mike harrison
@mjohnharrison
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Goldsmiths Prize 2020 | Booker Prize jury, 2022 | Wish I Was Here, p/b: 7 March 2024. Also at @mjohnharrison .bsky.social and @mjohnharrison @mastodon .social
Joined March 2012
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Pinned Tweet
I see now that Twitter's "What's happening?" was never an invitation. It was always a cry of despair.
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In this ludicrously unlikely sci fi disaster novel, a bat disease is killing off human beings in numbers & climate change has begun to destabilise the earth's axis. At the same time society is presented as stable & as if nothing has changed. One star.
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Best description yet of writing a book.
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This cat needed a desk from which to run his crime syndicate. He has invented crimes so new no one understands them yet. It's a complex business, but it gives him a certain amusement.
We took in a foster cat this week and I can’t tell you how much joy he is giving me. He is a grade A beefcate with zero neck and a delicate little meow like the tinkling of a bell. Here he is completely owning John’s desk area. John took his work and moved TO THE FLOOR.
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To the degree that science fiction has anything to do with the future, it describes the present as accurately as possible and makes its bet on that.
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click
Once again thinkin’ about the giant western red cedar trees that washed up on La Push beach in Washington and how vast and terrifying the ocean truly is.
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The weird idea that because you appear to have agency in some circumstances, you have agency in all circumstances.
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This completely, utterly, unapologetically 100% description of the effect fiction should produce
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seems fair
Before having their chests cut open and their hearts pulled out, Aztec human-sacrifice victims were given a cup of hot chocolate.
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you think these are funny until you see them hunt
An eighteenth-century lion, prepared by a taxidermist who had never seen a lion. In the royal collections at Gripsholms Castle, Sweden.
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HM Government’s next job could be in the workshop of the prison where they’re serving their sentences for corruption. They just don’t know it yet.
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Being 76 has its drawbacks, but I’m already enjoying it better than 26, which was nothing much more than anxiety on a stick.
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A book is weird because you finish it 18 months before it comes out. Also your life changes twice while you're writing it. & you're writing another book at the same time anyway. & both ideas are 12 years old by now. Like that.
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I plan to spend the rest of my life refusing to come down from this nice old tree.
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Remember--
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I cannot possibly begin to answer all these great tweets tonight--for one I am too drunk--but thanks, everyone! & please: that entire shortlist was packed with books I'd have been proud to review, by brilliant writers. So you know what to do!
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Learning to write publishable material is essentially a social process. It's like learning to say, "Oh not so bad, not so bad," when someone asks you how you are, rather than actually telling them anything.
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Do you get your account instantly suspended if you type the words, "Just another idiot-savant who lucked out picking the low-hanging fruit of digital capitalism then mistook himself for the centre of the universe"?
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In all my life I have never been so glad to see the back of anyone. Johnson next.
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These are the flowers, champagne, beard, etc that I was talking about just now.
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A Ballard story. Astronomy retreated to remote places to avoid light pollution but was finally finished off by curtains of satellite junk. Kerans the last astronomer ranges the high deserts with a telescope mounted on the back of a KAMAZ-4911, looking for the golden window...
The Warner and Swasey Observatory in Cleveland, abandoned because of light pollution from the town.
More at
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75 in a few days' time. You arrive there & find you still have potential & think of yourself as having a future & a need for change. Thanks to everyone who understands & supports that.
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The thing that gets clearer & clearer as you get older is to keep developing. As long as they don't like what you're doing now, they'll love it in 20 years time, just the way they're now loving what you did 20 years ago.
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how to write
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Age strips away the number of things you can be bothered to argue about. In that, it's like being young all over again. As a response, "Oh for god's sake fuck off," seems to do well enough at both ends of life.
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That would be it for me. What on earth would be the use of that? I mean, literally. What could I use it for?
CEO Jack Dorsey said Twitter is looking to change the focus from following specific individuals to topics of interest, acknowledging that what's incentivized today on the platform is at odds with the goal of healthy dialogue
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I don't mind a risk. I mind very much who decides I take it.
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Probably just being paranoid but it does seem to me that the French players are quite blatantly trying to get the ball off the English players & run with it to the other end of the field? & isn't that precisely the sort of thing we had Brexit to prevent?
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If you've waited for a certain level of evidence of things being bad, you're already too late. The last forty years is littered not just with dead canaries but dead miners.
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Novel about a police who realises every member of the protest group he's infiltrated is working for a different corporate intelligence unit.
