available soon
by uzwi
Cave & Julia, still doing well as a Kindle Single, will be joined in the autumn by 4th Domain, a 10,000 word short story featuring a map, a medium & some weird human genome shenanigans in the suburban badlands of Barnes & East Sheen. Lovecraft meets Aickman.
Between now & then, the new 4th Estate edition of JG Ballard’s The Drought should be out, with my introduction. In 1965/6 I was stunned & hypnotised by The Four Dimensional Nightmare, The Terminal Beach, The Drowned World & The Drought. I felt like one of the new organisms in “The Voices of Time”, redesigned for life in conditions which hadn’t yet appeared, an environment the parameters of which could only be intuited. I hardly knew what to do with myself. I would have been utterly elated but also rather shocked to know that nearly fifty years later I’d be writing an introduction to The Drought. To tell the truth, I’m still excited.
This intro joins up with similar efforts I’ve written for Wyndham’s The Day of the Triffids (Heyne 2012, German only) & The Chrysalids (Penguin Modern Classics) to explore the uses of disaster in the UK in the 50s & 60s.
the m john harrison blog 
(Do those Wyndham intros live in the wild somewhere? Writing on UK disaster fiction and would like to read…)
Very good news.
I can’t see the word “Barnes” without feeling a shudder. That leafy suburb for the rich, for the exclusive, for the quiet life in huge houses. And then there’s the Elm Guest House…
Hi Lara. All that will find a place, although the present obsession with Elm Guest House–cleverly adopted by the Tories to get people focussed on past wrongs to divert their attention from present ones–means I probably won’t be able to use my EGH material. Don’t you feel that peoples’ understandable tendency to be obsessed with justice for past wrongs is now being used daily against them? I do. A very powerful weapon in the spin doctor’s arsenal. Especially clever in this case because it seems to show politicians in general (& Tories in particular) being “transparent”. Yes, they’re all for transparency a generation too late. Meanwhile, while we hate the paedos & other “historical” wrongdoers & wrongdoings, the NHS is being destroyed in front of us along with most of the other genuine political gains of the last 70 or so years. Absurd.
Brendan: I DM’d you.
I do think it’s amusing that under the prevailing small & large c conservatism, even justice is retro. Stockbroker Tudor justice for half-timbered crimes. The Tories, like anyone in power, happy to hang their own ancestors in public to draw attention from what’s happening now in front of people’s noses. It’s a new twist on the Heritage Industry.
“Don’t you feel that peoples’ understandable tendency to be obsessed with justice for past wrongs is now being used daily against them?” Well, yes, I do, in a way, but I’m not sure I think that this EGH stuff (& more, etc.) is simply that. I mean, I think I’d argue that everything seems too be used daily against us these days. Very little is for us. And, if anything, this further unravelling of the establishment – the church (of course) too, as well as Westminster – only serves to further undermine the authority of that lot in power, and of power itself if you get me. So, yes, it is a “powerful weapon in the spin doctor’s arsenal”, but I don’t think it’s only that. And I’m not sure it’s good for the current crowd of Tories that this is all coming out now.
The thing is, the way I see it, *everything* is a distraction from what is really going down. To borrow from a piece published this weekend (a piece which probably made many people who read your fab blog convulse with irritation, but which I really enjoyed!) “reality [is] a stage set”.
Have I made any sense at all?
Plenty of sense. I just suddenly thought (& am thinking): What if they’ve learned to manage their own unraveling to their advantage? Wouldn’t that mean that it was no longer an unraveling but just another spinnable part of the process. So that their authority is maintained despite what looks like an unraveling–in fact via what looks like an unraveling? That can keep you awake at night. (Catching some politicians & churchpeople actually at it in today’s equivalent of EGH would be devastating to them: but that’s never going to happen, for the same reasons it didn’t happen when EGH was a hot number.)
But I guess this is what you mean in your second para–so on the essentials we agree. I’m just interested in, & carried away by, the concept of Heritage Crime–a subset of the war against previous generations–soft targeting. Suits the left as much as the right, really. If you’re without contemporary agency it’s easier to attack the past than admit your failures, put yourself back together & get on the long hard road again.
I’m really into getting carried away by this too. It’s just too good [= too awful] to not enjoy it. I *really* **really** ***really*** like the idea of their managing of their unraveling. It’s brilliant. [Oh God, it’s House of Cards again.]
But then, so much mainstream politics is a managed reaction punch to personal unravelling – Norman Tebbit must still fume over missing Syd and the Floyd at UFO back in ’67.
I’m working my way through the new Faber editions of Aickman at the moment (though ‘working’ is completely the wrong word), so Harrison does Lovecraft-meets-Aickman sounds like the pinnacle of readerly nirvana right now; can’t wait.