Nova Swing
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Average rating3.7
It is some time after Ed Chianese's trip into the Kefahuchi Tract. A major industry of the Halo is now tourism. The Tract has begun to expand and change, but, more problematically, parts of it have also begun to fall to earth, piecemeal, on the Beach planets. We are in a city, perhaps on New Venusport or Motel Splendido: next to the city is the event site, the zone, from out of which pour new, inexplicable artefacts, organisms and escapes of living algorithm - the wrong physics loose in the universe. They can cause plague and change. An entire department of the local police, Site Crime, exists to stop them being imported into the city by adventurers, entradistas, and the men known as 'travel agents', profiteers who can manage - or think they can manage - the bad physics, skewed geographies and psychic onslaughts of the event site. But now a new class of semi-biological artefact is finding its way out of the site, and this may be more than anyone can handle.
Series
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3 primary booksKefahuchi Tract
Kefahuchi Tract is a 3-book series with 3 primary works first released in 2002 with contributions by M. John Harrison.
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Harrison is one of my favourite authors and this is his sequel to the Science Fiction novel Light. Here he fuses Science Fiction with Noir, all wrapped in his usual surreal poetic style. Pieces of the Kefahuchi Tract have fallen to earth, creating a strange, dangerous zone of shifting landscapes within the city. Vic Seratonin, a ‘travel agent' will, for a price, take people into the zone. But things have started escaping too. New artefacts bringing with them the dangerous daughter code that leads to decay and disaster. On his tail is Lens Aschemann, a detective in Site Crime, a widower fascinated with the mysterious new people who emerge from the zone, only to fade away within hours. Then there's Liv Hula, bar owner and former rocket jockey; Fat Antoyne, desperate to be Vic's friend who falls into the employ of Paulie DeRaad, and in love with Irene the Mona. Familiar themes surface - a strange, afflicted city; strange new diseases; dysfunctional people. There are echoes here of the Viriconium stories, to my mind his masterpiece (especially the novel In Viriconium). But in the end I found this novel unsatisfying somehow. Don't get me wrong, it's good and well worth reading, but Harrison has written better.
