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Light (Light #1)

3.58 of 5 stars 3.58 · rating details · 1,750 ratings · 243 reviews

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...more

Paperback, 308 pages

Published August 31st 2004 by Spectra (first published January 1st 2002)

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Feb 10, 2011 Ceridwen rated it 4 of 5 stars

Recommended to Ceridwen by: Rob W.

Shelves: cyberpunk, incest-is-best, sexy-nihilists, space-the-final-frontier, the-future-is-now, what-are-you-doing-dave

Now this is one of the weirdest ass books I've read in a long while. This is not a criticism, just an observation. It's really defying me to encapsulate the story and themes in 50 words or less, but I'll try to give it a whirl. Three different plots lines follow three different people in three different times. This is not really accurate either: two of these time periods are the same, or overlap, and one of these people is not really a person anymore, but a sentient space ship working on the pur...more Now this is one of the weirdest ass books I've read in a long while. This is not a criticism, just an observation. It's really defying me to encapsulate the story and themes in 50 words or less, but I'll try to give it a whirl. Three different plots lines follow three different people in three different times. This is not really accurate either: two of these time periods are the same, or overlap, and one of these people is not really a person anymore, but a sentient space ship working on the purpose for a weirdass alien artifact. The contemporary story follows a serial killer who is working on quantum computing. The third follows a man who has just been dumped out of a tank and is running about in something approximating a Noir plot, but with lots of cyberpunkery as ornament.

This book made me have a couple revelations about genre, and for that I thank it. I don't generally enjoy super hard science fiction because it's really weird and schematic. The authors tend to get their duuuuuude on about concepts, and then they forget about good writing and character and all that. I'm up for this occasionally, as I have humanities-type person aversion to reading about science, so I enjoy hard sf for the narrative wrapper that it puts around scientific thought. I'd rather eat glass than read something written non-fictionally about the Technological Singularity (c.f. Kurtzweil, et al.) but it's cool as a bit of play in a story. (Also, I know, please don't freak out, that the TS is more bullshit and masturbation than *actual* scientific thought. It was just the first thing I thought of that I would rather see in fiction than in a treatise or similar.)

Anyway, I think it might be time for a massive digression. I recently watched a pretty fascinating conversation go down here on Goodreads between a romance novelist and a reader who doesn't generally read romance. The author spent a lot of time explaining where she was coming from in terms of the characters, how she was trying to say something about sex addiction within the confines of the romance genre. This got me thinking, why did she confine herself to the romance genre? She talked about the editing process, how her publisher edited pretty hard, and how some things got lost in the mix. Why not try to publish something that would break out of the romance ghetto?

I'm going to answer my own questions in true asshole fashion. She wrote a romance because that's the genre she enjoys. I read Light because a friend of mine, who is also an sf nerd, gave this to me for my birthday, and he must have thought I'd enjoy this. And I did. The language is totally killer, slick with a sort of cyberpunky Noir damage, but with these quick sketches which nail character in short, hard strokes. I hadn't really seen the relationship between Noir and cyberpunk before I read this; the way both tend to rely on hard-luck and the image of the Street; the chase and the mystery; the beauty of the flickering neon and ugly marketing of a gutter-level view on things.

The code parlors, the tattoo parlors – all run by one-eyed poets sixty years old, loaded on Carmody Rose bourbon – the store-front tailor operations and chop joints, their tiny show windows stuffed with animated designs like postage stamps or campaign badges from imaginary wars or bags of innocent-coloured candy, were already crowded with customers; while from the corporate enclaves terraced above the Corniche, men and women in designer clothes sauntered confidently towards the harbour restaurants, lifting their heads in anticipation of Earth cuisine, harbour lights on the wine-dark seas, then a late-night trip to Moneytown – wealth creators, prosperity makers, a little too good for it all by all their own account, yet mysteriously energised by everything cheap and tasteless. Voices rose. Laughter rose above them.

