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Kefahuchi Tract #1
Light
In contemporary London, Michael Kearney is a serial killer on the run from the entity that drives him to kill. He is seeking escape in a future that doesn’t yet exist—a quantum world that he and his physicist partner hope to access through a breach of time and space itself.
In this future, Seria Mau Genlicher has already sacrificed her body to merge into the systems of her starship, the White Cat. But the “inhuman” K-ship captain has gone rogue, pirating the galaxy while playing cat and mouse with the authorities who made her what she is.
In this future, Ed Chianese, a drifter and adventurer, has ridden dynaflow ships, run old alien mazes, surfed stellar envelopes. He “went deep”—and lived to tell about it. Once crazy for life, he’s now just a twink on New Venusport, addicted to the bizarre alternate realities found in the tanks—and in debt to all the wrong people.
Haunting them all through this maze of menace and mystery is the shadowy presence of the Shrander—and three enigmatic clues left on the barren surface of an asteroid under an ocean of light known as the Kefahuchi a deserted spaceship, a pair of bone dice, and a human skeleton.
In this future, Seria Mau Genlicher has already sacrificed her body to merge into the systems of her starship, the White Cat. But the “inhuman” K-ship captain has gone rogue, pirating the galaxy while playing cat and mouse with the authorities who made her what she is.
In this future, Ed Chianese, a drifter and adventurer, has ridden dynaflow ships, run old alien mazes, surfed stellar envelopes. He “went deep”—and lived to tell about it. Once crazy for life, he’s now just a twink on New Venusport, addicted to the bizarre alternate realities found in the tanks—and in debt to all the wrong people.
Haunting them all through this maze of menace and mystery is the shadowy presence of the Shrander—and three enigmatic clues left on the barren surface of an asteroid under an ocean of light known as the Kefahuchi a deserted spaceship, a pair of bone dice, and a human skeleton.
432 pages, Kindle Edition
First published October 31, 2002
444 people are currently reading
11372 people want to read
About the author
M. John Harrison
110 books829 followersaka Gabriel King (with Jane Johnson)
Michael John Harrison, known for publication purposes primarily as M. John Harrison, is an English author and literary critic. His work includes the Viriconium sequence of novels and short stories, Climbers, and the Kefahuchi Tract trilogy, which consists of Light, Nova Swing and Empty Space.
Michael John Harrison, known for publication purposes primarily as M. John Harrison, is an English author and literary critic. His work includes the Viriconium sequence of novels and short stories, Climbers, and the Kefahuchi Tract trilogy, which consists of Light, Nova Swing and Empty Space.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 756 reviews
February 9, 2017
Surprising and grand, I'm always thrilled and amazed when I get to read a serious SF about the soft and squishy underbelly of the universe. The world-building and the span of time and the characterizations are tops, too. The writing is actually pretty spiffy, too, with very clever idea-connections between every chapter and deep mirroring going on, not to mention a thousand and a half great SF ideas and themes running around and deepening the tale.
I would never have read this if Gaiman hadn't selected it for our notice, honestly, and that's a real shame because it's pretty damn high in not only literary quality and style, but also all the little things that make up a very memorable tale. Virtual reality, post-cyberpunk, dreams and alternate dimension-spaces, and broken physics. That's some great stuff, let me tell you. It's broken in terms of how certain particular math-branches see it, but each alien race manages to make a full math proof that disproves all the others and yet EVERYTHING works. It reminds me of all the alien races in Brin's Uplift saga with so many ways to break space, including the ones that Believe and then Make. :) Quantum Awesomeness.
Quantum mechanics in SF can be rather streamlined and silly, sometimes, but then we get works like this that don't focus so much on descriptions of how it works or any small engineering applications, but instead become a grand world-building exercise of what happens to so many alien species (and human) when they simply want to know why or what a portion of deep space is doing when it goes very wrong.
The Kefahuchi Tract. How many aliens and now humanity has broken themselves trying to understand what is happening there? Go in, and never come back out. Anything that can be imagined or tried, from super smart races to BDOs have been thrown at it, and every race fails. Humanity is in the process of it's greedy drive to understand and crack open its secrets, too.
We have three characters that run square up against some sort of entity called the Shrander. One is a modern physicist that also happens to be a serial murderer. One is an odd adventurer and virtual slacker from the future, and another is a heavily modded female captain of one of the really *broken* alien physics crafts that travel in 14 dimensions, with four of time, and all of the tales are pretty amazing.
Lots of sex, too. Not gratuitous, but it is part of the theme and it works very well, literarily, into the final message. Things are quite dark, but there is also light. :)
This is a novel that should be very welcome to hardcore Space Opera fans who love Iain M Banks, Reynolds, and some of the wilder and weirder authors of Science Fiction. It's not for the faint of heart, either. It's rich, rich, rich with ideas. :) I can't wait to read the rest of the trilogy, now!
I would never have read this if Gaiman hadn't selected it for our notice, honestly, and that's a real shame because it's pretty damn high in not only literary quality and style, but also all the little things that make up a very memorable tale. Virtual reality, post-cyberpunk, dreams and alternate dimension-spaces, and broken physics. That's some great stuff, let me tell you. It's broken in terms of how certain particular math-branches see it, but each alien race manages to make a full math proof that disproves all the others and yet EVERYTHING works. It reminds me of all the alien races in Brin's Uplift saga with so many ways to break space, including the ones that Believe and then Make. :) Quantum Awesomeness.
Quantum mechanics in SF can be rather streamlined and silly, sometimes, but then we get works like this that don't focus so much on descriptions of how it works or any small engineering applications, but instead become a grand world-building exercise of what happens to so many alien species (and human) when they simply want to know why or what a portion of deep space is doing when it goes very wrong.
The Kefahuchi Tract. How many aliens and now humanity has broken themselves trying to understand what is happening there? Go in, and never come back out. Anything that can be imagined or tried, from super smart races to BDOs have been thrown at it, and every race fails. Humanity is in the process of it's greedy drive to understand and crack open its secrets, too.
We have three characters that run square up against some sort of entity called the Shrander. One is a modern physicist that also happens to be a serial murderer. One is an odd adventurer and virtual slacker from the future, and another is a heavily modded female captain of one of the really *broken* alien physics crafts that travel in 14 dimensions, with four of time, and all of the tales are pretty amazing.
Lots of sex, too. Not gratuitous, but it is part of the theme and it works very well, literarily, into the final message. Things are quite dark, but there is also light. :)
This is a novel that should be very welcome to hardcore Space Opera fans who love Iain M Banks, Reynolds, and some of the wilder and weirder authors of Science Fiction. It's not for the faint of heart, either. It's rich, rich, rich with ideas. :) I can't wait to read the rest of the trilogy, now!
February 27, 2012
ORIGINALLY POSTED AT Fantasy Literature.
Michael Kearney is a physicist. He’s also a serial killer. Obsessed with numbers and patterns since he was three, he sees something behind them. Something is there, something dark and ominous that starts to emerge sometimes. He calls it the Shrander and the only way to hold it back is to kill someone. Trying to appease the Shrander, Michael uses Tarot cards and a special pair of bone dice to try to figure out what he’s supposed to do next. He’s also teamed up with a colleague named Brian Tate to study the relationship between mathematics and prophecy.
Three hundred years later, explorers are using the “Tate-Kearney transformations” to navigate the space phenomenon they call the Kefahuchi (K) Tract where ancient alien races have left artifacts from their advanced civilizations. One of these explorers is Seria Mau, who was molested by her father and escaped by transferring her consciousness to a K-ship. Now, as a sentient starship, she presides over a crew of brooding self-aware algorithms as she explores the Kefahuchi Tract. Her brother, Ed Chianese, used to be an explorer, but now he’s a Twink — he lives most of his life floating in a tank and plugged into a virtual reality that he likes better than real life.
These three characters are all connected by the Shrander. What is it, and why is it interested in these humans’ lives? What is the energetic light-spewing singularity that’s located in the center of the Kefahuchi Tract? Explorers who go there never come back.
When I read over my summary of Light, I think this sounds like an awesome book. I picked it up because I’ve wanted to read M. John Harrison for years. Then Neil Gaiman got into the audiobook business and started a new line called Neil Gaiman Presents in which he works with authors, narrators, and Audible.com to produce some of his favorite works in audio format. Light is one of his very first offerings so, naturally, I jumped. While I did admire Harrison’s characterization and writing style, and Julian Elfer’s narration was spot-on (I hope Gaiman uses him again), I did not like Light as much as I thought I would for two reasons.
First, it’s written in that self-conscious Teflon style that’s slick, vague and nebulous, maybe full of symbolism, and you’re never sure you’ve really got a grasp on what’s going on until the end. Or maybe not even then. And you wonder, “Is this book too smart for me? Or maybe I just have to try harder?” This can imbue the story with a heady atmosphere of wonder and mystery, or it can frustrate the reader who’s just looking for a good story. In the case of Light, things only start to clear up in the last few pages, which doesn’t feel like enough pay off. I didn’t read any reviews before I read Light because I didn’t want to spoil anything, but I would have enjoyed the plot more if I’d first read a summary such as the one I wrote above.
I could have overlooked the hazy plot if I had liked M. John Harrison’s characters. Unfortunately, and this is my biggest problem with Light, the characters are all, with the exception of one who dies not long after we meet him, completely unlikable. Neil Gaiman warns us in his introduction that we won’t like Michael Kearney, but he doesn’t mention that we won’t like any of the characters. Perhaps it’s shallow to insist on having some character to admire or root for, or maybe it’s simply a reflection of my own optimistic personality, but I know many readers feel the way I do, so I’ll warn them.
All of the characters have sad, desperate, pathetic lives. Many are suicidal and most have some sort of sexual hang-up. They can’t keep their hands off their own genitals, or they keep presenting their genitals for others to handle. Almost every single sex act (and there are a lot of them) is ugly, animalistic, and devoid of all positive emotion. Sex is about pity, power, self-loathing and grief. There is no beauty, passion, love, or hope here. I think that M. John Harrison’s symbolism with light and the singularity shaped like a birth canal is meant to convey some feeling of hope at the end of the novel, but I just felt drained.
I’m giving Light 3 stars because I admire Harrison’s vivid writing style, there are some cool cyberpunk elements (though some were too similar to William Gibson’s work) and this was a terrific audio production. My issues with Light are due to my own personal reading preferences. I recommend Light to readers who aren’t so small-minded that they insist on liking some of the characters. Meanwhile, I’ll be trying a different novel by M. John Harrison, including another produced by Neil Gaiman Presents.
