Lucas reviewed Empty Space by M. John Harrison
Beautiful and bewildering and painful, Empty Space takes the ground out from under its more hopeful prequels without leaving it a void.
4 stars
There's nothing that hasn't been there since the beginning, but it's all made new and alien, while still resonant, disturbing, ephemeral and eternal—so hard to place.
"These are the safe parts… Back in the day, entire sections would go missing. They'd be one thing when you lost them, another when you found them again. In circumstances like that, you have to understand that your perception is what's fragmentary, not the space itself. At some level an organising principle exists, but you will never have any confirmation of it. It will always be unavailable to you. Then, just as everyone's stopped trusting themselves, someone finds their way through a trap, the expedition gets a little further in."