Nova Swing

Kefahuchi Tract #2

by M. John Harrison

Years after Ed Chianese’s fateful trip into the Kefahuchi Tract, the tract has begun to expand and change in ways we never could have predicted—and, even more terrifying, parts of it have actually begun to fall to Earth, transforming the landscapes they encounter.

Not far from Moneytown, in a neighborhood of underground clubs, body-modification chop shops, adolescent contract killers, and sexy streetwalking Monas, you’ll find the Saudade Event Site: a zone of strange geography, twisted physics, and frightening psychic onslaughts—not to mention the black and white cats that come pouring out at irregular intervals.

Vic Serotonin is a “travel agent” into and out of Saudade. His latest client is a woman who’s nearly as unpredictable as the site itself—and maybe just as dangerous. She wants a tour just as a troubling new class of biological artifacts are leaving the site—living algorithms that are transforming the world outside in inexplicable and unsettling ways. Shadowed by a metaphysically inclined detective determined to shut his illegal operation down, Vic must make sense of a universe rapidly veering toward a virulent and viral form of chaos…and a humanity almost lost.

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

304 pages, Hardcover

First published November 9, 2006

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

[Glenn Russell]

Nova Swing - M. John Harrison's mix of Space Opera, Steampunk, Cyberpunk, Biopunk, New Wave, New Weird, Alien Invasion, Parallel Worlds and Retro Futurism to create his own unique literary brew. Wow! What a blastoff.

Signature M. John Harrison since, after all, he told an interviewer he's the type of author who could see no good reason why you couldn't combine genres and do all types of fiction at once, the type of author who uses literary fiction to undercut sf and sf to undercut literary fiction, an author continually on the lookout for a surprise ending, an ending that flips the direction the reader thought the story was going, an ending to recontextualize a story - in this way, you can keep things alive, fresh and fluid and bring exciting, uniquely individual ideas to your story.

Nova Swing is Book Two in the British author's Kefahuchi Tract Trilogy, bookended by Light and Empty Space. As a way to shake up my own energy in reading the trilogy, I've started with Nova Swing and plan to move outwards.

M. John Harrison frames his tale thusly: We're on a distant planet very much like Earth, in a rundown neighborhood within the coastal city of Saudade in the year 2444. With its bars and nightclubs, shoddy streets and restless young men and women hankering after fried food, sex and hard drugs, this future world has a frightening resemblance to our own modern culture; however, one aspect is truly distinctive: many years ago, a space/time disturbance known as the Kefahuchi Tract touched down in the city, radiating chaos every which way. It's no accident Nova Swing carries an epigraph from the Strugatsky brothers' Roadside Picnic.

Since our highly original author enjoys telling readers the backgrounds in his novels are closely intertwined with story, I'll shift immediately to the main players and a bucketful of background weirdness:

Vic Serotonin - In similar spirit to Stalker Red Schuhart from Roadside Picnic, Vic makes his living the dangerous way – illegally crossing over into the Kefahuchi event site, sometimes retrieving artifacts, sometimes performing the services of a tour guide, leading others into this mysterious realm. And like Red Schuhart, Serotonin, called Vic Testosterone by a gal detective, exudes the aura of a tough-guy, coarse and vulgar in manner and speech, but there’s an undeniable humanity at the core of M. John’s main character.

Irene the Mona – This lady frequents a chop shop for her “one-shot cultivars” to keep her appearance up as a “Mona,” a luscious sexpot with the face and hair of Marilyn Monroe (so retro!). Monas swing their stuff all over the lower class neighborhoods. Meanwhile, men like Joe Leone transform their bodies by hitting the shop for a new infusion of chemical energy to keep them in fighting shape. Hey, Joe! Don’t overdo it, boy, or you’ll wind up like many other combatants, a sack of toxic waste flushed down the drain.

Colorful Cast - Several other men and women strut and fret their hours on the novel's stage: a sexy tourist, a knockout with sleek, dark hair, seeks out Vic for a tour of the site; a detective who looks like Albert Einstein and his athletic, cyborg female assistant are more than a little interested in the happenings in the site and Vic's involvement in new developments; Emil Bonaventure, an old veteran explorer of the site shares his wisdom or craziness (although his daughter, Edith, loves her daddy and judges him a man of great insight, as readers, we pronounce the final verdict.)

Shadow Operators – Creepy miniature robots complete with recording equipment that fold up like moths in the corners of rooms. Beware of what you say since someone with power might be listening. But who ultimately is in power in this future world? Governments and nations receive not a mention but the Corporate World (my caps for emphasis) looms on the richer, upper class side of the city. In an eerie way, M. John Harrison anticipates the dissolving of the state and the rise of corporations as the absolute authority.

Oddball Object – Vic Serotonin’s last find in the site that he sold to one Paulie DeRaad: “It was half bone, half metal, or perhaps both at the same time; or perhaps neither. . . . it had been an animal, a one-off thing no one but him would ever see, white, hairless, larger than a dog . . . it had huge human eyes.” Once out of the site, the damn thing takes the shape of an 18" worm and emits light that infects both humans and cyborgs. And to think, power hungry Paulie actually paid good money for Vic's find. Well, Paulie, as Vic told you - risk comes with the goods.

Twilight Zone Bunch – At one cool jive joint, saxophone and piano play music that’s a joke of older, bygone era music (so post-postmodern). The music can cause a weird bending of the laws of physics: “the band squeezed out two or three thin boys in white singlets, earrings and studded leather belts, and into the prismatic light . . . They looked incomplete, and surprised to find themselves here.” Did they come from the fourth dimension? Well, perhaps we shouldn’t be overly concerned since these youthful visitors can vanish as instantly as they appear.

Annies – Youthful women pay a visit to Uncle Zip for the extreme package – to be lean and as fast and as big as a pony (Annies are all about 7’ tall), an ideal size for their job as rickshaw drivers. Oh, my, in their iridescent pink or green lycra suits these supersized Annies perform all varieties of extracurriculars. M. John leaves their sexual exploits to a reader’s vivid imagination.

Far-Out Kitties – At dawn black cats and white cats teem out of the site and then in the evening they all pour back in. Curiously, it doesn’t appear any of the city’s denizens adopt one of these cute creatures as a house pet. Well, maybe not so curious, since all is not what it seems in a world where biology and physics can morph most unpredictably.

John Clute wrote in his review of the novel for the Guardian: "The miracle a writer of the fantastic such as Harrison performs is to expand the possibilities of perception." I entirely agree. Along similar lines, I'll end with a quote from Nova Swing that speaks to the magic age of thirteen when many future sf authors and avid fans were first introduced to books within the genre that set their imagination on fire: "At thirteen you lived on a orbital factory. or a farm planet with infinite horizons and no room for you anywhere. Or you lived in a port city which stank of the outright bizarreness of things and made you raw all your childhood with . . . what? Delight. Anticipation. The desire to escape. The desire to know. Thirteen years of age, you looked older. You were a girl, you were a boy, your gender was indeterminate."