But then the real heart of this story has to do with sex, and it's totally uncomfortable and tricky as hell within a genre that doesn't really lend itself to that. I love science fiction like the brother I never had, but space opera, cyberpunk, doesn't generally have much to say about early childhood trauma, internalized body issues, sexual abuse. Or if it does, it says it in ways that are stupid and juvenile. (Sorry, science fiction. *arm punch* You know I love you.) Why did Harrison choose to write about this in this genre? Who the fuck knows? But probably because this is a genre he enjoys, and he clearly has fun in it & knows the idiom like a fever dream.

I really want to talk about some things, but I don't want to hit the spoiler box, and I haven't figured out how to do the inter-review spoilers that are such a dreamy new addition to this site. (view spoiler)

I guess I'll just say one last thing, not under cover of spolier. This book does not make a lot of sense in the end, in terms of plot-lines, and lots of reviews here on GR seem to grumble and imply that you need multiple reads to dig it all. Maybe. But I think it's pretty cool how the symbols just sort of rolled together like the patterns on dice, and didn't slip-knot into a hard conclusion, but into the impression of a conclusion, the bones held in the hand for the next hard throw. Inside the hand is bones too. Ah.

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Jul 06, 2008 Evan rated it 1 of 5 stars

M. John Harrison is under the impression that plot and character can be totally abandoned in favor of a frantic and sloppy exercise in "cyberpunk" style.

Far future cyberpunk just doesn't work.

First of all, the voice of the book is off: some deep future hep cat telling you like it is about quasars, dark matter, and quantum physics, baby, in language so opaque and "snappy" that a sense of wonder or even simple coherence is never achieved.

If you're going to do cyberpunk, and Harrison is very obvio...more M. John Harrison is under the impression that plot and character can be totally abandoned in favor of a frantic and sloppy exercise in "cyberpunk" style.

Far future cyberpunk just doesn't work.

First of all, the voice of the book is off: some deep future hep cat telling you like it is about quasars, dark matter, and quantum physics, baby, in language so opaque and "snappy" that a sense of wonder or even simple coherence is never achieved.

If you're going to do cyberpunk, and Harrison is very obviously trying, you need to offer a plausible immersion in a future world. Yes, I know good SF is never really about prediction, but good cyberpunk needs a faithful adherence to an illusion of reality. It can't just be a collage of weirdness for it's own sake, or a collection of hastily slapped together future slang, as this book is. The chosen style, such as it is, is consistently employed, but totally unsuited to the material.

You can't set a story 400 years in the future, and then keep coming up with reasons, on practically every page, for the environments to be drenched in "retro" detail. We don't read SF to immerse ourselves in a collage of weirdness we already know. Cyberpunk works because of its near-future mode, both strange and familiar, that engages cultural details and patterns of the reader's present and recent past. It requires highly specific descriptions of objects and fashions that have a kind of unfamiliar coherence. Harrison gives us absolutely none of that. He just lists a bunch of random objects and styles without really describing them or making them work together, so the "weirdness" just seems relentless, forced, and silly. Sort of like an interminable episode of Dr. Who.

The frantic onslaught of detail seems to come from a lack of confidence, a fear that the reader will realize that there is no actual story being told. We never get comfortable with the characters, or see them inhabit a coherent setting long enough for them to change or face challenges. All fiction has to do this to some degree. Even Ulysses by James Joyce does this. Harrison is no Joyce, or even William Gibson, and his readers don't come to his books expecting experimental art. They want SF, and his offering is in bad faith. I can't believe this book is as praised as it is.

Harrison's characters just scamper around facile collage landscapes, batted about by a Deus ex machina that, though revealed in the final chapter, has no organic, story-based reason for not being revealed in the very first chapter. There are one or two very conventional SF ideas that are stretched out over an entire, exhausting novel.

And all of this is a shame, because the first few chapters of the Michael Kearney section read like a first-rate horror novel. Harrison can obviously write well if he wants, and how he went so wrong is a mystery.

