M. John Harrison - Early Years

Early Years

Harrison was born in Rugby, Warwickshire in 1945 to an engineering family. His father died when he was a teenager and he found himself "bored, alienated, resentful and entrapped", playing truant from Dunsmore School now Ashlawn School. An English teacher introduced him to George Bernard Shaw and he was immediately "hooked on polemic". He left school in 1958 at age 18; he worked at various times as a groom (Atherstone Hunt), a student teacher (1963–65), and a clerk for the Royal Masonic Charity Institute, London (1966). His hobbies included dwarfs, electric guitars and writing pastiches of H.H. Munro. His early interest in dwarfs continued through various of his novels, via characters such as Arm the Dwarf in The Committed Men, Choplogic the dwarf in the Viriconium series, and so on.

His first short story was published in 1966 by Kyril Bonfiglioli at Science Fantasy magazine, on the strength of which he moved to London. He there met Michael Moorcock, who was editing New Worlds magazine. He began writing reviews and short fiction for New Worlds, and by 1968 he was appointed books editor. Harrison was ferociously critical of what he perceived as the complacency of much genre fiction of the time; the bulk of his reviews have been collected in the volume Parietal Games. In 1970, Harrison scripted comic stories illustrated by R.G. Jones for such forums as Cyclops and Finger. An illustration by Jones appears in the first edition of Harrison's The Committed Men (1971), published when he was living in "the least trendy part of Camden".

In an interview with Zone magazine, Harrison says "I liked anything bizarre, from being about four years old. I started on Dan Dare and worked up to the Absurdists. At 15 you could catch me with a pile of books that contained an Alfred Bester, a Samuel Beckett, a Charles Williams, the two or three available J.G. Ballards, On the Road by Jack Kerouac, some Keats, some Allen Ginsberg, maybe a Thorne Smith. I've always been pick 'n' mix: now it's a philosophy."