Contextualizing Harrison's approach to SF generally more than a review of any given book, and to the Viriconium series more than to books not part of that series. Nevertheless, he reminds readers of Harrison's quote on world-building as "the great clomping foot of nerdism" and derides it as destructive more than constructive.

Harrison's own books, the Viriconium sequence, are in his own words, "a theory about the power-structures culture is designed to hide; an allegory of language, how it can only fail; the statement of a philosophical (not to say ethological) despair." But he doesn't want them to be read for the "furniture" of the world so he makes sure that the reader can never grasp it. Viriconium has an evershifting description – there is setting but no continuity. He makes sure that "you can't read it for that stuff and so you have to read it for everything else."