Here’s the cover of the US (Night Shade Books) edition of Empty Space, published on March 5th. I’m not sure which of the major female characters the image represents, but perhaps neither the 60 year old East Sussex widow nor the genetically modified sex worker. Meanwhile, Publishers Weekly describes the book as “The third in genre legend Harrison’s Kefahuchi Tract sequence, following Light (2002) and Nova Swing (2007) … a self-referential mash-up of comedic horror and space opera caricature … most characters wallow in a state of existential angst and quantum absurdity, eventually coming to imaginatively grisly ends or beginnings, in a universe where sexual tourism powers economies and ‘stars and galaxies… look almost as remarkable as a new pair of Minnie Sittelman fuck-me pumps.’” So there you go. Order your copy now.
“by turns brilliantly satirical, impenetrably dense, and deliberately crude”
Filed under empty space
Sweet!!!
Um, the assistant?
And sorry to see you suffer the L word.
That’s their way of saying we all know you are the local guy who can solve that unsolvable problem the best climber turns up to watch.
Yeah, that’s the assistant (The Assistant?), IMO.
Do we get free fuck-me pumps with every copy? From legend to leg-end, uncle!
You do not, martm. Buy your own fuck-me pumps.
Was wondering if I was the only one who didn’t know who Minnie Stittleman is, but The Great Google cannot find her either.
Suspecting she made FMPs for Cass Elliott, Janis Joplin, Karen Carpenter, and Amy Winehouse…
Congratulations on the great reviews, Mike, all thoroughly deserved. I agree it’s the assistant on the cover (please name the artist who drew her btw!), and the occultation of the cat’s eye hints at the ‘more human than human’ augmentations and estrangements. However, for me Sam Green’s limp levitating corpse on the UK cover (which I first thought was Toni Reno but couldn’t be as you describe him wearing a jacket) says more about the abjection of so many of the bodies in the trilogy. Now when I catch sight of it, it also reminds me of the passage that made me weep in Chap 20 – the one about the process of becoming a K-pilot (“They core your spine”…)
Hi John. True. Sam Green’s image is raw. Would “abjectification” be a meaningful concept? I don’t know who painted the Night Shade cover but I’ll try to find out.
Very good. I don’t know if, with ‘abjectification’ you’ve just coined a neologism, but to me it suggests an appropriately sublime tension between the points at which the body abjectly splurges beyond coherence, ceasing to be or function as one object or one point of reference (“…the symptoms of MS lupus and schizophrenia…”) and the multifarious external forces/interventions that attempt to keep it in one place in order to make it so (“They strap you down”).
The creation of a space of abjection.
You put it so much more succinctly than I…
Can’t take credit for “space of abjection”, I think that goes all the way back to Kristeva. Also sad to find that “abjectification” has already got a fair bit of mileage on it, although maybe not as a depoliticised term for the professional horror writer’s technique. (Is there any possible meaning for “depoliticised” there?)
Ha, I suppressed a Kristeva quote earlier. It tickles to watch you know these things.
Have you thought of sending her Empty Space by the way?
She’s from Autotelia too, she will straight out gasp in joissance.
If the trilogy’s translated into French, that is, I don’t think her English is all that hot.
Is it?
Hi Ina. I’d be too shy. After all, it’s Kristeva. Light went into French, under one of those meaningless but weirdly overheated SF titles (I associate them with Ace books in 1962), leading to the predictable result: SF readers found it not to be proper science fiction, while title & cover tempted no one else to buy it. Shades of Timescape in the 80s, rebadging In Viriconium as The Floating Gods. I think there’s some possibility that ES might see a translation, perhaps even under the name I gave it.
the first time i saw the Sam Green cover (w/c i love love love, probably my favorite cover image of all time &c – a clear exaggeration but no irony intended, honest) i thought it was some kind of odd space toad. & loved it anyway. no kidding.