The Ice Monkey and Other Stories (1983, signed first edition)

Signed and dedicated by M John Harrison

Author

Publisher

Printing Details

First edition, first printing. Hardback in dustwrapper. 22 × 14cm, 144pp.

Signed and dedicated to the title page by M John Harrison (both a M John Harrison, and as Mike in the warm inscription), signed at Fantasycon in 1986.

From the dustwrapper, "These haunting and elusive stories, set against a grim and shabby world of alienation and failure, offer a series of obliquely glimpsed and ambiguous mysteries. There are elements of the macabre and of science fiction, but the effect is wholly original and defies easy categorization. Lyall, the central character of “Running Down” is a familiar type, maladroit and accident-prone, but in him the tendency is so extreme that everything around him ages and decays; he is in effect a human focus of entropy, the winding down of the universe. “The New Rays” is the account of a desperately-ill woman undergoing a new and bizarrely frightening medical treatment, whose savage violations may be more profound than those of her disease. In “Egnaro” fragmentary references to a mysterious land come to symbolize the missing imaginative elements in humdrum urban life. Egnaro is a place always tantalizingly out of reach for, as one of the characters puts it, “If there really is such a place then by the time I get there it’ll be just the same as it is here.”

Powerful and unsettling, the stories in The Ice Monkey establish M. John Harrison, author of In Viriconium, as a distinctive and significant voice in contemporary fiction."

The seven stories here are: 1. The Ice Monkey, 2. The New Rays, 3. The Incalling, 4. Settling the World, 5. The Quarry, 6. Running Down, and 7. Egnaro.

Condition

This copy is in very good condition. There is a little bumping to the head of the spine, but otherwise a very clean and solid copy. The dustwrapper has not been price-clipped and is now within a protective sleeve.

ISBN

0575032596