A flare of light or ‘the great clomping foot of nerdism?’: M John Harrison’s radical poetics of worldbuilding

Abstract

Over the last forty years, as Mark JP Wolf argues, worldbuilding has become central to the art of writing science fiction and fantasy books, as market conditions prioritise fictional worlds that are encyclopaedic, extendible, franchisable, consumable and which generate new forms of cultural pleasure. Following early fantasists George MacDonald and JRR Tolkien, much advice focuses on invention, completeness and internal consistency. This paper provides a counterpoint, arguing for the importance of M John Harrison in developing a poetics of scepticism toward worldbuilding, which he calls ‘the great clomping foot of nerdism’ (Harrison 2007b). The deliberate shifting depiction of his most famous fantasy world Viriconium – the Pastel City – across a sequence of novels and short stories exemplifies how he translates his radical poetics into practice. Focusing on blog posts, articles and internet comment threads in addition to literary works and my own exercises, I explore how Harrison developed a politically oriented approach to ‘the world’ in relation to the New Wave of the 60s and 70s and the New Weird of the last fifteen years, and I contrast it with contemporary approaches from China Miéville, Jeff VanderMeer and Timothy Morton.