the sunken land continues to rise
by uzwi
TSL is already my most successful novel. Nothing prepared me for the Goldsmiths prize; or for Russell T Davies’s recent fantastic & heartwarming review over on Instagram. It’s out in paperback in the UK now, & also available for preorder in the US and Canada.
In other news, the next book, tentatively entitled Fall Lines, or perhaps Fault Lines, or perhaps something else altogether, is finished and taking its first charming baby steps into what it sees as a shiny new world of possibility. It’s a compiled anti-memoir; a heavily fragmented nonfiction doped with fictional elements; a kind of How-to-Write; and a meditation on the impossibility of a coherent self (let alone the self’s looking back). An early responder called it “a book that invents a form and teaches you how to read it as you go along”. We shall have to hope that’s a good practical assessment.
It has an accompanying secret project, very exciting, more of which when everything’s sorted out.
Meanwhile, a new novel potters along, trying to understand the difference between disaster as its own retrospective & disaster as a series of moments in what used to be called “current affairs”. Clearly, one of the things both the classic 1950s disaster novel and the contemporary disaster novel got wrong was to regard the catastrophe as a complete object–an historical event with identifiable timelines and identifiable causalities, explorable as if by hindsight–rather than the patchy, emergent & incoherently combinative process it appears to be to its subjects as it unscrolls.
The big question today is: in a slow disaster like ours, when do you give up and admit that something has gone wrong? How does the prevailing culture persuade the frogs to stay in the pot? That is, to what extent will people learn to take it all for granted? And how grotesque might that look, late-ish on in the process? (Actually, it isn’t about any of that.)
the m john harrison blog 
Can’t wait for the ‘anti-memoir’ that is a ‘how to write’…!
It’s been so wonderful seeing TSL (and all your work) getting the recognition it deserves. And all those new projects sound so tantalising…. Waiting with bated breath!!!!!
Hi kaggsy, I’ve enjoyed every minute of it. I’m hoping you’ll like the new one.
Marko, hi & thanks. It’ll be a while before it sees the light of day, I expect.
Re: ‘The big question today is: in a slow disaster like ours, when do you give up and admit that something has gone wrong? How does the prevailing culture persuade the frogs to stay in the pot? That is, to what extent will people learn to take it all for granted?’
I can’t envision a time when those who deny culpability (there’s a whole generation of them) will ever admit that something has gone wrong since the presentation of a surface morality that is largely based upon accusatory polemics relieves them of any sort of feeling that would allow them to give up & make that admission – how can you become jaded when there is someone else to blame for the wreckage of existence? – this sort of Sartrean Bad Faith invigorates such people – embracing the illusory causality that seems to have an obvious conclusion & a way to control this conclusion – in terms of the prevailing culture I will simply say Nietzche’s concept of the herd mentality is alive & well
I’d be looking at the crux–the point at which people begin to admit collectively that something has gone wrong–less in terms of ideology & discourse than in practical terms. That seems to be the point of the disaster novel anyway: no one but horticulturalists care about the Triffids until, in combination with a plague of blindness, they make it impossible to live a middle class life. At which single, definable point, the middle class narrator is forced to take notice of something he already knew about. This is, in a sense, a cheat or (to give it the benefit of the doubt) a thought experiment, enabled by regarding the catastrophe as a known, historically completed object, rather than something running as a real-time environment. It’s a “fast” disaster in that sense–it emerges suddenly, is narrated in retrospect & is already beginning to be over by the end of the story. It’s a “human challenge”, encountered and dealt with after sufficient narrative vicissitude. I’m interested in a slow disaster, and how bizarre current affairs have to become before people are forced into the existential mode, and even then how reluctant they might be to give up the anthropocentric sense that the world is still organised for or by them. Also what aspects of the existential mode they would easily absorb into their pre-disaster assumptions about behaviour. (See Europe, during & immediately post WW2. The key disaster novels of the 1950s are in fact The Tin Drum, Cat & Mouse and Dog Years.)
But anyway, no thought experiments here: none of it will be made obvious or obviously centralised, a la Wyndham–the new book will simply be as obliquely-delivered, psychically eroded & presentationally weird as anything of mine. It will force you into the same epistemic space as the characters. How do you act when you don’t–can’t–actually know what’s happening?