I am willing to abandon all of my genre expectations if a book is good enough to sustain itself as a work of art. Stanislaw Lem does this. Thomas M. Disch does this. Harrison does not. William S. Burroughs could get away with a frantic collage of strangeness because his writing is so beautiful that you forget the need for any of the traditional offerings of the novel. Perhaps Harrison thought he could do the same thing, but he was most certainly wrong.(less)

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Nov 06, 2007 John rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: sf-fantasy

Picking up this book was like waking up tired and groggy then talking to someone who has already been awake for three hours and drank a pot of coffee. In other words, it throws you into this weird world without much explanation, moving very quickly through a fairly complex bifurcated story structure (one part set in the present, another in space several centuries into the future). But despite the minimal amount of exposition here, you eventually figure out what is going on, and maybe even come t...more Picking up this book was like waking up tired and groggy then talking to someone who has already been awake for three hours and drank a pot of coffee. In other words, it throws you into this weird world without much explanation, moving very quickly through a fairly complex bifurcated story structure (one part set in the present, another in space several centuries into the future). But despite the minimal amount of exposition here, you eventually figure out what is going on, and maybe even come to like it. For me, it was around page 120 that I actually got into the swing of this novel. And, by page 240, it dawned on me that I was really enjoying it.

The first thing that struck me is how bizarrely creative and idiosyncratically inventive the characters and they worlds they inhabit are. And unlike many sci-fi/”weird fiction” writers, who have tremendous imaginations but can often have a somewhat awkward relationship with the English language, Harrison is an excellent writer of prose. His characters are sympathetically rendered in three dimensions (with even a few of them existing, we are often told, in ten spatial and four temporal dimensions), and his language is clear, often lyrical, and precise, even when bogged down with the weighty jargon of theoretical physics (a rudimentary understanding of quantum physics enhanced my appreciation of Light – while probably not necessary, I would recommend a selective skim through Lisa Randall’s “Warped Passages” to prospective readers of this book.)

The part of the novel that takes place in the present is that of a serial-murdering physicist who we know will eventually happen upon a universe-shattering scientific discovery (we know this because the part of the story set in the future constantly refers to it). He is haunted by a disembodied presence that absolutely terrifies him, driving him to kill, and he entrusts his life to the rolls of strange dice he stole from it.

As for the part that takes place in the future, “space opera” is a very good way of describing it. Characters fall in love (or lust), seek hidden treasure (in the form of ancient advanced technology hidden in a wormhole), get betrayed, throw adolescent tantrums, fight and die (and sometimes come back to life), all with the same lyricism and bravura as a Bellini bel canto, only set in a mysterious region of deep space called the Kefahuchi Tract.

And then there’s the sex. There are several times when the faint disco beat of soft-core porn creeps into the soundtrack of this novel, most of it of a cold and impersonal sort. With the exception of the present-day protagonist, whose sexual inhibitions/predilections eventually shed some light on his character’s past and present circumstances, the rest of it seems borderline gratuitous, albeit entertaining.(less)

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Jul 17, 2012 Kyle Muntz rated it 5 of 5 stars

Rereading. Back in 2007 or so this book absolutely blew my mind. I wasn't sure whether it book would live up to what I remember--turns out, it's better. There are similarities to Steve Erickson, PKD, Angela Carter, Lynch, Iain Banks, Brian Evenson, Delany's Nova, but none of these comparisons are really accurate. I'm still not sure whether I like this more than Viriconium (which is so different they're difficult to compare anyway), but this is narrative at its most sophisticated and unique. I re...more

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Sep 18, 2008 Rook rated it 3 of 5 stars

Shelves: speculative-fiction

I normally don't take the time to add specifics to the rating I give a book, but this one necessitates it.
There are things about that frustrated me deeply. For most of the book, the point and the plot were discouragingly unclear. It was difficult to tell what anything had to do with anything, in the most general of senses. There was also a kind of oversexualization of the world setting that seems common nowadays, I think because of the lifting of the Western taboo on sex as a subject. It often s...more

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Apr 03, 2008 Res rated it 3 of 5 stars

Shelves: locus_poll, sff, tiptree_award

The one that interweaves three stories: physicist and serial killer Michael Keaton in the contemporary world, plus cyborg pirate ship Seria Mau Genlicher and virtual-world junkie Ed Chianese in the far future.

