Beyond Reality discussion

Topic for people who have finished reading Light by M. John Harrison.

Beware - this topic may contain spoilers!

Just spotted this article about the novel in Suvudu's current series of posts to commemorate the 25 year anniversary of Spectra:

http://www.suvudu.com/2010/07/25-year...

I finished! Can someone please explain it to me?

All right, I'm done.

As to explaining it. . . here's my understanding: The Shrander's race couldn't figure out the Kefahuchi Tract, so they created a race of beings (humans) that would be biologically primed to explore it. While we were busy evolving up from amino acids in primordial goo, they all died out but one, and that one stuck around to give our race a prod now and again to keep us going in the right direction. So he prodded Kearney, leading to Kearney making the scientific discovery that led to real space travel but also leading to Kearney going mad and becoming a serial killer. Still, it got us out there and encountering the Tract and the remnants of all this alien tech (including the Shrander's tech, the K-ships) and when we found the Shrander's tech we created beings like Seria Mau, who the Shrander kind of took under his wing because he admired her "rage to live" but she (like Kearney) was too afraid to quite make the leap into the Tract so he gave her a new life as some kind of space-faring phoenix type being. It was only in her brother, Ed Chianese, that the Shrander's plans came to fruition -- in him the human race finally achieved the proper amount of sheer will to push into the unknown (plus, of course, he exists at the time with the proper tech to explore) so the Shrander brought him to the edge of the Tract, gave him the ship that Seria Mau no longer needed, and sent him into the Tract to explore -- presumably, looking at the last paragraph of this book and the description of Nova Swing (the sequel), upending reality as we know it.

That's my take. . . but that means that most of the book is kind of futile, just a documentation of the Shrander's partial-successes, and over it all there's a disregard for individual lives that is abhorrent to me, so I don't think I liked the book. . . but it did have impact.

Wow. It looks like you did get it. I needed a combination of re-reading the first couple of chapters and reading the Wikipedia article about it to figure it out. It was very convoluted. Beautifully written, but convoluted.

It's a tough nut to crack. . . Harrison certainly doesn't bother with exposition! And pretty much everything except the final five chapters is just smoke-screen. . . very few of the actions taken by the characters in the novel have any bearing on what really happens. When I got to the end I had to just sit there with it and trace the Shrander through the novel to figure out what actually happened and what was just the characters flailing about making messes.

So did you like it? Are you interested in reading the sequel?

(I'm on the fence about the sequel. . . but I've heard it's better than Light in terms of its coherence. *g*)

One thing I did not get though (and I haven't checked Wikipedia yet to see if they explain it, lol): what was with the cat motif? Did it have a point, other than being the clue that lets you put together the relationship between Seria Mau and Ed Chianese?

Don't forget that there are both black and white cats in the Kearney story line. I kept thinking that the cats were important, but came away thinking that they're just a stylistic device.

Yeah, I remember the ones in the Kearney story line. . . that's why I was convinced there had to be some meaning too. But I guess maybe not. . .

Of course, this is coming from someone who didn't even realize that The Shrander, Sandra Chen, and Dr. Haends were all the same entity.

I guess a good question would be: Is this science fiction, or is it fantasy disguised as science fiction?

Sure it has spaceships and quantum computing, but the rest seems more like magic than science.

LOL, I was just having this discussion (not about this book, but in general) on another website.

Its SF to me. . . anything in the future I automatically place in SF (unless there's some really heavy-duty lifting on the part of the gods and/or there is a deliberate distinction made that there is science AND there is magic in the universe, and both those cases I would still call science fantasy) and in this particular case I would argue that all the stuff that seemed magical was simply the Shrander's waaaaaay more advanced tech.

BUT, thinking about it more closely. . . the fundamental component of Harrison's future was that literally any scientific theory would work, that the universe is ultimately malleable. I don't know much about quantum theory, but that sort of universe you could argue is fundamentally anti-scientific, and in that case you would say it is a fantasy world. (And imagine the uproar if we, with our focus on science, did reach the future and discovered it was a fantasy world?)

I think maybe we don't know yet, that the answer lies in Nova Swing when we see what happens when Ed Chianese explores the Tract.

Are we the only two who have read it?

It would appear so. . . though there were several other people who planned to read it, so maybe others will catch up. . . (I hope!)

I sometimes mark "planning to read" in the poll, but I may not be planning to read it for the foreseeable future. But this one didn't interest me.

I originally planned to read The Last Stormlord first and then since the month is rapidly disappearing decided to start this yesterday evening. About 3 pages in I realized I have read it before and for me it is not worth a reread. I have an unfortunate habit of buying books twice....and which ones, the ones that I have a hard time deciding whether or not to read. I pick them up, look them over, decide against them for now but not forever. repeat a few times and sometime later I will find myself 3 pages in. I didn't "get it" when I read it and even reading the comments here does not make me want to read the second one....

Phoenixfalls appears to have a handle on the story, much more so than I. But I agree with the comment about the seeming disregard for individual lives -- it was offputting. A lot of times the stream-of-consicousnees POV's reminded me of Faulkner's idiots, they had so many twists and turns, sometimes on the same page. But I'm fairly sure that was not deliberate by the author....but who knows?

The first half of the book I was fairly sure everything in our three "heroes" universes was happening inside one of the New Men's tanks...dream realities/unsure universes/Philip K. Dick-type stuff.... But I guess the Shrander puts an end to that theory. I guess.

But don't get me wrong. I'm not totally putting down the book. I think puzzles like this are kinda fun to mull over.