In 'our' world, a talented physicist called Michael Kearney was revealed as a serial killer, whose murders were an attempt to elude or stave off the attentions of a thing called the Shrander – it appeared as a sort of horse's skull, with a body of rags, wrapped in an old woman's coat. Light was a macabre waltz, dancing between the pre-millennium present and two strands in the future.

But while Light and Nova Swing shared certain elements – a future where 'tailors' stitch and snip DNA to create whole bodies, where the career choice of an intelligent teenage anorexic is to be catheterised, vivisected, lobotomised and wired in to alien technology as the pilot and central processor of a K-Ship, and where above it all, the Kefahuchi Tract looms, 'a singularity without an event horizon' which lets 'the wrong physics loose in the universe' – they were very different kinds of novel. Empty Space is set in the same universe as Light, published in 2002 to the green-eyed delight of his peers, and its Arthur C Clarke award-winning successor, Nova Swing (2007). A word of warning: readers new to the work of M John Harrison should probably not make this their first foray into his poetic, angry and intellectually thrilling oeuvre and it would be both a waste and a folly if their first was also their only expedition with him.

M john harrison nova swing