A-plus for worldbuilding, here. Far-future worlds are tough; half of them are implausibly similar to contemporary life, and the other half are so different they're incomprehensible, but Harrison doesn't fall into either of those traps. I loved the far future and the way he turns so many sci...more

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Dec 29, 2007 Will Kaufman rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition Recommends it for: SF fans

Shelves: fiction

I suppose this is the future of "hard" SF. A pretty entertaining read if your in to this sort of thing, the ideas are good and really the characters have good depth.
I call it hard because there is a certain amount of focus on the tech and science, but it doesn't make the sort of demands on the reader that can hamstring hard sf. It's all very easy to assimilate, and it works with the story. This certainly isn't a rayguns n' rockets book (even though it has those things).
I'd recommend it to anyon...more

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Oct 15, 2007 Mary rated it 3 of 5 stars Recommends it for: hardcore sci-fi fans

Shelves: sci-fi

Baffling but compelling.

I'm still not entirely sure what happened in this book, as it's short on explanation. It's one of those sci-fi books that drops science terms like there's no tomorrow; they come so fast and furious that you hardly know which ones are real and which ones are entirely made up. That isn't a bad thing, but it is something that, if you aren't used to it, can ruin a book.

There's no real point offering a synopsis of the book. It follows three seemingly unconnected characters and...more

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Jun 21, 2007 Ross Lockhart rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Light is easily one of the darkest books I’ve ever read, and that’s saying something. With a taut narrative split between three protagonists, a near-future serial killer/brilliant physicist (why are SF characters almost never mediocre physicists?), a far-future woman/starship with the impulse control of a spoiled and heavily armed child, and a "twink," a sort of futuristic virtual reality addict, Light moves along at breakneck speed, combining SF sensawunda, bleak noir cruelty, and lush, violent...more

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Jan 05, 2009 Lisa rated it 2 of 5 stars Recommends it for: no one

Shelves: yard-sale-shelf

Waste of a perfectly nice afternoon. Reminded me why I've moved away from sci-fi: the seeming certainty that only humanitiy's worst tendencies will endure. Despite the glowing reviews on the cover, this book wasn't particularly original. Unless you've managed to avoid reading about incest, drug addiction, sexual boredome and debauchery, serial killers, or lonliness in the past few years. And, there are better books on all of these topics.

I disagree strongly with an earlier reviewer who found the...more

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Apr 23, 2013 Sunshine Tentacles rated it 3 of 5 stars

I have mixed feelings about this book.

What I didn't like
- Kearney, one of the characters, is such a whiny cowardly asshole that my contempt for him actually made me put down the book for several months, and I honestly didn't expect to ever pick it up again. I can't decide if that's "just really good character writing" or what, but it seems to me that if a character is so unlikable or unsympathetic that you might actually *not* read the book, it kind of defeats the purpose.

- There are several poi...more

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Nov 21, 2012 Nigel Bird rated it 4 of 5 stars

