Amazon: Nova Swing Hits the US
My interview with M. John Harrison.
Amazon.com: You’ve returned to the same setting as Light with Nova Swing, but Nova Swing isn’t really a sequel, right?
M. John Harrison: It’s a kind of companion piece. It’s less sprawling than Light. It could be read independently but there’s some interplay, which you would miss if you hadn’t read the other book. I wanted to revisit the genetically-modified servants and entertainers–the prostitutes, gladiators, rickshaw girls and gun-kiddies–and show them as more human than some of the human beings. A key element I wanted to extend from the first book was the idea of human behaviour as code, further undermining conventional ideas we have of personality, character and consciousness.