Nova Swing - to fire your imagination. Read it.


British author M. John Harrison, born 1945

“Perception of a state is not the state.”
― M. John Harrison, Nova Swing

[Bradley · Rating 4 out of 5]

I had slightly higher expectations for this novel simply because I was blown away by all the awesome ideas that he managed to stuff into Light, and don't get me wrong, he continues the trend beautifully and a lot more cohesively from Vic's PoV, a travel agent that sometimes takes chumps to the Kefahuchi Tract, or at least to what has become of it after it descended to, and transformed, huge portions of Earth.

To be clear, this means that the laws of what should or should not be possible have been temporarily suspended in this area, and it also means that this novel has firmly slotted itself into the category of the New Weird.

A lot happens, just as many ideas are paraded about in awesome strangeness, including K-Ship tech on the surface of the planet in the hands of shop owners, of semi-intelligent tattoos, the need for rickshaws, and some of the funniest juxtapositions of gene-splicing technology for the marks that I've read, including transforming yourself to have the beauty of an old Einstein, because peeps in the 25th century just don't understand certain things... they should be going after his BRAINS... Not his LOOKS... lol

And this is also a mystery. The murders are still going on and it harkens straight back to the first novel and the odd end we got.

But most of all, with all the sex and the dreams and all the sheer naked desire for something more being displayed on everyone's scenes, it's also good commentary. About them. Not us. We certainly look nothing like that, do we?

Still, as much as I love so much of what's going on here, I wasn't quite as invested in these characters as I should have been, and that's despite the great line, "After all, no one has ever given a fuck about a fat man named Anton." I mean, truly, in a line-by line exploration of the novel, it's rich, rich, rich and literary. It makes me think and wonder and glory in the use of the language. It's truly a step up from normal SF. The mystery is a sight more accomplished and interesting that most, and that's merely because the setting was so damn well fleshed out. :)

Still, I have to wonder if the incidentals and the world-building might have been just a tad too strong in its flavors and it drowned out the taste of Vic's story. I mean, not to spoil anything here, he stops being a travel agent, and that's probably a good thing since everybody and their fat dog either wants to betray him or just went ahead and did it, and it's really not safe back at home, anyway. When it comes to themes, it's fine, it's good, and it's right, but I wonder if the plot might have been served better by something a bit more SATISFYING and MEATY, you know?

I complain. But I really ought to point out that the sheer weight of idea awesomeness in this series, so far, far outweighs six out of seven SF novels on the market. I complain about characters, while everything else happens to be freakily awesome. :) I just feel like it missed an opportunity. Or perhaps the intent wasn't quite that satisfying for me so it never would have won with me. *sigh*

[Adam · Rating 5 out of 5]

The whole debate, which is mostly due to the 20th century publishing industries insidious pollution of our intellectual market, of whether or not Sci-Fi is trash or literature is best summed up by the Ted Sturgeon quote, “Yes 95% of it is trash, but 95% of everything is trash.” But what dyed in the wool science fiction books of recent times match masterpieces of contemporary literature for tone, symbolism, meaning, intelligence, and ferocity? On this short shelf I would place Gene Wolfe’s Fifth Head of Cerberus, Michael Swanwick’s Stations of the Tide, Stepan Chapman’s Troika, Jeff Vandermeer’s Veniss Underground, and M. John Harrison’s Light. So where does this sequel of sorts to Light sit on this shelf? Pretty comfortably I believe. Delivering a story openly indebted to The Brother Strugatsky’s “Roadside Picnic (or Tarkovsky’s film “Stalker” based on the story), with an alien realm of bizarre physics that requires guides to explore, and is infecting the surrounding world. There is a noir/cyberpunk feel (if someone wrote a screenplay they could describe it as Stalker meets Blade Runner/Casablanca) to this but in Harrison’s Delaney and Bester channeled through Beckett prose this is a world of unfulfilled dreams, anguish, sickness, madness, and piercing melancholy; delivered in a surreal, dream state fugue. This book is a good literary companion of Bowie's Berlin Trilogy.(there is character named Joe the Lion afterall)

[Olethros · Rating 3 out of 5]

-Otra obras más de viaje que de destino, y además más de un viaje.-

Género. Ciencia ficción.

Lo que nos cuenta. El libro Nova Swing (publicación original: Nova Swing, 2006) nos lleva al bar Gato Negro Gato Blanco, un lugar de encuentro para varios personajes justo al borde de la zona conocida como Saudade, área en la que los fenómenos físicos, temporales, biológicos y de muchos otros tipos están muy alejados de lo normal, todo debido a la caída de fragmentos del Canal Kefahuchi. A pesar de la peligrosidad del lugar y de la actitud de las autoridades al respecto, muchos desean visitarlo por diferentes razones y hay personas, como Vic Serotonina, especializados en esas visitas ilegales. Segundo libro de la serie Canal Kefahuchi, cuya lectura es completamente independiente del primero.

¿Quiere saber más de este libro, sin spoilers? Visite:

https://librosdeolethros.blogspot.com...

[Jason · Rating 4 out of 5]

4 Stars

Nova Swing book two in the Light series by M John Harrison was bound to come up short when compared to the brilliance of the first book Light. This was exasperated for me as I read this one immediately following my read of it. One thing that they both share in common is the brilliant writing of M John Harrison. His books are literary and verbose and they deserve a wide audience.

....
""You must be careful of me, Vic. I'm not really here.""


Nova Swing is a much smaller scoped story that takes place not long after the events of book one. This one takes place on Saudade, a city on a planet of the same name on the Beach, a place in the galaxy significant to book one. The resolution of the first book have given Nova Swing a unique and incredible character. The city itself is now the resting place of the Kefahuchi Tract and the Event has caused this to be bizzare unreal environment where things are almost always not what they seem. It is more like a ghost town than a real place with shifting and evaporating people places and things. It is the best character and best part of the book.

Vic was not a good main protagonist for me. I never really cared for him or about him. The other small characters were forgettable. These character flaws were tough to accept after the larger than life hero-assholes from book one.

I never felt the noir aspect to the story. I was never engaged with any part of this one when compared to Light. Although I liked much of the book I didn't love it. Harrison piqued my interest enough to move on to the last book in the series Empty Space.

[Bart · Rating 4 out of 5]

(...)

This was another successful Harrison for me – and like his latest The Sunken Land Begins To Rise Again, one that I will probably reread in the coming decade, just as I will reread Light. Now that I think of it, I guess I’ll enjoy Light even more now that I have a better grip on what Harrison tries to do with his books. I might even read Swing's last 50 pages again tonight – expect no update here however, it will be a private affair. Nova Swing is recommended, 4.5 stars – caveats below. I’ll read the final Kefahuchi book, Empty Space, sooner than later.

