Michael John Harrison was born two months after VE Day and grew up in semi-rural Warwickshire. His father was an engineer and not much of a reader; the sparsely eclectic selection of books in the Harrison household reflected that fact and included staples such as Charles Kingsley’s The Water-Babies and a stack of military biographies.
“Monty” Harrison died when Mike was 13, taking that whole world with him and with it the sense of stability, even staidness, that characterised his childhood. “I’d bought into writing as an escape route,” Harrison says, “rather than an honest admission of what I saw and experienced.” That was soon to change.