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I forgot this. I was watering the garden the other evening & a blackbird came & sat on the fence not two feet away from me, looked me in the eye & *sang*. I mean, you can laugh all you like but I want to be hearing that sound when I die.
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Don't quite feel as if I'm here any more, but don't quite feel I'm anywhere else either. Twitter's like an empty institutional corrider down which you still catch the odd glimpse of people you used to see all the time. You wave & call out.
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Is he a clever professional clown or is he falling to bits. You'll never know. The effort to understand that, while he turns the world to shit around you, produces a kind of vacuous unease that never peaks as terror. It's an actual nightmare.
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my best advice for writing a prizewinning story is to write a story & see if it wins a prize
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Terrific work here. Places you recognise with a shiver even if you haven't been there. The river of cars in the flooded quarry is straight out of Climbers or Signs of Life. Facets of landscape both those books were trying to feature.
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What Ballard nailed wasn't the future but the impulse behind it, nakedly visible in the present.
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This will be the scandal that defines & clarifies the last two decades' exploitation of housing by private capital. It's a tipping point.
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This is a novel & one of the best I've read. I don't mean the contents of the sign or guesses at the situation. I don't mean it can be *developed* as a novel. I mean this, as it is, without interference, is a novel. I'm giving up now this novel has been written.
One of the best road side signs - on the coast road from Sheildaig to Applecross.
I would love to know what the etc is.
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Or to fail to find it & not be made whole, or to find it was never missing or never existed, or find it was the wrong forest, or the wrong idea about forests, or the wrong idea about people or wholeness...
‘All tales are at some level a journey into the woods to find the missing part of us, to retrieve it and make ourselves whole. Storytelling is as simple - and complex - as that. That's the pattern. That's how we tell stories.’ John Yorke, Into the Woods.
#folklorethursday
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Conspiracy theories now replaced by actual conspiracies.
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My birthday. I'm 3/4 the way through the oddest novel I ever wrote. I don't care who I am any more. I've got Rhiannon Giddens' "Ruby" turned up to 11 & I'm wondering why people like her aren't in charge of the world. It's sunny.
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"So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into Four Seasons Total Landscaping.”
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86% of hobbits who expressed a preference on passport colour have never applied to leave the shire.
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A magpie just came in the kitchen & ate the cat food. It knew I was there. It kept looking up at me. Didn't leave until I laughed out loud.
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The most successful people I've met were
Largely uninhabited
Nematode dependent
Sublunary
Shaped like pie
Next
Forthright but dishonest
Boxy in wrist & ankle
A few standard deviations away from the model being tested
Stylistically underprepared
Dense in a way I couldn't define
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what's the term for taking something away from a population, then redefining it & selling it back to them, in clumps & at a profit
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The god knows how many millionth writing tip: I hate self help & all kinds of positivity cheer-up language, but you've got to be on your own team & more importantly you've got to be sure your team is on your team too, rather than you being on theirs.
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nice to see people dropping neatly & without fuss into their post-WW2 UK comedy stereotypes, here's the Secretly Beloved Jobsworth
Taken on Golders Green high street by a friend of my uncle's: cop writes up shopkeeper for drawing *in chalk* lines to keep her customers two metres apart.
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writer mauled by sheep
horrific scenes in quiet shropshire valley
"I never saw it coming"
photo:
@phillipscath
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Just to remind you that the decent world has been an eighty year blip. You’ll all be glad to know that things are getting back on an even keel. The right people are in charge again and the wrong people are beginning to be taught their proper place.
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1/ They weren't prepared--that is they never intended--to be in charge of any situation than the one they'd already defined: capture the castle, do the ideology thing. I don't think they actually expected to have to run a country.
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The really nightmarish thing about this that it's weird but not that weird.
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I just scrape the mould off the city & eat what's underneath.
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The sparkling NinaAllan reviews Wish I Was Here in today's Guardian-- . Nina loved it, you might too.
#WishIWasHere
#WIWH
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amazed & delighted to find
#TheSunkenLandBeginsToRiseAgain
on the Goldsmiths shortlist 2020
We are delighted to announce the
#GoldsmithsPrize2020
shortlist! Congratulations to our six brilliant novelists! 🎉🎉 🍾🍾👏👏
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I've resisted this for a week, but here it is
If you’re fond of donkeys & like a bit of Georgian polyphonic singing accompanied by a panduri, check out
@MandiliTrio
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dig down far enough & the world is like this everywhere
There is something very special about seeing a
#Roman
mosaic peek out of a trench during excavations - in this case, from a Roman villa located in a vineyard at Negrar di Valpolicella (Italy). The colours are just amazing
#MosaicMonday
Photos: Comune di Negrar di Valpolicella
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This is my favourite political quip of the last several years.