To end this review, another lengthy quote, from R. Scott Bakker, who replied to the bit of Harrison I opened this review with, in a 2008 interview with Pat of Fantasy Hotlist:

“For Harrison, who is an avowed post-modernist, the reader should be continually confronted with the performative as opposed to the representational function of language. They should be reminded (apparently over and over and over) of the power of words to spin realities, to the point where the work becomes a multifarious, promiscuous, meaning event (albeit one that is too often generated by the most mechanical of po-mo tactics, elision). Forcing the reader to draw whole characters out of fragments, narrative arcs out of discordant events – to “fulfill their part of the bargain” – this is the true way to make the reader an active part of the process, and so a critically minded, enlightened citizen.

I don’t know whether to laugh or yawn anymore. For better or worse, readers without literature degrees tend to hate this stuff. They like coherent characters and stories and settings. So when you start screwing with “representational expectations” (in other words, unilaterally rewriting the “bargain”) by and large all you end up doing is preaching to the choir, writing for people with literature degrees, which is to say, for people who already share your values. In other words, you simply end up catering to their expectations. You become an “upscale” version of the very commercial entertainers you continually denigrate.”

We’re hardwired for this shit, which is why you see the same pattern repeating itself over and over in every sphere of cultural production. Every sphere has a self-styled elite who both identify and flatter themselves via their values, then criticize others for not sharing those values. “Our values are the values and you guys are losers because of this and this and this…”

This pattern bums me out because it swallows so much talent in our society and aims it inward. Harrison really is a prodigious talent, but he can’t seem to see his way past this post-modern crap. This is another universal human pattern: whatever your yardstick happens to be, nothing else seems to measure up – it quickly becomes the yardstick.

Don’t blame the cretinized masses for not reading your stuff. If you really are afraid, if you really are a writer with a social conscience, then go out and meet them. Write something that communicates to them, and not just to those who already share your values. Stop writing for “yourself,” or for the “page,” or for whatever clever euphemism you use to cover the fact that you’re simply a producer of a kind of a high-end cultural commodity.

Until you do, you’re just another entertainer. Which is okay, so long as you’re not pretending otherwise. Say, “I write for people like me, and I’m not all that interested in making a social difference.”

I guess Bakker is right too – although I’d hesitate to fully subscribe to the intentional tribunal of Harrison he paints at the end – I simply don’t have enough grip on Harrison to judge either way. But the bulk of Bakker’s argument stands – as I said, in the beginning: taste & polemics. It is clear later day Harrison will not appeal to everybody – although you do not need a literature degree at all, just an open mind and a palate that can handle the poetic, the uncertain and the undefined. Nova Swing is not the same postmodern affair Light was – and as such maybe the best entry level Harrison novel I’ve come across so far. That, or newbies could try one of his short story collections.

“The known is slicked on to everything like a kind of grease. You would do anything to avoid the things you already know.”

Full review on Weighing A Pig Doesn't Fatten It

[Jason Pettus · Rating 4 out of 5]

(My review of this book is much longer than Goodreads' word-count limitations. Find the entire essay at the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com].)

Regular readers know that I've been in a bit of a special situation for the last month, in that by random luck I was able to track down at my local library five of the ten twelve(!) science-fiction books nominated this year for either the Philip K Dick Award or the Hugo Award; added to my review of Charles Stross' Halting State earlier in the year, that makes half of the books I'm going to get the chance to review here at CCLaP, between now and August 9th when the Hugo winner is finally announced in Denver. (The others so far besides Halting State: Jon Armstrong's Grey, Sean Williams' Astropolis: Saturn Returns, and Ian McDonald's Brasyl. Still to come: John Scalzi's The Last Colony. Oh, and even more good news: On my latest trip to the main Chicago library in the Loop, I also found Robert J Sawyer's Rollback and Adam Roberts' Gradisil, making it now at least eight of the twelve nominees I'll get a chance to read for myself. That leaves only Michael Chabon's The Yiddish Policemen's Union, Minister Faust's From the Notebooks of Dr. Brain, Elizabeth Bear's Undertow and Karen Traviss' Ally.)

For those who don't know, in fact, these two awards represent very different things within the world of science-fiction (or SF), and with two very different sets of criteria for winning them: The Hugo is in fact supposed to reflect the absolutely best SF novel of the year, as chosen by the members of the annual Worldcon convention and maintained by the World Science Fiction Society; while the PKD Award instead reflects the best experimental or cutting-edge SF novel of the year, chosen by a private panel of professionals and co-sponsored by the Philip K Dick Trust and the Philadelphia Science Fiction Society. And indeed, it's no coincidence that an award dedicated to experimental and cutting-edge work would be named after PKD, because that was his own career in a nutshell: visionary, madman, possible drug addict, a man who in 1974 experienced either a set of persistent mystical visions or a nervous breakdown (depending on who you're talking to), Dick was literally decades ahead of his time in his trippy, mind-bending work, making him obscure and controversial in the '70s when he was alive but just now becoming a mainstream cultural figure in the shiny Singularity times of the present day. (But of course I'm giving short shrift to this imminently remarkable artist, since he's not really the focus of today's review: for a lot more about him and why you should care about his work, see my review of Richard Linklater's adaptation of A Scanner Darkly, from last year.)

My main point of even bringing all this up is to establish to all you SF non-fans just what's so important about winning the PKD Award, and what it signifies to readers in the know before they ever pick up the award-winner in question; and that of course is because today's book under review just happens to be the winner of this year's PKD Award, M John Harrison's Nova Swing. Because make no mistake, this is not the best of the nominated SF books I've read this year (that honor still belongs to Brasyl); but it's definitely the best experimental or cutting-edge novel I've read this year, and that counts all the other experimental stuff I've reviewed here in the last twelve months, whether or not it was SF. This is a crazy story for people who specifically love crazy stories, a tale which takes elements from half a dozen genres and mixes them all into one giant unique stew; you're going to love it if you already love things like that, hate it (and in fact find it barely comprehensible) if you don't. It's a perfect reflection of what the PKD Award should be about in the first place, because like Dick's work itself the book is a frustrating and fascinating one -- one that requires patience and a lot of digressive thoughts in order to get through, one that is constantly veering off into unexpected directions.

