Product Description

It is some time after Ed Chianese's trip into the Kefahuchi Tract. A major industry of the Halo is now tourism. The Tract has begun to expand and change, but, more problematically, parts of it have also begun to fall to earth, piecemeal, on the Beach planets. We are in a city called Raintown, perhaps on New Venusport or Motel Splendido: next to the city is the event site, the zone, from out of which pour new, inexplicable artefacts, organisms and escapes of living algorithm - the wrong physics loose in the universe. They can cause plague and change. An entire department of the local police, Site Crime, exists to stop them being imported into the city by adventurers, entradistas, and the men known as 'travel agents', profiteers who can manage - or think they can manage -the bad physics, skewed geographies and psychic onslaughts of the event site. But now a new class of semi-biological artefact is finding its way out of the site, and this may be more than anyone can handle.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #451551 in Books
• Published on: 2006-11-09
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 247 pages

Sam Thompson, TLS
'Nova Swing begins to look like not only state-of-the-art noir SF, but a cunning cryptogram of a novel, as well.'

Review
'Nova Swing begins to look like not only state-of-the-art noir SF, but a cunning cryptogram of a novel, as well.' (Sam Thompson TLS )

'Harrison is a fine writer whose bleak vision draws much of its power from well observed descriptions of the real world.' (Lisa Tuttle THE TIMES )

"Harrison's gloomy, seedy world is a constant delight of precise images, of sounds half-heard on the wind that delight even more than they disturb. Harrison writes with tremendous panache. A Poet of decay." (Roz Kaveney THE INDEPENDENT )

"There are moments of high science fiction action, beautifully sustained by Harrison." (John Clute THE GUARDIAN )

"Nova Swing is chilling, enigmatic, often darkly funny and beautifully written." (David Langford SFX )

"It reads like mainstream fiction soaked in noir. Coloured by longing and wonder, 'Nova Swing' is filled with a humanity that makes it as substantial as it is dazzling." (Nocholas Royle TIME OUT )

"The lives touched by the novel's inchoate enigmas are disturbingly real, and Harrison's vision of the longing of failed lives disturbingly authentic. (Gary K Wolfe LOCUS )

"Harrison's deliciously scuzzy prose style and warped ideas grab you and drag you through the pages that he has populated with some memorably bizarre characters. Join the fan club while it's still exclusive." (Dave Golder BBC FOCUS )

"Harrison writes with tremendous panache of vast machines and bizarre cosmetic therapies and about the reaches between stars. Harrison is a poet of decay." (Roz Kaveney THE INDEPENDENT )

"Harrison's considerable imagination runs far and wide." (SCOTLAND ON SUNDAY )

David Langford, SFX
"Nova Swing is chilling, enigmatic, often darkly funny and beautifully written."

Customer Reviews

Space Noir...
Nova Swing manages to combine a number of genres - the film noir and sci-fi being the main elements. It follows the exploits of Vic Serotonin as he ventures into the forbidden zone where physics and reality are forever changing - he does this as a "tour operator" taking in the curious... and others. The novel contains many of the recurring elements of Harrison's works with beautifully described locations and complex characters. It also focuses in on many of the sub-characters - what do the events mean to them and what are they trying to achieve. If you like Harrison's work you will not be disappointed but I would recommend other novels by this author rather than coming to this novel first.

A worthy sucessor to Light.....
'Nova Swing' is M John Harrison's sequel to 2003's 'Light', a book that marked a welcome return to Science-Fiction. Harrison can be a polarising writer and 'Nova Swing' does nothing to change this.

The story is loosely related to 'Light' and concerns a cat and mouse game between detective and 'tour operator' Vic Serotonin. Serotonin risks all by routinely going into the 'event site', a place where normal laws of physics don't seem to apply and the risk to the person's mind seems huge.

Whereas 'Light' was arguably a character driven piece that wrapped three narratives into an intense conclusion, 'Nova Swing' allows its two main characters to fade into the background, instead choosing to explore the effects of the event site on the secondary characters in the book. Initially this move can seem confusing, but to me it enabled the book to build to a much richer and ambiguous conclusion than 'Light'. Harrison's prose (as always), is a wonder and the dark noir world will feel instantly familiar to those familiar with the Cyberpunk genre.

This is a book that does not offer up any easy answers, it makes you work for them. For that alone, I highly reccomend it.

And how well the man writes. . .
Genre novels are never considered for the Booker prize. And never mind that middle-class angst is as much a genre as crime or science/weird fiction. When challenged, the keepers of the provincial book-club flame murmur disparagingly that, of course, science fiction writers are, well, not that good, are they? Certainly not the kind of work to offer ladies-who-lunch in Tunbridge Wells, with whom the publishing industry is curiously obsessed. . .as it is with celebrity, surely the publishing equivalent of hedge funds. Trouble being that publishing is infested with marketeers convinced books are the same as detergent or baked beans; that you can turn anything into a 'brand' and that the market rules, okay.
Except this is, actually, piss-poor marketing. The best companies have always sought to innovate, to lead rather than follow. But nowadays all too many publishers play follow-my-leader, scared to develop the next big thing themselves, terrified they'll miss out when someone else does.
The point being that M John Harrison ought, by now, to be one of Britain's best known, most justly celebrated, authors. Not only because he deals with complex subjects - quantum mechanics, Gnosticism, humanity's future - but because the man writes like an angel, fallen or otherwise. Nova Swing is a follow up to 'Light', which was one of the most significant novels of any genre over the past twenty years. 'Swing' deals with the (un)reality of a quantum universe, combined with a film-noir plot. It is, like all Harrison's work, beautifully written and with that seemingly effortless economy and precision which marks the truly great writer. Buy this book. Read this book. Be enthralled.