- Paperback: 336 pages
- Publisher: Gollancz (Sep 1 2003)
- Language: English
- ISBN-10: 0575074035
- ISBN-13: 978-0575074033
- Product Dimensions: 12.9 x 2.3 x 19.8 cm
- Shipping Weight: 322 g
- Average Customer Review: 3.5 out of 5 stars See all reviews (10 customer reviews)
- Amazon Bestsellers Rank: #132,531 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
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Product Details |
Product Description
From Amazon
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 the Hardcover edition.
From Publishers Weekly
Harrison's talent for brilliant, reality-bending SF is on display yet again with this three-tiered tale, published (and highly praised) in the U.K. in 2002. It's 1999, and British scientist Michael Kearney and his American partner, Brian Tate, are studying laboratory quantum physics; unbeknownst to them, they'll become the fathers of interplanetary travel. Kearney nervously holds a pair of predictive dice he's stolen from a frightening specter called the Shrander, whom he keeps at bay by committing random murders. Four hundred years in the future, K-ship captain Seria Mau Genlicher has gravely erred in splicing herself with a hijacked spacecraft called the White Cat—and now she wants out. There's also Ed Chianese, a burned-out interstellar surfer now spending his life within a reality simulation machine. His problem? Monetary debt to the nasty Cray sisters. As Kearney continues to narrowly evade the Shrander, he discovers that company CEO Gordon Meadows has sold the lab to Sony. All three story lines converge and find heavenly closure at the cosmological wonder known as the Kefahuchi Tract, a wormhole with alien origins bordered by a vast, astral "beach" where time and space are braided and interchangeable. This is space opera for the intelligentsia, as Harrison (Things That Never Happen) tweaks aspects of astrophysics, fantasy and humanism to hum right along with the blinking holograms in a welcome and long overdue return.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to an alternate Paperback edition.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to an alternate Paperback edition.
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Most helpful customer reviews
5.0 out of 5 stars
Fascinating, Strange, Remarkable Book,
By Abigail Nussbaum (Israel) - See all my reviews
This review is from: Light (Gollancz S.F.) (Hardcover)
M. John Harrison's Light is indescribable. A mind-warping romp that exists somewhere in the continuum between hard SF and cyberpunk. A cruel, violent story, with a core of pure forgiveness and grace. The story of three throughly unlikable people, who nevertheless earn the reader's affection. At times tragic, at others bitingly sarcastic, and even funny in certain patches. It requires the reader's complete confidence - one must trust that Harrison knows what he's doing. Amazingly, that trust is repaid.I could try to say a few words about the plot, but to do so seems almost beside the point. A reader cracking open this deceptively slim novel had better not expect anything even approaching a linear plot. Almost to the very end, Harrison keeps his readers befuddled - the best you can hope for is to hang on as he drags you into the deepest, oddest reaches of the galaxy. Then, only a few pages before the end, like a magician pulling a rabbit out of a hat, Harrison manages to tie it all together. If you're looking for Sci Fi that breaks the mold, that challenges you, that is as much about inner space as outer space, look no further.
5.0 out of 5 stars
One of the Best,
By Andy (Montreal) - See all my reviews
This review is from: Light (Gollancz S.F.) (Hardcover)
If you like Banks, MacLeod, Mieville, Vinge, McAuley, Stephenson and Gibson, you should read this. As good or better as any of their best. It's hard sf, it's literary - it features rounded sympathetic characters, the vast scale of space opera, suspense, intense sex, lost loves, ghost programs, psycho killers, contract assassins, intergalactic carnivals, aliens, virtual worlds, a singularity, human-machine blendings, science funding battles, subtle pop references, condensed visual imagery, 3 different narrative streams...and a universe of "more...and more after that." Wow.
5.0 out of 5 stars
Tiptree Winner from Harrison Blows the SF Competition Away,
By Leigh Blackmore "Leigh" (Australia) - See all my reviews
This review is from: Light (Gollancz S.F.) (Hardcover)
LIGHT by M John Harrison marks a return for this author to science fiction of a genre type - it's a big, thrill-packed space opera that delivers on all the promise of his long-ago CENTAURI DEVICE. Yet simultaneously it retains all the characteristics of his writing since that time - the peculiar take on things that appears in his short stories is present here, with bizarrely-named characters and unexpected ideas aplenty. This novel is a Moebius strip woven of three plots - the quantum physicist and serial killer Kearney and how his fate intersects with that of Seria Mau Genlicher, K-ship pilot; and with that of 'Chianese' Ed, hooked on a strangely addictive form of virtual reality. Behind all this is the shadowy presence of the Shrander, an entity whose agenda is perhaps? made clear by the astounding climax to this novel. It's difficult to rate this book too highly, since it succeeds on so many levels. I was blown away by the visual impact of a scene where a coin is set spinning on its edge as two characters race through a mazelike habitation; and that was but one tiny thread in this complex book. I loved the off-kilter Kray sisters, menacing oddball characters to rival such great Harrison creations from earlier books as Benedict Paucemanly. The light in the Kefahuchi Tract illuminates a book which is a sheer pleasure to read and hits the buttons of both action and literary quality. A must-read!
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