In fact, that's probably a good place to start with any review of Nova Swing, that its particulars make it difficult to offer up any kind of simple summary whatsoever; I mean, just to begin with, this is a sequel of sorts to an earlier book of Harrison's called Light (which I confess I haven't read), although supposedly not really a sequel either, but rather a story that simply takes place in the same fictional universe, a story set a generation after the first one, where the major characters of the former have fleeting cameos in the latter, otherwise not affecting the brand-new story being told. And what is that story? Well, like I said, it's kind of hard to wrap your brain around it all, without sitting down and reading the entire 250-page book yourself; although you can safely say that it is primarily about an alien city, one that has been under the influence for a quarter of a century now of a mysterious galaxian anomaly in the sky above, an unexplainable black-holey-type...thing that scientists have named the Kefahuchi Tract. This in turn has produced a bizarre local effect on the part of the city itself directly below the tract, which is called the Saudade Event; and reflecting the disruptive space-time storm that it is, like a traditional storm this Event has an "eye" (or especially destructive center) and "aureole" (or weaker outer edge).

Have I lost you already? See, that's why it's important to actually read Nova Swing, and why it's notoriously difficult to write a tidy summary of such a book; because under Harrison's elegant, veteran hands, he presents a more complex Event site than I ever could today, a city neighborhood that is part haunted house and part Surrealist film, a physical space with all the dread of Mark Danielewski's House of Leaves but all the absurdist humor of Robert Heinlein's The Cat Who Walks Through Walls. (And is it just me, or did this book remind anyone else of the obscure, short-lived Vertigo comic Deadenders, by Ed Brubaker? Or was I the only person in America who actually used to read that comic?) Let's be clear, that the Saudade Event is basically the main "character" of Nova Swing; it is bizarre, it is obsessively fascinating, it presents its own geography and inexplicable rules, just like the best "world-building"-style fantastical literature should. Because that's really what Harrison is doing here, building an uncannily real-feeling fictional world for us to get lost in, or at least a city in this case, a proud tradition within SF and sometimes more important to certain readers than the actual story being told.

Because when Harrison gets around to telling the actual story, see, strangely enough it's not too much more than a standard noir, told in a tough and minimalist Chandleresque way, full of street-smart humor you usually don't expect from a SF story, part of why it's been getting so much attention precisely for its language. (Like, take this good example, from when a cop and his assistant are debating the origins of a group of unknown space aliens currently in custody: "What do they look like to you?" "They look like idiots.") Because as you can well imagine, in a city neighborhood where both the weather and the sky-color change every few minutes, where random snippets of music can always be heard and sometimes a thousand pairs of used boots will suddenly appear in the sky for no reason, of course this becomes the hottest extreme-tourist destination this side of Vietnam, and of course people from all over the galaxy are arriving each day for the chance to take a walk through its streets. But because of its danger and unpredictability (dozens have been lost in the Event and never seen again), the local government has made all entry into the site highly illegal; but since the local police can't exactly build physical barriers (they just get swallowed up by the Event in the night, turned into something random and weird the next morning), it is in fact pretty easy to take a walking tour of the site's aureole if you're sneaky and happen to know what you're doing.

And thus enters our anti-hero, professional Event guerrilla-tour organizer Vic Serotonin, one of a whole group of "futured-up" noir stereotypes who populate the seedy bar "Black Cat White Cat" at the center of our tale -- there is also the genetically-engineered warrior-animal underground boxer (he of the elephant-like tusks and three-foot perpetually erect penis), the matching genetically-engineered prostitute (she of the...never mind) who loves him, the weasely gangster who pays good money for "artefacts" snuck out of the site, the cynical cop who's been cloned to look like Albert Einstein, even the grizzled female owner of the bar, a former "K-ship" pilot with a past she doesn't like discussing. And that's the thing I want to try to get across today: that even with Harrison's superior writing skills (and make no mistake, he's a better writer than most others in the genre), this would essentially still be not much more than a blase space-noir tale if not for the grand funk known as the Saudade Event, or least not a book worthy of the PKD Award. By filtering it through this utterly original, utterly mesmerizing concept of the Event itself, by making that concept metaphorically shine and sparkle as much as Harrison does, the noir stereotypes of the plot suddenly become a delight instead of tiring and hackneyed, which I think is where so many other SF authors get things wrong; there are too many writers, I think, who...

[Szplug · Rating 4 out of 5]

I love the science fiction of M. John Harrison, which he writes in burnished steel, elegantly and smoothly detailing heartbreak and loss, perversion and excess, etching rapid, brutal violence with the same casual ease he tosses off bar-stool patter between mean-street acquaintances and gene-spliced miscreants. I have yet to come across another writer who can so vividly—yet matter-of-factly—describe the interplay between multidimensional mathematics and quantum exoticness in ultra-technology, while simultaneously ensuring that his characters all retain traces of vulnerable and bruised humanity, no matter the biotech alterations—tailoring in Harrison's future slang—that have swung the far-flung spawn of Earth closer towards something mechanical and artificial.

Nova Swing takes places several decades after the events of his equally brilliant novel Light . This time, the mysterious Kefahuchi Tract has been leaking its singular strangeness: a large mass of warped physics and unreality known as the Event has landed smack dab in the middle of the city of Saudade, the chief urban centre of a self-named planet that is one of the cluster of systems that constitute the Beach, a stretch of the galaxy all under the overarching halo of the mysterious Kefahuchi Tract. Vic Serotonin is a lonely, unsure, and burned-out entradista, one who illegally leads tourists into the reality-flux and dream-logic of the Event's boundaries, a place where strange smells, sights, and sounds call out luringly from objects sketched in the air like wispy cartoons; where tens of thousands of black and white cats amass like living fur architecture and staircases change to milky streams in mid-step. Vic is despised by the older guides for never having dared to seek the heart of the Event, to suss its secrets, with their pioneering spirit; he is pursued by the guilt-daubed detective Lens Aschemann, bio-sculpted to resemble a middle-aged Einstein, still tormented by the death of his wife years before and aware of a curious—and perhaps dangerous—exchange that is operating between the Event and the unwitting citizens of Saudade. Throw in a supporting cast of code-sick criminal kingpins, gun-toting, rain-slicker wearing nine year-old bodyguards, sexily clad and scented Mona's, gladiatorial cultivars, and a trio of women—Edith, Liv and the Assistant—who all have ties and desires to a combination of Vic, Lens and the Event—and you have a novel as fascinating, flowing and fun as Nova Swing.

A word of warning—even more so than in Light , there is little resolution to Nova Swing in the form of closure—much like life, events have a way of continuing on, plus or minus a few actors. Harrison is really inking panels depicting loss, memory, guilt, and desire, especially the desire to remake ourselves, the siren song of starting anew—enticingly easy in Harrison's 2444, when biotechnology is a cultural institution. Panels about etiolated dreams and the way we resist trying to colourize them past a certain age or point; about the life the past and memories can take on, independent of those who were there at a certain point in space-time, and that the Event might just be involved in creating life-forms from such memories, from discarded pain and triumphs and wonder and lust—hatching a new breed of humanity from the detritus of the old. I will be eagerly snatching up the other fictions of Harrison—I recommend this one whole-heartedly.

