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Settling the World: Selected Stories 1970-2020
Throughout his career, M. John Harrison’s writing has defied categorisation, building worlds both unreal and all-too real, overlapping and interlocking with each other. His stories are replete with fissures and portals into parallel dimensions, unidentified countries and lost lands. But more important than the places they point to are the obsessions that drive the people who so believe in them, characters who spend their lives hunting for, and haunted by, clues and maps that speak to the possibility of somewhere else.
This selection of stories, drawn from over 50 years of writing, bears witness to that desire for difference: whether following backstreet occultists, amateur philosophers, down-and-outs or refugees, we see our relationship with ‘the other’ in microscopic detail, and share in Harrison’s rejection of the idea that the world, or our understanding of it, could ever be settled.
This selection of stories, drawn from over 50 years of writing, bears witness to that desire for difference: whether following backstreet occultists, amateur philosophers, down-and-outs or refugees, we see our relationship with ‘the other’ in microscopic detail, and share in Harrison’s rejection of the idea that the world, or our understanding of it, could ever be settled.
271 pages, Paperback
First published August 20, 2020
30 people are currently reading
339 people want to read
About the author
M. John Harrison
109 books837 followersaka 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.
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.
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Displaying 1 - 29 of 29 reviews
November 26, 2022
On the grass banks at Brentwood & Corbets Tay, out of the grey central glare of the midnight carriageway, processions of the dead were glimpsed, shadowy and irritable, swaying down towards realities they thought they had been able to leave behind They were, as WG Sebald put it so succinctly, ‘usually a little shorter than they had been in life…’
(from Colonising The Future, 2020)
M John Harrison’s brilliantly unsettling novel The Sunken Land Begins to Rise Again was a worthy winner of the 2020 Goldsmiths Prize (my review)
I’d strongly recommend those who liked that, particularly those previously unfamiliar with the author, to read Settling the World: Selected Stories 1970-2020, a new compendium of 17 short stories from Comma Press.
The stories have been curated by the author and publisher from Harrison’s work over the last 50 years, the earliest story ‘The Causeway’, originally published in New Worlds Quarterly 2 (1971), and the most recent Land Locked, originally from the post-Covid anthology Seen From Here: Writing in the Lockdown.
The author’s own take on the list is on his blog – although there were some late changes to the line up, and also in a short video for Blackwells:
He previously said in a 2003 interview
Most of my short stories these days are on the cusp between what you might call fantasy and what you might call mainstream. Part of what I'm doing is to see how far you can push things before the stories fall down on one side or the other of that divide. Or, coolest of all, if you can get them to hang there, without visible means of support, and not fall either side.
And Jennifer Hodgson’s foreword provides an excellent introduction to Harrison’s style, first setting him in a context that explains why he is a worthy Goldsmiths winner:
Harrison came up in a different tradition, as part of that remarkable 1960s generation of literary experimenters, including Ann Quin, B.S. Johnson, Christine Brooke-Rose, Brigid Brophy, J.G. Ballard, Brian Aldiss, Michael Moorcock and others, who turned fiction against itself.
And then encapsulating many of the stories hear rather neatly:
I don’t always know what he is doing – and mostly I don’t really want to – but I think he’s using fiction-writing’s sleight of hand not to make us believe in a world that does not exist, but to invite us back into our own.
...
Harrison is always telling us the same story. It happens like this – although what ‘it’ might be, precisely, is hard to say. People look up one day and ‘all at once’ they ‘can’t make head or tail of anything’. Whether they’ve eked out their lives lodging in little rented rooms by the glow of one-bar heaters subsisting on tinned soup, or they’ve done pretty well for themselves, buying wisely in the up-and-coming boroughs of South London and accumulating a decent set of cast iron saucepans, it’s the same. Suddenly nothing makes sense, it’s all out of joint, all the familiar meanings have leached away
Typically a Harrison story is narrated by someone who encounters just such a character. One example:
By the end he was attributing the whole of his illness to the uncertainties he had inherited then: his mother’s fear that ‘there was no government in the country’; his father’s obsession with the electrical wiring. He was determined to remember what he could, and if not come to terms with it, then offer it to me like a half-finished crossword in case I could help. But how do you begin to retrieve a landscape you clearly spent so much of your life trying to forget?
I’m not going to attempt a story-by-story review of the collection, although my favourite stories were perhaps Running Down (originally 1975) and A Young Man’s Journey to Viriconium (1985). In this more recent interview Harrison describes the former as “pure excitement, moving on, finding out that you can do something you couldn’t do before. “Running Down” felt like a huge step forward at the time.”
Harrison’s ability to create atmosphere in a sentence is admirable – I highlighted so many but one example (here in a run-down clothes shop):
On the way out I brushed against a stiff peach-coloured bodice covered with green sequins, to be startled by a sudden smell of the empty dance hall – some American perfume, faded and innocent; and beneath it, like a memory of the disingenuous festivals of a post-war Saturday night, the quick thin bitterness of ancient perspiration.
Three stories appear here from his previous story collection with Comma Press, You Should Come With Me Now: Stories of Ghosts (my review). At the time, I was a little put-off by the banker-bashing in the otherwise ingenious The Crisis. Perhaps age and having left that industry has softened me, and I was fascinated to revisit the world it created, not least as, as anyone whose been to the City in the last 8 months will realise, we’re now living in it:
The pull of the Square Mile was still strong for people like Jane and Jack. Everyone knew someone who, unable to bear it any longer, had found their way in, to re-emerge weeks or even months later after wandering puzzledly about the empty towers, lost souls eyeing other lost souls in the deserted corridors and partner washrooms. With a good pair of binoculars you could see them, staring out of the Lloyds lifts – which still travelled in their stately way up and down the outside of the structure – in despair.
