Niall Harrison
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niallharrison.bsky.social
Niall Harrison
@niallharrison.bsky.social
2.6K followers 990 following 1.8K posts
reader, critic, fan, he/him
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niallharrison.bsky.social
I mean I hope you don't have this
Photo of a page of the ARC of Ice by Jacek Dukaj; the page has the sentence "space equivalent to 14 lines of type" repeated, er, 13 times.
October 18, 2025 at 2:46 PM
niallharrison.bsky.social
Behold, I have passed the half way mark!
A splayed-open copy of Ice by Jacek Dukaj, such that you can see that slightly more of the 1177 pages have been read.
October 13, 2025 at 12:27 PM
niallharrison.bsky.social
in fact to be fair I have a physical ARC and it's not one you can easily pick up full stop.
ARC of Ice by Jacek Dukaj, all 1177 pages of it, sitting on a scales. It weighs in at approximately 1.2kg.
October 10, 2025 at 6:07 AM
niallharrison.bsky.social
Right, this has been looming at me from the shelf for a few months, but it's time. I'm going in.
ARC of Ice by Jacek Dukaj, all 1177 pages of it. The title is rendered as black jagged text on a white background.
October 1, 2025 at 10:00 AM
niallharrison.bsky.social
Right then, excluding review copies, here's my pile of aspiration/despair.
A pile of books. Top to bottom: Sympathy Tower Tokyo; Beautyland; Landscapes; The Immeasurable Heaven; Greyhound; Strange and Perfect Account from the Permafrost; Eros the Bittersweet; On the Calculation of Volume (I, but ideally at least II as well, assuming I enjoy I); Notes From A Regicide; The Place of Shells; Fantasy: A Short History; Death of the Author; The Dream Hotel; The North Road
September 22, 2025 at 6:31 PM
niallharrison.bsky.social
And here it is with some other recent acquisitions
A stack of books. Bottom to top: Portalmania by Debbie Urbanski; Sublimation by Isabel J. Kim; The Outspoken and the Incendiary by Terry Bisson; Harmattan Season by Tochi Onyebuchi; Designing Hope by Sarah Houseley; Tender by Lauren du Plessis; House of Day, House of Night by Olga Tokarczuk; Orphan Planet by Madeehah Reza; and The Carrying Capacity of Paradise by Deborah L Davitt
September 20, 2025 at 9:24 AM
niallharrison.bsky.social
International book buying in 2025: it has taken me four months to acquire an actual copy of Portalmania, having reviewed it from pdf. But I guess its arrival is a good excuse to link to my review again! locusmag.com/review/porta...
Copy of Portalmania by Debbie Urbanski. Cover shows an oval portal filled with stars on a green background, with a woman who to my eye looks to be styled in a mid-twentieth-century American fashion, half in and half out of the portal. Her expression treads a Mona Lisa-esque line between wonder and fear.
September 20, 2025 at 9:01 AM
niallharrison.bsky.social
...Most of this is in Look at the Evidence, where Doomsday Book is reviewed very positively and as a mammal
Extract of John Clute writing about Doomsday Book by Connie Willis, from Look at the Evidence: "A bright quick mammal’s glitter suffused every single character in Connie Willis’s brilliant Doomsday Book, which won the Nebula this year (along with her “Even the Queen,” whose central debate about menstruation was hilarious but deeply unfair to Cyclists, whose representative got about as many words in as a liberal in Heinlein Country). But Doomsday Book, which seemed clearly to have been written in a state of love, set up no bogies to blow over. The thirteenth century country near Oxford to which the protagonist time-travels on a university assignment from the near future, though it has been criticized for a variety of historical inaccuracies, breathes all the same like another country of the heart. As the Black Death begins to transmogrify the culture she has inserted herself into, the protagonist slowly becomes a figure of almost mythic density, almost like some mythago in Robert Holdstock’s Wood, and her ultimate rescue, in the last sentences of the book, ends the novel like a song whose last note is all we came to hear."