[cycads and ferns · Rating 3 out of 5]

…his wife's voice said, "Can you see the same ship as me, those lights to the right of the Point?" In life she had constantly asked him similar questions, whether he was standing next to her or lying in bed with some other woman halfway across the city. She had, somehow, never trusted her own eyes.
"I see the ship," he reassured her. "It's only a ship. Go to bed now."

[Mason · Rating 4 out of 5]

3.75- Major step down from Light however Harrison’s prose and world building carry the book to a quality novel still.

[Joff]

Cyberdrunk.

Wow.

Any trendy genre is doomed to become desperately uncool in time. Take cyberpunk, bless it. That self-consciously wired sci-fi stepchild ended up making the journey from envelope-pushing early-80s edginess to nothing more than fodder for mid-90s straight-to-video stodge. But hey, it's not cyberpunk's fault. It heralded the age of information overload, but now that we're sliding down the infolanche for real, it can seem as naive as a 1950's World's Fair. A lot of its concerns - style tribes, virtual reality, post-apocalyptic dystopias - seem laughably dated.

M. John Harrison couldn't give a toss, though. Good for him.

"Nostalgia and science fiction are spookily close" A A Gill

That's one of the quotes that prefaces this extraordinary exercise in style. It makes a lot of sense, too. Harrison's world is cyberpunk refried and expertly blended into a pulp setting - a setting that cyberpunk has always been magnetically drawn to from the start. The action takes place in a backwater street of a down-at-heel city on a who-cares planet, stuffed full of romantically dissolute lowlifes. Liv Hula manages a bar, but can't pull her life out of the gutter; Vic Serotonin makes a living out of taking slumming tourists to the edge of an indescribable spatial anomaly that landed downtown a generation ago, but he's losing himself in the process; Fat Antoyne hustles for a buck and tries to get loved; Lens Aschemann is the detective who looks just like the older Albert Einstein, driving a 1952 pink Cadillac, who's trying to piece all these lives together. But the centre of the novel is the city Saudade itself, in its desperate, dingy beauty, eerily mirrored in the dreamlike chaos of the anomaly.

And everybody drinks, like there's no tomorrow. For these hoods and whores, maybe there isn't. They're trapped in a future where the only gene-modification you can't buy is a way to like who you are.

This isn't about the wisecracks-and-sharp-hats noir of films like The Big Sleep. It's more like the melancholy cool of Raymond Chandler's original novel, where regret and betrayal is more subtly deadly than a hundred blackjack-armed thugs, and the streets are always slick with rain. Nova Swing isn't about sci-fi whizz-bang gadgetry or cosmos-spanning metaphysics either, although Harrison doles these out with a sort of weary, inspired generosity.

So why isn't this a mere literary experiment? Because Harrison has something to write about. The characters circle each other, desperate to find a meaning in a midnight hook-up, a collar, a brawl. It's about how everything falls apart slowly, how adults betray their child-selves, how love is already on the lam; but how just maybe it's enough to get you off this godforsaken world and into a future which might be illusory, but has to be better than the now.

Make no mistake - Nova Swing sweats style. Even if sometimes the effects are a little laboured, it's all a labour of love. This review may be dull, but Harrison’s prose isn’t. It’s jaded, seductive street poetry.

Inevitably, the detective plot (which is always the loser in the pulp setting, and doesn't even have much what-happens-next attraction here) can't pull us all the way to a showstopping finish. But even this doesn't matter, because Harrison is evoking a mood, a style - a way of living or putting off life - that's as grown-up, thrilling and phantasmagorical as anything else in science fiction.

[Qristy · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was the spiritual successor to Roadside Picnic that I have always wanted.

[Paul Dembina · Rating 4 out of 5]

An SF "noir" type of thing. Full of atmosphere although sometimes lacking in forward momentum.

This whole Kefahuchi Tract mystery advanced technology shtick obviously references Roadside Picnic and the solipsistic feel of it reminds of some of Steve Erickson work

[Morgan · Rating 2 out of 5]

I read this for three reasons:

1. I figured it would be best to read it after Light, seeing as they occupy the same universe;
2. To move it from the traveling library into the Massachusetts semi-permanent library; and
3. So that I could have three books in a row on my Read shelf with cats on the cover.

The third reason was actually the deciding point, and if I knew where it was I'd consider rereading The Schrödinger's Cat Trilogy for a try at four books featuring cats on the cover. (Or maybe Tailchaser's Song, except I don't own that one.)

Not that I was expecting much from this after Light, but I think this one was less satisfying. Surprisingly enough.

-Drab neo-noir tone. It was cliché, redundant, and inane.
-Sense of story/character. Again, he gets close to getting somewhere, and then a character does or says something stupid, and it's all back to square one. I can't for the life of me tell you why Fat Antoyne or Irene the Mona are prominent characters, and even in a literary sense they don't serve a purpose (foils for Vic Serotonin? and if they were, they were pointless, redundant, and inane).
-Sense of plot. I'm sorry, something happened?
-Sense of environment. Same place as before, except stuck on one planet with some REALLY FUCKED UP SHIT GOING DOWN WITH THIS SITE THING. No explanation, no attempt at explanation, lots of cats.
-Pointless concluding chapter. Vic's dead, Lens is pixelating for lack of a better word, Vic's under-developed client Elizabeth is loose in the event site, so how about we wrap things up for everyone else mentioned? Ooh, look, happy-ish endings.

On the whole, this book suffers from lack of execution. It has some really good things going for it. Weird "event site" thing, maybe presenting a chance to explore and explain the Kefahuchi Tract some? A mysterious woman shows up and wants to be taken inside for a tour, and as the back of the cover hints she could be more dangerous than she seems. Boom!, you have yourself a femme fatale, however, in execution she is the worst femme fatale I have ever encountered. She's whiny, under-developed, and not at all interesting, while Harrison tries to make her seem more philosophical via introduction of her diary than she really is. You also have your weakened male protagonist, who seems to be tailored (pun intended?) to look more like the Humphrey Bogart-esque noir man with his gabardine jacket than he does act like one. A cheap knock-off, and everyone has to tell you about him instead of him acting it out for himself.

Add on to this the mystery of the people leaking out of the site, and Aschemann and his psychotic assistant's "investigation" ("There was no investigation, this was a mess" exactly, and I hate to say I agree w/ the assistant), which goes nowhere despite its seeming relevance and mystery. No, instead, it's mere grounds for trying to bag Vic for crime(s) I'm not at all clear on (because he brings things out of the event site? because that's a real plot point right there that's highly elaborated on, except for Paulie's daughter, which isn't explained at all, really), and then we can forget about it and try to make a story surrounding arresting Vic for one reason or another.

Positives:
Black Cat White Cat. Nice name. Real keeper.
Lens. Great name, really dig that he looks like Einstein. Now go deeper.

