You went on in silence and the sheep lifted their heads to stare.Ĭlimbers documents the micro-dialect of a community of climbers and faithfully describes the British road network and the decor of Northern cafés. Distances were shortened, sounds muffled. Inside, frost covered everything: before you had run a mile it had formed in your hair and beard, on the fibres of your clothes. A tree stood on the interface, bare and thorny. Going down into it you found it grey, without comfort. ‘For three days the valleys were full of freezing fog,’ the narrator, Mike, says of the Peak District in March.įrom above you could see it lying pure white and motionless in the sun. It’s not unusual for writers of sci-fi and fantasy to have a non-fantasy mode, but Harrison’s is almost fantasy’s opposite.Ĭlimbers is celebrated for its fine-grained depictions of the landscapes of Northern England through the seasons. He has fans who’ve read all the science fiction but not Climbers (1989), his semi-autobiographical masterpiece about rock climbing in the North of England, and fans who are effusive about Climbers but won’t go near the sci-fi. John Harrison’s books have aliens in and carry endorsements from China Miéville others are alien-free and endorsed by Robert Macfarlane.
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