September 4, 2025 at 6:35 AM
niallharrison.bsky.social
Image of the comedian Eddie Izzard saying, "I grew up in Europe. Where the history comes from."
September 1, 2025 at 8:13 PM
niallharrison.bsky.social
Reading a novel in which humans have been on a planet for half a millennium and a city has "ancient walls"
A gif of Giles (middle aged English white man from Buffy the Vampire Slayer) driving at night and, clearly irritated, muttering "Americans!" to himself.
September 1, 2025 at 8:04 PM
niallharrison.bsky.social
This paragraph from near the end of the novel, and especially its last sentence, struck me deeply. "Not a world under glass, but made of it." It means youth; it means the environment; it means, I think, America at the start of the twenty-first century.
Paragraph from Dream State by Eric Puchner: Charlie laughed again, then gave Garrett a look that seemed to say, merely, It’s late. Not in the day—it wasn’t even noon—but in a way that seemed to include the islands of slush, the mountains around them, the fact that they were standing there at all. He thought of the day they’d met in college, when the campus was encased in ice. Not a world under glass, but made of it.
August 30, 2025 at 2:19 PM
niallharrison.bsky.social
A brilliant selection. My review is in the current Locus, so probably won't be online in full until some time in September, but here's the thrust of it
Excerpt from a review of Moon Songs by Niall Harrison in the August 2025 issue of Locus magazine: "For different reasons, I don’t really need to tell you much about the next book, either. All I should need to tell you, in fact, is that Moon Songs: The Selected Stories of Carol Emshwiller is, as it sets out to be, an exemplary primer on the work of an extraordinary writer. Editor Matthew Cheney is clear in his aim and transparent in his methods, with the result that from a career of over 150 stories, the nineteen included here are the right ones for the task at hand. Moon Songs is representative of both the breadth of Emshwiller’s career and its peaks, and the selections have been sequenced into a book that works, with illuminating juxtapositions of stories written decades apart. It also becomes the best easily available text for these stories, cleaning up some typographical and layout issues that mar the otherwise essential two-volume The Collected Stories of Carol Emshwiller (Non Stop Press, 2011 and 2016). It is a scrupulous book, and it is recommended."
August 19, 2025 at 4:22 PM
niallharrison.bsky.social
Have arrived at @captioncomicfest.bsky.social
Cover of the Caption 2025 (Caption Rebirth) programme book: black and white art of a phoenix, with the convention name and tagine: Oxford's small press and indie comics festival
August 16, 2025 at 1:09 PM
niallharrison.bsky.social
It has been 0️⃣ days since the last Blackwell's incident
A stack of books acquired from Blackwell's in Oxford, top to bottom: Two Lights by James Roberts; Basilisk by Matt Wixey; No Straight Road Takes You There by Rebecca Solnit; We Hexed The Moon by Mollyhall Seeley; The Olcinium Trilogy by Andrej Nikoladis; Fair by Jen Calleja; Dealing With The Dead by Alain Mabanckou; and The Midnight Shift by Cheon Seon-ran
August 14, 2025 at 7:52 PM
niallharrison.bsky.social
Went out to the coast
Coloured wooden beach huts at Blyth: one yellow with a white door, one red with a blue door. A hazy view of St Mary's lighthouse, Whitley Bay, across a stony beach. Path along the edge of a headland, long grasses either side, just north of Whitley Bay View from a red path over Whitley Bay, St Mary's Lighthouse in the distance.
August 12, 2025 at 12:57 PM
niallharrison.bsky.social
My critical philosophy
Screencap of Harvey Dent from Christopher Nolan's The Dark Knight saying, "You either die a hero, or you live long enough to see yourself become the villain"; except "hero" has been replaced with "neophile" and "villain" has been replaced with "canoniser", in honour of today's iteration of the eternal debate about older SF vs SF of the now, canons, all that.