Next time, more about the cats, though, please.

[Shane · Rating 2 out of 5]

Two stars means 'It was OK' according to goodreads which really sums up 95% of this novel. I'm not going to go to town on this review. In fact, it's more of a personal reminder or a general overview of why I didn't quite dislike it, but certainly didn't rate it at all. So here it is then. This is the story of an anomaly or part of it anyway that basically drops off the main anomaly and causes a kind of rent or tear through to somewhere else. Predictably, things come through from that side and people go through to that side. If it sounds like I'm bored writing this its because I am. A book that can make me bored all over again when I write the review is definitely a book to avoid. Some of it was pretty good. There were parts that made me smile or sent my thoughts off at a tangent, and for that I am thankful but seriously now, most of this novel is very, very slow going and is little more than an exercise in character development. This wouldn't be a bad thing at all if there was a story to go with it, but what story there is didn't hold my interest.

I liked 'Light', but this just dragged a little to much for my taste and in the end didn't really go anywhere, at least nowhere that I wasn't expecting all along.

Not great, but not terrible either. Just OK.

[Darren · Rating 5 out of 5]

Amazing achievement here, as Harrison pulls off the almost impossible feat of seamlessly blending hard sci-fi, cyberpunk, noir crime, homage to Strugatskys/Tarkowsky, while doing what all the best literature does i.e. cast light on essential human themes - in this case the yearning/struggle for meaning/place/happiness. Easiest 5 Stars I've awarded in a while.

[Yev · Rating 3 out of 5]

Nova Swing is Roadside Picnic reimagined with a Philip K. Dick aesthetic as a New Weird Cyberpunk Noir set in the city of Saudade in 2444. That's reductive because it's also literary, subversive, and much else. There's a lot to say for the beauty of its style, but I'm not one to do so. I found its substance to be a secondary consideration at best. Its literary qualities probably go a long way to explaining its award nominations and wins.

This time it was extremely obvious that I didn't understand the meaning of what I was reading and wasn't able to appreciate what was there. That's not to say that there isn't anything to appreciate. Its greatest strength to me was how much it felt like this was something that had happened. The sense of surreal verisimilitude for something that almost surely could never be, yet was so clearly presented is praiseworthy. Everything else though, not so much.

The characters were too much like people in ways that I don't usually like to read in fiction. Their motives were inscrutable, their impulses irrational, and their behavior inexplicable. The reader never really gets to know any of them and I assume that was intentional. As I wrote of the first book, Harrison seems almost indifferent to entertaining the reader and that's much more so the case this time.

There's only one character that was mentioned in passing from the first book in this one. Other than that they don't seem to have almost anything in common other than the setting and cats. There's Vic Serotonin, who travels into the Saudade Event as a travel guide for tourists and also to smuggle out items to sell. Inside the event zone anything could happen and everything is always changing. Those who go in never return exactly as they were before. This time he's unknowingly brought out something dangerous, which leads to detective Lens Aschemann to investigate his activities. They're the two primary perspectives, though various others have a go at it as well.

There are a few sex scenes, which run more towards the metaphorical than the erotic, some masturbation, and several descriptions of the female breast. After the first sex scene one of the characters says that he's very puzzled by why the sex happened, which I found funny, though it would've had more impact if variations of "puzzled", weren't used 29 times, or 2-5 times per chapter, except for one that only had a single instance, throughout the ~300 or so pages. The characters apparently were as puzzled as I was, though in a different way.

Despite my disinterest more than disappointment, I'll be reading the third as well, if only to see how what I assume will be another disconnected entry finishes out the series. Reading this still gave me a strange feeling, though unfortunately it wasn't also moderately enjoyable.

Rating: 2.5/5

[Ben Chandler · Rating 4 out of 5]

Nova Swing is a messy book, in what feels like a very intentional way. It's filled with lives that are messy, ideas that are messy, a general sense that chaos and disorder are something natural to the universe and to lives. Like the hardboiled novels of old that it seems to echo, parody and revere, it's hard to understand motives, it's hard to follow any trail of reason. But unlike Sam Spade or Philip Marlowe, nobody is conveniently witty, nobody is unexpectedly prepared. Lives are just there, desperate, stained by time and life and uncertain.

One thing I particularly love about Harrison's writing is that ideas can trade places. Maths, code and time become things, tricky and alive and a physical force that push the story around and wish over characters. Characters are either important, or they're not - a complicated set of regrets over an unknowable past, or just a genre of people all folded together into vague idea.

Nova Swing isn't as neat and easy to like as Light was, and it feels like it fills a very different role. There are no carefully placed reveals that unravel the endless knot of threads that felt so rewarding. Here things are often just what they are, and if you're confused by them, it's because the characters are too, because they're unknowable. There's a moment right near the very end where a quiet moment of reflection paints each moment in a slightly different light, and at that moment it was easy for me to look back on these stories and see similarities to my own experiences in them, and feel a sense of resonance that had eluded me for most of the book. That was satisfying, but I don't think that's the reason to read this book. Mostly it appears to be a testament to, and a critique of, nostalgia, hope, the self-destructive act of being alive and aware, and the desperate search for meaning, order and tidiness in a universe that is apathetic to the needs of the human heart.

[Oscar · Rating 3 out of 5]

’Nova Swing’ puede considerarse como una extraña secuela de ‘Luz’, ambas ambientadas en el universo del Canal Kefahuchi. La novela transcurre en Saudade, zona en la que cayó parte de dicho canal, y que ha dado lugar a una singularidad espacio-temporal donde las leyes de la física se han visto alteradas, y en cuyo interior pueden encontrarse artefactos, tecnologías y organismos de origen extraterrestre (aunque esto se supone). Es aquí donde entra en juego Vic Serotonina, una especie de recuperador, que trabaja como guía y traficante de estos elementos. Pero nunca se sabe qué se va a encontrar uno cuando se adentra en el Solar, en esta zona prohibida. Puede ser desde algo maravilloso, hasta algo de pesadilla. Aquí es donde interviene Delitos del Solar, digamos que la policía que se encarga de que nadie se adentre y pueda extraer cualquier objeto contaminante.

La novela de M. John Harrison es una historia coral ambientada en un futuro lejano, que propone un escenario totalmente fascinante. A lo largo de la narración, iremos conociendo a una serie de personajes y las relaciones que se establecen entre ellos, siendo lo más interesante su apreciable evolución. Como es habitual en la prosa de Harrison, esta es excelente, quedando la historia supeditada a los personajes y no tanto al trasfondo de la misma. Como si de un puzzle se tratase, el lector debe ir encajando las piezas, quedando ciertas partes de la narración a merced de su imaginación. Esto hace que la lectura de la novela no sea precisamente fácil, aunque sí existe un hilo conductor más patente que en ‘Luz’, que le da un aire de novela negra más que interesante.