Light is a little different from my usual read, but it came to me highly recommended by a trusted friend and so I went for it.
Essentially, it’s the science-fiction aspect of the book that is my uncharted territory, not that I needed to have worried. M John Harrison has produced a work that is highly engaging throughout and suffuses high drama and tension into an intricate plot that is populated by tremendous characters.
The story is told in three strands which occasionallyoverlap and eventually c...more Light is a little different from my usual read, but it came to me highly recommended by a trusted friend and so I went for it.
Essentially, it’s the science-fiction aspect of the book that is my uncharted territory, not that I needed to have worried. M John Harrison has produced a work that is highly engaging throughout and suffuses high drama and tension into an intricate plot that is populated by tremendous characters.
The story is told in three strands which occasionallyoverlap and eventually come together.
There’s Michael Kearney, a scientist on the verge of a breakthrough of immense proportions. He’s an Oxbridge graduate who’s a bit of a loafer and who relies upon his partner to do most of the research in the messy lab. He’s obsessed by a creature called the Shrander which appears to be chasing him. He also has a rather interesting relationship with women – mostly he kills them as a sacrifice to keep him safe, but he never quite manages to get round to ditching his ex-wife. There’s a wonderful moment when, after a few days in bed together, Kearney decides he need to work and says goodbye to that ex-wife. “I knew you’d go out again,” she tells him. In that phrase I think you get to see some of the author’s talent. It encapsulates so much about their relationship and her character (and indeed that moment that many lovers may experience when they’ve wrapped themselves in a perfectly safe bubble for a while). Lovely and heartbreaking and apparently simply crafted.
The next strand of the story follows a burned-out space pilot who is addicted to spending time in ‘The Tanks’. When inside the tank, the world is one of imagination and dreams. It’s full of an amniotic fluid that bathes the subject and keeps them alive. When the money in the machine runs out, the subject is prepared for release with tranquilisers and hormones to help with the withdrawal as reality kicks back in. Ed Chianese loves the tanks. Unfortunately, not everyone loves Ed. He’s being chased by the imposing, frightening and heartless Cray sisters who are prepared to pretty much anything to get the guy. Ed’s only chance is to fight them and run and from the point of his flight, his world becomes an exciting and eventful place to be.
The third aspect of the story is about a human who has been through a process of becoming a space-craft. She’s part consciousness, part machine. She’s on a mission to get her existence sorted out. Unbeknown to her, the man she turns to for help (Uncle Zip) ends up setting her up so that he can follow her and reach his own goal and this is an engrossing journey in itself.
I need to admit that some of the aspects of the imagination had me bamboozled – the nature of travel, the K-Tract, the morphing and genetic interference and such. Luckily, though, I don’t think that spoiled my enjoyment at all.
There are bizarre sex scenes, there's crazy fashion, there's shape-shifing and there's a gentle sense of parody from time-to-time.
The plot is driven by the needs and desires of the characters. The settings are wonderfully described. The questions posed are challenging and fun to consider and the image of the future seems to be neither welcoming of frightening, more just the way things turn out.
Well worth the investment of time and money this one. Check it out.
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Sep 04, 2012 Mjhancock rated it 3 of 5 stars

Shelves: sci-fi

Light is a story of three individuals: a physicist/serial killer named Michael Kearney; Seria Mau Genlicher, a human turned sentient spaceship; and Ed Chianese, a twink--a guy who deliberately puts himself into a sort suspended animation every time he gets. And each one is drawn in a different way to the light of the Kefahuchi Tract, and three objects: an abandoned spacecraft, a human skeleton, and a pair of bone dice. Some sci-fi novels start with one big concept, and play the rest of the story...more

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Jul 15, 2012 Cari Mcconnell rated it 4 of 5 stars

This is an interesting little sci-fi read. It is great, the concept, the charactures, everything is great. Really intersting world and believable. The only thing about it is...there is a lot of random sex. As in, "Hi, nice to meet you, lets do it." It suited the theme of the novel, or the theme I identified anyway, but there were a few points where I just had to throw my hands up and yell, "really, again?"
My thoughts on the book were thus: In the future, where humans have finally shed the last r...more

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Jul 14, 2012 Steven Mclain rated it 2 of 5 stars

Even though this is a great book, I would never recommend it to any of my friends. That may seem like a paradox, but bear with me. The prose is brilliant and beautiful, full of stunning metaphors and precise description that made me re-read them out loud just to feel them roll off my tongue. That said, this is not a pleasant or engaging book. None of the characters are particularly sympathetic and the plot takes a very long time to become apparent. You can read the synopsis elsewhere, but suffic...more

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Jul 13, 2012 littlemiao rated it 3 of 5 stars

Shelves: 2012

I struggled to get through this book (audio version), despite the great narration, until the last third when the pace picked up and things started coming together in a way that made some sort of sense. There are parts of the book I loved - the vision of the future, the exploration of what it means to be human, the frequently beautiful language. This is more sci-fi-y than what I usually read, but I think the real reason I had trouble with this book was that the characters were generally unsympath...more

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Feb 08, 2012 Damon rated it 3 of 5 stars

Maybe it's fitting that a book titled Light managed to keep me in the dark for so long. Descriptions promising quantum shenanigans with a cast of quirky characters, including a serial killer and addict, lured me in but I became frustrated with this novel at far too many points.