Recommended
(from Colonising The Future, 2020)
M John Harrison’s brilliantly unsettling novel The Sunken Land Begins to Rise Again was a worthy winner of the 2020 Goldsmiths Prize (my review)
I’d strongly recommend those who liked that, particularly those previously unfamiliar with the author, to read Settling the World: Selected Stories 1970-2020, a new compendium of 17 short stories from Comma Press.
The stories have been curated by the author and publisher from Harrison’s work over the last 50 years, the earliest story ‘The Causeway’, originally published in New Worlds Quarterly 2 (1971), and the most recent Land Locked, originally from the post-Covid anthology Seen From Here: Writing in the Lockdown.
The author’s own take on the list is on his blog – although there were some late changes to the line up, and also in a short video for Blackwells:
He previously said in a 2003 interview
Most of my short stories these days are on the cusp between what you might call fantasy and what you might call mainstream. Part of what I'm doing is to see how far you can push things before the stories fall down on one side or the other of that divide. Or, coolest of all, if you can get them to hang there, without visible means of support, and not fall either side.
And Jennifer Hodgson’s foreword provides an excellent introduction to Harrison’s style, first setting him in a context that explains why he is a worthy Goldsmiths winner:
Harrison came up in a different tradition, as part of that remarkable 1960s generation of literary experimenters, including Ann Quin, B.S. Johnson, Christine Brooke-Rose, Brigid Brophy, J.G. Ballard, Brian Aldiss, Michael Moorcock and others, who turned fiction against itself.
And then encapsulating many of the stories hear rather neatly:
I don’t always know what he is doing – and mostly I don’t really want to – but I think he’s using fiction-writing’s sleight of hand not to make us believe in a world that does not exist, but to invite us back into our own.
...
Harrison is always telling us the same story. It happens like this – although what ‘it’ might be, precisely, is hard to say. People look up one day and ‘all at once’ they ‘can’t make head or tail of anything’. Whether they’ve eked out their lives lodging in little rented rooms by the glow of one-bar heaters subsisting on tinned soup, or they’ve done pretty well for themselves, buying wisely in the up-and-coming boroughs of South London and accumulating a decent set of cast iron saucepans, it’s the same. Suddenly nothing makes sense, it’s all out of joint, all the familiar meanings have leached away
Typically a Harrison story is narrated by someone who encounters just such a character. One example:
By the end he was attributing the whole of his illness to the uncertainties he had inherited then: his mother’s fear that ‘there was no government in the country’; his father’s obsession with the electrical wiring. He was determined to remember what he could, and if not come to terms with it, then offer it to me like a half-finished crossword in case I could help. But how do you begin to retrieve a landscape you clearly spent so much of your life trying to forget?
I’m not going to attempt a story-by-story review of the collection, although my favourite stories were perhaps Running Down (originally 1975) and A Young Man’s Journey to Viriconium (1985). In this more recent interview Harrison describes the former as “pure excitement, moving on, finding out that you can do something you couldn’t do before. “Running Down” felt like a huge step forward at the time.”
Harrison’s ability to create atmosphere in a sentence is admirable – I highlighted so many but one example (here in a run-down clothes shop):
On the way out I brushed against a stiff peach-coloured bodice covered with green sequins, to be startled by a sudden smell of the empty dance hall – some American perfume, faded and innocent; and beneath it, like a memory of the disingenuous festivals of a post-war Saturday night, the quick thin bitterness of ancient perspiration.
Three stories appear here from his previous story collection with Comma Press, You Should Come With Me Now: Stories of Ghosts (my review). At the time, I was a little put-off by the banker-bashing in the otherwise ingenious The Crisis. Perhaps age and having left that industry has softened me, and I was fascinated to revisit the world it created, not least as, as anyone whose been to the City in the last 8 months will realise, we’re now living in it:
The pull of the Square Mile was still strong for people like Jane and Jack. Everyone knew someone who, unable to bear it any longer, had found their way in, to re-emerge weeks or even months later after wandering puzzledly about the empty towers, lost souls eyeing other lost souls in the deserted corridors and partner washrooms. With a good pair of binoculars you could see them, staring out of the Lloyds lifts – which still travelled in their stately way up and down the outside of the structure – in despair.
Recommended
October 7, 2021
I read two of Harrison’s short stories and disliked one (or at least was ‘meh’ towards it: Dog People), but liked the other (Getting Out of There), and the liking of that story must have pushed me over the edge to get this book, a compilation of some of his short stories over a 50-year period.
Alas, not for me. 🙁
I should say why I did not care for the stories. His descriptions of people, the environment at hand, pretty much everything was really long-winded. Please get to the point. Most of the stories were long, and I found them to be tedious because the plot line often was bizarre. In most stories there was very little dialogue. Very little action.
That said, I realize I am swimming against the current of others’ opinions…opinions that I read on the back cover and the front pages of the collection. From such a person as Ursula K. Le Guin…
• The exactness, acute self-consciousness and vigilant self-restraints of Harrison’s writing give it piercing authenticity.
Maybe I just picked the wrong collection of short stories. He certainly seems to be prolific.
1. Settling the World – 2 stars
2. The Gift – 2 stars
3. I Did It – 2 stars
4. Running Down – 1 star
5. Land Locked – 1 star
6. Yummie – 1.5 stars
7. The Causeway – 2 stars
8. Colonizing the Future – 1 star
9. The Machine in Shaft Ten – 2.5 stars
10. A Young man’s Journey to Viriconium – 1 star
11. Science & the Arts – 1.5 stars
12. The Incalling – 1 star
13. The Ice Monkey – 2 stars
14. The East – 1 star
15. ‘Doe Lea’ – 3 stars
16. Cicisbeo – 3 stars (This was halfway decent. A husband whose wife has just had their third child goes up in the loft of the house (attic?) and stays there, much to the chagrin of her and to the bewilderment of a friend who had the hots for the wife)
17. The Crisis – 1 star
1.5 stars overall. Glad to be done so I can move on…. But different strokes for different folks.
