Books & Poetry

Saudade, 2444. Travel agent Vic Serotonin escorts clients into the ‘event site’, a quarter of the city transformed into ‘an electronic nightmare’ after part of the Kefahuchi Tract ‘fell to earth’. Lens Aschemann, a police detective from Site Crime who resembles Albert Einstein and drives a pink Cadillac, is on Vic’s case, but also haunts the bungalow of his own dead ex-wife. Removal of artefacts from the site is not only dangerous, it’s against the law, so when Vic sells on a mysterious objet to dealer Paulie de Raad, he jumps right to the top of Aschemann’s to-do list.

The great thing about M John Harrison’s take on SF – at least in ‘Nova Swing’, and more so than in ‘Light’, in which a fog of mathematics obscured the humanity – is that it reads like mainstream fiction soaked in noir. You are almost invited to substitute ‘in a part of town’ for ‘on a planet’ in sentences like this one: ‘Irene was born on a planet called Perkin’s Rent.’ It’s SF for people who don’t read SF, as well as for those who do. That said, there’s science in here that would be baffling if you thought the author meant you to understand it. He doesn’t.

It’s a bluff. This isn’t what Harrison thinks the universe will be like in 400 years’ time. The clue is in the name, Saudade, an untranslatable Portuguese concept implying a yearning for the return of something dearly loved and much missed.

Fans will recognise the surf bars, jazz duo and tattoo killer motif from an earlier short story ‘The Neon Heart Murders’. The language is fresh and vivid: rain ‘lacquers the sidewalk’, an
unlined face is ‘unwritten-to’.

The event site, for so long talked about and never entered, holds the same fantastic promise as the Zone in Tarkovsky’s ‘Stalker’, but when we do finally go in, it’s far stranger. Coloured by longing and wonder, ‘Nova Swing’ is filled with a humanity that makes it as substantial as it is dazzling.