Originally posted at www.fantasyliterature.com
Michael Kearney is a physicist. He’s also a serial killer. Obsessed with numbers and patterns since he was three, he sees something behind them. Something is there, something dark and ominous that starts to emerge sometimes. He calls it the Shrander and the only way to hold it back is to kill someone. Trying to appease the Shrander, Michael uses Tarot cards and a special pair of bone dice to try to figure out what he’s supposed to do next. He’s also teamed up with a colleague named Brian Tate to study the relationship between mathematics and prophecy.
Three hundred years later, explorers are using the “Tate-Kearney transformations” to navigate the space phenomenon they call the Kefahuchi (K) Tract where ancient alien races have left artifacts from their advanced civilizations. One of these explorers is Seria Mau, who was molested by her father and escaped by transferring her consciousness to a K-ship. Now, as a sentient starship, she presides over a crew of brooding self-aware algorithms as she explores the Kefahuchi Tract. Her brother, Ed Chianese, used to be an explorer, but now he’s a Twink — he lives most of his life floating in a tank and plugged into a virtual reality that he likes better than real life.
These three characters are all connected by the Shrander. What is it, and why is it interested in these humans’ lives? What is the energetic light-spewing singularity that’s located in the center of the Kefahuchi Tract? Explorers who go there never come back.
When I read over my summary of Light, I think this sounds like an awesome book. I picked it up because I’ve wanted to read M. John Harrison for years. Then Neil Gaiman got into the audiobook business and started a new line called Neil Gaiman Presents in which he works with authors, narrators, and Audible.com to produce some of his favorite works in audio format. Light is one of his very first offerings so, naturally, I jumped. While I did admire Harrison’s characterization and writing style, and Julian Elfer’s narration was spot-on (I hope Gaiman uses him again), I did not like Light as much as I thought I would for two reasons.
First, it’s written in that self-conscious Teflon style that’s slick, vague and nebulous, maybe full of symbolism, and you’re never sure you’ve really got a grasp on what’s going on until the end. Or maybe not even then. And you wonder, “Is this book too smart for me? Or maybe I just have to try harder?” This can imbue the story with a heady atmosphere of wonder and mystery, or it can frustrate the reader who’s just looking for a good story. In the case of Light, things only start to clear up in the last few pages, which doesn’t feel like enough pay off. I didn’t read any reviews before I read Light because I didn’t want to spoil anything, but I would have enjoyed the plot more if I’d first read a summary such as the one I wrote above.
I could have overlooked the hazy plot if I had liked M. John Harrison’s characters. Unfortunately, and this is my biggest problem with Light, the characters are all, with the exception of one who dies not long after we meet him, completely unlikable. Neil Gaiman warns us in his introduction that we won’t like Michael Kearney, but he doesn’t mention that we won’t like any of the characters. Perhaps it’s shallow to insist on having some character to admire or root for, or maybe it’s simply a reflection of my own optimistic personality, but I know many readers feel the way I do, so I’ll warn them.
All of the characters have sad, desperate, pathetic lives. Many are suicidal and most have some sort of sexual hang-up. They can’t keep their hands off their own genitals, or they keep presenting their genitals for others to handle. Almost every single sex act (and there are a lot of them) is ugly, animalistic, and devoid of all positive emotion. Sex is about pity, power, self-loathing and grief. There is no beauty, passion, love, or hope here. I think that M. John Harrison’s symbolism with light and the singularity shaped like a birth canal is meant to convey some feeling of hope at the end of the novel, but I just felt drained.
I’m giving Light 3 stars because I admire Harrison’s vivid writing style, there are some cool cyberpunk elements (though some were too similar to William Gibson’s work) and this was a terrific audio production. My issues with Light are due to my own personal reading preferences. I recommend Light to readers who aren’t so small-minded that they insist on liking some of the characters. Meanwhile, I’ll be trying a different novel by M. John Harrison, including another produced by Neil Gaiman Presents.
Originally posted at www.fantasyliterature.com
March 10, 2015
Making sense is a stylistic choice. A stylistic choice that this book firmly opted out of. That’s not to say that’s always a bad thing. There are a few books where “not making sense” works rather well. This is not one of them.
M. John Harrison appears to be trying to write cyberpunkish weird fiction and in doing so, misses the mark on both. The cyberpunk isn’t cyberpunk and the weird isn’t weird. It’s just an incoherent far-future what-the-fuckery mess. Now, I usually like the worldbuilding style where you don’t explain the world and let the reader understand it through immersion. But here’s the thing: the reader needs to be able to understand it eventually.
Light seems to just constantly throw more nonsensical technobabble and futurespeak at us by the second, and never really looks back to see if things are clear. Considering how disjointed and unexamined the writing is, that makes sense. The problem is, I think the disjointed, frantic writing was once again, a choice. I think Harrison is trying to emulate the styles of Stephenson and Gibson, but what he doesn’t understand is that writing was well-crafted and purposefully put together. It wasn’t cobbled together in a fit, even though that’s how it feels.
To be honest, this book feels like I’m reading badly written fanfiction for a fandom I’m not familiar with and the author is trying to expand the scope of the medium. And failing badly.
Also, like much of fanfiction, there’s a lot of sex (and masturbation) happening all the time. While I think there’s nothing wrong with sex (or masturbation), constant references seem like a bit of a hangup. There is more on-page sex in this than in a lot of erotica. And a lot of the sexualized characters are described as looking underage, in a lusty tone. Then you have a sex-crazed anorexic named Anna with daddy issues, written with what seems to be a completely straight face...
In fact, much of it reads like someone who was trying to be too hard to be edgy. The book kind of sort of attempts to deal with some real issues, like anorexia, suicide, mental illness, abuse... but it all comes off as kind of glib and just ends up being offensive rather than anything useful. The characters aren’t even caricatures. They’d need more personality for that. Maybe these “issues” were an attempt to make the characters more complex or compelling. If it was, it failed. Like pretty much everything in this book.
The end is also stupid.
M. John Harrison appears to be trying to write cyberpunkish weird fiction and in doing so, misses the mark on both. The cyberpunk isn’t cyberpunk and the weird isn’t weird. It’s just an incoherent far-future what-the-fuckery mess. Now, I usually like the worldbuilding style where you don’t explain the world and let the reader understand it through immersion. But here’s the thing: the reader needs to be able to understand it eventually.
Light seems to just constantly throw more nonsensical technobabble and futurespeak at us by the second, and never really looks back to see if things are clear. Considering how disjointed and unexamined the writing is, that makes sense. The problem is, I think the disjointed, frantic writing was once again, a choice. I think Harrison is trying to emulate the styles of Stephenson and Gibson, but what he doesn’t understand is that writing was well-crafted and purposefully put together. It wasn’t cobbled together in a fit, even though that’s how it feels.
To be honest, this book feels like I’m reading badly written fanfiction for a fandom I’m not familiar with and the author is trying to expand the scope of the medium. And failing badly.
Also, like much of fanfiction, there’s a lot of sex (and masturbation) happening all the time. While I think there’s nothing wrong with sex (or masturbation), constant references seem like a bit of a hangup. There is more on-page sex in this than in a lot of erotica. And a lot of the sexualized characters are described as looking underage, in a lusty tone. Then you have a sex-crazed anorexic named Anna with daddy issues, written with what seems to be a completely straight face...
In fact, much of it reads like someone who was trying to be too hard to be edgy. The book kind of sort of attempts to deal with some real issues, like anorexia, suicide, mental illness, abuse... but it all comes off as kind of glib and just ends up being offensive rather than anything useful. The characters aren’t even caricatures. They’d need more personality for that. Maybe these “issues” were an attempt to make the characters more complex or compelling. If it was, it failed. Like pretty much everything in this book.
The end is also stupid.
January 19, 2018
“Behind all this bad behaviour was an insecurity magnificent in scope, metaphysical in nature. Space was big, and the boys from Earth were awed despite themselves by the things they found there: but worse, their science was a mess. Every race they met on their way through the Core had a star drive based on a different theory. All those theories worked, even when they ruled out one another's basic assumptions. You could travel between the stars, it began to seem, by assuming anything”
This is one of my favorite passages from Light, the idea of different kinds of star drives some of which are based on principles which are impossible according to known science. I wonder if the idea was inspired by the infinite improbability drive from The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. In any event, the chaotic conflicting science fits in with the novel’s theme of an incomprehensible universe. Light is M. John Harrison’s highly respected and 2002 novel that blends contemporary human drama with space opera and magical realism and surreal fantasy. Quite a heady brew.
The basic premise of Light is difficult to express succinctly. Here is an extract from the official synopsis:
“Three quantum outlaws face a universe of their own creation, a universe where you make up the rules as you go along and break them just as fast, where there’s only one thing more mysterious than darkness.”
The term “quantum outlaws” does not appear in the book (and does not make a lot of sense) and none of the characters are running from the police. However, the novel does focus on three protagonists in their own distinct plotlines that are related but never really intersect as such. The setting for each plot strand is quite interesting:
1999 AD: Michael Kearney, physicist by day and serial killerby night in his spare time. Kearney and his partner Brian Tate discover the quantum computing that leads to the development of FTL star drive. When not working on quantum science or killing people he is running away from a mysterious entity called The Shrander.
2400 AD: Seria Mau Genlicher is the captain of a “K-ship” called The White Cat, or more accurately she is the White Cat spaceship, having been fused into the ship and not needing any crew. She is a mercenary and an assassin.
2400 AD: Ed Chianese is an ex-space pilot, and now a “twink”, a man who is addicted to virtual reality. He is on the run from gangsters he owes money to.
All three protagonists are looking for some meaning to their lives. In the meantime, I was looking for meaning to the book. Light is not an easy read, it is structurally complex, there are a lot of neologisms and written in a range of style, shades, and tones. It is something of an “arty” sci-fi book, a genre bursting novel that blends contemporary human drama with cyberpunk, space opera, and even magical realism. The narrative jumps around frequently between the three plot strands in a non-linear timeline. It can be a little confusing and disorienting at first but as I read on it becomes more and more accessible, most of the neologisms are also directly explained as the narrative unfolds. I do, however, feel that the artistry gets in the way of the storytelling at times. The frequent switching between the almost disconnected plotlines makes the book feels rather fragmented and by the end still not one cohesive story. It does not help that I did not find the narrative compelling because none of the characters resonate with me. The moments of pathos did not do much for me because I was not invested in the characters. On a more positive note, Light is immensely imaginative and quite original.
