Harrison’s prose is luminous and evocative, his command of landscape and mood vivid and memorable, his characters convincingly human. It is a wonderful novel, full of haunting imagery and with a constant undercurrent of unease and strangeness, and almost impossible to categorise. With The Sunken Land Begins To Rise, Harrison once again delivers a powerful and confounding novel that challenges the limits of the genre. On top of that, Harrison is one of my favourite authors, so my expectations going in were high. The Kefahuchi Tract trilogy redefined the limits of what space opera could do, in much the same way that Harrison’s earlier Viriconium books paved the way for a new kind of Fantasy writing.

John Harrison’s first novel since Empty Space in 2012, the final volume of the multiple-award-winning Kefahuchi Tract trilogy. The Sunken Land Begins To Rise Again (2020) is M. Sea change precludes the single cause, is neither convulsive nor properly conclusive: perhaps, like anyone five fathoms down into their life, he had simply experienced a series of adjustments, of overgrowths and dissolvings – processes so slow they might still be going on, so that the things happening to him now were not so much an aftermath as the expanding edge of the disaster itself, lapping at recently unrecognisable coasts.”

“If all change is sea change, he thought on the train back to Mortlake, then he could describe his own crisis – whatever it had been – as distributed rather than catastrophic.

Empty space m john harrison