The children of the ghetto are unanimous about the man: If you can imagine a world where Borges was only ever published in Del Ray paperback editions with minotaurs on the cover, then you can imagine how fucked M. Harrison has written mainstream fiction, and it is lackluster his verbal imagination is like William Burroughs’s or the Comte de Lautreamont’s–it is at its most intense when the entire environment can be bent to his psycholinguistic will. People afraid of ghettos, or who only know ghettos from what makes it onto the news, will not know his name. No computer-generated blockbuster will manage to get any of the bleakly magnificent prose that makes Harrison genuinely unique on the screen. In his best work, he writes as well as our best authors–Pynchon, Amis, Nabokov. John Harrison can write–really write–not just describe strange situations with words. This is because, unlike fellow fantasists like Tolkien or Asimov or William Gibson, the best thing about Harrison is not the thoroughness with which he imagines his worlds–although he’s no slouch in imagining–but the power of the language he uses to animate them.

The films will be terrible because his books aren’t really about things you can film, and he will go back to being ignored and, if he hasn’t died already, he’ll die. This discovery will probably be at least partially due to all the hip, young science-fiction and fantasy writers currently claiming him as an influence–writers who will have many films to their names by then and who I hesitate to name here because they are all so much worse than he is that listing them would give the reader the wrong impression entirely.

Here is what is going to happen to him: in ten or twelve years, after the Hollywood development people have clawed past the Dunes and Narnias and Spider-Men and have begun to see the bottom of the complexly-constructed-fictional-realities-that-can-be-plausibly-turned-into-mammoth-SFX-epics barrel, Harrison’s work will be discovered and turned into films.

In viriconium