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It is some time after Ed Chianese's trip into the Kefahuchi Tract. A major industry of the Halo is now tourism. The Tract has begun to expand and change, but, more problematically, parts of it have also begun to fall to earth, piecemeal, on the Beach planets.

We are in a city called Raintown, perhaps on New Venusport or Motel Splendido: next to the city is the event site, the zone, from out of which pour new, inexplicable artefacts, organisms and escapes of living algorithm - the wrong physics loose in the universe. They can cause plague and change. An entire department of the local police, Site Crime, exists to stop them being imported into the city by adventurers, entradistas, and the men known as 'travel agents', profiteers who can manage - or think they can manage -the bad physics, skewed geographies and psychic onslaughts of the event site.
But now a new class of semi-biological artefact is finding its way out of the site, and this may be more than anyone can handle.

M John Harrison is, without a doubt, one of the finest SF writers the UK has produced, which is saying something because we have produced way more than our share of top SF&F scribes. Harrison creates some of the most unusual work around, never content to ride a popular genre bandwagon – his work is inventive, unusual and forces the reader to think. Of course, that also means that a lot of readers might not pick up his books and that is a shame, because they are missing out on a very special writing talent – if you like your Brit SF then you have to have a couple of Harrison’s books at least in your collection.

Nova Swing is a sequel of sorts to the astonishing – and often disturbing – Light, but being a Harrison work simply referring to is as a sequel is to do a disservice to the book. Mixing elements of the gumshoe Noir genre with reality-altering perceptions, this isquite brilliantly twisted, like putting your imagination through a quantum blender.

Gollancz, trade paperback, 304 pages, published November 2006

Author: M John Harrison

Winner of the 2007 Arthur C Clarke Award