In a 1906 letter, the physicist Pierre Curie wrote: ‘In my opinion, there is here a whole domain of completely new facts and physical states of space about which we have had no conception.’ Few authors working today have M John Harrison’s capacity for engaging with such states, from the fractals and folds of his Kefahuchi Tract trilogy (Light, 2002; Nova Swing, 2006; Empty Space, 2012) to the weird setting of The Sunken Land Begins to Rise Again, which was awarded the Goldsmiths Prize in 2020. His new novel visits similarly unstable ground.

The world has been invaded by aliens called the iGhetti. Hypotheses about their arrival abound: they leaked into this world from the astral plane, manifesting first as transparent jelly, then as bursts of light; they spread primarily from nodes of commerce, such as the City of London; they might be the result of late-stage capitalism, dark matter, the internet or something else altogether. We learn that they produce ‘bad patches’, distortions of reality into which spaces vanish and people stumble, experiencing memories of things never lived through. Bad patches fix themselves to a site or drift around like fog. This apocalypse is experienced almost like weather, so inextricable from the every­day as to become banal. 

The crisis has observable effects alongside the bad patches, including the appearance of new buildings that resemble ‘elaborate, not entirely stable parodies of 00s vanity architecture, which lasted a week or a month before toppling slowly away into a kind of dark blue air’. But nobody quite knows how to