Thanks to his Booker win, links are bubbling up to all sorts of vintage M John Harrison interviews, such as this one from 2003 at Strange Horizons, conducted by the inimitable Cheryl Morgan on the occasion of the publication of Light.

First, two clippings for the “how easily we repeat our established errors” folder. Number one:

My feeling about escapist fiction has softened a little down the years but it has never really changed. I think it’s undignified to read for the purposes of escape. After you grow up, you should start reading for other purposes. You should have a more complicated relationship with fiction than simple entrancement. If you read for escape you will never try to change your life, or anyone else’s. It’s a politically barren act, if nothing else. The overuse of imaginative fiction enables people to avoid the knowledge that they are actually alive. (In fact, various evasions, various kinds of fantasy, seem to me to be a kind of bad politics in themselves, the default politics of the day, through which we maintain our Western illusions of freedom and choice.)

I wasn’t sufficiently sophisticated a reader to have been having those sorts of thoughts about fiction at the time, if I’m entirely honest. But if it were possible to have them then, how much more possible is it to have them now?

Second verse, rhymes with the first:

The whole of Western Society is based on the idea of “if I want it I should be able to have it.” The world, we tell ourselves, much the way the Edwardians did, is now under control and all that remains is to guide it into the exact shape of our dream. Two things are wrong with that. The first is that our world is only under control because we ship our chaos and garbage elsewhere. The other, what control freaks never understand, is that you can’t control the whole of a situation. It is like squeezing a balloon. Compress it in one place, it bulges out somewhere else.

The wheel turns, and with every turn we are astonished at the dawn, and later by the sunset.

A third clipping, meant more as a writerly note-to-self:

To go back to Katherine Mansfield: if you just present the events to the reader (or appear to), then the complexity of human motive will spin off that. If you try too hard to determine the way the reader sees character and motivation, you will actually restrict the reader’s interpretive opportunities. By limiting the amount of guidance you give, you automatically get the depth and complexity of interpretation you want. Because that’s what we readers do in real life — we interpret people’s actions and thus assign them “motive” and “character.”

This feels like a stronger and harder-to-misparse version of our old frenemy “show don’t tell”.

Having isolated them both by clipping them, it’s also suddenly obvious that this last paragraph is the technical flipside of the first one: comforting, escapist literatures achieve their affect by (among other devices) black-and-whiting the moral landscape, making it very clear who we should be rooting for and who we should be hating on. The ambiguity of greyscale seems to be the most horrifying thing with which a contemporary reader can be presented… though perhaps that’s no more true now than it’s ever been.

I’m reminded of that brief spat back in 2022, when various people decided that show-don’t-tell was ableist or elitist or privileged or some combination of all three. With hindsight, I think that period—which was also, not coincidentally, the period during which the pandemic was retreating from its most immediate salience, which left a whole lot of moral policing energy with no easy route to earth—was probably the high-water mark for that sort of absurd and extremely-online aesthetic totalitarianism? Whether the ecosystem that throws up new authors can actually support a new generation capable of moving past its legacy of cozy didacticism remains to be seen, I suppose.