all that remains is to guide it into the exact shape of our dream

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…

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