I do not want to dissuade you from reading this book, there is quite a lot of substance to it and it is never really dull. However, I am a little disappointed that I do not like is as much as I expected to after reading all the plaudits it has received. Stylistically it does not appeal to me, I personally prefer a more accessible narrative without so many literary adornments. However, I do admire what M. John Harrison has accomplished with this book and I think it will appeal to readers who have a better appreciation for the artistic side of storytelling. If you are interested read a few trusted reviews and maybe try some sample chapters.
Quotes:
“They were arrant newcomers, driven by the nouveau enthusiasms of a cowboy economy. They had no idea what they had come for, or how to get it: they only knew they would. They had no idea how to comport themselves. They sensed there was money to be made. They dived right in. They started wars. They stunned into passivity five of the alien races they found in possession of the galaxy and fought the sixth—which they called “the Nastic” out of a mistranslation of the Nastic’s word for “space”—to a wary truce. After that they fought one another.”
“Seria Mau Genlicher, chained to her horrible ship yet still fighting to be human.”
“They grew the cultivar in a tank much like her own, in an off-the-shelf proteome called Tailors’ Soup, customised with inorganic substrates, code neither human nor machine, pinches of alien DNA and live math.”
‘At the moment,’ the mathematics announced, ‘I’m solving Schrödinger’s equation for every point on a grid of ten spatial and four temporal dimensions. No one else can do that.’
(“The mathematics” is the AI on board the K-ship)
“He took her by the hand and made her run down the stairs with him, then pulled her into an empty room which contained two or three billiard tables, where he killed her as quickly as he had all the others. She looked up at him, puzzlement replacing interest in her eyes before they filmed over.”
This is one of my favorite passages from Light, the idea of different kinds of star drives some of which are based on principles which are impossible according to known science. I wonder if the idea was inspired by the infinite improbability drive from The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. In any event, the chaotic conflicting science fits in with the novel’s theme of an incomprehensible universe. Light is M. John Harrison’s highly respected and 2002 novel that blends contemporary human drama with space opera and magical realism and surreal fantasy. Quite a heady brew.
The basic premise of Light is difficult to express succinctly. Here is an extract from the official synopsis:
“Three quantum outlaws face a universe of their own creation, a universe where you make up the rules as you go along and break them just as fast, where there’s only one thing more mysterious than darkness.”
The term “quantum outlaws” does not appear in the book (and does not make a lot of sense) and none of the characters are running from the police. However, the novel does focus on three protagonists in their own distinct plotlines that are related but never really intersect as such. The setting for each plot strand is quite interesting:
1999 AD: Michael Kearney, physicist by day and serial killer
2400 AD: Seria Mau Genlicher is the captain of a “K-ship” called The White Cat, or more accurately she is the White Cat spaceship, having been fused into the ship and not needing any crew. She is a mercenary and an assassin.
2400 AD: Ed Chianese is an ex-space pilot, and now a “twink”, a man who is addicted to virtual reality. He is on the run from gangsters he owes money to.
All three protagonists are looking for some meaning to their lives. In the meantime, I was looking for meaning to the book. Light is not an easy read, it is structurally complex, there are a lot of neologisms and written in a range of style, shades, and tones. It is something of an “arty” sci-fi book, a genre bursting novel that blends contemporary human drama with cyberpunk, space opera, and even magical realism. The narrative jumps around frequently between the three plot strands in a non-linear timeline. It can be a little confusing and disorienting at first but as I read on it becomes more and more accessible, most of the neologisms are also directly explained as the narrative unfolds. I do, however, feel that the artistry gets in the way of the storytelling at times. The frequent switching between the almost disconnected plotlines makes the book feels rather fragmented and by the end still not one cohesive story. It does not help that I did not find the narrative compelling because none of the characters resonate with me. The moments of pathos did not do much for me because I was not invested in the characters. On a more positive note, Light is immensely imaginative and quite original.
I do not want to dissuade you from reading this book, there is quite a lot of substance to it and it is never really dull. However, I am a little disappointed that I do not like is as much as I expected to after reading all the plaudits it has received. Stylistically it does not appeal to me, I personally prefer a more accessible narrative without so many literary adornments. However, I do admire what M. John Harrison has accomplished with this book and I think it will appeal to readers who have a better appreciation for the artistic side of storytelling. If you are interested read a few trusted reviews and maybe try some sample chapters.
Quotes:
“They were arrant newcomers, driven by the nouveau enthusiasms of a cowboy economy. They had no idea what they had come for, or how to get it: they only knew they would. They had no idea how to comport themselves. They sensed there was money to be made. They dived right in. They started wars. They stunned into passivity five of the alien races they found in possession of the galaxy and fought the sixth—which they called “the Nastic” out of a mistranslation of the Nastic’s word for “space”—to a wary truce. After that they fought one another.”
“Seria Mau Genlicher, chained to her horrible ship yet still fighting to be human.”
“They grew the cultivar in a tank much like her own, in an off-the-shelf proteome called Tailors’ Soup, customised with inorganic substrates, code neither human nor machine, pinches of alien DNA and live math.”
‘At the moment,’ the mathematics announced, ‘I’m solving Schrödinger’s equation for every point on a grid of ten spatial and four temporal dimensions. No one else can do that.’
(“The mathematics” is the AI on board the K-ship)
“He took her by the hand and made her run down the stairs with him, then pulled her into an empty room which contained two or three billiard tables, where he killed her as quickly as he had all the others. She looked up at him, puzzlement replacing interest in her eyes before they filmed over.”
July 11, 2016
5 Stars
Light by M John Harrison is a science fiction worth full marks. This is not an easy read. Harrison dumps the reader into three separate story lines as well as multiple time differences. The reader has to push through the tough start and trust in the author as well as the reviewers that it is worth your time and your energy. Three losers for protagonists, one is a junkie another is a sociopath and the last is a mathematical genius serial killer. None of them are good people yet you can identify with them and they are worth your time. Light is a powerful science fiction story that asks the big questions and leaves you wondering. This is not a character driven novel nor is it a book of trickery or twists and turns. But it is incredible well written, literary, poetic in a way. It is definitely unforgettable. Light is a frenetic powerful science fiction space opera cyberpunk adventure that would probably be easier to understand if you were high.
I was blown away by the writing. Even at the start when I was confused as hell, I knew that my efforts would be worth it. This is unbelievably my first M John Harrison novel. I am not sure what took me so long but I am diving into his works now. I enjoyed all three story lines and looked forward to each. They are really messed up. Once things get going Light is tough to put down. The ending is mind blowing good.
One example of the incredible writing :
"“Things went exactly as she had predicted. Before the Nastic vessel could react, Seria Mau had engaged the mathematics; the mathematics had engaged whatever stood in for reality; and the White Cat had vanished from that sector of space, leaving only a deteriorating eddy of charged particles. “You see?” said Seria Mau. After that it was the usual boring journey. The White Cat’s massive array—aerials an astronomical unit long, fractally folded to dimension-and-a-half so they could be laminated into a twenty-metre patch on the hull—detected nothing but a whisper of photinos. A few shadow operators, tutting and fussing, collected by the portholes and stared out into the dynaflow as if they had lost something there. Perhaps they had. “At the moment,” the mathematics announced, “I’m solving Schrödinger’s equation for every point on a grid of ten spatial and four temporal dimensions. No one else can do that.”
A near masterpiece of a book and thankfully only book one in the series. Awesome.
Light by M John Harrison is a science fiction worth full marks. This is not an easy read. Harrison dumps the reader into three separate story lines as well as multiple time differences. The reader has to push through the tough start and trust in the author as well as the reviewers that it is worth your time and your energy. Three losers for protagonists, one is a junkie another is a sociopath and the last is a mathematical genius serial killer. None of them are good people yet you can identify with them and they are worth your time. Light is a powerful science fiction story that asks the big questions and leaves you wondering. This is not a character driven novel nor is it a book of trickery or twists and turns. But it is incredible well written, literary, poetic in a way. It is definitely unforgettable. Light is a frenetic powerful science fiction space opera cyberpunk adventure that would probably be easier to understand if you were high.
I was blown away by the writing. Even at the start when I was confused as hell, I knew that my efforts would be worth it. This is unbelievably my first M John Harrison novel. I am not sure what took me so long but I am diving into his works now. I enjoyed all three story lines and looked forward to each. They are really messed up. Once things get going Light is tough to put down. The ending is mind blowing good.
One example of the incredible writing :
"“Things went exactly as she had predicted. Before the Nastic vessel could react, Seria Mau had engaged the mathematics; the mathematics had engaged whatever stood in for reality; and the White Cat had vanished from that sector of space, leaving only a deteriorating eddy of charged particles. “You see?” said Seria Mau. After that it was the usual boring journey. The White Cat’s massive array—aerials an astronomical unit long, fractally folded to dimension-and-a-half so they could be laminated into a twenty-metre patch on the hull—detected nothing but a whisper of photinos. A few shadow operators, tutting and fussing, collected by the portholes and stared out into the dynaflow as if they had lost something there. Perhaps they had. “At the moment,” the mathematics announced, “I’m solving Schrödinger’s equation for every point on a grid of ten spatial and four temporal dimensions. No one else can do that.”
A near masterpiece of a book and thankfully only book one in the series. Awesome.
November 6, 2007
Picking up this book was like waking up tired and groggy then talking to someone who has already been awake for three hours and drank a pot of coffee. In other words, it throws you into this weird world without much explanation, moving very quickly through a fairly complex bifurcated story structure (one part set in the present, another in space several centuries into the future). But despite the minimal amount of exposition here, you eventually figure out what is going on, and maybe even come to like it. For me, it was around page 120 that I actually got into the swing of this novel. And, by page 240, it dawned on me that I was really enjoying it.
The first thing that struck me is how bizarrely creative and idiosyncratically inventive the characters and they worlds they inhabit are. And unlike many sci-fi/”weird fiction” writers, who have tremendous imaginations but can often have a somewhat awkward relationship with the English language, Harrison is an excellent writer of prose. His characters are sympathetically rendered in three dimensions (with even a few of them existing, we are often told, in ten spatial and four temporal dimensions), and his language is clear, often lyrical, and precise, even when bogged down with the weighty jargon of theoretical physics (a rudimentary understanding of quantum physics enhanced my appreciation of Light – while probably not necessary, I would recommend a selective skim through Lisa Randall’s “Warped Passages” to prospective readers of this book.)
The part of the novel that takes place in the present is that of a serial-murdering physicist who we know will eventually happen upon a universe-shattering scientific discovery (we know this because the part of the story set in the future constantly refers to it). He is haunted by a disembodied presence that absolutely terrifies him, driving him to kill, and he entrusts his life to the rolls of strange dice he stole from it.
