Product Description

On the barren surface of an asteroid, located deep in the galaxy beneath the unbearable light of the Kefahuchi Tract, lie three objects: an abandoned spacecraft, a pair of bone dice covered with strange symbols, and a human skeleton. What they are and what they mean are the mysteries explored and unwrapped in LIGHT, M. John Harrison's triumphant return to science fiction.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #27461 in Books
• Published on: 2003-09-01
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 336 pages

Amazon.co.uk Review
Light marks that fine writer M John Harrison's first return to the heartland of SF--including spaceships and hair-raising interstellar chases--since his apocalyptic anti-space opera The Centauri Device (1975).

The heavy SF action begins in 2400. Space-going humanity is the latest of many civilizations to be baffled by the impenetrable Kefahuchi Tract; that vast stellar region where an unshielded singularity makes physics itself unreliable. Along its accessible fringe, the "Beach", solar systems are littered with crazy, abandoned devices used to probe the Tract since before life began on Earth. A whole dead-end culture is based on beachcombing this rubble of industrial archaeology...

25th-century characters include a woman who's sacrificed almost everything to merge with the AI "mathematics" of a crack military spacecraft; a former daredevil who once surfed black holes but has retreated into a virtual reality tank; the lady proprietor of the Circus of Pathet Lao, with an alien freakshow and a hidden agenda; and a variety of raunchy, smelly, gene-sculpted lowlife, some comic, some menacing. Many are not what they seem.

Meanwhile in 1999 London, physicists Kearney and Tate--remembered in 2400 as the fathers of interstellar flight--are getting nowhere. Kearney's personal problems occupy familiar Harrison territory: urban paranoia, a seedily unreliable guru, bad sex, guilty rituals to propitiate a metaphysical-seeming threat called the Shrander--a pursuing image out of nightmare. In the lab, both Kearney and Tate fear the increasing quantum strangeness of their results.

The cosmological wonders and hazards of the Beach form a backdrop to space pursuits and violent skirmishes whose duration is measured in nanoseconds, reported in tensely lyrical prose. Eventually everything comes together as it should--even that oppressive 1999 story strand--with revelations, transformation, transcendence, and ultimate hope. Harrison demands your full attention and rewards it richly. --David Langford

Guy Haley, DEATHRAY
"Harrison's lyrical prose and penetrating philosophy on experience intersect to give you an SF adventure that is way beyond the norm. We need more [writers] like him. This is literature with a capital 'L'. Read it."

Review
"Harrison's lyrical prose and penetrating philosophy on experience intersect to give you an SF adventure that is way beyond the norm. We need more [writers] like him. This is literature with a capital 'L'. Read it." (Guy Haley DEATHRAY )

Customer Reviews

Light speed
I was not aware of any of the hype surrounding this book until after I had read it - so my views were not influenced by propaganda - I also have no author bias. I find the comparisons to Iain M Banks very interesting. To be honest, Banks is one of the few SF writers I read consistently, but I struggled with 'Look to Windward' and had to give up half way through. This was something completely different. I found Harrison's style dark, harrowing, brutal but always stylish and compelling - to the extent that I wanted to re-read it immediately after finishing it. Some of the other SF authors get bogged down in overtly technical aspects of science or they give descriptive text which while sometimes impressive, detracts from the characters themselves. Harrison does the descriptive bit but ignores the waffle - he achieves in 50 clear, harsh and vivid words what takes others 5000. The only way I can compare it is to the first time you see Pulp Fiction - it was shocking, unreal and awesome in equal measures. For me it was a masterpiece, like nothing that was seen before it - with style and content you won't forget - ever. The comparisons get more similar when you look at the characters; they are also unpleasant and more importantly human. The story deals with humanity, darkness, internal conflict and ultimately character progression in a way that I feel is completely new and uncharted. If you haven't read the book yet, please do so, but do it with an open mind. I really feel that this is a book that many SF writers would have loved to have written and even if they had the abilities to do so, they may not have had Harrison's bravery to publish it. It has taken the game to a new and exciting level.

A Radiant read...
I'm not surprised that this book has polarized opinions, don't read this if you think it's going to be another formulaic space opera. Light is a book that asks more questions than it answers and certainly isn't from the Clarke or Asimov branch of "science" fiction. Instead you get something a lot like the film Pi, an exploration of madness and obsession mingled with the strangeness that is pure math and quantum theory. Nothing much is explained, it's just left for the reader to piece together in whatever way they want.

This is a challenging read, but if you're tired of the same old formula of derivative fiction try this guy out. It is a truly intense book that might not be on everyone else's wavelength but is all the better for that. I've been devouring his work since rediscovering him a while back. I had read the Virconium books a long time ago but had lost them (and his name wouldn't come to me) until I found Light.

Reading Harrison's work you begin to see his influence refracted through all that is good in SF/Fantasy at the moment, from Iain Banks to China Mieville. His strength, apart from some wonderful prose, is his ability to transcend genres; moving through the full spectrum of pastiche, science fiction and literature, sometimes in the same paragraph.

Highly recomended if you like to think about what you're reading.

This is how the future feels
I have never read a better imagining of the future - of how it would feel to perceive in eleven dimensions; what the come-down from a period of artificially accelerated consciousness would be like; what kind of person would choose to sacrifice their bodily persona to enter cybernetic communion with a space-ship. One memorable scene has the holographic avatar projection of an orbiting cyborg ship (which manifests itself as a cat) saying a remorseful farewell to the man she loved and then dumped on an isolated planet, where an epidemic of rogue software from who knows where is progressively re-engineering his body's molecules into stone. Harrison has the improbable ability to make this situation real, to make you care. Here, the 25th century is no great advance on our own: technological magic turned to trinkets and whimsy, alienated, deracinated populations, faith only in a distant, unknowable cloud in space. It is an exhilarating read, holding on to three strands of the story with their widely different perspectives - panic-attack materialism, epic tragedy, and likeable yarn, with internal echoes and pastiche passages - with the continual pleasures of Harrison's shape-shifting prose. To leaven all this praise, I would say that I was never quite convinced that, or perhaps why, the main character in the 20th-century strand would have been driven to his career as a murderer, and I will have to re-read it before I make my mind up as to the overall coherence of the book: it ends well, but I was left wondering what both light and 'Light' is all about. Despite that, very exciting, very funny, very frightening and very beautiful.