They never disconnected their defences or target-acquisition systems, so the air around them was constantly cooking with everything from gamma to microwaves. They flickered in and out of visibility as their navigation systems trawled through 10 spatial dimensions.

'Night and day,' we are told, K-ships 'crouched in the service bays with arc lights slicking down their dark grey flanks. In one, we meet Seria Mau Genlicher, the barely embodied captain of a K-ship called the White Cat. Harrison has developed enormously, bringing a far deeper wisdom and considerably more mature literary ability to the task of showing a generation or two of SF writers inspired by his earlier work how it should be done. Recent novels of spare textual elegance and closure-denying restraint - Climbers, The Course of the Heart and Signs of Life - have impressed and fulfilled, but also implied that if he chose to Harrison could storm back over the barricades and into the SF ghetto with even more skill and energy than when he left. Harrison's latest work marks a return to a genre - unashamed science fiction, indeed space fiction - that many of us thought he'd abandoned for ever, after The Centauri Device, nearly 30 years ago. And just occasionally, out of that general, gently rolling vista, an individual work jumps out at us, a spike within the spike, a spired city dominating the surrounding towns, villages and hamlets and denoting where a writer has upped the game and achieved a critical density of meaning that sends the needles of our discriminatory apparata off the scale. The library reveals itself to be fractal as we zoom in, growing peaks and valleys, crests and troughs, within the crumpled scape of information. Objects demand, and reward, closer inspection. Suddenly there is something there to understand that we have ourselves emplaced. The buildings rise, profiles plotting complexity, with every library a peak upon that graph, a virtual spike of processed information. They uplift, press and pleat the plane of existence, packing and unpacking all our plans and works, all our cases and designs. But books, and especially the created abstractions that are novels, fold our base realities.

Light novel m john harrison