Reviews
• This reviewer predicted my overall dissatisfaction with the stories…I guess I like some indication of what the plot/story line is: “Readers looking for nothing more than transparency of plot are inevitably going to be frustrated by Harrison’s finely honed if unconventional narrative techniques”: https://locusmag.com/2020/10/gary-k-w...
• Yikes, this is a long review! http://strangehorizons.com/non-fictio...
• This is an article which is biography of sorts: https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2...
Alas, not for me. 🙁
I should say why I did not care for the stories. His descriptions of people, the environment at hand, pretty much everything was really long-winded. Please get to the point. Most of the stories were long, and I found them to be tedious because the plot line often was bizarre. In most stories there was very little dialogue. Very little action.
That said, I realize I am swimming against the current of others’ opinions…opinions that I read on the back cover and the front pages of the collection. From such a person as Ursula K. Le Guin…
• The exactness, acute self-consciousness and vigilant self-restraints of Harrison’s writing give it piercing authenticity.
Maybe I just picked the wrong collection of short stories. He certainly seems to be prolific.
1. Settling the World – 2 stars
2. The Gift – 2 stars
3. I Did It – 2 stars
4. Running Down – 1 star
5. Land Locked – 1 star
6. Yummie – 1.5 stars
7. The Causeway – 2 stars
8. Colonizing the Future – 1 star
9. The Machine in Shaft Ten – 2.5 stars
10. A Young man’s Journey to Viriconium – 1 star
11. Science & the Arts – 1.5 stars
12. The Incalling – 1 star
13. The Ice Monkey – 2 stars
14. The East – 1 star
15. ‘Doe Lea’ – 3 stars
16. Cicisbeo – 3 stars (This was halfway decent. A husband whose wife has just had their third child goes up in the loft of the house (attic?) and stays there, much to the chagrin of her and to the bewilderment of a friend who had the hots for the wife)
17. The Crisis – 1 star
1.5 stars overall. Glad to be done so I can move on…. But different strokes for different folks.
Reviews
• This reviewer predicted my overall dissatisfaction with the stories…I guess I like some indication of what the plot/story line is: “Readers looking for nothing more than transparency of plot are inevitably going to be frustrated by Harrison’s finely honed if unconventional narrative techniques”: https://locusmag.com/2020/10/gary-k-w...
• Yikes, this is a long review! http://strangehorizons.com/non-fictio...
• This is an article which is biography of sorts: https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2...
August 14, 2025
Usually, the more you read of a writer’s work, the clearer their project becomes to you; I think the opposite might be true of M. John Harrison. I don’t mind, though. (And reading Ballard’s
Myths of the Near Future
has given me a better idea of the sci-fi landscape within which Harrison’s earlier stories existed – 1975’s ‘Settling the World’ and 1971’s ‘The Causeway’ would slot pretty comfortably into that collection.) As ever with Harrison, parts of this book remained obscure to me, inaccessible, but when it’s good, it’s like nothing else. ‘Running Down’ and ‘A Young Man’s Journey to Viriconium’ are stunning.
May 30, 2023
The Course of the Heart is one of my all-time favourite novels, and I'm so glad that it led me to trying out M. John Harrison's short stories.
I love the uneasiness in the worlds that he creates: the sense that something in his characters' lives has gone off the rails and can't be made right again. There's a sense of global or personal apocalypse lurking just behind the veil of middle-class life, waiting to break through. Conversely, in his stories of apocalypse, there's the unsettling portrayal of people living in a bougie bubble, like frogs in a pot, trying to go about "business as usual".
The writing itself is eerie and beautiful, and this book ended up taking some time to finish because I wanted to spend time with each story. I can't wait to begin The Sunken Land Begins to Rise Again.
I love the uneasiness in the worlds that he creates: the sense that something in his characters' lives has gone off the rails and can't be made right again. There's a sense of global or personal apocalypse lurking just behind the veil of middle-class life, waiting to break through. Conversely, in his stories of apocalypse, there's the unsettling portrayal of people living in a bougie bubble, like frogs in a pot, trying to go about "business as usual".
The writing itself is eerie and beautiful, and this book ended up taking some time to finish because I wanted to spend time with each story. I can't wait to begin The Sunken Land Begins to Rise Again.
February 15, 2025
A master of limbo, a lord of the vague, M. John Harrison started writing during the New Wave era of SF, yet carried his speculative powers into territories that touchdown into modern horror, gritty fantasy, amnesiac slipstream, and tales of London urban dread where wayfarers catch a whiff of the parallel and get lost in the in-between. When he is ON, he is a powerhouse of subtlety (if that's a thing), evoking grand schemes of otherworldly machinations that barely scratch the surface of the everyday humdrum English life (perfect example, 'Cicesbio', where a husband loses his identity while trying to remodel the attic space into a studio, only to tap into an invisible network that weaves over the suburbs like a ghostly spider web). He writes from the borders, only problem is we don't know what those borders even mean ('The Crisis' nails this quite wonderfully as he details the iGhetti, a parallel neighbor that may be extraterrestrial, or a virus that has slipped through the crack on the astral plane). Info-dumps are not his crutch; instead he teases the readers with things that fall into the gap and can't seem to find a way out. What Ramsey Campbell did to urban horror, Harrison has done with his tales of otherworldly invasion. 'Settling the World' is a masterpiece. It evokes the cold expanse of a shift in the collective human mind, where the creature unearthed on the dark side of the moon, may bring us an enlightenment that will change us forever -- for the better or worse, Harrison won't tell us. 'A Young Man's Journey to Virconium' shows the evolution of his fantasy world developed into a game of finding the rabbit in the hole, in this case, a bathroom mirror that will open the door to this other reflected land. 'The Incalling' is a brilliant take on the seance gone awry. And complete with other tales of dissolution, lone men and women vying for something that they can't reach, willowing and waning in some supernatural transition that is not entirely bleak but only illuminated with a pinpoint of hopeful light (re: 'The Gift'). Peppered with other stories that ring quite similar - the lone mountain climber against the odds of reality, the awful friend you can't get rid of no matter how far you make an escape, and the curse and the call of the wild that most have turned deaf ears to. Best served in doses, like all great collections, M. John Harrison deserves all the accolades. And I'll never forget what he had uncovered from the dark side of the moon.