August 11, 2025 at 4:54 PM
niallharrison.bsky.social
Not terribly rigorously... Just that it's clearly a solid market category, dedicated sections and display tables in bookshops, prizes etc, and a certain amount of analysis along the lines of this article:
First paragraph of article "The New Nature Writing" by Jos Smith: "The rise of ‘The New Nature Writing’ as a cultural phenomenon in the UK has been one of the country’s most notable literary movements this century. There have been new prizes (The Wainwright Prize, The Nan Shepherd Prize), new journals and magazines (Archipelago, Earthlines), new websites (Caught by the River, The Clearing), new publishers like Little Toller, and there have even been new conservation organisations that owe a debt to the literature (Rewilding Britain, Action for Conservation). This has all contributed to an exciting and lively time for what Robert Macfarlane has called the “cultures of nature”. But it has not been without its uncertainties and controversies and at times it has felt like the New Nature Writing has raised more questions than it has answered."
July 25, 2025 at 7:25 AM
niallharrison.bsky.social
Recent acquisitions
A pile of books, bottom to top: Saraswati by Gurnaik Johal; New Story of the Stone by Wu Jianren; The Place of Shells by Mai Ishizawa; Exophony by Yoko Tawada; On Writers and Writing by Henry James; Late Star Trek by Adam Kotsko; Strange and Perfect Account from the Permafrost by Donald Niedekker; The Immeasurable Heaven by Caspar Geon; Newcastle, Endless by Alex Niven; Twenty Terrifying Tales From Our Technofeudal Tomorrow by William Kherbek
July 24, 2025 at 3:15 PM
niallharrison.bsky.social
Yeah, that's what it looks like (paywall keeps me out of the full article)
Google preview text of a Bookseller article about Olga Tokarczuk translations: "Antonia Lloyd-Jones will revise her existing translations of House of Day, House of Night and Primeval and Other Times..."
July 12, 2025 at 9:27 AM
niallharrison.bsky.social
Gif of James T Kirk and Leonard 'Bones' McCoy nodding at each other.
June 27, 2025 at 1:40 PM
niallharrison.bsky.social
London day
Black and white view of mist swirls in beams of light; part of Anthony McCall's "solid light" exhibition at Tate Modern View upwards from the street of two skyscrapers, both glassy, one has another skyscraper reflected within it; blue/grey light, cloudy skies. Two delightful bookmarks acquired at the Wildlife Photographer of the Year Exhibition: a) a small white ermine braced across a mountain crevasse with a very "I suppose you're wondering how I ended up in this situation" expression and b) what looks at first glance like a field of blue wildflowers but is in fact a field of grasses and many blue butterflies Small brass model of a prehistoric mammal, vaguely rodent-looking, on a pale stone outside the Natural History Museum; diffident pigeon in the background. Alternate caption is "Evolution by Stephen Baxter (2002)" because this is what the protagonist of the first few chapters looks like (I think)
June 26, 2025 at 4:59 PM
niallharrison.bsky.social
I can't help it, I just really like digest magazine intros that lead into the story title
Screenshot of a short story published in Asimov's; at the top of the page is the author bio, which ends with "Her newest story for Asimov's is a chilling vision of ..." And then the title in larger font: "THE FOUR SISTERS OVERLOOKING THE SEA"
June 16, 2025 at 9:38 PM
niallharrison.bsky.social
Should've gone to Giant's Causeway after Eastercon
A neon pink National Trust bookmark embossed with a sliver line drawing of Giant's Causeway
June 9, 2025 at 6:13 PM
niallharrison.bsky.social
Top tier parenthetical on page 3 of Do Metaphors Dream of Literal Sheep. "As I will soon explain" ...!
Photo of some text, with a striking parenthetical: "(I also differ with Suvin's and Freedman's characterization of fantasy as the product of the flattening of the dialectic between cognition and estrangement to mere estrangement. As I will soon explain, fantasy is a type of science-fictional mimesis whose cognitively estranging referent is the prodigious working of the imagination itself.)"
June 3, 2025 at 8:58 PM
niallharrison.bsky.social
Looking forward to this one
An advance copy of When There Are Wolves Again by EJ Swift.
May 15, 2025 at 12:40 PM