As for the part that takes place in the future, “space opera” is a very good way of describing it. Characters fall in love (or lust), seek hidden treasure (in the form of ancient advanced technology hidden in a wormhole), get betrayed, throw adolescent tantrums, fight and die (and sometimes come back to life), all with the same lyricism and bravura as a Bellini bel canto, only set in a mysterious region of deep space called the Kefahuchi Tract.
And then there’s the sex. There are several times when the faint disco beat of soft-core porn creeps into the soundtrack of this novel, most of it of a cold and impersonal sort. With the exception of the present-day protagonist, whose sexual inhibitions/predilections eventually shed some light on his character’s past and present circumstances, the rest of it seems borderline gratuitous, albeit entertaining.
The first thing that struck me is how bizarrely creative and idiosyncratically inventive the characters and they worlds they inhabit are. And unlike many sci-fi/”weird fiction” writers, who have tremendous imaginations but can often have a somewhat awkward relationship with the English language, Harrison is an excellent writer of prose. His characters are sympathetically rendered in three dimensions (with even a few of them existing, we are often told, in ten spatial and four temporal dimensions), and his language is clear, often lyrical, and precise, even when bogged down with the weighty jargon of theoretical physics (a rudimentary understanding of quantum physics enhanced my appreciation of Light – while probably not necessary, I would recommend a selective skim through Lisa Randall’s “Warped Passages” to prospective readers of this book.)
The part of the novel that takes place in the present is that of a serial-murdering physicist who we know will eventually happen upon a universe-shattering scientific discovery (we know this because the part of the story set in the future constantly refers to it). He is haunted by a disembodied presence that absolutely terrifies him, driving him to kill, and he entrusts his life to the rolls of strange dice he stole from it.
As for the part that takes place in the future, “space opera” is a very good way of describing it. Characters fall in love (or lust), seek hidden treasure (in the form of ancient advanced technology hidden in a wormhole), get betrayed, throw adolescent tantrums, fight and die (and sometimes come back to life), all with the same lyricism and bravura as a Bellini bel canto, only set in a mysterious region of deep space called the Kefahuchi Tract.
And then there’s the sex. There are several times when the faint disco beat of soft-core porn creeps into the soundtrack of this novel, most of it of a cold and impersonal sort. With the exception of the present-day protagonist, whose sexual inhibitions/predilections eventually shed some light on his character’s past and present circumstances, the rest of it seems borderline gratuitous, albeit entertaining.
March 22, 2009
The most persistent reminder I have of my mortality is the nagging consciousness of all the good books I will never read. From this perspective, Light is my least favorite kind of book: one I regret having taken the time to finish. I usually follow a 100-page rule but, in this case, the reviews were so good I felt sure that I must be missing something, or the quality of the writing would make up for the adolescent themes, or everything would come together in a brilliant conclusion that redeemed the earlier parts of the book. It didn't happen.
I realize there are books I don't care for that are still good books. Perhaps this is one of them. All I know is that this wasn't a book for me, no doubt because I am insufficiently turned on by the idea of growing tusks, injecting myself with the ribosomes of exotic animals, or libertarianism practiced on a galactic scale. In fact, there are a lot of things the author fetishizes that I just think of as effete themes in science fiction: girls who are spaceships, inscrutable "oriental" women, doll-like women, gigantic women, women genetically altered to resemble Japanese pornography of the 20th century, anorexic women, an incident of sexual molestation as a child being the key to understanding a woman's identity, and prostitution as a viable career for women in an interplanetary economy.
I know that bosoms and ray-guns go together in this genre, so I'm willing to overlook a lot of dumb ideas about women if there are at least some interesting ideas about science, but Light reads more like The Secret than science fiction. Consider: There is a cosmic bogeyman influencing human destiny. Most people don't actually perceive reality. Beyond what most people perceive as real there is a deeper level of reality where anything is possible. The deeper level of reality is governed by our thoughts, wishes, and intentions. The underlying reality can be perceived by the very simple (cats and madmen) and by the wise (physicists). The message we hear when we perceive the underlying reality of the universe is to forgive ourselves. In the "real" universe, where anything can happen, self-actualization is our highest end. What a load of New Age humbug given license by vague references to quantum physics!
I realize there are books I don't care for that are still good books. Perhaps this is one of them. All I know is that this wasn't a book for me, no doubt because I am insufficiently turned on by the idea of growing tusks, injecting myself with the ribosomes of exotic animals, or libertarianism practiced on a galactic scale. In fact, there are a lot of things the author fetishizes that I just think of as effete themes in science fiction: girls who are spaceships, inscrutable "oriental" women, doll-like women, gigantic women, women genetically altered to resemble Japanese pornography of the 20th century, anorexic women, an incident of sexual molestation as a child being the key to understanding a woman's identity, and prostitution as a viable career for women in an interplanetary economy.
I know that bosoms and ray-guns go together in this genre, so I'm willing to overlook a lot of dumb ideas about women if there are at least some interesting ideas about science, but Light reads more like The Secret than science fiction. Consider: There is a cosmic bogeyman influencing human destiny. Most people don't actually perceive reality. Beyond what most people perceive as real there is a deeper level of reality where anything is possible. The deeper level of reality is governed by our thoughts, wishes, and intentions. The underlying reality can be perceived by the very simple (cats and madmen) and by the wise (physicists). The message we hear when we perceive the underlying reality of the universe is to forgive ourselves. In the "real" universe, where anything can happen, self-actualization is our highest end. What a load of New Age humbug given license by vague references to quantum physics!
June 15, 2016
There's a rogue rim of science fiction inhabited by experimentalists. Harrison is one. Moorcock another. A few less distinct figures slip in and out of the wings. Theirs is a careening brand of storytelling that skates the edge of comprehension, fueled by twisted psychological truths and the madness that fumes at the root of the math that makes travel of any kind (spatial, temporal, evolutionary) eerily possible. Light finds Harrison at the top of his game, and can best be described as desperation on crack.
There's little time to say hello to Michael Kearney, a physicist whose fear of making a discovery has him serial-killing his way through London to keep the future at bay. He is stalked by the Schrander, a demon whose dice he's stolen to roll in the darker corners of train stations and airports in an urgent attempt to divine his fate's destination. He's already on the run when we meet, and we're all-too-soon clutching at his coattails (in tandem with his anorexic first wife) just to keep up.
Any foothold here is an illusion. The story jumps at will to a universe four hundred years in the future to join Seria Mau Genlicher - a young woman who, much like Herbert's Guild Navigators, has bargained away her physical integrity to bond with a space ship. Seria's surfing the wild and wooly Kefahuchi Tract, resurrecting her sanity daily in an effort to hunt down the key to an ancient artifact she's recently acquired. A swift shift and we're in for a visit with Chinese Ed, tank addict a la Total Recall, who's run out of time and money and mission and has no idea how to make his life work again. Will Rickshaw-girl Annie Glyph convey him to safety, or simply somewhere less interesting?
It's a jigsaw of a story. Connections exist to be made through clues in dreams, in fantasies; in the falling away of marginally masquerading disguise. Harrison kept me on my toes, and stretched a few boundaries to boot. The only issue I had with Light was its frequent collapse into scenes of squalid, knee-jerk sexuality. Once or twice and I can take the point, but too much of a bad thing is...a bad thing.
This aside? I found it a searingly inventive piece of work.
There's little time to say hello to Michael Kearney, a physicist whose fear of making a discovery has him serial-killing his way through London to keep the future at bay. He is stalked by the Schrander, a demon whose dice he's stolen to roll in the darker corners of train stations and airports in an urgent attempt to divine his fate's destination. He's already on the run when we meet, and we're all-too-soon clutching at his coattails (in tandem with his anorexic first wife) just to keep up.
Any foothold here is an illusion. The story jumps at will to a universe four hundred years in the future to join Seria Mau Genlicher - a young woman who, much like Herbert's Guild Navigators, has bargained away her physical integrity to bond with a space ship. Seria's surfing the wild and wooly Kefahuchi Tract, resurrecting her sanity daily in an effort to hunt down the key to an ancient artifact she's recently acquired. A swift shift and we're in for a visit with Chinese Ed, tank addict a la Total Recall, who's run out of time and money and mission and has no idea how to make his life work again. Will Rickshaw-girl Annie Glyph convey him to safety, or simply somewhere less interesting?
It's a jigsaw of a story. Connections exist to be made through clues in dreams, in fantasies; in the falling away of marginally masquerading disguise. Harrison kept me on my toes, and stretched a few boundaries to boot. The only issue I had with Light was its frequent collapse into scenes of squalid, knee-jerk sexuality. Once or twice and I can take the point, but too much of a bad thing is...a bad thing.
This aside? I found it a searingly inventive piece of work.
September 18, 2008
I normally don't take the time to add specifics to the rating I give a book, but this one necessitates it.
There are things about that frustrated me deeply. For most of the book, the point and the plot were discouragingly unclear. It was difficult to tell what anything had to do with anything, in the most general of senses. There was also a kind of oversexualization of the world setting that seems common nowadays, I think because of the lifting of the Western taboo on sex as a subject. It often seemed that all the characters did in their free time was have sex or masturbate - this is both unrealistic and irritating, and throughout most of the story, the sex-scenes added little to the story.
On the other hand, there are things about this book that were positively masterful. The image of "the Shrander" was truly scary, and most of Harrison's imagery was appropriately wonder-inspiring and grandiose. The hopelessness of the main characters really came through in the prose. Beautiful stuff. And the ending was more conclusive and satisfying than that of any book I've read in years.
I'm giving it a 3-star rating, because it's the cumulative mean of the book's flaws and strengths. There were 1-star moments, and 5-star moments, but in the end, I'm glad to have read this story.
There are things about that frustrated me deeply. For most of the book, the point and the plot were discouragingly unclear. It was difficult to tell what anything had to do with anything, in the most general of senses. There was also a kind of oversexualization of the world setting that seems common nowadays, I think because of the lifting of the Western taboo on sex as a subject. It often seemed that all the characters did in their free time was have sex or masturbate - this is both unrealistic and irritating, and throughout most of the story, the sex-scenes added little to the story.
On the other hand, there are things about this book that were positively masterful. The image of "the Shrander" was truly scary, and most of Harrison's imagery was appropriately wonder-inspiring and grandiose. The hopelessness of the main characters really came through in the prose. Beautiful stuff. And the ending was more conclusive and satisfying than that of any book I've read in years.
I'm giving it a 3-star rating, because it's the cumulative mean of the book's flaws and strengths. There were 1-star moments, and 5-star moments, but in the end, I'm glad to have read this story.
November 16, 2008
FAIR WARNING: There are spoilers galore below and for the "faint of heart" I do get a bit more sexually graphic in describing parts of the book than is my wont, so take care if you like to read these things with your kids :-)
I liked this book...I think.
