Editing M. John Harrison (section)

===1968–1975: ''New Worlds'', ''The Committed Men'', ''The Pastel City'', and ''The Centauri Device''===

From 1968 to 1975 he was literary editor of the [[New Wave science fiction]] magazine ''[[New Worlds (magazine)|New Worlds]]'', regularly contributing criticism. He was important to the New Wave style which also included writers such as [[Norman Spinrad]], [[Barrington Bayley]], Langdon Jones and [[Thomas M. Disch]]. As a reviewer for ''New Worlds'' he often used the pseudonym "Joyce Churchill" and was critical of many works and writers published using the rubric of [[science fiction]]. One of his critical pieces, "By Tennyson Out of Disney" was initially written for ''Sword and Sorcery Magazine'', a publication planned by [[Kenneth Bulmer]] but which was never published; the piece was printed in ''New Worlds'' 2.

Amongst his works of that period are three stories utilising the [[Jerry Cornelius]] character invented by [[Michael Moorcock]]. These stories do not appear in any of Harrison's own collections but do appear in the ''Nature of the Catastrophe'' and ''New Nature of the Catastrophe.''  Other early stories published from 1966 were featured in anthologies such as ''New Writings in SF'', edited by [[John Carnell]], and in magazines such as ''[[Transatlantic Review (1959)|Transatlantic Review]]'',  ''[[The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction]]'', ''New Worlds'', and ''Quark''.

A number of Harrison's short stories of this early period remain uncollected, gathered neither in his first collection ''The Machine in Shaft Ten'', nor in his later collections.

The novel ''The Committed Men'' (1971) (dedicated to [[Michael Moorcock]] and his wife [[Hilary Bailey]]) is an archetypal British New-Wave vision of a crumbling future with obvious debts to the work of Michael Moorcock and [[J. G. Ballard]]. It is set in England after the apocalypse. Social organisation has collapsed, and the survivors, riddled with skin cancers, eke out a precarious scavenging existence in the ruins of the Great Society. A few bizarre communities try to maintain their structure in a chromium wilderness linked by crumbling motorways. But their rituals are meaningless clichés mouthed against the devastation. Only the roaming bands of hippie-style "situationalists" (presumably a reference to the then contemporaneous [[situationist]] group) have grasped that the old order, with its logic, its pseudo-liberalism and its immutable laws of cause and effect, has now been superseded. Among the mutants are a group of reptilian humans – alien, cancer-free but persecuted by the 'smoothskins'. When one of them is born of a human mother in Tinhouse, a group of humans sets off to deliver it to its own kind – a search of the committed men for the tribes of mutants. David Pringle called the novel "brief, bleak, derivative – but stylishly written."<ref>David Pringle. ''The Ultimate Guide to Science Fiction''. Grafton, 1990, p. 67</ref>

Harrison's first novel of the [[Viriconium]] sequence, ''The Pastel City'' was also published in 1971. Harrison would continue adding to this series until 1984. During 1972, the story "Lamia Mutable" appeared in [[Harlan Ellison]]'s anthology ''[[Again, Dangerous Visions]]''; while this tale forms part of the Viriconium sequence, it has been omitted from omnibus editions of the Viriconium tales to date.

During 1974 Harrison's third novel was published, the [[space opera]] ''[[The Centauri Device]]'' (described prior to its publication, by ''New Worlds'' magazine, as "a sort of hippie space opera in the baroque tradition of [[Alfred Bester]] and [[Charles Harness]]). An extract was published in ''New Worlds'' in advance of the novel's publication, with the title "The Wolf That Follows". The novel's protagonist, space tramp John Truck, is the last of the Centaurans, victims of a genocide. Rival groups need him to arm the most powerful weapon in the galaxy: the Centauri Device, which will respond only to the genetic code of a true Centauran.

Harrison himself has said of this book:
<blockquote>
I never liked that book much but at least it took the piss out of sf’s three main tenets: (1) The reader-identification character always drives the action; (2) The universe is knowable; (3) the universe is anthropocentrically structured & its riches are an appropriate prize for <s>the colonialist</s> people like us. TCD tried to out space opera as a kind of counterfeit pulp which had carefully cleaned itself of Saturday night appetite, vacuuming out all the concerns of real pulp fiction to keep it under the radar of the Mothers of America or whatever they called themselves. Pulp’s lust for life was replaced, if you were lucky, by a jaunty shanty & a comedy brawl. Otherwise, it was lebensraum & a cadetship in the Space Police (these days it’s primarily low-bourgeois freedom motifs & nice friendly sexual release).<ref>{{cite web|last1=Harrison|first1=M. John|title=the centauri device|url=https://ambientehotel.wordpress.com/2012/04/02/the-centauri-device/|website=The M John Harrison Blog|date=2 April 2012|access-date=20 September 2017}}</ref>
</blockquote>

Harrison's first short story collection ''The Machine in Shaft Ten'' (1975) collects many (but not all) of his early short tales, from such sources as ''New Worlds Quarterly'', ''New Worlds Monthly'', ''New Writings in SF'', ''Transatlantic Review'' and others. "The Lamia and Lord Cromis" is an early [[Viriconium]] tale. The moody "London Melancholy" features a ruined future London haunted by winged people. None of the stories, with the exception of "Running Down", (a psychological horror tale about a man who is literally a walking disaster area), have been reprinted in his subsequent short story collections. "The Bringer with the Window" features Dr Grishkin, a character also appearing in ''The Centauri Device'', seemingly in Harrison's recurring fictional city of Viriconium. 

Harrison's early novels ''The Committed Men'', ''The Pastel City'' and ''The Centauri Device'' have been reprinted several times. The latter was included in the [[SF Masterworks]] series.