Paul Kincaid

Among the interesting things he said this evening was that what had given The Separation, by Christopher Priest, the edge over M John Harrison's Light in the Clarke Awards was the view that you would always enjoy reading the latter as the same book, but that Priest's novel was a different book every time you returned to it.

And I see what he means, and that that can be an attraction. Certainly, I love Priest's books (though I would rate The Glamour far above The Separation).

But Light continues to spill around me in umpteen different ways; Nova Swing has made it the more difficult to read it even from that (singular) point of view. I'd always thought that was the point of them.

With Harrison, I find myself going back again and again into the short stories: Egnaro and Gifco particularly enrage me. He won't agree, but I think the best work is in them and Climbers, and, of course, in The Course of the Heart. But the Viriconium fans have me outnumbered.