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Niall Harrison
@niallharrison.bsky.social
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reader, critic, fan, he/him
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Loved this. Locus review won't be online for a bit, but here's the conclusion.
Quote from Locus review of Loss Protocol by Niall Harrison: In other words, Loss Protocol is a novel about the only world that is ever available to us. It is a gnarly, ornery piece of work, one that I sense has not given up all of its secrets on a first read, but here is my preliminary conclusion: I think the absolute solidity of its initial realism is a kind of trap, an attempt to make you forget that you are reading a dream. But a dream it is, for Winters, for his author, and now for me, too.
February 12, 2026 at 3:13 PM
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I had been doing ok this year, but thanks to a book event, a couple of pre-orders coming in, and then a trip to York to see friends, I have comprehensively fallen off the wagon
A stack of 15 books, bottom to top: The Oak & The Larch by Sophie Pinkham; Seven by Joanna Kavenna; Glyph by Ali Smith; A Guardian and a Thief by Megha Majumdar; The Plague Dogs by Richard Adams; The Fortunate Fall by Cameron Reed; Monk & Robot by Becky Chambers; Rondo by Kazimierz Brandys; Penance by Eliza Clark; Friendly City by Sofia Samatar; AI 2041 by Kai-fu Lee and Chen Qiufan; Wild Dark Shore by Charlotte McConaghy; Perfection by Vincenzo Latronico; White Moss by Anna Nerkagi; and The Ultimate Threshold: A Collection of the Finest in Society SF edited by Mirra Ginsburg
February 1, 2026 at 5:21 PM
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Exciting review copy received: The White Desert by Luis López Carrasco trans. Rosalind Harvey (Granta, June)
Back cover of the ARC of The White Desert by Luis López Carrasco, which is quite text heavy so I'm afraid I'm not going to transcribe more than the first paragraph: "The story of a millennial couple facing life on an increasingly fragile planet and a stirring reflection on our place in the cosmos - for fans of Martin MacInnes and Samantha Harvey." I am very much a fan of both the named writers.
January 22, 2026 at 12:33 PM
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January 1, 2026 at 11:29 PM
niallharrison.bsky.social
Reading, listening, watching and doing in 2025. Onwards.
A grid of nine book covers: Portalmania by Debbie Urbanski, A Granite Silence by Nina Allan, Red Sword by Bora Chung, Everything Will Swallow You by Tom Cox, Sea Now by Eva Meijer, Ice by Jacek Dukaj, Notes From A Regicide, Dream Hotel by Laila Lalami, and The Book of Records by Madeleine Thien A grid of nine albums covers: Constellation for the Lonely by Doves, Sword by Wisp, No Scope by Crushed, People Watching by Sam Fender, Mystery Park by Kathryn Williams, We Were Made Prey by Kathryn Joseph, We Were Just Here by Just Mustard, If You Asked For a Picture by Blondshell, and Bird by Low Island Grid of nine film/TV posters: Thunderbolts, Wake Up Dead Man, The Diplomat (S3), ER (S6), Foundation (S3), Andor (S2), The Brutalist, Flow, Severance (S2) Grid of nine photos of landscapes/events: a red misty sunset; the coast near Whitley Bay; three people and their reflections walking through a conference centre in Beijing; a parkrun in Garvagh Forest; a bird taking off from a hotel balcony in Amsterdam; Sam Fender at St James's Park; a view of Jesmond Dene; the Red Arrows flying over the crowd at the start of the Great North Run; the pond at Longshaw Estate
December 31, 2025 at 5:59 PM
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Eva Meijer and Anne Thompson Melo in conversation about Sea Now at Toppings, Edinburgh
Three seated figures in front of a wall of books: Anne Thompson Melo (left), Eva Meijer (centre), and interviewer whose name I did not catch (right).
December 1, 2025 at 8:54 PM
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Eva Meijer and Anne Thompson Melo in conversation about Sea Now at Toppings, Edinburgh
Three seated figures in front of a wall of books: Anne Thompson Melo (left), Eva Meijer (centre), and interviewer whose name I did not catch (right).
