the planet's housekeeping, stood a sixty-by-sixteen-foot O'mahony-style diner called Mann Hill Tambourine but known to its habitués–edgy young middle managers from the rocket yards along the coast–simply as 'the Tambourine.' By day, the gulls dived and gyred above its deco steinles steel and glass tile. Nightly, the Tambourine yearned towards the waves, just as if it ached to fall, and greet the sea with minty greens, deep flickering reds and fractured stainless steel glitters of its own. From seven o'clock on, the tables were deserted. No one came to the Tambourine to eat. Instead, they pressed themselves up against the seaward glass, where like called to like in that as-yet-unbettered phase of the universe."

If you want more of this kind of thing, then read all Harrison has to offer! If you wonder, though, why we're reading a complex paragraph on some kind of diner that never appears again before or after, and what the heck all those managers in it are doing pressed against the glass, then you'll only find this book frustrating.
I'm still not quite sure to which of the two camps I belong.

[Yev · Rating 3 out of 5]

This third book is a sequel to both the first and second books. In the past it's either 2023 or 2024 and it follows the sole viewpoint of Anna, who was in the first book. In the future it's 2452 at the very earliest and follows the perspectives of the crew of the Nova Swing, the unnamed assistant, and a few others. Is there a present? It would seem that all time may be.

The opening screams "you're reading weird fiction!" and continues to do so for the remainder of the book. This is definitely the weirdest of the trilogy and I'd go as far as to say it's gratuitously so. I don't know if it was for the sake of shock value, grossness, perversion, transgression, or whatever else. I assume it was intended to be literary regardless. The question I asked myself the most by far was, "What purpose does its inclusion serve?" I wasn't able to find any answers to that.

The characters continued to be in the same fashion as the previous books and in some ways even more so. Two of the viewpoint characters don't have much of a self. Anna is entirely disordered which makes for similar reading and the unnamed is empty. All the other characters have some level of detachment, though its especially pronounced with the aforementioned. Its so weird that it makes for interesting reading at least.

When it comes to the plot, for Anna it's her daily life, which is peculiar due to her thought processes but otherwise relatively mundane. The unnamed continues to investigate stuff. The crew of the Nova Swing does runs from place to place. The others live their lives as they normally do. That's to say there isn't really a plot all that much. There's a galactic war going on in the background, but it's irrelevant except for its metaphorical value. What plot there is revolves around an ancient artifact that may have unknowable motives and unlimited power.

As for the graphic content, there's a lot of sexual activity, effluence, and children. There's so much sex, though most of it is casually mentioned in passing rather than being described in detail. Seemingly almost everything comes back to sex or genitalia. Emesis may be the second most common activity, as there's a steady flow of its discussion and occurrence throughout the book. In other words, vomit everywhere. There's also multiple scenes of urination and one of defecation. Children, both male and female, have several sexualized descriptions and engage in sexual activity. Again, it's brief moments not much described. There's no denying they're present though. Was all of this in service of profundity and literary excellence? Based on the reviews I looked through, many seem to think so, but that wasn't how I read it.

I'm very conflicted. It has so many problems but its also so fascinating. Reading it is an entrancing experience in both a pleasing and displeasing way. It's a very elegant sort of decadence. I don't know.

[Larou]

Empty Space is – after Light and Nova Swing – the third installment in M. John Harrison’s Kefahuchi Tract trilogy. Nobody who has read the previous volumes (and I strongly recommend doing so before tackling this one) will expect any major reveals or a neat tying-up of loose threads from this, but even so, the lack of closure here is quite amazing, and I for one can not discern any reason why the author should not continue the series, should he feel so inclined.