This makes me realize that if america was attacked by aliens, our first response would be to lower interest rates
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Stimpy: What'll we do when the disaster's actually happening, Ren?
Ren: Why, we'll normalise it!
THREAD: IMF warns of 'fundamental shift' from stable predictability, to an age of breakdown, economic volatility, geopolitical confrontations, natural disasters – "a world in which any country can be thrown off course more easily and more often” 🧵/1
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children, so uncannily accurate in their perceptions
Are you in your 40s? Here are two kids imagining what that’s like. Have a nice day.
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We always said: nothing will get done until people can actually see it happening. Now we know that nothing will get done even when people can actually see it happening. This gives you a really mixed set of feelings.
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A benefit of ageing is the growth of a sense of freedom. A disadvantage is that you can no longer generate energy from always moving forward, because there's a kind of equal & opposite sense of a decreasing amount of space to move forward into.
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ur technique will set u free
And now for something completely different to take your minds off things that weigh too heavy and we have no control over anyway:
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Can't believe I've signed to do a four book sequel to Viriconium.
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"Look what they make us give"
Seeing people come to buy fish and handing the owner, money, this cat went out and got a leaf to pay for her fish. On the first day, the owner of the shop thought this was very cute, so he gave her a small fish. Now everyday this cat comes in to buy a fish with a leaf.
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Don't learn this too late.
"One of the things I know about writing is this: spend it all, shoot it, play it, lose it, all, right away, every time. Do not hoard what seems good for a later place in the book or for another book; give it, give it all, give it now."
–– Annie Dillard
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We should all be especially mindful of Rule One as we go about our daily lives. It's a metaphor for so much.
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Cachet moderne. Always suave, always emphatic. Above all, always glam.
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I've never in my life needed to use the A15, surely there's no case for wasting public money on it. Or for that matter, on any of the roads around Lincoln.
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It's not horror, it's not sci fi, it's not a subtly Lovecraftian romp, it's not hauntology, it's not psychogeography, it's not a romance. It broke all those things. The Sunken Land Begins To Rise Again. Gollancz 2020, & I'll be reminding you about it at intervals until then.
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I like this well enough & I'm glad it exists, but it does look as if it was invented in Hollywood in 1982.
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every night they ring & ring & no one answers
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It's too expensive to throw a laptop or e-reader across the room & that's eliminated one of the small harmless joys of reading
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Seventy years of decent, humane healthcare & a functioning infrastructure, gone. We put it there & now we're being conned into letting them take it away. Excuse me if I go somewhere & just, basically, cry.
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As far as "pop culture" is concerned, moral binaries exist so the violence can take place. It's a mistake to assume that the moral quarrel is the content. The violence is what moves the product. Good vs bad is a textual mechanism that enables & releases the violence.
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Waking up & starting a new day has become an interestingly weird process in that you can't quite believe what's happening around you, or, really, work out a convincing explanation of why things got the way they are. Must have been like this in Germany in the 1930s.
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free I'm free
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I've been doing what I do for getting on 60 years. Along with one or two other big changes in my life, coming here & meeting people has made me more aware, more lively, more committed to doing it. Twitter is crap for your grammar but good for your sense of direction.
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the fear of having to live a reduced life in the coming failed state in a heated world
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Take home here is: Forget rationality, forget the issues, forget your obsolete demographics, unless you have this:
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Some say this stone at Redmires used to be part of a pub. Others know better. The sunken lands will rise again.
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So I can drive to an empty moor & walk around on it in the rain complaining about my knees & be no threat to anyone? That's a relief.
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alexa, show me the point at which cheerful procrastination flips into anxiety-driven denial
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People who don't know enough about sf make the same mistake as people who know too much: they think it's a payload not a delivery system.
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hard to tell these days what's tinnitus, what's music & what's a stonecutter somewhere down the street
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A famous rock climber once advised me sadly, never turn the thing you love into the way you earn your living. He was ten years younger than me & I'd already done it twice. You never learn.
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CLIMBERS to be reissued by Weidenfeld & Nicolson in May 2022.
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I'm finding it harder & harder to look at this picture. But it needs to be looked at squarely, & faced up to; & these two brave women are saying what needs to be said.
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Some days you switch on, look at today's content, then switch off again & resolve to go on a very long walk, on not very much money, with no destination planned, for the rest of your life, with maybe quite a small bag, because that would be a better use of yourself.
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