First off the story has several different diverging and converging plot lines which can get messy. This made much of the early parts of the novel unclear and I found myself re-reading sections. With that said, the writing...more

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Feb 15, 2011 Krishnakumar Sankaran rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: sci-fi, fiction

Light is a difficult read. M John Harrison tries to weave three seemingly distinct narratives together to a single contained conclusion. I'm still skeptical about the success of his venture. The plot revolves around the lives of three people all on the run from some aspect of their past: Michael Kearney(view spoiler) ; Seria Mau(view spoiler)...more Light is a difficult read. M John Harrison tries to weave three seemingly distinct narratives together to a single contained conclusion. I'm still skeptical about the success of his venture. The plot revolves around the lives of three people all on the run from some aspect of their past: Michael Kearney(view spoiler) ; Seria Mau(view spoiler) ; Ed Chianese(view spoiler)

Let's deal with the bad bits first. The Seria Mau narrative is perhaps the best of the three, evenly paced though I faced other difficulties in it. Of the rest, the Ed Chianese narrative advances jerkily towards its conclusion. Michael Kearney narrative is, for the most part, him running around from person to person and place to place (something like a RPG hero). There are places where Harrison's language becomes too garbled with jargon which forced me to either ignore it altogether or read it harder. I faced this mostly in the Seria Mau narrative as it featured the mechanics of ship travel the most of the lot. Another annoying problem with Harrison's overall narrative was his tendency to casually introduce something and leave his larger explanation behind it for much later. He does with the shadow operators thrusting them into the narrative at an early stage without any other explanation as to their nature, and providing one much farther into the narrative. (view spoiler)

Now for the good bits. For all the problems with jargon, Harrison whips some stunning prose up. He is best describing an environment like Seria Mau's stroll through Motel Splendido or Ed Chianese's time in the New Men warrens. Another nice touch was the subtle repetition of themes. While obvious at times, in case of the cats and some recurring names, it gave a loose, ephemeral sense of connection to the three narratives.

Overall, I wouldn't say Light is a challenging read. It's difficult, plodding through it, true. But there isn't much complex about it. If I read Light again, it would be for the good bits. (less)

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Jul 07, 2010 Phoenixfalls rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: aliens, male-author, science-fiction, sf-challenge, space-opera

This is a difficult novel. Harrison's prose is meaty, but that is not where the difficulty lies; his characters are unlikeable, and while that is a challenge, it is not insurmountable. The main difficulty lies in the novel's structure -- much of it is an elaborate smoke screen, ultimately having little to no effect on the resolution. This also makes the novel particularly difficult to review, as its true nature doesn't become evident until the last four chapters, but any mention of what is in th...more This is a difficult novel. Harrison's prose is meaty, but that is not where the difficulty lies; his characters are unlikeable, and while that is a challenge, it is not insurmountable. The main difficulty lies in the novel's structure -- much of it is an elaborate smoke screen, ultimately having little to no effect on the resolution. This also makes the novel particularly difficult to review, as its true nature doesn't become evident until the last four chapters, but any mention of what is in those chapters (and what is in those chapters will make or break the novel for most readers) constitutes a giant spoiler.

Alas, I am committed to writing reviews that are as spoiler-free as possible, so I will focus on what the novel focuses on, which is that smoke screen.

The novel consists of alternating chapters from three perspectives, two sociopaths and one junkie. All three are running from something, and most of the novel is spent figuring out what they are running from and what turned them into sociopaths/junkies. In this sense the novel is akin to a character study, and I suspect it will work best for those people who generally like character studies. (I am one of those people, but I will admit it didn't work particularly well for me in this aspect because I'm not a big fan of sociopaths and junkies.) One perspective is set in contemporary England & America, with just enough detail to be immediately recognizable, and the other two are set in 2400 A.D., which is a future with plenty of SF world-building that Harrison spends very little time describing -- the world is catch-as-you-can, and readers who aren't used to hard SF will likely be hopelessly confused at points while readers who are used to these sort of milieus will be able to fill in the blanks fairly easily. There is some action, but most of the novel is spent getting into these peoples' heads.

But at its heart, and despite the first 350 pages, Light isn't a character study. It's a Big Idea story, and its Big Idea is what constitutes the spoiler, so I have to talk around it. The jacket description actually does as much as it can to help readers to that Big Idea -- it doesn't describe the set-up and first act like most jacket descriptions, but instead provides clues to the elements astute readers need to keep track of in order to decipher the resolution. That resolution will determine whether the novel succeeds or fails for most readers, so anyone who attempts this novel needs to be prepared to read it to the end to give it a fair shot, and unfortunately even reading to the end will not guarantee that you will like it. Ultimately, I decided I did not like the resolution Harrison provides, but I get it, and I can see why other people love it, and I will defend his pure craft that went into making this book. This is the rare novel I will recommend despite not having enjoyed it.(less)

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Dec 26, 2009 Michael rated it 4 of 5 stars

What a well-written novel.