Having said that, I should add, however, that Empty Space is tied more closely to both Light and Nova Swing than those two novels were amongst each other – the most recent (I do hesitate to say “final”) novel is populated by characters first encountered in the two earlier ones, and it makes use of the same three-threaded narrative as the first volume, again presenting the reader with one thread taking part in the twenty-first and two taking place in the twenty-fifth while retaining at least some of the noir atmosphere from the second. While the previous novel had a strong element of pastiche, this seems to have been curtailed in Empty Space – or rather (unless, of course, I simply missed something) this third novel does not so much mimic other Science Fiction authors, but appears to be a pastiche of the two previous novels – as if the third novel was haunted by the two earlier ones, or maybe in turn was haunting them. Given the way Harrison messes around with time it is hard, maybe impossible to tell which it is, but in either case I think Empty Space bears its subtitle “A Haunting” not only because of the various kinds of ghosts we encounter on the plot level but also for the way it picks up, repeats and distorts themes and motives from the earlier novels. And for the way it is haunted (or in turn haunts) the history of the Science Fiction genre – Harrison might have toned down the pastiche somewhat, but Empty Space is still filled with references and allusions to SF movies and literature; hardly a page went by where I did not stumble across something and it is likely I missed a lot, too.

The Kefahuchi Tract trilogy has always been about Science Fiction, about what it is, was, and could be, and Empty Space, possibly the saddest of three novels none of which is exactly cheerful, comes across (at least it did to me, but I’m certain it will mean different things to different readers) as an elegy on the genre – a story of failures, missed chances, outright betrayals, populated by spectres of lost hopes. At the same time, however, the novel is a wonderful example of what Science Fiction is still capable of.

I might be wrong (it has been quite some time since I read the earlier volumes) but I had the impression that in Empty Space there is given considerably more room to descriptions than in the previous novels, paragraphs upon paragraphs of dense, detailed descriptions piled on top of each other, demanding that the reader to remain tightly focused on the text or else become mired in impenetrability. But possibly the difference is not so much quantity but rather quality – M. John Harrison, who always was a writer with a keen ear for the English language, appears to have reached new heights of intensity here, and the writing in Empty Space seamlessly melds the precision of travel narratives with the semantically ambivalent imagery of poetry. This results in breathtaking, utterly gorgeous writing, but it also keeps the reader at a distance from things happening (or not happening) in the novel – this is not a novel for readers who want their fictional characters to be likeable and easy to relate to and identify with. This is clearly a narrative strategy – the characters themselves appear strangely distant from their own experiences, and even seem unable to identify with themselves, watching their own actions and even emotions as if from afar. There is a distinct chill pervading not just Empty Space but all of the Kefahuchi Tract trilogy, but contrary to what one might expect, it is not a chill that repels the reader but quite to the contrary is almost a beguilement, drawing readers into the novel.

And this, I think is M. John Harrison’s major achievement with Empty Space (and the whole of this trilogy, if trilogy it is) – the way he gradually transforms the novel into just one of the strange phenomena he describes inside it, something at the same time utterly alien and irresistibly intriguing, something that promises an epiphany, some revelation of meaning any second now, only to collapse into itself and remain incomprehensible. It has been several centuries since the discoveries of Copernicus revolutionised our view of the world; but while we may have accepted on an intellectual that the universe was not created for humanity, it remains very hard to realise this on an emotional level. I think one of the things Science Fiction is particularly suited for is to make us aware, make us really feel what it is like to live in a world that does not care about man, that is sublimely indifferent to his needs for warmth and meaning, and there are few – very few works of SF that transmit that feeling as intensely and viscerally as M. John Harrison’s Kefahuchi Tract trilogy. It is an uncomfortable place to be in, and with a rather bleak outlook, but it is also an extremely fascinating one, and one that possesses its own, unique beauty.

[Jed Mayer · Rating 4 out of 5]

Perhaps the best of the Kefahuchi trilogy, the postmodern indeterminacy is nevertheless too omnipresent to make for a great piece of fiction. Meta fiction can only be so meta before it becomes ephemeral, and while this has moments of insight and pathos it remains just out of phase.