August 3, 2025
M. John Harrison es un discreto representante de la ciencia ficción de la nueva ola que apareció tras la publicación de la revista New Worlds, editada por el legendario Michael Moorcock. Su nombre no resuena con la misma fuerza que el de Brian W. Aldiss, ni sus ideas eran tan revolucionarios y ahora tan actuales como los de Ballard, pero, como exponente de esta ciencia ficción contracultural, este también autor inglés trabaja con el mismo material que los dos últimos, a saber, experimentación formal, temáticas subversivas, personajes alienados y un concepto flexible de qué es la ciencia ficción. No en balde Harlan Ellison, otro renovador del género, optó por utilizar el ambiguo término "ficción especulativa" para definir lo que trataban de hacer sus colegas y él.
Los cuentos contenidos en esta antología, que reúne lo mejor de 50 años de trabajo, a duras pueden considerarse ciencia ficción o fantasía, catalogarlos es muy complicado. Y entenderlos también es muy complicado. Harrison tiene un estilo hermético, como si buscara contar sus historias utilizando las imágenes más crípticas y ambiguas o aportando poco o nulo contexto, también mediante la misma metodología, con el propósito generar un sentimiento de incomodidad y extrañeza que provee de una pátina fantástica a historias que, puede, fueran realistas. Cuando acierta en su propuesta, Harrison es sublime, pero cuando falla no hay quien lo entienda. Precisamente por esto último no puedo resumir algunos de los relatos de esta antología, y es que, si no entiendo algo, ¿cómo lo resumo? Ya he dejado por escrito en numerosas ocasiones que soy un tio bastante limitado intelectualmente.
Los relatos contenidos en esta antología son los siguientes:
Colonizando el mundo (****): Dios ha aparecido en la cara oscura de la Luna y un equipo decide traerlo a la Tierra, dando inicio a una nueva etapa de la civilización humana, una de desarrollo y mejora social en todos los aspectos. Sin embargo, no todos están de acuerdo con este nuevo orden mundial, y están dispuestos a asesinar a Dios. Este delirio me recuerda a cierta frase que dijo el biólogo evolutivo -y bigotudo profesional- John Haldane cuando le preguntaron, como ateo declarado, sobre sus ideas acerca de la existencia de Dios, a lo que respondió que, en caso de haber un Dios, "hay que reconocer que siente un extraordinario cariño por los escarabajos". Y dado que Dios nos ha creado a imagen y semejanza...
El regalo (***): dos personajes solitarios, ella, una scort con una mancha de nacimiento en la cara en forma de mapa al que falta la leyenda, él, un taciturno y peripatético que encuentra con un libro en el que figuran los topónimos de un atlas inexistente. Dos almas solitarias que se buscan inconscientemente.
Lo hice (***): al perder el Manchester City, un hombre decide darse un hachazo en la cabeza. Sí, un hachazo. En mitad de la cabeza. Harrison, ¿estás bien? ¿te traigo una tila?
El derrumbe (***): dos amigos de la universidad que en el fondo nunca se han soportado, pero que han permanecido inexplicablemente unidos, siguen dos trayectorias muy diferentes: el primero, se dedica a la venta equipos de escalada y a guiar a grupos de senderistas por las cordilleras europeas, el segundo, encerrado en sí mismo, malvive en una casa aislada en los páramos. Cuando el primero acude a la llamada del segundo, éste se confirma que algo extraño y sorprendente le ocurre a su amigo, algo que, en el fondo, siempre sospecho: algo muy relacionado con la entropía.
La máquina del pozo Diez (**): un grupo de científicos descubren en el interior de la Tierra una máquina que parece funcionar a partir de las emociones de toda la humanidad.
La invocación (****): el protagonista, editor de un escritor prometedor con dificultades para terminar su última novela, acude junto a éste a una sesión espiritista cuyo propósito es invocar esa inspiración esquiva. Sin embargo, pese a que el sórdido ritual parece haber tenido éxito, la vida del escritor parece ir a peor. Mucho, mucho peor.
El mono de hielo (***): el protagonista observa cómo el matrimonio de su amigo se ha ido a pique, y cómo éste se refugia en su única afición: la escalada. Una historia en la que priman más las relaciones humanas que el componente sobrenatural, tan sutil que se diría inexistente.
Los cuentos contenidos en esta antología, que reúne lo mejor de 50 años de trabajo, a duras pueden considerarse ciencia ficción o fantasía, catalogarlos es muy complicado. Y entenderlos también es muy complicado. Harrison tiene un estilo hermético, como si buscara contar sus historias utilizando las imágenes más crípticas y ambiguas o aportando poco o nulo contexto, también mediante la misma metodología, con el propósito generar un sentimiento de incomodidad y extrañeza que provee de una pátina fantástica a historias que, puede, fueran realistas. Cuando acierta en su propuesta, Harrison es sublime, pero cuando falla no hay quien lo entienda. Precisamente por esto último no puedo resumir algunos de los relatos de esta antología, y es que, si no entiendo algo, ¿cómo lo resumo? Ya he dejado por escrito en numerosas ocasiones que soy un tio bastante limitado intelectualmente.
Los relatos contenidos en esta antología son los siguientes:
Colonizando el mundo (****): Dios ha aparecido en la cara oscura de la Luna y un equipo decide traerlo a la Tierra, dando inicio a una nueva etapa de la civilización humana, una de desarrollo y mejora social en todos los aspectos. Sin embargo, no todos están de acuerdo con este nuevo orden mundial, y están dispuestos a asesinar a Dios. Este delirio me recuerda a cierta frase que dijo el biólogo evolutivo -y bigotudo profesional- John Haldane cuando le preguntaron, como ateo declarado, sobre sus ideas acerca de la existencia de Dios, a lo que respondió que, en caso de haber un Dios, "hay que reconocer que siente un extraordinario cariño por los escarabajos". Y dado que Dios nos ha creado a imagen y semejanza...