Early in M. John Harrison’s science fiction novel “Light,” different characters begin to mention “going deep” -- whether deep into areas of space that have never been explored (or explored millennia ago and forgotten), or deep into knowledge, deep into information, also perhaps once explored and since forgotten.

If you choose to go along with the ride, I can promise you -- you’ll go deep -- even the jaded science-fiction geeks out there, who think that there isn’t anyth...more

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Sep 11, 2009 Belarius rated it 3 of 5 stars

Shelves: speculative-fiction, fiction-finished, reviewed

It's difficult to pin down what the correct yardstick for evaluating a book like Light. In the end, it negotiates an uneasy truce between poetry, concept fiction, and narrative storytelling, doing so at the expense of all aspects. Light isn't quite a novel, and author M. John Harrison seems perfectly content with this.

If the book fails, it does so to the extent that the author playfully intermixes elements that have a narrative purpose with those that are mere emotional set-dressing. Much has be...more

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Apr 23, 2011 Michael Eisenberg rated it 4 of 5 stars

Finished M. John Harrison's "Light". Like his "Viriconium" sequence, this one continues and expands his thoughts and explorations into such lofty studies as what it means to be human and the way we bury all means and abilities to actually "live" and experience life, have relationships, make choices and the consequences resulting from them and vague references to Arthurian grail tale telling. And this is just touching on some of the themes...because this book is, in a word...deep!

All of the abov...more

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Aug 08, 2011 Craig rated it 3 of 5 stars

What to say about this one? I picked it up at the recommendation of no other than Mr. Neil Gaiman. I read Signs of Life while waiting for this one to come into the library, and that was pretty astounding. Light was... less so.

One thing I did like was the three apparently disparate and unconnected storylines do, ultimately, connect in a fairly good and understandable way - not that this was unexpected by any stretch of the imagination, but it was quite an experience to be reading one section, onl...more

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Nov 12, 2007 Julie added it

Shelves: tried-to-read-but-couldn-t-do-it

Why is it certain science fiction writers feel compelled to jump around a story like a jack rabbit, and introduce wild, irrelevant new vocabulary just to imbue the story with a sense of "futureness?" For instance, instead of calling something, say, a "cracker," they have to say, "Ferko took a bite of his salty flinky, and thought it would be good in soup." You're going along, and then all of a sudden "flinky" comes up and you're like, "What the hell?"

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Sep 02, 2009 John rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: science-fiction

The Good: M. John Harrison's descriptions are so evocative, so immediate, they thrust me headlong into the scene. The pacing continually picked up as I read the novel, by the end I found myself hitting the next page button on my kindle before I finished the last line or two on the page. Pacing was relentless. The ending was a knockout, and brought revelations that astounded me. Wow.

The Bad: If I hadn't read this for my book club (Other Worlds Book Group, in Lake Oswego, Oregon), I probably would...more The Good: M. John Harrison's descriptions are so evocative, so immediate, they thrust me headlong into the scene. The pacing continually picked up as I read the novel, by the end I found myself hitting the next page button on my kindle before I finished the last line or two on the page. Pacing was relentless. The ending was a knockout, and brought revelations that astounded me. Wow.

The Bad: If I hadn't read this for my book club (Other Worlds Book Group, in Lake Oswego, Oregon), I probably would have put it down and never finished it. It's an ensemble book, and of all the point of view characters, I found it a slog to read all but one: Seria Mau Genlicher. A serious anti-hero, she grabbed my attention from the start. The others made my eyes blur, and wonder why I wasn't doing something productive, like playing World of Warcraft. Thank god for Harrison's stunning descriptions, that's all I had to hang on to. About a fifth of the way through the book, the slog stopped and real enjoyment took over. Rebeca, from my book group, didn't get to that point until midway through the book.

