Nova Swing

Though Harrison himself admits that 'Nova Swing' can stand on it's own, it's best enjoyed if you've read his previous book 'Light', which introduces the legendary pilot Ed Chianese and the strange phenomenon known as 'The Kefahuchi Tract' - an area in space of alternate reality and strange physics. 'Nova Swing' uses this base with a new twist ... The Kefahuchi Tract has shifted, and part of it has fallen to earth in what is known as the Saudade Event Site. 'Nova Swing' is a complex novel, a generous novel; a character driven novel though it's still centered around an event that is slowly expanding. The characters are not only unique in their formation but also in the very naming of them - Harrison affectedly creating character in the very names of his protagonists. Vic Serotonin is a travel agent; but not the sort you'd expect to run into booking a tour with one of the great space-cruise ships docked in the non-corporate port of Saudade. For the right price, Vic will take you into the Event Site. On his heels though, is police investigator Lens Aschemann who bears a striking resemblance to the elder Albert Einstein. With Lens is an "enhanced" assistant, data streams running down the inside of her arm, who transferred over from Sports Crime. Vic can be seen at anytime in Liv Hula's bar called Black Cat White Cat, dangerously close to the Event Site, and named so after the streams of black and white cats that flow from the Event Site every morning. It's in Liv Hula's bar that Mrs. Elizabeth Kielar contracts Vic to take her into the site. Not only Vic but Liv is suspicious, due to the fact that Kielar - in her glamorous clothing and real fur coat - don't fit the stereotypical "traveler". She's an enigma, and why she insists on entering the site is a mystery. Vic's ever-present sidekick, Fat Antoyne Messner, deserts him after Irene The Mona begins to pay attention to him. (A Mona is a woman who's undergone body redesign to become Barbie-like with peppermint smelling hair). After Vic, in other ways, are Paulie DeRaad, a smuggler who paid good money for an artifact from the Event Site that is now changing him into something unthinkable. Emil Bonadventure, suffering his own side effects from years as a renegade pilot and expeditions into the Event Site, tries and fails to warn Vic, just as Emil's "daughter" (read to fully understand this) eventually writes off Vic and refuses to give him Emil's secret journal. In a world of "smart tattoos", body redesign and re-engineering, space cruises along the Beach and Radio Bay - Vic continues his tours and Paulie continues to decay, Aschermann cruises Saudade's streets in his vintage pink Cadillac and Liv Hula runs her bar night and day - the Event Site continues to expand and pour forth ruinous people and things from the most unlikely locations. Does an ending really come to all things, or is an ending a beginning to some? Despite its multifaceted and intricate plot, 'Nova Swing' is a very e

"Nova Swing" is a terse, jazz-inflected gem of a space opera science fiction novel from British writer M. John Harrison. An exhilarating literary trek replete with references to such familiar motifs as spaceships, androids and alien life intermingled with hard-boiled detective fiction of the kind favored by the likes of Chandler, Hammett and the early William Gibson. However, it isn't cyberpunk, but its own unique literary genre, which nonetheless demonstrates the creative literary potential of classic space opera science fiction. M. John Harrison has written a novel truly inspired by its jazz motifs, spinning complex riffs on characters and the strange locale of twisted space and time known as the Saudade Event Site; the complex geography favored by the novel's lead protagonist, one Vic Serotonin, who functions as a "travel agent" to and from this bizarre location. Harrison demonstrates that he is a superlative prose stylist and spinner of yarns as memorable as any from the likes of China Mieville or Iain M. Banks, two of his fellow distinguished contemporaries in British science fiction. Harrison has written a jazz-inflected gem of a novel that deserves ample recognition as among the finest science fiction novels published in the English language during this decade.

In Nova Swing, Harrison takes us back to the universe of Light, but this is a very different novel. At the core Nova Swing is less space opera and more of a personal story, with a mystery/film noir edge to it. Readers of George Alec Effinger's Marîd Audran novels like A Fire in the Sun will feel right at home. The Saudade Event Site is the stuff of dreams and nightmares and Harrison is not afraid to plunge us and his characters into the fire. The results are enlightening, frustrating and ultimately moving. In the end, Harrison is such a talented writer that this could be a recipe book and still be great reading. Nova Swing is not at all what I expected, but much more than I had hoped for. I'd rank it with the finest work of PK Dick and JG Ballard for the pure intensity of vision. Worth enjoying regularly.

For those with a sf noir bent and a decidedly oblique sense of the nature of reality, consciousness and our debatable right to our place in the universe this book is for you. Harrsion sets an eclectic table with piquant appetizers of character and hard science while providing a light-eaters entrée of plot. No just deserts.

I am a fan of Harrison's work and think his Viriconium series is one of the most underated in the genre. I also found Nova Swing to be a small gem of a book. In newer science fiction, I hope to find one of 3 things: compelling characters, a strong sense of place and/or new concepts. Amazingly, this book has all three. It is set in a run down future city which gives the reader a pervasive feeling of decay as in the movie Touch of Evil. Through the city, however, and enclosed by shifting boundries runs the Kefahuchi Tract. This zone changes all who enter it as the cost of retreiving biological artifacts, destabalising technologies and unfathomable organisms. Tour operater Vic Seratonin evades law enforcement authorities who try to limit the importing of strangeness from the zone. The plot moves along quickly and the dialogue between the characters is pitch perfect with few words wasted; coming close to the artistry of Raymond Chandler. One other point: Harrison is very adept at naming his characters so that they enhance the character without hitting the reader over the head. You will meet Seratonin, Paulie Degraaf, Fat Antoyne, Emil Bonaventure and Vic's foil, Lens Aschemann. If you like Light and Nova Swing, try the Viriconium books now available in a single volume.