Light (GOLLANCZ S.F.) [Paperback]

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 --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

"Mike Harrison is the only writer on Earth equally attuned to the essential strangeness both of quantum physics and the attritional banalities of modern urban life. This is space opera for these dark times, and LIGHT is brilliant." Iain M. Banks

'At last Mike Harrison takes on quantum mechanics. The first classic of the quantum century, LIGHT is a folded-down future history bound together by quantum exotica and human endurance. Taut as Hemingway, viscerally intelligent, startlingly uplifting, Harrison's ideas have a beauty that
unpacks to infinity.' Stephen Baxter, award-winning author of THE TIME SHIPS

"With an austere and deeply moving humanism, M. John Harrison proves what only those crippled by respectability still doubt - that science fiction can be literature, of the very greatest kind. LIGHT puts most modern fiction to shame. It's a magnificent book." China Miéville, award-winning author of PERDIDO STREET STATION

I loved it. The multilayered plot worked stunningly well: in most such cases I tend to prefer one or the other, but with LIGHT I was delighted to return to whichever came next. The story is somehow both bewildering and utterly clear, razor-sharp and wide enough to encompass worlds, and the language is beautiful, nailing both the bizarre and mundane with eerie skill. On every other page there's a line which makes you think 'it can't get better thanthis', and then it does. An amazing book: not just a triumphant return to science fiction, but an injection of style and content that will light up the genre." Michael Marshall Smith, author of SPARES and ONE OF US

"Post-cyberpunk, post-slipstream, post-everything, LIGHT is the leanest, meanest space opera since NOVA. Visually acute, shot through with wonder and horror in equal measure, in LIGHT's dual-stranded narrative M.John Harrison pulls off the difficult trick of making the present seem every bit as baroque and strange as his neon-lit deep future. Set the controls for Radio Bay and prepare to get lost in the K-Tract. You won't regret it." Alastair Reynolds, award-winning author of REVELATION SPACE and CHASM CITY --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.