All right, I won't be so namby-pamby: I liked this book (period).
Light is, however, not an easily comprehensible book nor one you can simply race through in an afternoon. The plot is rather simple ("nonexistent" in the opinion of some GR reviewers): Late in the 20th century (1999), Michael Kearney is a physicist and serial killer, who, with his partner, have stumbled on the beginnings of a Theory of Everything. He's also haunted by a creature he calls "the Shrander" that drives him to murder as he desperately tries to escape it. Interwoven with the modern-day story are those of Seria Mau and Ed Chianese in the late 25th (2400). Humans have spread throughout the galaxy but the novel focuses on an "impossible" phenomenon known as the Kefahuchi Tract, where all the laws of physics are bent if not broken and the relics of thousands of alien civilizations give mute testimony to intelligences' attempts to understand the phenomenon. Seria Mau is a sentient starship, a once-human girl overlaid on the technology of the earliest known race to investigate the Tract. (These enigmatic aliens were simply designated "Kefahuchi" and their technology, K-tech.) Ed, who turns out to be Seria's brother, became one of those humans who court death by exploring the Tract and getting as close to the singularity at its heart, though never going "all the way." We're introduced to him at the lowest point in his life, when he's become a "twink," addicted to VR. Unknown to these two, the Shrander has been manipulating their lives as well in order to bring events to a culmination where humans can begin to get a handle on the Tract.
Ah, the Tract. It turns out that the universe is, quite literally, what we make it. When humans ventured out into space they discovered a host of alien civilizations, most with physics that were incompatible with their own - sometimes in direct contradiction to "established" fact. The Tract is a mad place of dark energies & matter, weird energies and a naked singularity down which many have gone but none returned.
The Shrander is the last relic of K-tech. It's been manipulating alien cultures for 65 million years (at least) because it too needs to know what the Tract is. The original K aliens were "defeated" by the Tract. They came, they saw, but they couldn't conquer it so they made intelligent life more probable on a number of worlds and hoped that one of their "descendants" would understand it. (In a way, it's like The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy : a super-advanced race of beings creates the ultimate computer to answer the ultimate question.) The 65-million-year figure is interesting because that's when the last dinosaurs went extinct on Earth, opening up all those juicy ecological niches to our family - the mammals.
And then there's the sex. Having had twenty-four hours to mull over the book, I'm beginning to see where the sex fits in to the story as a whole. None of the three protagonists are very well adjusted, and their sexual hang-ups explain many of their actions. Kearney has sublimated his sexual desires into a fantasy house where he masturbates to his cousins' sexual play. It's only late in the book when he's able to have "normal" sex with his ex-wife Anne that he's able to face the Shrander and his phobias. Seria Mau was molested as a girl by a father who couldn't handle his wife's death; and there are two episodes in the novel where she murders her human passengers in a jealous fit of pique because they're having sex. Again, it's when she's able to reinhabit a physical body and at least have the opportunity for sex that she conquers her fears. I haven't quite figured out all sexual connection in terms of Ed's character, though his sex life is certainly far from normal, and seems to fixate around mother figures and dependency.
I was annoyed by the Shrander - another near-omnipotent, alien deus ex machina that's been subtly manipulating mankind for eons - stepping in at just the right moment. And it made the ending a bit too hopeful, considering all that had come before. Outside of that, though, I thought the book was worth reading. It's an intuitive guess at this point but I'm leaning toward the opinion that this is a "failed" novel. Harrison is trying to say something profound about "life, the universe & everything" but this book isn't strong enough to carry that weight.
I liked this book...I think.
All right, I won't be so namby-pamby: I liked this book (period).
Light is, however, not an easily comprehensible book nor one you can simply race through in an afternoon. The plot is rather simple ("nonexistent" in the opinion of some GR reviewers): Late in the 20th century (1999), Michael Kearney is a physicist and serial killer, who, with his partner, have stumbled on the beginnings of a Theory of Everything. He's also haunted by a creature he calls "the Shrander" that drives him to murder as he desperately tries to escape it. Interwoven with the modern-day story are those of Seria Mau and Ed Chianese in the late 25th (2400). Humans have spread throughout the galaxy but the novel focuses on an "impossible" phenomenon known as the Kefahuchi Tract, where all the laws of physics are bent if not broken and the relics of thousands of alien civilizations give mute testimony to intelligences' attempts to understand the phenomenon. Seria Mau is a sentient starship, a once-human girl overlaid on the technology of the earliest known race to investigate the Tract. (These enigmatic aliens were simply designated "Kefahuchi" and their technology, K-tech.) Ed, who turns out to be Seria's brother, became one of those humans who court death by exploring the Tract and getting as close to the singularity at its heart, though never going "all the way." We're introduced to him at the lowest point in his life, when he's become a "twink," addicted to VR. Unknown to these two, the Shrander has been manipulating their lives as well in order to bring events to a culmination where humans can begin to get a handle on the Tract.
Ah, the Tract. It turns out that the universe is, quite literally, what we make it. When humans ventured out into space they discovered a host of alien civilizations, most with physics that were incompatible with their own - sometimes in direct contradiction to "established" fact. The Tract is a mad place of dark energies & matter, weird energies and a naked singularity down which many have gone but none returned.
The Shrander is the last relic of K-tech. It's been manipulating alien cultures for 65 million years (at least) because it too needs to know what the Tract is. The original K aliens were "defeated" by the Tract. They came, they saw, but they couldn't conquer it so they made intelligent life more probable on a number of worlds and hoped that one of their "descendants" would understand it. (In a way, it's like The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy : a super-advanced race of beings creates the ultimate computer to answer the ultimate question.) The 65-million-year figure is interesting because that's when the last dinosaurs went extinct on Earth, opening up all those juicy ecological niches to our family - the mammals.
And then there's the sex. Having had twenty-four hours to mull over the book, I'm beginning to see where the sex fits in to the story as a whole. None of the three protagonists are very well adjusted, and their sexual hang-ups explain many of their actions. Kearney has sublimated his sexual desires into a fantasy house where he masturbates to his cousins' sexual play. It's only late in the book when he's able to have "normal" sex with his ex-wife Anne that he's able to face the Shrander and his phobias. Seria Mau was molested as a girl by a father who couldn't handle his wife's death; and there are two episodes in the novel where she murders her human passengers in a jealous fit of pique because they're having sex. Again, it's when she's able to reinhabit a physical body and at least have the opportunity for sex that she conquers her fears. I haven't quite figured out all sexual connection in terms of Ed's character, though his sex life is certainly far from normal, and seems to fixate around mother figures and dependency.
I was annoyed by the Shrander - another near-omnipotent, alien deus ex machina that's been subtly manipulating mankind for eons - stepping in at just the right moment. And it made the ending a bit too hopeful, considering all that had come before. Outside of that, though, I thought the book was worth reading. It's an intuitive guess at this point but I'm leaning toward the opinion that this is a "failed" novel. Harrison is trying to say something profound about "life, the universe & everything" but this book isn't strong enough to carry that weight.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
October 19, 2022
I did not expect to DNF this one.
Light has a bit of a reputation. I've seen it mentioned around the SF scene, and I expected big things, but in the end the book asked a little too much of me as a reader.
SF readers are used to trusting authors. We trust that mysteries will be revealed, strange languages will be explained, odd cultural quirks will becontextualised. Here though, my trust was stretched, and stretched... and eventually it broke a couple of hundred pages in.
Light is full of mystery, full of unexplained things that have huge influence on the characters and narrative, while being largely unfathomable to the reader.
That's fine if it goes for a reasonable page count, and can even be fine in the long run if the story is compelling and interesting enough to keep stringing you along, but in Light the unexplained catalyst begins to grate against the narrative and the unlikeable characters in a way that for me, killed my enjoyment.
The first character in this book, a mathematical researcher, is being stalked by a mysterious creature called the Shrander. This being has driven him to semi-madness, making him a serial killer. As he kills his way around the world, while also working on some arcane mathematical research, a narrative in the future is unfolding. A starship captain using the arcane mathematics our serial killer was working on, is killing her own way around the galaxy, being a bit of an asshole at every opportunity. Another future person is stuck on a dead end world, where he is addicted to an immersive VR game. He used to be a buccaneering sort, but is now a bit of a loser and falls in with a sort of future carnival where he predicts the future.
Anyway, we bounce around between these stories a bit, spending lots of time with the serial killer who is stalked by the evil presence that seems to be the key to his present and the futures we have been reading. Everyone is bit of a dick, or a loser, or a blend of both. There's an area of space called the Kefahuchi Tract that is referred to a lot in a meaningful way, but it's never really explained.
What is the evil presence? What is this dark key to everything? What is the Tract?
I never found out. Light is beautifully written, and I'm still keen to read more of Harrison's work, but this one simply didn't fly for me. I needed more to be revealed, and maybe characters that aren't so unremittingly awful.
Two mysterious, ghostly entities (That are evil? Good? Pedantic about apostrophes? Who knows?) out of five.
Light has a bit of a reputation. I've seen it mentioned around the SF scene, and I expected big things, but in the end the book asked a little too much of me as a reader.
SF readers are used to trusting authors. We trust that mysteries will be revealed, strange languages will be explained, odd cultural quirks will becontextualised. Here though, my trust was stretched, and stretched... and eventually it broke a couple of hundred pages in.
Light is full of mystery, full of unexplained things that have huge influence on the characters and narrative, while being largely unfathomable to the reader.
That's fine if it goes for a reasonable page count, and can even be fine in the long run if the story is compelling and interesting enough to keep stringing you along, but in Light the unexplained catalyst begins to grate against the narrative and the unlikeable characters in a way that for me, killed my enjoyment.
The first character in this book, a mathematical researcher, is being stalked by a mysterious creature called the Shrander. This being has driven him to semi-madness, making him a serial killer. As he kills his way around the world, while also working on some arcane mathematical research, a narrative in the future is unfolding. A starship captain using the arcane mathematics our serial killer was working on, is killing her own way around the galaxy, being a bit of an asshole at every opportunity. Another future person is stuck on a dead end world, where he is addicted to an immersive VR game. He used to be a buccaneering sort, but is now a bit of a loser and falls in with a sort of future carnival where he predicts the future.
Anyway, we bounce around between these stories a bit, spending lots of time with the serial killer who is stalked by the evil presence that seems to be the key to his present and the futures we have been reading. Everyone is bit of a dick, or a loser, or a blend of both. There's an area of space called the Kefahuchi Tract that is referred to a lot in a meaningful way, but it's never really explained.
What is the evil presence? What is this dark key to everything? What is the Tract?