El regalo (***): dos personajes solitarios, ella, una scort con una mancha de nacimiento en la cara en forma de mapa al que falta la leyenda, él, un taciturno y peripatético que encuentra con un libro en el que figuran los topónimos de un atlas inexistente. Dos almas solitarias que se buscan inconscientemente.
Lo hice (***): al perder el Manchester City, un hombre decide darse un hachazo en la cabeza. Sí, un hachazo. En mitad de la cabeza. Harrison, ¿estás bien? ¿te traigo una tila?
El derrumbe (***): dos amigos de la universidad que en el fondo nunca se han soportado, pero que han permanecido inexplicablemente unidos, siguen dos trayectorias muy diferentes: el primero, se dedica a la venta equipos de escalada y a guiar a grupos de senderistas por las cordilleras europeas, el segundo, encerrado en sí mismo, malvive en una casa aislada en los páramos. Cuando el primero acude a la llamada del segundo, éste se confirma que algo extraño y sorprendente le ocurre a su amigo, algo que, en el fondo, siempre sospecho: algo muy relacionado con la entropía.
La máquina del pozo Diez (**): un grupo de científicos descubren en el interior de la Tierra una máquina que parece funcionar a partir de las emociones de toda la humanidad.
La invocación (****): el protagonista, editor de un escritor prometedor con dificultades para terminar su última novela, acude junto a éste a una sesión espiritista cuyo propósito es invocar esa inspiración esquiva. Sin embargo, pese a que el sórdido ritual parece haber tenido éxito, la vida del escritor parece ir a peor. Mucho, mucho peor.
El mono de hielo (***): el protagonista observa cómo el matrimonio de su amigo se ha ido a pique, y cómo éste se refugia en su única afición: la escalada. Una historia en la que priman más las relaciones humanas que el componente sobrenatural, tan sutil que se diría inexistente.
October 14, 2020
'Settling the World' is an unsettling, intriguing, imaginative and surreal selection of stories that are decidedly well written.
Some are more engaging then others, especially the ones in the later half of the book.
Quite a few start with blunt sweeping statements that immediately pull you into the story, like the title story with '....the discovery of God on the far side of the moon...'
Some are realistic but slightly out of reality vignettes, while others play with that savage insane brush with unreality like 'Yummie' about a heart patient meeting a completely round headed person in a hospital spouting disturbing gibberish and appearing wherever he goes (this one particular plummets sharply into the mind.)
Many are mysterious, hinting at but never truly revealing a deeper truth (The implied vampirism of 'Running Down' and the mysterious man in 'The East', for example)
The weirdness in these stories is almost magical realism as they are written in an almost casual way.
'Doe Lea' is a beautiful story about grief written simple and majestically that is ripe with mystery, like many others.
The last story, 'The Crisis' about the homeless and the invasion of aliens, may well have taken in my home town of Wakefield, Wakefield after all being in the rhubarb triangle, so what better place then aliens that look like giant pieces of rhubarb to invade?
Those mentioned are but a few of the unquiet wonders on offer, stories that all have their great writing in common.
Some are more engaging then others, especially the ones in the later half of the book.
Quite a few start with blunt sweeping statements that immediately pull you into the story, like the title story with '....the discovery of God on the far side of the moon...'
Some are realistic but slightly out of reality vignettes, while others play with that savage insane brush with unreality like 'Yummie' about a heart patient meeting a completely round headed person in a hospital spouting disturbing gibberish and appearing wherever he goes (this one particular plummets sharply into the mind.)
Many are mysterious, hinting at but never truly revealing a deeper truth (The implied vampirism of 'Running Down' and the mysterious man in 'The East', for example)
The weirdness in these stories is almost magical realism as they are written in an almost casual way.
'Doe Lea' is a beautiful story about grief written simple and majestically that is ripe with mystery, like many others.
The last story, 'The Crisis' about the homeless and the invasion of aliens, may well have taken in my home town of Wakefield, Wakefield after all being in the rhubarb triangle, so what better place then aliens that look like giant pieces of rhubarb to invade?
Those mentioned are but a few of the unquiet wonders on offer, stories that all have their great writing in common.
December 27, 2020
Harrison is simply the most extraordinary writer around, and this collection of stories is near perfect. A succession of driven oddbods inhabit the stories, searching for hidden worlds that rarely become visible, instead lurk mysteriously out of reach. The collision of the grubby, social realism with a new kind of weirdly prosaic fantasy is utterly enthralling, and if you don't already know, he writes like a dream - so good it's a mystery why he isn't collecting every prize going. Perhaps because the genres he chooses to write in are as amorphous as the situations he creates.
Haunting, immaculate stuff. Truly tales of mystery and imagination.
Haunting, immaculate stuff. Truly tales of mystery and imagination.
April 14, 2021
My ratings story by story...
Settling the World *****
The Gift ***
I Did It **
Running Down *****
Land Locked **
Yummie ****
The Causeway ***
Colonising the Future **
The Machine in Shaft Ten ***
A Young Man's Journey to Viriconium ****
Science & the Arts ***
The Incalling ****
The Ice Monkey ****
The East ***
'Doe Lea' ****
Cicisbeo *****
The Crisis *****
Settling the World *****
The Gift ***
I Did It **
Running Down *****
Land Locked **
Yummie ****
The Causeway ***
Colonising the Future **
The Machine in Shaft Ten ***
A Young Man's Journey to Viriconium ****
Science & the Arts ***
The Incalling ****
The Ice Monkey ****
The East ***
'Doe Lea' ****
Cicisbeo *****
The Crisis *****
June 26, 2024
((Original review is hiding below...))