December 1, 2025 at 8:53 PM
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"Death of the SF category but not SF content" latest: I count, I think, six science fiction novels in the NYT notable books list; none of them are categorised in the list as SF and none of them were published as SF. One was even marketed as Romantasy, it seems! www.nytimes.com/2025/11/24/b...
NYT notable 100 listing for A Guardian and A Third by Mesha Majumdar, which sounds great. "Set in the near future" and categorised as "literary fiction." NYT 100 notable books listing for Silver Elite by Dani Francis. Categorised as "Romantasy" but described as "dystopian" with "Hunger Games vibes"; additional research does seem to suggest it is set in the future.
November 25, 2025 at 1:19 PM
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A conference! In Newcastle! With am excellent keynote speaker! This is exciting.
Flyer with details of the CFP for the "Women in SFF: Navigating Gender & Genre" conference taking place at Newcastle University, 11-12 June 2026
November 20, 2025 at 6:07 PM
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The top fifty
The 50 highest selling SFF titles of 2025; I am afraid I am not going to type out all fifty, but the top ten are six Sarah J Maas, three Rebecca Yarros and Alchemised by SenYinLu; the top placed non-Romantasy title is Katabasis by RF Kuang at 11; only two titles are science fiction, Hail Mary by Andy Weir at 28 and Dune by Frank Herbert at 48; and in addition to those two, there are three other books by men: The Rose Field by Philip Pullman (16), Wicked by Gregory Maguire (21) and The Devils by Joe Abercrombie (36).
November 17, 2025 at 10:24 AM
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I mean I hope you don't have this
Photo of a page of the ARC of Ice by Jacek Dukaj; the page has the sentence "space equivalent to 14 lines of type" repeated, er, 13 times.
October 18, 2025 at 2:46 PM
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Behold, I have passed the half way mark!
A splayed-open copy of Ice by Jacek Dukaj, such that you can see that slightly more of the 1177 pages have been read.
October 13, 2025 at 12:27 PM
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in fact to be fair I have a physical ARC and it's not one you can easily pick up full stop.
ARC of Ice by Jacek Dukaj, all 1177 pages of it, sitting on a scales. It weighs in at approximately 1.2kg.
October 10, 2025 at 6:07 AM
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Right, this has been looming at me from the shelf for a few months, but it's time. I'm going in.
ARC of Ice by Jacek Dukaj, all 1177 pages of it. The title is rendered as black jagged text on a white background.
October 1, 2025 at 10:00 AM
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Right then, excluding review copies, here's my pile of aspiration/despair.
A pile of books. Top to bottom: Sympathy Tower Tokyo; Beautyland; Landscapes; The Immeasurable Heaven; Greyhound; Strange and Perfect Account from the Permafrost; Eros the Bittersweet; On the Calculation of Volume (I, but ideally at least II as well, assuming I enjoy I); Notes From A Regicide; The Place of Shells; Fantasy: A Short History; Death of the Author; The Dream Hotel; The North Road
September 22, 2025 at 6:31 PM
niallharrison.bsky.social
And here it is with some other recent acquisitions
A stack of books. Bottom to top: Portalmania by Debbie Urbanski; Sublimation by Isabel J. Kim; The Outspoken and the Incendiary by Terry Bisson; Harmattan Season by Tochi Onyebuchi; Designing Hope by Sarah Houseley; Tender by Lauren du Plessis; House of Day, House of Night by Olga Tokarczuk; Orphan Planet by Madeehah Reza; and The Carrying Capacity of Paradise by Deborah L Davitt
September 20, 2025 at 9:24 AM
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International book buying in 2025: it has taken me four months to acquire an actual copy of Portalmania, having reviewed it from pdf. But I guess its arrival is a good excuse to link to my review again! locusmag.com/review/porta...
Copy of Portalmania by Debbie Urbanski. Cover shows an oval portal filled with stars on a green background, with a woman who to my eye looks to be styled in a mid-twentieth-century American fashion, half in and half out of the portal. Her expression treads a Mona Lisa-esque line between wonder and fear.
