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: #83895 in Books
• Published on: 2003-09-01
• 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

The majority of the story appears complex as it unfolds, but blossoms into a beautifully written conjunction of the three main story arcs: three characters of different times and places, one the creator of the technology another relies upon, the other hopelessly intertwined with both. The inexplicable and deeply interesting events of the plot somehow follow one another into deeper madness, yet never confuse or put off the reader. The net result is an easy-to-read, intricately composed piece of literary fiction pretending to be sci-fi.

Awesome: 8.5/10

Simply beautiful and thought-provoking
I have never read a greater feat of imagination since Dune or The Silmarillion. In its own sphere this is an unsurpassed masterpiece - and I am not prone to hyperbole.

Impenetrable Rubbish
Purchased this book on the recommendation of Ian M Banks, looking forward to a quality sci-fi read, bitterly disappointing. From the opening chapter to the closing paragraph this book was a struggle to read. Empty characters which evoke no emotion, empathy or hatred, on the part of the reader and a senseless plot that leaves you empty. Drivel is the best single word to describe it.