I never found out. Light is beautifully written, and I'm still keen to read more of Harrison's work, but this one simply didn't fly for me. I needed more to be revealed, and maybe characters that aren't so unremittingly awful.
Two mysterious, ghostly entities (That are evil? Good? Pedantic about apostrophes? Who knows?) out of five.
November 7, 2009
i frigin' love M John Harrison! WOWEE, this book..umm..this book is so far beyond a simple sci-fi! it is about the choices we make (in the case of the characters, mostly bad choices) for various inner reasons or for fear of living or whatnot and how they shape or warp our existence. Do u really want to shape your life for the better or just pretend to and secretly, or openly, sabotage it at every chance. While i was reading Light i thought of a bunch of good things for the review and now i don't remember any of them. Light was an amazing book! Just recently found out that there is a sequel to this- Nova Swing- which i will be buying very soon, prob right now actually.
June 22, 2007
Light is easily one of the darkest books I’ve ever read, and that’s saying something. With a taut narrative split between three protagonists, a near-future serial killer/brilliant physicist (why are SF characters almost never mediocre physicists?), a far-future woman/starship with the impulse control of a spoiled and heavily armed child, and a "twink," a sort of futuristic virtual reality addict, Light moves along at breakneck speed, combining SF sensawunda, bleak noir cruelty, and lush, violent imagery shown through prose that is both shocking and beautiful. Oddly enough, it’s also the most accessible M. John Harrison (The Course of the Heart, Viriconium, Things That Never Happen) book I’ve read yet. Recommended.
October 19, 2007
"The Persian poet Rumi wrote, 'Open your hands if you wish to be held.' Almost the same could be said about M. John Harrison... Open your mind if you wish to be enthralled."—Jonathan Carroll
Few writers have have written better passages with descriptive and poetic prose, especially combined with an estranging vividness "capturing the strange mixture of beauty, banality and menace in everyday life".
"Light" is an aesthetic vision. Imaginative, startling and only barely Science Fiction. OK, it is half SiFi and half literary genius. It is also a genius in both genres. Like Iain M. Banks (and now William Gibson) Harrison truly knows how to combine and handle the speculative ideas of the near/far future shocks along with poignant politics of everyday reality. He is a writer of pure beauty and emotion who is not afraid to be strange, to warp us into bizarre constellations and take us for stimulating rides.
This book should have won the Arthur C. Clarke Award (it was Short-Listed). It's follow up, "Nova Swing", which is more involved w/ the world of SciFi and less rounded actually won the award. As much as I like "Nova Swing", I do not love it as I do "Light".
"Light" possesses fabrics of the mystery & magic.
[A short excerpt]: "Inside nothing had changed. Nothing had changed since the 1970s, and nothing ever would. The walls were papered a yellowish colour like the soles of feet. Low wattage bulbs on timers allowed you twenty seconds of light before they plunged the stairs back into darkness. There was a smell of gas outside the bathroom, stale boiled food from the second floor rooms. Then aniseed everywhere, coating the membranes of the nose. Near the top of the stairwell a skylight let in the angry orange glare of the London night."
[193].
Its atmosphere is marvelously galactic, dark, literal and metaphorical... always changing, always brilliant. Light was released in 2003, but should easily already be considered a true classic. As bright and dark as Light is, it is also quite heavy (pun intended).
Read it.
Few writers have have written better passages with descriptive and poetic prose, especially combined with an estranging vividness "capturing the strange mixture of beauty, banality and menace in everyday life".
"Light" is an aesthetic vision. Imaginative, startling and only barely Science Fiction. OK, it is half SiFi and half literary genius. It is also a genius in both genres. Like Iain M. Banks (and now William Gibson) Harrison truly knows how to combine and handle the speculative ideas of the near/far future shocks along with poignant politics of everyday reality. He is a writer of pure beauty and emotion who is not afraid to be strange, to warp us into bizarre constellations and take us for stimulating rides.
This book should have won the Arthur C. Clarke Award (it was Short-Listed). It's follow up, "Nova Swing", which is more involved w/ the world of SciFi and less rounded actually won the award. As much as I like "Nova Swing", I do not love it as I do "Light".
"Light" possesses fabrics of the mystery & magic.
[A short excerpt]: "Inside nothing had changed. Nothing had changed since the 1970s, and nothing ever would. The walls were papered a yellowish colour like the soles of feet. Low wattage bulbs on timers allowed you twenty seconds of light before they plunged the stairs back into darkness. There was a smell of gas outside the bathroom, stale boiled food from the second floor rooms. Then aniseed everywhere, coating the membranes of the nose. Near the top of the stairwell a skylight let in the angry orange glare of the London night."
[193].
Its atmosphere is marvelously galactic, dark, literal and metaphorical... always changing, always brilliant. Light was released in 2003, but should easily already be considered a true classic. As bright and dark as Light is, it is also quite heavy (pun intended).
Read it.
Want to read
June 14, 2014Added because in the acknowledgements of Perdido Street Station, M John Harrison is one of only two authors credited (the other being the wonderful Mervyn Peake).
Comments in the Mievillians group suggest this may be a good one to start with: https://www.goodreads.com/topic/show/...
Comments in the Mievillians group suggest this may be a good one to start with: https://www.goodreads.com/topic/show/...
August 24, 2022
The features of the universe in which the stories play are so over the top that, to me, the book belongs in the fantasy, not SF, genre. Also an awful lot of repetition. Still, some interesting stories. I don't think I will read the next part of this series.
May 31, 2021
I don't understand why any of this happened, and ye gods the sex stuff made my skin crawl, but it was very interesting for the last 100 pages.
November 11, 2009
I picked up this novel at a thrift shop as an impulse buy, believing that I would be getting something in the same vein as an Iain M. Banks story. I'm glad that I did: Harrison is perhaps a better writer than Banks (with or without the "M."), even as he possesses the same black sense of humour and ability to write wryly and casually about the grotesque and the vicious. Well-crafted science fiction provides a perfect way to pass a weekend, and I thoroughly enjoyed Harrison's tripartite tale.
We open in the present, in the presence of a cooly amoral serial killer and breakthrough-poised physicist, Michael Kearney, seemingly driven to his deadly pattern by an entity called "the Shrander". Interspersed with the latter's story are those of the far future's Seria Mau Genlicher, an ultra-tech K-ship pilot, available to the highest (alien or human) bidder, who prowls the dimensional borderlands of the mysterious and artifact-cluttered singularity of the Kefahuchi Tract, and Ed Chianese, a wastrel virtual reality addict, or "twink", on the run from the spiritual menace of the past and the physical menace the geriatric Cray sisters. Though the first story is separated from the other two by some four hundred years, they are all linked through contact with the enigmatic Shrander. Harrison drives us towards the heart of the mystery with lovely prose and great creativity. If the ending doesn't seem completely satisfactory - and in particular, if Kearney's story doesn't quite add up - the book as a whole is very good, and the Kefahuchi tract is a fascinating and tantalizing concept. Harrison is particularly adept at describing the quantum-level mathematics and time-space fluctuations of the K-ship - I found Genlicher's third of the tale to be the most interesting.
Harrison has written a second novel that involves his fictional future milieu, called Nova Swing, which I'm going to be picking up, either first- or second-hand, within the next few months. Harrison is good enough to have been placed in my "must read" list of science fiction authors.
We open in the present, in the presence of a cooly amoral serial killer and breakthrough-poised physicist, Michael Kearney, seemingly driven to his deadly pattern by an entity called "the Shrander". Interspersed with the latter's story are those of the far future's Seria Mau Genlicher, an ultra-tech K-ship pilot, available to the highest (alien or human) bidder, who prowls the dimensional borderlands of the mysterious and artifact-cluttered singularity of the Kefahuchi Tract, and Ed Chianese, a wastrel virtual reality addict, or "twink", on the run from the spiritual menace of the past and the physical menace the geriatric Cray sisters. Though the first story is separated from the other two by some four hundred years, they are all linked through contact with the enigmatic Shrander. Harrison drives us towards the heart of the mystery with lovely prose and great creativity. If the ending doesn't seem completely satisfactory - and in particular, if Kearney's story doesn't quite add up - the book as a whole is very good, and the Kefahuchi tract is a fascinating and tantalizing concept. Harrison is particularly adept at describing the quantum-level mathematics and time-space fluctuations of the K-ship - I found Genlicher's third of the tale to be the most interesting.
Harrison has written a second novel that involves his fictional future milieu, called Nova Swing, which I'm going to be picking up, either first- or second-hand, within the next few months. Harrison is good enough to have been placed in my "must read" list of science fiction authors.
December 8, 2016
-Buen pulso, tinta equivocada sobre el papel tal vez incorrecto.-
Género. Ciencia ficción.
Lo que nos cuenta. Tres tramas se alternan: una capitana mercenaria al servicio de una civilización alienígena en contra de los intereses humanos, un antiguo piloto de combate que ahora es un adicto a la realidad virtual y un físico que descubrirá las bases científicas para viajar entre estrellas pero que es un asesino en serie. Las tres relacionadas, de una u otra forma, con una singularidad en el espacio, el Canal Kefahuchi.
¿Quiere saber más de este libro, sin spoilers? Visite:
http://librosdeolethros.blogspot.com/...
Género. Ciencia ficción.
Lo que nos cuenta. Tres tramas se alternan: una capitana mercenaria al servicio de una civilización alienígena en contra de los intereses humanos, un antiguo piloto de combate que ahora es un adicto a la realidad virtual y un físico que descubrirá las bases científicas para viajar entre estrellas pero que es un asesino en serie. Las tres relacionadas, de una u otra forma, con una singularidad en el espacio, el Canal Kefahuchi.
¿Quiere saber más de este libro, sin spoilers? Visite:
http://librosdeolethros.blogspot.com/...
August 4, 2019
If you can't deliver the point of a story prior to the final ten pages of the novel, why bother? Most stories are a combination of journey and destination--you want to appreciate the story as you read it, and you want to appreciate the ending. But don't make the journey so unappetizing that I'd rather read a synopsis than the actual novel. There are some neat stuff in here in all three of the novel's plotlines (well, maybe not Kearney's). I only wish it had been worth the rest of it.
December 13, 2018
This was not good. Neil Gaiman recommended this, and I'm not going to trust his recommendations going forward.
Imagine if Stephen King wrote A Wrinkle In Time but you didn't even know what was going on until close to the end? That's this novel.
Imagine if Stephen King wrote A Wrinkle In Time but you didn't even know what was going on until close to the end? That's this novel.
August 29, 2021
John M Harrison specialises in stories where the meaning seems to be just out of reach so if you are looking for a straightforward story then do not enter.