Lo que más me ha gustado de ’Nova Swing’ es la atmósfera evocadora que logra transmitir, hasta cierto punto decadente y opresiva, que me ha recordado a las novelas de Viriconium. Es una lectura exigente, que gustará a los que ya conozcan a M. John Harrison, aunque no la recomendaría a todo el mundo.

[Adam · Rating 4 out of 5]

The whole debate, which is mostly due to the 20th century publishing industries insidious pollution of our intellectual market, of whether or not SciFi is trash or literature is best summed up by the Ted Sturgeon quote, “Yes 95% of it is trash, but 95% of everything is trash.” But what dyed in the wool science fiction books of recent times match masterpieces of contemporary literature for tone, symbolism, meaning, intelligence, and ferocity? On this short shelf I would place Gene Wolfe’s Fifth Head of Cerberus, Michael Swanwick’s Stations of the Tide, Stepan Chapman’s Troika, Jeff Vandermeer’s Veniss Underground, and M. John Harrison’s Light. So where does this sequel of sorts to Light sit on this shelf. Pretty comfortably I believe. Delivering a story openly indebted to The Brother Strugatsky’s “Roadside Picnic ( or Tarkovsky’s film “Stalker” based on the story), with an alien realm of bizarre physics that requires guides to explore, and is infecting the surrounding world. There is noir/cyberpunk feel (if someone wrote a screenplay they could describe it as Stalker meets Blade Runner/Casablanca) to this but in Harrison’s Delaney and Bester channeled through Beckett prose this is a world of unfulfilled dreams, anguish, sickness, madness, and piercing melancholy; delivered in a surreal, dream state fugue.

[Viridian5 · Rating 1 out of 5]

I don't know how this won the Arthur C. Clark Award and the Phillip K. Dick Award and was a finalist for the John W. Campbell Award. I really don't. The narrative jumps around without much warning, to the point where you're not sure what character's being talked about or whether it's the past, present, or future. It uses a terse pseudo noir narration that makes all that worse by cutting out words that would help the reader figure that kind of thing out. Characters react to things in ways that often make no sense from what's happening or what another character is doing.

By the book's end it's hard to figure out what the point of Nova Swing really was. Nothing you think would be resolved is resolved. The people you thought were the main characters just drift off, letting the book end with characters I had no investment in. I stuck around to see how things developed... then they never developed.

...at least it wasn't boring?

[Laurence · Rating 3 out of 5]

I realised about quarter of the way through that this novel was basically an extended love letter to the Strugastky's Roadside Picnic. So I read it as such. It's also crossed with Chandler esque noir vibes that work much of the time but fail occasionally. Harrison's prose is as stylised and pleasing as in Light.

[Tudor Ciocarlie · Rating 5 out of 5]

Marvelous novel which is set in a sea/space-port intersected by the Kefahuchi Tract. Now, that I've reread Light and read Nova Swing, it's, finally, the time for Empty Space, the conclusion of Kefahuchi Tract trilogy.

[osoi · Rating 4 out of 5]

Ниспошли мне сердце неоновое, с любовью его пошли, найди меня внутри.

Меня сразу очаровал Саудади - кажется, в самой сердцевине этого притона всех растерянных и затерявшихся живет обреченная грусть. Есть какая-то гармония в том, что основное место действия - это либо бар, либо Зона, где действуют свои чокнутые законы. Прямой связи с предыдущей книгой нет, хотя присутствуют отдельные упоминания о фигурах из “Света”, судьба которых так и осталась неизвестной. Эм Джон переплюнул самого себя в “Нове Свинг” - текст ради текста превалирует, почти ничего из происходящего не объясняется, отсылок слишком много для получения удовольствия от интерпретации. И все его персонажи спят мертвецким сном.

Может, виновато это лишенное чистых и незамутненных душевных побуждений, голода и холода, революций и страшных войн будущее, где можно перекраивать себя до бесконечности, где можно буквальным образом менять маски неисчислимое количество раз. Каждый в этом будущем стал тем, кем хотел - и одновременно остался никем. Где только толпы безымянных людей, бесцельно бредущих по дороге существования - отличить их от роботов или фантомов практически невозможно. У них есть только низменные желания, осознанное отчуждение и покрытая дымкой ностальгия, которую они даже сформулировать как следует не могут. Иногда ка��ется, что они все как один дегенераты, и способность выстраивать мысленные цепочки у них вовсе отсутствует. Не потому что они глупые, а потому что необходимость думать и абстрактно мыслить отмерла за ненадобностью. В потоке действий ради действий теряются редкие проблески гениально прекрасных картинок.

Как с двумя джазменами, застывшими в своем цикле повторяемости. Или с привлеченными музыкой фантомными фигурами, проявляющимися аки полароидные снимки и обретающими материальность под стилизованный бибоп в баре у самого края Зоны. Или с морем черных/белых котов, как по часам ежедневно совершающих пробег вдоль определенной улицы - это одновременно сюр, туманный намек и твердое обещание отсутствия каких-либо объяснений.
А еще Эм Джон мастерски обращается со словом. Выше посетовала на его “текст ради текста”, и это была искренняя похвала его способности выкрутить фразу под нужным углом. Я читала в переводе, и наверняка потеряла часть удовольствия от его скульптурно-словесных игр.

“Нова Свинг” необычайно хороша в своих образах, не позволяющих забыть, что Саудади со своей Зоной - это коробочка фокусника, бесцельно засасывающая всех без разбора. И хороша даже в своей атмосфере отсутствия мотивации/направления у всех без исключения персонажей. Героям не хочется сопереживать - они слишком “другие”, и по прошествии глав все чаще задаешься вопросом, не являются ли они временным порождением феномена Зоны. И от этого еще слаще, потому что в своем раскручивании теории фантомов Зоны можно дойти до того уровня абсурда, что на Эм Джона больше не хочется ругаться. И рука тянется за третьей книгой.

“Почем нам знать, что мы вернемся туда, откуда явились?”

lukk.svbtle

[Fx Smeets]

Nova Swing is a lament. A Greek tragedy. A choir comes, holds the Gods as its witnesses and tells the sorrows and misfortunes which befell the hero. No heroic deed, no fatal clench from destiny, no suspense or tension is necessary. Only this joined presence of a choir, a hero, a place.
The place is Saudade, the sorrow, the nostalgia, the longing for something gone. Ask a Portuguese to translate Saudade and he will baulk. There is something holy in this word, something so deeply rooted into the Portuguese mind that to translate it is to desecrate it. Saudade is a wound of the soul. Its only cure is lament, then silence.