As I suspected on first read, these stories stayed with me. I found my copy of this book again and the stories inside called to me in my bedroom. One night a few months ago I re-read the opening, title story in bed. I set it down, quivering. A few weeks later it called to me again. I read Settling the World again - it remains one of the most stunning pieces of writing I've read. Then I embarked on the rest of the tales.
It seems this is what M John Harrison does - carves these strange, baroque, haunting figurines out of prose and sets them off into the world to bury themselves into your brain like parasites.
Each story in here is nothing less than astonishing. Each one shunts you into liminal space and leaves you trying and failing to crawl back out.
After I turned the last page on the last story, 'The Crisis', I thought to myself - those twenty pages were more intriguing, more richly drawn, more full of ideas, more powerful than most sci fi novels I've read. Much more than fucking Dune, say.
His prose shines and crinkles like beaten gold throughout, too.
Anyway. Can't get more ecstatic than this.
~~~~see below for my more formative thoughts, years prior~~~~
An irresistibly strange and haunting collection of stories. Holding the book is like holding a portal into liminal space, because that just about defines everything Harrison does. Between genres, between styles, between perspectives, between readings, meaning, landscapes.
The stories, even though selected from throughout Harrison's career, seemed to be seeping into one another at times too.
I learned very quickly that it is the sense of place and the atmosphere that is so impactful with his writing. Images and feelings have stayed with me, rather than plots or characters. One feeling in particular will linger, in which I was in a deserted waiting area an hour before taking a ferry. Flies were circling and a far-off baby was screaming and the story entitled The Machine In Shaft Ten had an astonishingly potent effect, making me feel very miserable and very hopeless. (Don't worry it didn't linger too long). I had to literally put the book down for a few days and read something more frivolous. The Gift had me so rapt I nearly missed my tube stop, and remains a highlight.
The prose throughout was various degrees of absolutely stunning, which made every venture worthwhile. I am very glad I read it and I'm going to approach, cautiously, some of Harrison's novels soon.
As I suspected on first read, these stories stayed with me. I found my copy of this book again and the stories inside called to me in my bedroom. One night a few months ago I re-read the opening, title story in bed. I set it down, quivering. A few weeks later it called to me again. I read Settling the World again - it remains one of the most stunning pieces of writing I've read. Then I embarked on the rest of the tales.
It seems this is what M John Harrison does - carves these strange, baroque, haunting figurines out of prose and sets them off into the world to bury themselves into your brain like parasites.
Each story in here is nothing less than astonishing. Each one shunts you into liminal space and leaves you trying and failing to crawl back out.
After I turned the last page on the last story, 'The Crisis', I thought to myself - those twenty pages were more intriguing, more richly drawn, more full of ideas, more powerful than most sci fi novels I've read. Much more than fucking Dune, say.
His prose shines and crinkles like beaten gold throughout, too.
Anyway. Can't get more ecstatic than this.
~~~~see below for my more formative thoughts, years prior~~~~
An irresistibly strange and haunting collection of stories. Holding the book is like holding a portal into liminal space, because that just about defines everything Harrison does. Between genres, between styles, between perspectives, between readings, meaning, landscapes.
The stories, even though selected from throughout Harrison's career, seemed to be seeping into one another at times too.
I learned very quickly that it is the sense of place and the atmosphere that is so impactful with his writing. Images and feelings have stayed with me, rather than plots or characters. One feeling in particular will linger, in which I was in a deserted waiting area an hour before taking a ferry. Flies were circling and a far-off baby was screaming and the story entitled The Machine In Shaft Ten had an astonishingly potent effect, making me feel very miserable and very hopeless. (Don't worry it didn't linger too long). I had to literally put the book down for a few days and read something more frivolous. The Gift had me so rapt I nearly missed my tube stop, and remains a highlight.
The prose throughout was various degrees of absolutely stunning, which made every venture worthwhile. I am very glad I read it and I'm going to approach, cautiously, some of Harrison's novels soon.
April 5, 2022
This wouldn't be my compilation of MJH's best short stories - I'd have liked more from 'Travel Arrangements'. Nevertheless, there are many wonderfully strange and disturbing pieces here. There's always a tension in MJH's work between the vulgar demands of 'plot' and the beautifully observed sociological, natural, and emotional details which surround it, and there are times when the latter overwhelms the narrative (sometimes, he's too poetic for his own good, though as his prose is so exquisite, I'm happy to let him get away with it). There are also times when there's an opacity to events, though that could simply be my failure to understand or appreciate what's going on,
I like him best when he's writing strange, Aickmanish stories such as 'The Incalling' (which I never tire of reading), and the more recent 'Ciscebeo' and 'Doe Lea' (wonderfully haunting and all-too believable). He also has a gift for describing bodily torment (the finale of 'The Crisis' is a case in point). Like Aickman, he's quite happy to build atmosphere and detail at a leisurely pace, with 'Running Down' offering a politicised variant on Peter Van Greenaway's 'The Medusa Touch' (with its classic line, 'I am a man with the power to create catastrophe!'). It doesn't always work - 'I Did It' is pretty slight, and 'Science and the Arts' gestures towards a profundity I'm not sure it actually possesses - but he's always willing to take risks rather than recycle earlier hits, and there's still a lot here to delight the discerning reader. For a more comprehensive selection with a lot of revealing authorial comments, I'd recommend the earlier compilation, 'Things That Never Happen', but this one is a great addition to any Weird bookshelf.
I like him best when he's writing strange, Aickmanish stories such as 'The Incalling' (which I never tire of reading), and the more recent 'Ciscebeo' and 'Doe Lea' (wonderfully haunting and all-too believable). He also has a gift for describing bodily torment (the finale of 'The Crisis' is a case in point). Like Aickman, he's quite happy to build atmosphere and detail at a leisurely pace, with 'Running Down' offering a politicised variant on Peter Van Greenaway's 'The Medusa Touch' (with its classic line, 'I am a man with the power to create catastrophe!'). It doesn't always work - 'I Did It' is pretty slight, and 'Science and the Arts' gestures towards a profundity I'm not sure it actually possesses - but he's always willing to take risks rather than recycle earlier hits, and there's still a lot here to delight the discerning reader. For a more comprehensive selection with a lot of revealing authorial comments, I'd recommend the earlier compilation, 'Things That Never Happen', but this one is a great addition to any Weird bookshelf.
