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Loading... Light (2002)
Work detailsLight by M. John Harrison (2002)
None.  ChrisRiesbeck | May 30, 2013 |  Think I've read this before - seems familiar. Anyway, I don't know why it won the Tiptree in 2002 but it is an excellent book. (  ) SChant | Apr 26, 2013 | Absorbing and intriguing. I am not entirely clear that the ending has explained everything, but it has tied together the bones of the links in a pattern that is probably more beautiful than true. It reminded me a little bit of Iain M Banks in style and feel; killing people mixed with high-tech high-concept sf, people doing unpleasant things to each other (sometimes with high-tech equipment, sometimes not) that nevertheless draws you in. ( ) comixminx | Apr 5, 2013 | *note to self. Copy from A.  velvetink | Mar 31, 2013 | Very rarely does a book transform itself so utterly on a second reading. The first time I read it I gave up halfway through tired and exhausted failing to understand what was going on. The second time though, I picked it up and I was hooked from start to finish. I think I was a lot fresher the second time around. The thing with Harrison is that you need to read carefully. He writes short books but books in which every word is measured and carefully put in. I was surprised to find myself taking the same time to read this as some of the heftier epic fantasy volumes. Harrison is able to construct words with mere sentences and a hint of detail. Attention needs to be paid and only then are his books a rewarding read. ( ) kaipakartik | Dec 21, 2012 | no reviews | add a review
Amazon.com Product Description (ISBN 0553587331, Mass Market Paperback)In M. John Harrison’s dangerously illuminating new novel, three quantum outlaws face a universe of their own creation, a universe where you make up the rules as you go along and break them just as fast, where there’s only one thing more mysterious than darkness.In contemporary London, Michael Kearney is a serial killer on the run from the entity that drives him to kill. He is seeking escape in a future that doesn’ t yet exist—a quantum world that he and his physicist partner hope to access through a breach of time and space itself. In this future, Seria Mau Genlicher has already sacrificed her body to merge into the systems of her starship, the White Cat. But the “inhuman” K-ship captain has gone rogue, pirating the galaxy while playing cat and mouse with the authorities who made her what she is. In this future, Ed Chianese, a drifter and adventurer, has ridden dynaflow ships, run old alien mazes, surfed stellar envelopes. He “went deep”—and lived to tell about it. Once crazy for life, he’s now just a twink on New Venusport, addicted to the bizarre alternate realities found in the tanks—and in debt to all the wrong people. Haunting them all through this maze of menace and mystery is the shadowy presence of the Shrander—and three enigmatic clues left on the barren surface of an asteroid under an ocean of light known as the Kefahuchi Tract: a deserted spaceship, a pair of bone dice, and a human skeleton. From the Trade Paperback edition. (retrieved from Amazon Thu, 14 Feb 2013 13:34:30 -0500) 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...… (more) (summary from another edition) |
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Wikipedia in English (1)
2
Though I tried with all my might.
But this I know and know full right,
I do not like thee, book called "Light."
Literate space opera, by an author I have fond memories of, with many interesting sfnal ideas, connecting near future Earth with worlds far away in both space and time . And yet it took me several months to finish because everything was so damn unpleasant. Quite a few of the main characters are unapologetic murderers. Sex is frequent but never fun. That's the literary part. Events happen in nanoseconds, planets don't explode any more, they boil in fusioned fury. All characters sound exactly the same, namely modern day England. That's the modern space opera part.
YMMV. (