Excellent writing

I am reading Light by M. John Harrison Lyrical SF it is, or maybe literature accidentally catagorized as SF. I am too much of a purist for that, if there are space-halos and brains who live in tanks and pilot ships it's SF.

Not the point, the point is how incredibly nice some of Harrison's prose is. These are my favorites so far:

the New Men had invaded Earth in the middle 2100s. The were bipedal, humanoid - if you stretched a point- and uniformly tall and white-skinned, each with a shock of flaming red hair. THey were indistinguishable from some kinds of Irish junkies. It was difficult to tell the sexes apart.they had a kind of pliable etoliated feel about their limbs. To start with they had a great optimism and energy.everything about Earth amazed them. They took over and, in an amiable, paternalistic way, misunderstood and mismanaged everything. It apeared to be an attempt to understand the human race in terms of a 1982 Coke ad. They produced food no-one could eat, outlawed politics in favor of the kind of beaurocracy you find in the subsidized arts, and buried enormous machinery in the subcrust which eventually killed millions.

I feel like the 'subsidized arts' is a bit of a jibe at England or Canada?

The hair of the women was brush-cut and lightly moussed to have a semiotic of assertion.

I had that hair once, the author is right about teh semiotic of assertion.

Her dreams continued to distress her.

They gave her a sense of herself as a kind of bad-natured origami...

That last one goes on a little long and gets into the whole space-halo issue, so I cut it - but bad-natured origami??? so good.