“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.”
That’s the opening sentence of the first short story in the anthology Settling the World: Selected Stories 1970-2020 (published by Comma Press in 2020), and it shares its title with the collection. Published in 1970 it’s not the earliest of Harrison’s fictions, and in many ways untypical, but is a favourite of mine partly on account of its majestic premise: in the wake of God’s new reign on Earth a civil servant named Oxlade travels from London to investigate the sudden appearance of a twenty-lane freeway that emerges from the Thames estuary in Southend-on-Sea (the town where I grew up) and runs inland to the Midlands, its purpose uncertain. Deserted by day, there is intense movement after dark, with enormous driverless trucks transporting elements of colossal statuary to serve some unknowable Divine purpose. The story becomes ‘a complicated business, with a solution perhaps more metaphysical than actual.’
But Harrison’s first published story was not ‘Settling the World.’ That distinction goes to ‘Marina,’ which had appeared four years earlier in the magazine Science Fantasy(issue 81, February 1966). This was published under the pen name ‘John Harrison’ and has, alas, proved elusive. It doesn’t appear to have been anthologised. Can anyone share a copy? [Ed.: Former Personal Anthologist Ray Davies shared this link to read Harrison’s ‘Marina’ online.]
Harrison’s first novel, The Committed Men, would appear in 1971. Many novels and short story collections have followed and his latest novel, The End of Everything, was published recently to huge acclaim and is currently shortlisted for the Booker Prize. It is (I think) as good as anything he has written in a long career.
First published in Science Fantasy issue 81, February 1966
