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Light (Gollancz S.F.) (Paperback)

by M. John Harrison (Author) "Towards the end of things, someone asked Michael Kearney, 'How do you see yourself spending the first minute of the new millennium?' ..." (more)
3.1 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (35 customer reviews)
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Product details

  • Paperback: 336 pages
  • Publisher: Gollancz; paperback / softback edition (1 Sep 2003)
  • Language English
  • ISBN-10: 0575074035
  • ISBN-13: 978-0575074033
  • Product Dimensions: 19.4 x 12.8 x 2.2 cm
  • Average Customer Review: 3.1 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (35 customer reviews)
  • Amazon.co.uk Sales Rank: 200,860 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Product Description

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



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."
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Towards the end of things, someone asked Michael Kearney, 'How do you see yourself spending the first minute of the new millennium?' Read the first page
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Customer Reviews

35 Reviews
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 (13)
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3 star:
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2 star:
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Average Customer Review
3.1 out of 5 stars (35 customer reviews)
 
 
 
 
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16 of 17 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars Light speed, 21 Oct 2004
By S James (London) - See all my reviews
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.
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7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars A Radiant read..., 13 Dec 2006
By Shane Lucy (UK) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   
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.
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11 of 12 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars This is how the future feels, 12 Nov 2003
By Julian Richards (Johannesburg, South Africa) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   
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.
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Most Recent Customer Reviews

1.0 out of 5 stars Nonsensical Garbage
I'm no more enlightened about the plot of this book after reading it than I was before. Confusing and nonsensical descriptions of people and places and a poor stitching together... Read more
Published 1 month ago by HRH Elizabeth III

1.0 out of 5 stars Some kind of joke, I assume
This book contains ridiculous characters whose singular dimension is entirely dislikeable in almost every way (check out the sci-fi clichés where the heroes get the ladies), and... Read more
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2.0 out of 5 stars Light
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4.0 out of 5 stars 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... Read more
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1.0 out of 5 stars Impenetrable Rubbish
Purchased this book on the recommendation of Ian M Banks, looking forward to a quality sci-fi read, bitterly disappointing. Read more
Published on 19 May 2007 by John A. Browne

4.0 out of 5 stars Brilliant
Interesting how this book polarises opinion. I loved it. I fail to see how some reviewers view it as "infantile" or "puerile", referencing the few sex scenes and the character... Read more
Published on 11 Sep 2006 by Mr. E. Smith

1.0 out of 5 stars Very disappointed!
This is a very difficult book to get in to. In the early chapters it's hard to understand what's going on, who the characters are and where everything is heading. Read more
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1.0 out of 5 stars Boring
Boring, a waste of time, nearly ununderstandable.
Published on 10 Mar 2005

3.0 out of 5 stars An Interesting Read
I had never heard of M. John Harrison before and bought this book on the strength of the recommendation of Iain Banks whom I like and the intriguing summary on the back... Read more
Published on 18 Sep 2004 by Joe

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