Read
June 12, 2021To my taste, the best stories in the book are those in which the weird intrudes on the ordinary (in an Aickmanesque fashion), rather than those in which the premise is a strange science-fiction in itself. That said, Harrison's elliptical style makes even the sci-fi stories never less than intriguing. I'm looking forward to seeing how Harrison sustains the unsettling and disorienting mood in a novel-length narrative.
August 6, 2021
Really one of my favorite living authors. I would say that these short stories tend to unsettle one, but that's not quite accurate. I think it's more that I got done with many of them and didn't have a quick, easy way to place them, to know what they were doing. And that doesn't happen too often. Among other things, there's a nice story in here, "I Did It," about a man who puts an axe in his face, that is among my new favorite of all time short stories.
October 14, 2025
It's often tough-going in an M. John Harrison story. For the characters, I mean. People are either maniacally climbing upward, or perilously plunging downward, or relentlessly pursuing each other through something or other: rubble, dirt, dust, garbage, disease, real estate, darkness, mental illness, reason.
It's often tough-going in an M. John Harrison story. For the reader, too, I mean. There's the words you know and the words you most certainly don't yet, and then the... psychogeomorphological... meaning of it all, which is never lovingly set and lit for you. Rather, it's even more willingly set across the flotsam of time, people and place, each one of those things more shadowy than the last.
But Harrison seems largely celebrated for this hard-won access to anything. It's likely the very unique reader who can penetrate and appreciate it all. For this reader, his Virconium and Kefahuchi world works will forever be unexplored. I've taken so many running starts at Light, and I simply can't break through. Why I keep trying is as murky to me as to why I can't make it, other than the fact that you don't have to read more than three sentences by Harrison and know the guy knows what he's doing.
This collection of short pieces that originally appeared in some out-of-print collection was a little more merciful with me. What I loved:
* Settling the World: probably something to the fact that this is the piece that lends the collection its name; this one bolsters its already great pitch-black idea (collosal spider-at-the-end-of-the-highway-that-god-built) with some panicky shoot-out vibes that feel wonderfully, incongruously, like some 80s/90s indie thriller film
* The Machine in Shaft Ten: a man sets out to destroy the machine embedded at the earth's core that translates human emotion into consumable energy for an alien race, as everyone's been all "what's it all for" ever since it was discovered
* Science and the Arts: a sneaky hideaway inside of a collection with some unapologetically fantastical premises, this is a great little bit about humans make it so complicated when they like each other
* Running Down: similar to "Science and the Arts", this one's about the harrowing complexity of human relationships (specifically the concept of "frenemies" here) but this one also opts occasionally dips into the Weird fiction paintbox
All in all: glad I read this collection; I might try my hand at one more set of short stories by the author, as he's very talented, but he makes you work for it more than your average word-slinger.
It's often tough-going in an M. John Harrison story. For the reader, too, I mean. There's the words you know and the words you most certainly don't yet, and then the... psychogeomorphological... meaning of it all, which is never lovingly set and lit for you. Rather, it's even more willingly set across the flotsam of time, people and place, each one of those things more shadowy than the last.
But Harrison seems largely celebrated for this hard-won access to anything. It's likely the very unique reader who can penetrate and appreciate it all. For this reader, his Virconium and Kefahuchi world works will forever be unexplored. I've taken so many running starts at Light, and I simply can't break through. Why I keep trying is as murky to me as to why I can't make it, other than the fact that you don't have to read more than three sentences by Harrison and know the guy knows what he's doing.
This collection of short pieces that originally appeared in some out-of-print collection was a little more merciful with me. What I loved:
* Settling the World: probably something to the fact that this is the piece that lends the collection its name; this one bolsters its already great pitch-black idea (collosal spider-at-the-end-of-the-highway-that-god-built) with some panicky shoot-out vibes that feel wonderfully, incongruously, like some 80s/90s indie thriller film
* The Machine in Shaft Ten: a man sets out to destroy the machine embedded at the earth's core that translates human emotion into consumable energy for an alien race, as everyone's been all "what's it all for" ever since it was discovered
* Science and the Arts: a sneaky hideaway inside of a collection with some unapologetically fantastical premises, this is a great little bit about humans make it so complicated when they like each other
* Running Down: similar to "Science and the Arts", this one's about the harrowing complexity of human relationships (specifically the concept of "frenemies" here) but this one also opts occasionally dips into the Weird fiction paintbox
All in all: glad I read this collection; I might try my hand at one more set of short stories by the author, as he's very talented, but he makes you work for it more than your average word-slinger.
February 6, 2026
I’m not usually a fan of short story collections, and this book didn’t completely change that. A couple of the stories are genuinely excellent and show just how good Harrison can be in the shorter format — sharp, unsettling, and thought-provoking. However, many of the stories felt only okay, often because they seemed to end just as they were becoming truly interesting. I found myself wishing Harrison had spent more time expanding certain ideas or characters. There were also one or two stories that felt flat to me and never quite developed into anything memorable.
Although the collection is often labelled as science fiction, only a minority of the stories lean heavily into genre ideas. Most focus instead on relationships, emotional ambiguity, memory, and psychological unease. Where the book consistently worked for me was in Harrison’s atmosphere and prose. Even when a story wasn’t gripping me narratively, his language, rhythm, and striking turns of phrase kept me reading. Overall, while this collection didn’t fully win me over, it did convince me that Harrison is an author worth continuing with — next time, though, I’d rather invest in one of his longer novels where his ideas and characters have more room to develop.
