M. John Harrison is a British science-fiction writer who skillfully combines phantasmagoric images, action sharpened like choreography, and deep psychological realism. He continues the trilogy started with the incomparable “Light,” with the equally capricious and multifaceted “Nova Swing.”
A few years after the fateful journey of Ed Czyc zczyk to the Tract of Kefauchi Galo became a tourist route, and the Tract began expanding and changing, reaching into the Earth and creating Zones where the universe has decided to rest from the laws of physics. From there seep mysterious artifacts and organisms; live algorithms slip away, capable of provoking unpredictable changes. To prevent these disasters, the Zone Police exists—opposing adventurers and the so-called “tour agents,” who can control— or think they can—distorted physics, skewed geography, and the Zone’s psychic attacks. And one day, a mysterious phenomenon—at best only half biological—finds a crack into the normal world.