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Empty Space: A Haunting (Kefahuchi Tract Trilogy 3) [Hardcover]

M. John Harrison
3.9 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (15 customer reviews)
RRP: £20.00
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Book Description

19 July 2012 Kefahuchi Tract Trilogy 3

EMPTY SPACE is a space adventure. We begin with the following dream:

An alien research tool the size of a brown dwarf star hangs in the middle of nowhere, as a result of an attempt to place it equidistant from everything else in every possible universe. Somewhere in the fractal labyrinth beneath its surface, a woman lies on an allotropic carbon deck, a white paste of nanomachines oozing from the corner of her mouth. She is neither conscious nor unconscious, dead nor alive. There is something wrong with her cheekbones. At first you think she is changing from one thing into another -- perhaps it's a cat, perhaps it's something that only looks like one -- then you see that she is actually trying to be both things at once. She is waiting for you, she has been waiting for you for perhaps 10,000 years. She comes from the past, she comes from the future. She is about to speak--

EMPTY SPACE is a sequel to LIGHT and NOVA SWING, three strands presented in alternating chapters which will work their way separately back to this image of frozen transformation.


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Empty Space: A Haunting (Kefahuchi Tract Trilogy 3) + Jack Glass (Golden Age)
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Product details

  • Hardcover: 320 pages
  • Publisher: Gollancz (19 July 2012)
  • Language: English
  • ISBN-10: 0575096306
  • ISBN-13: 978-0575096301
  • Product Dimensions: 23.4 x 16.2 x 3.6 cm
  • Average Customer Review: 3.9 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (15 customer reviews)
  • Amazon Bestsellers Rank: 419,017 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Review

On a sentence level, Harrison outwrites most British authors currently working in any genre... A typically abrupt download of a Chandlerian future-noir, quantum space opera and some sad vignettes of contemporary British alienation. With patience, it's extraordinary. (The Daily Telegraph 20121215) --This text refers to the Paperback edition.

Book Description

At last: the final book in the awesome Kefahuchi Tract Trilogy!

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews
18 of 19 people found the following review helpful
5.0 out of 5 stars Sparks in Everything 22 July 2012
Format:Paperback
"Time present and time past
Are both perhaps present in time future
And time future contained in time past"

As a teenager in the 1960s, I read science fiction avidly; the usual suspects - Asimov, Heinlein, Clarke, Aldiss, Ballard - all the postwar writers I could find, really.

But by the time the "New Worlds" school of sex and drugs and rock'n'roll sf came along, I had largely moved on to more mainstream fiction. In the forty-plus years since then, I have occasionally dipped a toe back into the genre, without ever really finding anything to get me really excited. Then I (re)discovered M. John Harrison. A chance find of "Light" (the first part of this trilogy) in a charity shop had me intrigued, not least by the heavyweight recommendations in the review blurbs. My initial attempt to read it was a false start - the first chapter introduced us to a rather unlikable theoretical physicist with a penchant for randomly murdering yuppies. Was this going to be some sort of British rehash of "American Psycho"? I put it down and read something else. But some months later I gave it another shot. And, as the action shifted to a bizarre (yet strangely familiar) 25th century culture far out in a region of the galaxy where conventional physics breaks down in unpredictable ways - The Kefahuchi Tract - I was hooked.

The apparently unrelated threads of the story, were ultimately reconciled - sort of. It left me slightly confused, but entertained, intrigued, and wanting more. So I got a copy of the sequel "Nova Swing". Still set in the futuristic cultural mash-up of the region around the Tract, this was a wonderful detective noir pastiche, chock full of sly in-jokes and pop culture references, like some sort of deranged collision between Philip K.
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6 of 6 people found the following review helpful
3.0 out of 5 stars Couldn't quite get it. 26 Aug 2012
Format:Paperback
The good: it is exceptionally well-written. I mean, Harrison's prose is fantastic, and I found myself re-reading entire pages not because of the story, not because something was happening, but just for the sheer pleasure of it. The story itself is incredibly complex on one level and pretty straightforward on another - you could say that while there's a lot going on, in fact there's an almost... minimalist feel to the whole thing, which is also rather pleasant.

But this is where it becomes (for me, at least) difficult: after a little while I realised that I didn't care at all about the story. Or the characters. Or their entire bent universe, for that matter, because all the different plot lines just weren't... I don't know... "human" enough. Another reviewer made a comparison with a few great movie directors, and one of them I find particularly significant here - David Lynch. Now, I consider Lynch an absolute genius and I love his movies, but I can't help finding some of them a trifle perplexing. Take Lost Highways: great visual. Breathtaking scenes. A sense of dread that insinuates into you from the first few minutes and doesn't go away, and yet... and yet... what the h*** is it all about?!