September 20, 2025 at 9:01 AM
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...Most of this is in Look at the Evidence, where Doomsday Book is reviewed very positively and as a mammal
Extract of John Clute writing about Doomsday Book by Connie Willis, from Look at the Evidence: "A bright quick mammal’s glitter suffused every single character in Connie Willis’s brilliant Doomsday Book, which won the Nebula this year (along with her “Even the Queen,” whose central debate about menstruation was hilarious but deeply unfair to Cyclists, whose representative got about as many words in as a liberal in Heinlein Country). But Doomsday Book, which seemed clearly to have been written in a state of love, set up no bogies to blow over. The thirteenth century country near Oxford to which the protagonist time-travels on a university assignment from the near future, though it has been criticized for a variety of historical inaccuracies, breathes all the same like another country of the heart. As the Black Death begins to transmogrify the culture she has inserted herself into, the protagonist slowly becomes a figure of almost mythic density, almost like some mythago in Robert Holdstock’s Wood, and her ultimate rescue, in the last sentences of the book, ends the novel like a song whose last note is all we came to hear."
September 4, 2025 at 6:35 AM
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Image of the comedian Eddie Izzard saying, "I grew up in Europe. Where the history comes from."
September 1, 2025 at 8:13 PM
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Reading a novel in which humans have been on a planet for half a millennium and a city has "ancient walls"
A gif of Giles (middle aged English white man from Buffy the Vampire Slayer) driving at night and, clearly irritated, muttering "Americans!" to himself.
September 1, 2025 at 8:04 PM
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This paragraph from near the end of the novel, and especially its last sentence, struck me deeply. "Not a world under glass, but made of it." It means youth; it means the environment; it means, I think, America at the start of the twenty-first century.
Paragraph from Dream State by Eric Puchner: Charlie laughed again, then gave Garrett a look that seemed to say, merely, It’s late. Not in the day—it wasn’t even noon—but in a way that seemed to include the islands of slush, the mountains around them, the fact that they were standing there at all. He thought of the day they’d met in college, when the campus was encased in ice. Not a world under glass, but made of it.
August 30, 2025 at 2:19 PM
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A brilliant selection. My review is in the current Locus, so probably won't be online in full until some time in September, but here's the thrust of it
Excerpt from a review of Moon Songs by Niall Harrison in the August 2025 issue of Locus magazine: "For different reasons, I don’t really need to tell you much about the next book, either. All I should need to tell you, in fact, is that Moon Songs: The Selected Stories of Carol Emshwiller is, as it sets out to be, an exemplary primer on the work of an extraordinary writer. Editor Matthew Cheney is clear in his aim and transparent in his methods, with the result that from a career of over 150 stories, the nineteen included here are the right ones for the task at hand. Moon Songs is representative of both the breadth of Emshwiller’s career and its peaks, and the selections have been sequenced into a book that works, with illuminating juxtapositions of stories written decades apart. It also becomes the best easily available text for these stories, cleaning up some typographical and layout issues that mar the otherwise essential two-volume The Collected Stories of Carol Emshwiller (Non Stop Press, 2011 and 2016). It is a scrupulous book, and it is recommended."
August 19, 2025 at 4:22 PM
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Have arrived at @captioncomicfest.bsky.social
Cover of the Caption 2025 (Caption Rebirth) programme book: black and white art of a phoenix, with the convention name and tagine: Oxford's small press and indie comics festival
August 16, 2025 at 1:09 PM
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It has been 0️⃣ days since the last Blackwell's incident
A stack of books acquired from Blackwell's in Oxford, top to bottom: Two Lights by James Roberts; Basilisk by Matt Wixey; No Straight Road Takes You There by Rebecca Solnit; We Hexed The Moon by Mollyhall Seeley; The Olcinium Trilogy by Andrej Nikoladis; Fair by Jen Calleja; Dealing With The Dead by Alain Mabanckou; and The Midnight Shift by Cheon Seon-ran
August 14, 2025 at 7:52 PM
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Went out to the coast
Coloured wooden beach huts at Blyth: one yellow with a white door, one red with a blue door. A hazy view of St Mary's lighthouse, Whitley Bay, across a stony beach. Path along the edge of a headland, long grasses either side, just north of Whitley Bay View from a red path over Whitley Bay, St Mary's Lighthouse in the distance.
August 12, 2025 at 12:57 PM