And so for Nova Swing. As Colona is to Oedipus, Saudade is the place where the hero comes to die. This small town lost in North America is the theatre of extraordinary phenomena. Extraordinary, at least to the human race. They negate all the physical laws which ruled Earth for the first 4.5 billion years of its existence. But they have become common to anyone who has spent some time on the Beach of the Kefahuchi Tract. They are well known to the reader of Light, Nova Swing’s prequel. The Event, this fragment of the Tract fallen on our planet, generates an area very similar to the Zone found in Roadside Picnic, the Strugatsky’s masterpiece often described as Nova Swing’s model. In the Zone, the physical space had been affected by an alien artefact. The usual laws were not applying, or rather were following some logic unknown to human scientists. In Harrison’s Event though, physical laws, whether existing or not, whether possible or not, all apply at the same time – “or not”. The Event is this area where nothing is predictable any more: where you are going, where you come from, who is with you, how long you have been here, whether you are moving or standing still, what you see, what you hear, what you touch, what you taste, what you feel, what you think, who you are.

People come here and die. People do not come here TO die. Some come to find something they have lost. Elisabeth Kielar – the closest Harrison will give us to a femme fatale – has lost part of her soul and she laments. She sings her Saudade to Vic Serotonin – the closest Harrison offers to the hard-boiled detective – . Will Vic Serotonin, who makes a living out of wandering inside the Event with whoever is crazy enough to pay him, will Serotonin take her in there, as far as she can – as far as HE can? She pays good money for it, good enough for Vic to say yes.

Vic himself has lost his soul, years ago. He has seen too much of the Event. Once looking for adventure, the spectacular of the unknown, the thrill of the unexpected, he aspires to nothing more nowadays than drink himself to death. This is his own Saudade, the loss of adventure, of thrill, of hope. He never found any of it in the Event. He still looks up at his role model, Emil Bonaventure, now an old man dying of weariness and of whatever one catches from wandering too often too far in the Event. Vic Serotonin interrogates Bonaventure, steals his diaries, in search for what he might have missed. Vic Serotonin searches for what he might have lost and the women who love him lament.

At times it feels that every woman in Saudade is in love with this big loser Vic Serotonin. Edith Bonaventure, the old adventurer’s daughter, sleeps with him whenever he comes visit her father. Liv Hula, whom we knew to be the assistant pilot of this other hero Ed Chianese and now is the poor owner of the Black Cat White Cat, a shady bar on Saudade main street, worries for this coward Serotonin, even when he runs in trouble for abandoning his customers. Elisabeth Kielan, the abandoned customer, wants to have sex with him as if her life depended on it. Strong women lamenting a weak man, a man addicted to a youthful dream, who cannot let go of who he thinks he could have been and who one day, they all know it, will go into the Event in search of his never happening future, to never return.

The place is Saudade – but who is the hero? Serotonin is too weak a man, too whingey, too much of a mop for the title. Could it be Aschemann, the old cop? But what do we know of Aschemann? That he resembles Einstein very very much. Disturbingly much. Aschemann bought his face from Uncle Zip, a company selling cheap gene selections. Aschemann bears his resemblance to Einstein like a mask. Aschemann has lost his wife. She died resenting him. This is his lament. He too searches her in the Event. Aschemann wears the mask of the hero. But no one is here to lament him. No one speaks for him, not the prostitutes with whom he sleeps, not his assistant rendered mad by uncontrolled gene changes. Aschemann is a hero without a choir.

For the choir, when not busy with Serotonin, is busy lamenting itself. In Saudade everybody has lost something, including the weepers. Edith is in search of the young circus artist she once was. Liv wonders what happened to the promising pilot who used to fly with Ed Chianese. They lament the heroes then, when all heroes have died, they pick themselves up. Taking off the weepers’ habit they become someone else. They decide to leave it all behind. But is it even possible? Are we not, in spite of our best efforts, always someone different and always the same person?

“None of us is anyone any more” Liv Hula says.” We all lost who we were. But we can all be something else, and I will be happy to fly this rocket anywhere you suggest, even though you and Irene called it Nova Swing, which is the cheapest name I’ve ever heard”.

Something else. In a universe with a Kefahuchi Tract humans cannot be individuals any more. The heroes are dead. The remaining humans are mere replica of ancient models: Einstein the genius, Mona the intriguing prostitute from Light, copies of dead cultures, artefacts of our imagination, things. The Event may make everything possible, it is still powerless to change a single life. Those who come to Saudade in the hope of enlightenment and stay around, stick around, get entangled in its everyday life, those will die waiting. “You weren’t the person you were before you got trapped; you weren’t the person you were while you got trapped: the merciless thing about it, Liv discovered, was that you weren’t someone entirely different either.”

Nova Swing: the name of a cheap spacecraft. Of a poor adventure. Of a hop to the next place, hoping to become someone happier. But the nova towards which we swing proves to be the same old yellow star. Nova Swing is the story, never ending, always repeated, of our memories and our hopes.

[Alex · Rating 5 out of 5]

This guy crafts sentences like Turner paints, there is an ethereal quality to almost every paragraph. Like I think, oh I got that, then only to realise after reading it for the third or fourth time, nope I don't. It's like trying to read a book comprised of poetry. One of my favourite and most sublime sentences is this 'Between them and the sea; and the horizon somewhere past the tremendous roll of surf, like a crease in a piece of paper the colour of doves'. It's a challenging book to read cos its filled with prose like that. Mix into that that he writes a world so totally real and known to him that you as well as being a reader are a detective, like a stranger in a land at first familiar but the totally alien. It's a bloody good read.

[Alex · Rating 5 out of 5]

Second Read and I know this will have a third and forth in my lifetime. Great read, reminds me of old sci-fi with new visions. Like the sci-fi of the old bbc. Deep thought provoking, but all the while simply observing. Love it.

[Gernot1610 · Rating 1 out of 5]

Für 2.99 aus irgendeiner grabbelkiste gezogen, hübsches Cover ... nach 57 Seiten abgebrochen.

[Juan Santapau · Rating 4 out of 5]

Esta novela sigue en la ambientación del Tracto Kefahuchi, una franja de imposibilidad espacial que afecta las historias de los personajes de Harrison. En este caso es una paleta de personajes nocturnos en la ciudad de Saudade, una especie de California en un mundo distante, entre peleas de tristes combatientes alterados en las tiendas de piel, bares donde suena “neo nuevo tango” y desde donde aparecen a la existencia personas nuevas y desconocidas, alguien que hace de coyote para turistas que quieren experimentar una zona prohibida afectada por el tracto, y un detective que lo persigue. Muy “noir de neón”, como se titula uno de los capítulos. La disfruté tanto como “Light”, quizás la diferencia es que en esta la energía es un poco más melancólica y la estética más definida. Me da muchas ganas de leer la próxima: Empty Space.

[Keith Deininger · Rating 4 out of 5]

Not as good as 'Light', but I love Harrison's literary style applied to speculative fiction themes.