[Mieneke · Rating 4 out of 5]

Empty Space is easily the hardest SF I've ever read, in both senses of the word. It is also my first M. John Harrison I've ever read. It might not have been the wisest place to start, but it hasn't put me off reading more Harrison as I loved his prose and the challenges his writing poses to the reader. This book was hard work for me as hard SF isn't something my mind processes easily and I'm proud that I finished it and I found it very much worth the work as in the end the puzzle pieces fell together and the book made a beautiful sort of sense.

To be fair, I did know at the start that this was the third in a trilogy, but I thought I'd see how well it stood on its own. A lot of the confusion I felt reading the book and the hard work I had to put in, might have been alleviated if I'd read the first two books, Light and Nova Swing first. As it was, I kept wondering whether elements of the world building, specifically the nature of the Kefahuchi Tract, were explained in the previous books. Some things weren't a problem, even without explanation, such as the Tailoring. I soon figured out that this was some kind of genetic modification people could have done to enhance themselves. I may not have gotten all the nuances and the complete depth of the procedure, but I understood enough to be getting on with. Not so much the world of the Kefahuchi Tract and the rest of space; at times I wasn't sure whether all the places we found were real or whether in some parts or dimensions they were virtual entities and until I just decided to accept that I didn't know how it worked, my mind kept getting stuck on trying to figure it out.

Once I'd convinced my brain to stop trying to make sense of everything and just read what happened, it was remarkably easy to fall into the story or stories, as there are actually two timelines. The first is set in the near future on Earth and follows Anna Waterman as she slowly loses her grip on life and seemingly her sanity. The other is set in the far future in the Kefahuchi Tract and mainly follows the assistant during her efforts of solving a set of puzzling murders and the crew of the Nova Swing while they go about picking up mysterious deliveries for an even more mysterious employer. Of the three narrative arcs, I started out enjoying Anna's story the most, probably because it was easier to parse than the ones set in the far future, but toward the middle of the book I liked all of them equally and I didn't keep looking to get back to Anna's story.

All the story lines essentially pose the same question to its characters: Who are you and who do you want to be? In some cases this is rather in your face, such as the assistant's continuing quest for a name to call herself by or the researcher, isolated far out in space, who sees his questions reflected in the alien entity that leavens his solitude. In other cases the point is more oblique. Anna's life has been one long search for identity, but in the beginning it's presented more like she's in the early stages of Alzheimer's, rather than a woman with mental problems, it's only through the eyes of her psychiatrist that we get to see Anna's search and her ultimate answer. Empty Space looks at identity and how much of it is constructed by us and by our pasts, something shown beautifully by one of the Nova Swing's crew members' disastrous return to her home planet.

While the plot didn't always make that much sense to me due to my lack of understanding of the mechanics of the world, by the time it wrapped up, it actually wasn't as confusing as I'd thought—all the pieces fell into place. Except for the ending, that was rather open-ended and open for interpretation. But even when confused, I was enchanted with the writing. Harrison has a way with words that is remarkable and he manages to make clever allusions to other works that make you go 'Aha!' if you catch them and otherwise are just part of the beautiful prose. This is a book that will lend itself well to rereading, just to catch all the allusions and get the full impact of the stylistics at work and the clever clues given for the ending.

Would I recommend reading Empty Space as a standalone? Probably not, as I do feel I have probably missed out on a lot of the depth of this novel not having read Light and Nova Swing. One day I plan to get around to reading both of those and then rereading Empty Space, just to see what I missed here. Do I recommend Empty Space? Most definitely. If an inexperienced, unversed-in-(hard)-SF reader such as myself can get so much enjoyment out of this book, I'd surmise that to those with a good grounding in the field would be blown away by it. If anything, Empty Space has shown me I've a lot of reading to do to be able to appreciate the more complicated hard SF books out there. Empty Space has been an education all on its own.

This book was provided for review by the publisher.

[Alex · Rating 4 out of 5]

Well that was an experience.

[David Knight · Rating 5 out of 5]

An excellent ending to a fantastic trilogy