However if you're up for some intriguing playfulness with genre tropes and enjoy the journey then come on in.
However if you're up for some intriguing playfulness with genre tropes and enjoy the journey then come on in.
July 7, 2024
“….and when he looked down again, some shift of vision had altered his perspective: he saw clearly that the gaps between the larger stones made the same sorts of shapes as the gaps between the smaller ones. The more he looked, the more the arrangement repeated itself. Suddenly he understood this as a condition of things- if you could see the patterns the waves made, or remember the shapes of a million small white clouds, there it would be, a boiling, inexplicable, vertiginous similarity in all the processes of the world, roaring silently away from you in ever-shifting repetitions, always the same, never the same thing twice.”
With a failed marriage, the funding for his research in jeopardy and a mysterious force following him; Michael Kearney was on the run from his life. With a father who wanted her to play mother and an organization who wanted to keep her under its thumb, Seria Mau Genlicher was running from her past. With an addiction for the tank and owning money to all the wrong people, Ed Chianese was on the run trying to stay alive.
“Then he heard a voice say: ‘It was amazing to them to discover they had always been in the garden without understanding it,’ and knew for certain that the inside and the outside of everything are always a single, continuous medium. In that moment he believed he could go anywhere. With a shout of elation he attempted to fall forward in all possible directions at once….”
With a failed marriage, the funding for his research in jeopardy and a mysterious force following him; Michael Kearney was on the run from his life. With a father who wanted her to play mother and an organization who wanted to keep her under its thumb, Seria Mau Genlicher was running from her past. With an addiction for the tank and owning money to all the wrong people, Ed Chianese was on the run trying to stay alive.
“Then he heard a voice say: ‘It was amazing to them to discover they had always been in the garden without understanding it,’ and knew for certain that the inside and the outside of everything are always a single, continuous medium. In that moment he believed he could go anywhere. With a shout of elation he attempted to fall forward in all possible directions at once….”
June 14, 2023
“Behind all this bad behavior was an insecurity magnificent in scope, metaphysical in nature. Space was big, and the boys from earth were awed despite themselves by the things they found there: but worse, their science was a mess. Every race they met on their way through the Core had a star drive based on a different theory. All those theories worked, even when they ruled out one another’s basic assumptions. You could travel between the stars, it began to seem, by assuming anything…..
It was affronting to discover that. So when they fetched up on the edge of the tract, looked it in the eye, and began to dispatch their doomed entradas, the Earthlings were hoping to find, among other things, some answers. They wondered why the universe, which seemed so harsh on the top, was underneath so pliable. Everything worked. Wherever you looked, you found. They were hoping to find out why.”
Light by M. John Harrison is an acid trip experience, worth being read by the snobbiest of literary officials. When I first picked up this book I was expecting a science heavy novel focused on the physics of the knowable universe however what I got was much more different. Light is a novel which makes absolutely no sense, yet at the same time succeeds at its goal to the highest level, a goal which I found to be a thing of beauty. To review this book is a challenge as 90 percent of this novel is pure chaos until the final pages when everything clicks(to an extent). Without going into spoilers I direct this question at those who ponder at the idea of creation: Even if the patterns of life could fully be explained, would you not then ponder at how these patterns came to be? And to quest further: Would that unknowable element be the symbol of purpose for man? Light pushes the reader with questions like these, and although it is a challenge to keep track of all the events at hand, the conclusion wraps up in what I consider a perfect fashion.
Harrison’s prose is one of the most fluent I have read, creating a post-cyberpunk atmosphere that reeks of drugs and sex, while also giving off the ambiguous vibe which surrounds us through the novel. He is easily able to shift tones from all 3 POV’s and skips from fever dream to reality as simple as blinking an eye.
Disclaimer: For those not interested in heavy violence or sexual activity this may not be the book for you. Even though it is said often about many books, Light uses these elements as essential pieces to the overarching themes at hand, but it does get quite odd in some spaces.
So what is Light? Is it a grand, unorthodox space opera, or is it a literary snob's dream. The answer is both these things and while I can see why this book has many who openly dislike it, I can say for certain that 1) This is my book of the year so far, and 2) This is one of my favorite books of all time period. Do not be surprised when I finish Nova Swing, and Empty Space if I talk about them like this. I think M. John Harrison is just an author I am going to adore.
Character work- .5
Prose- 1
Plot/ Pacing- 1
Themes/Ideas- 1
Execution- 1
4.5/5
It was affronting to discover that. So when they fetched up on the edge of the tract, looked it in the eye, and began to dispatch their doomed entradas, the Earthlings were hoping to find, among other things, some answers. They wondered why the universe, which seemed so harsh on the top, was underneath so pliable. Everything worked. Wherever you looked, you found. They were hoping to find out why.”
Light by M. John Harrison is an acid trip experience, worth being read by the snobbiest of literary officials. When I first picked up this book I was expecting a science heavy novel focused on the physics of the knowable universe however what I got was much more different. Light is a novel which makes absolutely no sense, yet at the same time succeeds at its goal to the highest level, a goal which I found to be a thing of beauty. To review this book is a challenge as 90 percent of this novel is pure chaos until the final pages when everything clicks(to an extent). Without going into spoilers I direct this question at those who ponder at the idea of creation: Even if the patterns of life could fully be explained, would you not then ponder at how these patterns came to be? And to quest further: Would that unknowable element be the symbol of purpose for man? Light pushes the reader with questions like these, and although it is a challenge to keep track of all the events at hand, the conclusion wraps up in what I consider a perfect fashion.
Harrison’s prose is one of the most fluent I have read, creating a post-cyberpunk atmosphere that reeks of drugs and sex, while also giving off the ambiguous vibe which surrounds us through the novel. He is easily able to shift tones from all 3 POV’s and skips from fever dream to reality as simple as blinking an eye.
Disclaimer: For those not interested in heavy violence or sexual activity this may not be the book for you. Even though it is said often about many books, Light uses these elements as essential pieces to the overarching themes at hand, but it does get quite odd in some spaces.
So what is Light? Is it a grand, unorthodox space opera, or is it a literary snob's dream. The answer is both these things and while I can see why this book has many who openly dislike it, I can say for certain that 1) This is my book of the year so far, and 2) This is one of my favorite books of all time period. Do not be surprised when I finish Nova Swing, and Empty Space if I talk about them like this. I think M. John Harrison is just an author I am going to adore.
Character work- .5
Prose- 1
Plot/ Pacing- 1
Themes/Ideas- 1
Execution- 1
4.5/5
October 7, 2024
I’m positive this book is genius that went over my head….hence 4 stars. But its somehow hard to follow. Reminds me of of the kind of work it took to read blindsight but harder to describe…. Maybe because of how depressingly pathetic and lonely humans are in this book. Everyone is messed up beyond repair,serotonin junkies, and the plot feels more like subplot….
Book follows 3 POV who evetually come together to make a reveal at the end…. But none are likable, if that important to you. First is kearney a physicist working on a cutting edge project that he is aftaid of and also is a serial killer of women to stress relieve.
Book follows 3 POV who evetually come together to make a reveal at the end…. But none are likable, if that important to you. First is kearney a physicist working on a cutting edge project that he is aftaid of and also is a serial killer of women to stress relieve.
Read
October 15, 2013For anyone holding to the self-evident truth that genre fiction should be eligible for the big literary prizes, one hurdle remains. Which book, exactly, should win? In any year there are plenty of science fiction books (and doubtless crime ones, if I kept up with crime, and so forth) which bear comparison to the Booker shortlist - but ones which could win over the infidels? Ones unassailable enough to bear the extra scrutiny they'd inevitably receive? Banks' Use of Weapons was one obvious contender, and this astonishingly good novel is another. Hell, one of the plot strands even looks a bit like litfic - following a contemporary mathematician with relationship difficulties. Now, granted he's also a serial killer being pursued by a menacing apparition, and his work ties him to the other two protagonists 400 years hence, in a region of space where physics goes strange and carnivorous algorithms roam - but it's not *all* talking maths in space, and that's hopefully enough of a hook for the fearful, right?
August 1, 2007
This book will continue to reverberate in your head years after you read...something has entered me from this book but what is it...a must read.
November 29, 2013
If this was the debut novel of a new young author I would say 'good effort'. It was an experiment that might have worked as a short story, but fails utterly as a novel. Never mind, always good to try something new, maybe you'll do better next time.
Indeed on first reading this is what I assumed it was. Then I read the huge list of awards and recommendations from throughout the sci-fi publishing industry that had been bestowed upon it, and learnt the author was a well respected veteran.
Some of these quotes are quite telling. SFSite said
So, why is it so bad?
The meta-plot, the big revelation that rewards those who make it to the end, is merely recycled from . (That, btw, contains a lot more actual science than this does!)
The actual plot… well, there isn't one. Nor are there any real characters. Everyone just bumbles around doing whatever random thing is necessary to get them where the author wants them to be. At the end it's revealed that , which may go some way to explaining their behaviour, but does not make for an interesting story.
There are three separate stories that we cut between. This technique is often used to add tension, but here it is essential, because all the stories are so boring I doubt anyone would make it to the end if they read each story uninterrupted. Let's look at the stories.
1. Michael Kearney's story. It's not a story. Nothing happens. He kills some people for no reason, travels around for no reason. The London sections are given much more accurate descriptions than the others which makes me assume the author lives in London. (Indeed, there is no actual science I can detect in the whole book, just magic.) I was hoping that this gloomy world of existential angst would turn out to be an hallucination, or a reality that took play inside the box from the other story, giving it some purpose. But no such luck.
2. Chinese Ed's story. This is a story, but a bad, boring one. There is a plot, but it doesn't make sense, and we don't really care what happens anyway. There is also a major problem here in that most of the characters are
3. Seria Mau Genlicker's story. This is the only one that had the potential to be interesting. The technology of the K-ships and the shadow operators sounds interesting (until it all turns out to be magic). Also it has space battles and approximates a quest-type plot. But ultimately Seria is not a compelling enough character for us to care what happens to her.
All three stories suffer from a kind of existential malaise. Characters live and die randomly, and don't seem to care, and nor does the reader. This might be OK in a Haruki Murakami book, which is really just about evoking that feeling in the reader, but it's not what I want from science fiction.
All the characters are constantly fucking one another. I don't mind sex in science fiction - it's not realistic when no characters have sex. One character, Michael Kearney, has sex obsession as an actual character trait, so that is OK. After all, in real life some people have a lot of sex, while some have none. In anthropological science fiction authors sometimes create alien societies full of nymphomaniacs, as a form of 'what would our society be like if…' But this isn't that, it's just our human society except everyone is having sex. When I see this I always wonder if it is some subtle wish-fulfilment by the author.