Now, Lynch himself admitted that for the most part he doesn't know what it is about, either; and I'm sure this is not the case for mr Harrison. Still, to me and for my evidently limited abilities, "Empty Space" is exactly like Lost Highways, which is a real shame because with a little more it could have been Mulholland Drive instead - i.e. something that, in the end, actually makes sense. As it is, it left me with a feeling of having read something exceptional without really "getting it", and that ...is not very pleasant. :)
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4 of 4 people found the following review helpful
5.0 out of 5 stars When physics and metaphysics collide... 28 July 2012
Format:Hardcover|Amazon Verified Purchase
A beautifully written continuation of 'Light' and 'Nova Swing'. An experience such as this is difficult to express as a review. Nominally a work of science fiction, it is actually a work that explores metaphysics as well as physics, inner space as well as outer space (and, indeed, recognises that these are false distinctions), and the dynamics of personal relationships. The whole thing is a glorious feast of symbolism that will provide generations of students material for their theses, none of which will ever come close to exhausting the deep veins of meaning - although like the aliens who gave up trying to understand the Tract, the universe will be littered with these long abandoned and forgotten experiments in understanding whilst the thing itself will still provide pleasure and a rich metaphorical background.

Harrison (even in his earliest works) has always been a writer able to find ways of discussing ideas through action and events. And not content with that skill, he writes with a confidence, wit, and intelligence that leaves a lot of other writers gibbering incoherently on the starting blocks. Literate, entertaining, and clearly working at his craft in order to enhance his art. One could wish that we were able to say as much of many of our so-called literary authors.

Despite having written `straight' novels, there is a perception that Harrison is a science fiction writer (or worse, a writer of fantasy). But like all good writers, he transcends that. For one thing, he always manages to turn any genre tropes he uses inside out and upside down. And at the heart of his work are human beings trying to come to terms with being human.
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Most Recent Customer Reviews
4.0 out of 5 stars Weird and rewarding
On finishing reading this, my first reaction was to go back and re-read the whole trilogy for the sheer pleasure of it. Read more
Published 2 months ago by Ged Dixon
3.0 out of 5 stars What?
Can't tell whether I loved or hated this book, it seems to polarise people. Initially I thought it was rubbish, but it's one of those that I've found myself thinking about during... Read more
Published 3 months ago by matthenkes
5.0 out of 5 stars a dance beneath the diamond sky
Completely awesome. Fantastic tying up of (some) loose ends from the earlier novels "Light" and "Nova Swing". Hard to describe. Read more
Published 3 months ago by Mr Marlowe
3.0 out of 5 stars An okay book
I have read many of Harrison's books and enjoyed them all. I especially liked "Climbers" which is a very rewarding story of people obsessed with rock climbing of all kinds. Read more
Published 4 months ago by Michael Tomlinson
3.0 out of 5 stars Empty Space: A Haunting (Kefahuchi Tract Trilogy)
Quite good fun - lots of nanosecond fornication. I hope to enjoy the next two books as much as I have this one..
Published 4 months ago by Philip M. J. Carteret
4.0 out of 5 stars Challenging and beautiful
Empty Space is easily the hardest SF I've ever read, in both senses of the word. It is also my first M. John Harrison I've ever read. Read more
Published 6 months ago by W.M.M. van der Salm-Pallada
2.0 out of 5 stars Gorgeous prose doesn't make up for fragmented, unsatisfactory...
There is general agreement that this book is beautifully written. The prose is evocative, delicate, sometimes surprising. Read more
Published 6 months ago by Davide
5.0 out of 5 stars Radically decentred
One of the characters "self-identified as human" but is really - or should that be "also"? - an emergent property of an interplanetary network of cash registers. Read more
Published 6 months ago by Julian Richards
2.0 out of 5 stars Empty space; empty writing
I must say that this is a mixed review. As an earlier reviewer commented, there is no doubt that Harrison is a brilliant wordsmith. Some of the prose is an utter delight to read. Read more
Published 8 months ago by rk future unwritten
5.0 out of 5 stars A future we all want to live in
In his blogs, Harrison often states that the act of writing is a quest for identity, a means for him to understand himself in this world. Read more
Published 8 months ago by Samuel Sanders
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