Although the collection is often labelled as science fiction, only a minority of the stories lean heavily into genre ideas. Most focus instead on relationships, emotional ambiguity, memory, and psychological unease. Where the book consistently worked for me was in Harrison’s atmosphere and prose. Even when a story wasn’t gripping me narratively, his language, rhythm, and striking turns of phrase kept me reading. Overall, while this collection didn’t fully win me over, it did convince me that Harrison is an author worth continuing with — next time, though, I’d rather invest in one of his longer novels where his ideas and characters have more room to develop.
February 16, 2023
There aren’t many writers who can world-build with the imaginative dexterity of Tolkien and map the liminal with the creepy ambiguity of Robert Aickman while conjuring the absolute truth of underprivileged and working class milieus with the kind of tactile detail that nobody has managed since Alan Sillitoe. In fact, scratch that: there’s only one writer who can achieve all this - without, I must add, seemingly even remotely derivative - and that’s M. John Harrison. This rich, immersive, haunting and often horribly disturbing cross section of fifty years of his short fiction is an absolute must for anyone with an interest in the effect that words, carefully crafted and honed, can have on the mind, the dreams and the subconscious of the reader.
January 23, 2024
It's not often that one comes across a collection of short stories that is so finely balanced. Very often - too often - the actual short stories are jammed like packing confetti around a novella that couldn't stand the rigours of transport alone possessing neither the perfection of the shorter, nor the structural integrity of the longer forms. A short story ought to be short and these are. There's nothing here that can't be read in the bedtime hour between the wife nodding off and the irresistible pull of sleep.
November 25, 2025
I'm not sure this author is for me. He writes very well and his stories are atmospheric and definitely weird/interesting, but I prefer character driven stories/plots. These stories were mostly descriptions of worlds that were just slightly off of our own, which I found interesting, but they don't hook me like a good character does. Of the 15+ stories in it, I only really liked maybe 3 of them becuase those ones focused more on the main characters of those stories. He's definitely a good author, but just not my thing I think.
July 26, 2024
Settling The World (1975): ••••
The Gift (1988): ••••
I Did It (1996): •••
Running Down (1975): •••••
Land Locked (2020): •••
Yummie (2017): •••
The Causeway (1971): ••••
Colonising the Future (2020): •••
The Machine in Shaft Ten (1972): ••••
A Young Man’s Journey to Viricorium (1985): •••••
Science & the Arts (2003): •••
The Incalling (1978): •••••
The Ice Monkey (1980): •••••
The East (1996): ••••
“Doe Lea” (2019): ••••
Cicisbeo (2003): ••••
The Crisis (2017): •••
The Gift (1988): ••••
I Did It (1996): •••
Running Down (1975): •••••
Land Locked (2020): •••
Yummie (2017): •••
The Causeway (1971): ••••
Colonising the Future (2020): •••
The Machine in Shaft Ten (1972): ••••
A Young Man’s Journey to Viricorium (1985): •••••
Science & the Arts (2003): •••
The Incalling (1978): •••••
The Ice Monkey (1980): •••••
The East (1996): ••••
“Doe Lea” (2019): ••••
Cicisbeo (2003): ••••
The Crisis (2017): •••
September 16, 2025
In the story "The East", the narrator says of another character:
"His English was very good indeed. There was never any doubt about his English. But the story he told had such a skewed feel it was like a bad translation, full of innuendos just where you wanted clarity. The language he couched it in was good, it was more than good. The story itself was what needed translating. This he failed to do."
I find that describes the actual book really well.
"His English was very good indeed. There was never any doubt about his English. But the story he told had such a skewed feel it was like a bad translation, full of innuendos just where you wanted clarity. The language he couched it in was good, it was more than good. The story itself was what needed translating. This he failed to do."
I find that describes the actual book really well.
July 17, 2021
Liminal stories from somewhere else that is not quite here but seem to exist here. The weird and the prosaic. Tarkovsky cinema scapes of decaying urban landscapes. It's all very unsettling in the world of M John Harrison. The world is a veneer on the surface of a shabby and over used and never fully explained series of twilight zones.
February 8, 2026
Settling the World ~ ★★★★
The Gift ~ ★★★★
I Did It ~ ★★
Running Down ~ ★★★
Land Locked ~ ★★★
Yummie ~ ★★★★
The Causeway ~ ★★★★
Colonising the Future ~ ★★
The Machine in Shaft Ten ~ ★★★
A Young Man’s Journey to Viriconium ~ ★★★★
Science & the Arts ~ ★★★
The Incalling ~ ★★★★
The Ice Monkey ~ ★★★★
The East ~ ★★★★
‘Doe Lea’ ~ ★★★★
Cicisbeo ~ ★★★
The Crisis ~ ★★★
The Gift ~ ★★★★
I Did It ~ ★★
Running Down ~ ★★★
Land Locked ~ ★★★
Yummie ~ ★★★★
The Causeway ~ ★★★★
Colonising the Future ~ ★★
The Machine in Shaft Ten ~ ★★★
A Young Man’s Journey to Viriconium ~ ★★★★
Science & the Arts ~ ★★★
The Incalling ~ ★★★★
The Ice Monkey ~ ★★★★
The East ~ ★★★★
‘Doe Lea’ ~ ★★★★
Cicisbeo ~ ★★★
The Crisis ~ ★★★
October 7, 2023
This was a very agreeable collection even though at least a quarter of the stories are variations on "disaffected Londoner observes dubious/seedy/weird occult proceedings" (not complaining, just noting).
December 18, 2021
Excellent, stories which often feel impossible, like there are basic rules slipping imperceptibly. The Crisis and The Gift were highlights for me.
March 9, 2022
The master
April 18, 2022
Strange tales, strangely crafted yet beautifully told
March 21, 2024
Brilliant as always.
November 27, 2024
Pure mastery of prose. M John Harrison is almost surgical in his writing, one word or a sentence can throw your brain and the story totally and almost subliminally off kilter. A fantastic collection.
May 7, 2025
8/10 stars
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