The biggest problem is that this is an attempt to write 'quantum' post-singularity science fiction by someone with no background in quantum physics, so it ends up just being magic. To see the same idea executed correctly I would recommend The Quantum Thief by Hannu Rajaniemi. Rajaniemi is an actual scientist and creates technology that may appear magical but has a basis in logic.
For example, let's compare Harrison's shadow operators with Rajaniemi's gogols. A gogol is a human consciousness that has been scanned and uploaded into a computer and now runs on a tiny processor in a nano particle. They can control humanoid robot bodies, or float around the universe creating billions of copies of themselves. This makes them quite powerful and in some ways godlike, but still tightly limited. We don't have the technology to upload a human mind currently. Nor can we create processors so small. But these are both plausible future technologies that could be combined in this way. Now, what it is a shadow operator? It's a computer program, except it doesn't require any computer to run on. Sometimes it can manipulate matter, or take on a body, similar to a gogol, but we don't know how or under what circumstances. It's just magic.
Even if you don't care about that, The Quantum Thief also has an exciting plot and compelling characters, while Light does not.
Indeed on first reading this is what I assumed it was. Then I read the huge list of awards and recommendations from throughout the sci-fi publishing industry that had been bestowed upon it, and learnt the author was a well respected veteran.
Some of these quotes are quite telling. SFSite said
"Not since Use of Weapons has a novel managed to so single-handedly revitalise the reenergise the SF field."Yes, they are praising it by comparing it to Use of Weapons, probably the worst sci-fi novel ever written. Ian M. Banks himself and China Mieville are quoted praising the book: both appallingly over-rated writers. Some good writers are also listed, but the whole thing really makes me wonder what is going on with science fiction. It's as if there is a whole parallel industry that turns out shit but also publishes magazines and runs awards ceremonies to proclaim how good it is. Notably many of these authors crossed over from writing literary fiction, which is a genre that has always been shit and yet has always cultivated a popular perception that it isn't, and that if you don't like it that is your failing as a reader, or more likely as a human being.
So, why is it so bad?
The meta-plot, the big revelation that rewards those who make it to the end, is merely recycled from . (That, btw, contains a lot more actual science than this does!)
The actual plot… well, there isn't one. Nor are there any real characters. Everyone just bumbles around doing whatever random thing is necessary to get them where the author wants them to be. At the end it's revealed that , which may go some way to explaining their behaviour, but does not make for an interesting story.
There are three separate stories that we cut between. This technique is often used to add tension, but here it is essential, because all the stories are so boring I doubt anyone would make it to the end if they read each story uninterrupted. Let's look at the stories.
1. Michael Kearney's story. It's not a story. Nothing happens. He kills some people for no reason, travels around for no reason. The London sections are given much more accurate descriptions than the others which makes me assume the author lives in London. (Indeed, there is no actual science I can detect in the whole book, just magic.) I was hoping that this gloomy world of existential angst would turn out to be an hallucination, or a reality that took play inside the box from the other story, giving it some purpose. But no such luck.
2. Chinese Ed's story. This is a story, but a bad, boring one. There is a plot, but it doesn't make sense, and we don't really care what happens anyway. There is also a major problem here in that most of the characters are
3. Seria Mau Genlicker's story. This is the only one that had the potential to be interesting. The technology of the K-ships and the shadow operators sounds interesting (until it all turns out to be magic). Also it has space battles and approximates a quest-type plot. But ultimately Seria is not a compelling enough character for us to care what happens to her.
All three stories suffer from a kind of existential malaise. Characters live and die randomly, and don't seem to care, and nor does the reader. This might be OK in a Haruki Murakami book, which is really just about evoking that feeling in the reader, but it's not what I want from science fiction.
All the characters are constantly fucking one another. I don't mind sex in science fiction - it's not realistic when no characters have sex. One character, Michael Kearney, has sex obsession as an actual character trait, so that is OK. After all, in real life some people have a lot of sex, while some have none. In anthropological science fiction authors sometimes create alien societies full of nymphomaniacs, as a form of 'what would our society be like if…' But this isn't that, it's just our human society except everyone is having sex. When I see this I always wonder if it is some subtle wish-fulfilment by the author.
The biggest problem is that this is an attempt to write 'quantum' post-singularity science fiction by someone with no background in quantum physics, so it ends up just being magic. To see the same idea executed correctly I would recommend The Quantum Thief by Hannu Rajaniemi. Rajaniemi is an actual scientist and creates technology that may appear magical but has a basis in logic.
For example, let's compare Harrison's shadow operators with Rajaniemi's gogols. A gogol is a human consciousness that has been scanned and uploaded into a computer and now runs on a tiny processor in a nano particle. They can control humanoid robot bodies, or float around the universe creating billions of copies of themselves. This makes them quite powerful and in some ways godlike, but still tightly limited. We don't have the technology to upload a human mind currently. Nor can we create processors so small. But these are both plausible future technologies that could be combined in this way. Now, what it is a shadow operator? It's a computer program, except it doesn't require any computer to run on. Sometimes it can manipulate matter, or take on a body, similar to a gogol, but we don't know how or under what circumstances. It's just magic.
Even if you don't care about that, The Quantum Thief also has an exciting plot and compelling characters, while Light does not.
December 15, 2024
Surreal, slightly perverted science-fiction, playing around in the end of physics where 'quantum' and 'magic' hold hands. Three viewpoint characters with at first no obvious connection explain a somewhat-interesting setting. One of them is a serial killer who masturbates his ex-wife, another is the child-brain of a rogue starship that watches passengers fuck and then spaces them, and the third is a fantasy-junky who has grungy sex with a couple of women who pity him. There's also some sort of algorithmic intelligence from a dead civilisation who is involved with everything, though exactly why or how isn't particularly clear.
If you like weird fiction then you'll likely find this at least passably entertaining, and I did, but there was too much left unexplained here to really satisfy me. I'm not averse to fiction that requires interpretative work, but I will happily skip the homework when all signs indicate there's no real reason to attempt it. There are a few good lines and cool ideas in here, and I'll bank those and move on.
April 19, 2018
There's no doubt that John Harrison sets out to stretch the bounds in Light, the first of a trilogy. Nor is there any doubt that what Harrison does in this book is very clever. The result is something that is arguably both a great book and a mess, so the three stars is something of an average.
Some readers may be put off by the fact that the narrative starts out in a way that is highly disjointed. We've got three interlaced story strands, one in present day England and two in a distant future, though there is no obvious connection between them. You have to read a whole lot of the book without much clue as to what's going on before it all comes together. Done properly, and if the reader has a lot of patience, this technique can be stunning. Gene Wolfe does it to perfection in the fantasy classic There Are Doors. Here it sort of works.
The two future strands, with central characters who are respectively an addict of an immersive entertainment system and someone who has given up her humanity to be the sort-of controlling brain of a starship, have a clever premise that space travelling humans, and a couple of non-human races, make use of vastly older technology they don't really understand, found near a strange natural (or not) phenomenon in a kind of tech graveyard. This is certainly interesting, though the strand I found I was happiest to return to was the present day one.
In this, the central character is one of two physicists, apparently trying to develop a quantum computer in a strangely amateurish setting. What they're doing seems to bear little resemblance to anything in current quantum computer research, but somehow, in part thanks to something unnatural seen in a computer simulation, it seems to end up being a faster-than-light drive instead. Oh, and the main character is haunted by a creature with a horse's skull for a head, which he somehow assumes will stay away from him if he kills people.
It's hard to have any sympathy for any of the central characters - one more obstacle Harrison seems to have intentionally put in the way to make this book harder work to enjoy. There's also a lot of techno-glitter - the sort of clever wordplay that sounds like it should be meaningful but really isn't. This technique is probably best illustrated by Roy's 'I've seen things you people wouldn't believe,' speech towards the end of Blade Runner. Harrison seems particularly fond of terminology from chaos theory - we get at least three references to a strange attractor - but often it feels like the words wash over the reader, sounding as if they have more content than is really there.
To an extent it all comes together at the end, though a fair amount is left unexplained. There's no doubt that reading this book is an experience you will remember. Whether you will enjoy it or not, I'm not sure. Several weeks after reading it, I still can't decide whether or not to go onto the other books in the trilogy - there's a kind of 'Want to read on, despite yourself' feeling as you go through the book, and this urges me to continue to the next volume. But it's the same kind of appeal of picking a scab. Might be best not to.
Some readers may be put off by the fact that the narrative starts out in a way that is highly disjointed. We've got three interlaced story strands, one in present day England and two in a distant future, though there is no obvious connection between them. You have to read a whole lot of the book without much clue as to what's going on before it all comes together. Done properly, and if the reader has a lot of patience, this technique can be stunning. Gene Wolfe does it to perfection in the fantasy classic There Are Doors. Here it sort of works.
The two future strands, with central characters who are respectively an addict of an immersive entertainment system and someone who has given up her humanity to be the sort-of controlling brain of a starship, have a clever premise that space travelling humans, and a couple of non-human races, make use of vastly older technology they don't really understand, found near a strange natural (or not) phenomenon in a kind of tech graveyard. This is certainly interesting, though the strand I found I was happiest to return to was the present day one.
In this, the central character is one of two physicists, apparently trying to develop a quantum computer in a strangely amateurish setting. What they're doing seems to bear little resemblance to anything in current quantum computer research, but somehow, in part thanks to something unnatural seen in a computer simulation, it seems to end up being a faster-than-light drive instead. Oh, and the main character is haunted by a creature with a horse's skull for a head, which he somehow assumes will stay away from him if he kills people.
It's hard to have any sympathy for any of the central characters - one more obstacle Harrison seems to have intentionally put in the way to make this book harder work to enjoy. There's also a lot of techno-glitter - the sort of clever wordplay that sounds like it should be meaningful but really isn't. This technique is probably best illustrated by Roy's 'I've seen things you people wouldn't believe,' speech towards the end of Blade Runner. Harrison seems particularly fond of terminology from chaos theory - we get at least three references to a strange attractor - but often it feels like the words wash over the reader, sounding as if they have more content than is really there.
To an extent it all comes together at the end, though a fair amount is left unexplained. There's no doubt that reading this book is an experience you will remember. Whether you will enjoy it or not, I'm not sure. Several weeks after reading it, I still can't decide whether or not to go onto the other books in the trilogy - there's a kind of 'Want to read on, despite yourself' feeling as you go through the book, and this urges me to continue to the next volume. But it's the same kind of appeal of picking a scab. Might be best not to.
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