(e) Short story as sacred physical artefact:
Someone — I forget who; certainly not me — once said that Jeffrey Ford was the American M John Harrison. Which, like most such comparisons, sort of works and also almost entirely doesn’t. ‘Settling the World’ is a case in point. It has the wonky, left-field, yet entirely natural-seeming inventiveness of Ford’s early stories, mixed in with a sort of John-Buchan-meets-Saki archness, and topped off with something incurably bitter. But it’s Harrison’s preternatural precision that marks it as entirely his own.
“With the discovery of God on the far side of the Moon, and the subsequent gigantic and hazardous towing operation that brought Him back to start His reign anew, there began on Earth, as one might assume, a period of far-reaching change.”
As one might assume, indeed. Oxlade, our Departmental hero, an odd cross between Harry Palmer and Richard Hannay, is sent out to investigate goings-on along God’s Motorway, the mysterious miles-wide divine link-road that has formed ex nihilobetween the Thames Estuary and the industrial Midlands (Harrison does love to traumatise genre tropes, in this case the beloved Big Dumb Object of hard sci-fi). Oxlade’s nemesis, retired foreign spy Estrades, is also there, digging around and causing trouble. It’s all a bit of an old school cloak-and-dagger hoot with extra weirdness thrown in, until they get onto the Motorway itself and Estrades’s real plan is set in motion. It doesn’t go well. Trying to blow up the Umwelt of God never does, and even that is far from the end of Oxlade’s travails.
This is easily one of my favourite Harrison stories, even though, like the Poe, it’s a bit of an odd one out for him (it was originally written for an anthology of ‘utopian science fiction’ but Harrison really doesn’t do topias, whether u or dys; what he does do is something that stretches the grimy mundane and the gnarly weird directly across each other and as far as either will go without quite snapping; sometimes even further). But it’s also my favourite because it’s in my copy of The Ice Monkey that cost me £5.99 in the mid-90s and that the man himself signed, with great down-to-earth friendliness and aplomb, at a reading at The Horse Hospital in London in 2013. While, as per Oxlade, it’s almost never good to meet your God, it was, in this case, a sheer and genuine pleasure to meet my writing god.
The book itself is, of course, now in a hermetically sealed bulletproof glass case in a time-locked vault in Zürich.
First published in The New Improved Sun, Harper & Row, 1975. Collected in The Ice Monkey and Other Stories, Unwin, 1988, Things That Never Happen, Gollancz, 2004, and Settling the World: Selected Stories 1970-2020, Comma Press, 2020
A Personal Anthology 