The Ugly: What could be more boring than sex or serial killing? In this book, not much. An alien race that looks like Irish junkies who masturbate every 20 minutes sounds like a set-up for some edgier version of Douglas Addams, but in Light it's just more evidence of how dreary everything is. We get a serial killer who claims he's driven to kill, but really seems unconnected.
Do women exist who don't greet men with an offer/demand of instant sex? It's hard to find them in this book, and given how distant, gray, and emotionless almost all the sex is depicted as, you have to wonder why they bother.

And Yet: I ended up loving this book. The ensemble starts to work, often by the introduction of minor characters, like Anna, who bring focus and insight into characters who failed to grab me at the start.
The structure of the book is a real strength, with jumps from the present day to 400 years in the future, that tie together seemlessly.
The cloud of despair lifts as the pace throttles up to full tilt, and by the end the book is awash in a gonzo intensity.

If you start this book and find yourself wavering, keep going. If you're going to go into Light, go deep.

http://johnwsmarvin.blogspot.com/
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Jun 28, 2012 Jani rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

This was probably the fifth time I've read this novel (I've read it for fun and a few times for academic purposes) and I'm still greatly delighted by it. Harrison plays around with genres, subgenres and language in deeply witty style that is both deep and satiric. He takes conventions and tropes of cyberpunk, postmodern literature and space opera and melds them into an intoxicating cocktail full of fancy and flair.

Then again, I'n not a fan of cyberpunks nihilism (which by my estimate gets its sh...more

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Dec 21, 2009 Chip rated it 3 of 5 stars

I have got to stop reading quips from reviewers when deciding which book to read next. "Light" had front and back quotes and three or four pages of quotes inside. "Book of the decade" jumps out in memory. Hype? Yes. Book of the decade? No.

What I liked: the gritty blade-runner-esque landscapes, the concept of The Beach, the K-ships, ten-dimensional space travel.

What I didn't like: the word "ruch" (which apparently was the proud author's favorite new word; it occurred at least five times in the b...more

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Dec 06, 2011 Jan rated it 3 of 5 stars

Light is a hard book to like and possibly an even harder book to follow - especially when you listen to it in episodes instead of reading it in a few focused sittings. The book is split into the stories of three people, one in present day (well, turn-of-the-century) London, two in the distant future. If and how these stories are connected stays unclear for a long time and it is easy to mix up characters and threads of the story. Especially when flashbacks are involved and most of the characters...more

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Feb 05, 2009 Bookmarks Magazine added it

Reviewers call Light "complex," yet seemed more than willing to forgive the complexity

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Sep 21, 2012 Marc Nash rated it 3 of 5 stars

Having read this, I found the blurb on the back of the book to be the most misleading I think I have ever come across. Not necessarily in a bad way, merely in that the three mysterious objects is suggests are the heart of the book, are not the central narrative drive or quest of the characters at all and are only almost incidentally explained in the very ending. Though the book has plenty of wonder, imagination and creativity in its world building, it is actually about its main characters, which...more Having read this, I found the blurb on the back of the book to be the most misleading I think I have ever come across. Not necessarily in a bad way, merely in that the three mysterious objects is suggests are the heart of the book, are not the central narrative drive or quest of the characters at all and are only almost incidentally explained in the very ending. Though the book has plenty of wonder, imagination and creativity in its world building, it is actually about its main characters, which can be quite refreshing in science fiction books where often the characters are dwarfed by the science.

Having said that, the characters are troubling. Humans craving to surrender their bodies to merge with quantum infinities, clones, holograms, virtual projections, artificially created lifeforms, all questing to be human, to have a real body. Yet a relative immateriality doesn't seem to prevent any of them having sex, which happens a lot. Some of them are trying to fill their personal psychological voids, some seek after love and others just wish to have a physical sensation. So in part the book is an exploration of the struggle to be human.

The book is described as space opera, a genre label I've never understood the meaning of to be honest. The space bit I get and accede as far as this book is concerned. But operatic too me suggests not only a wide sweep, which again this book effortlessly meets, but a heightened sense of emotion. Now while Harrison deals with emotion a plenty as suggested in the characters' various quests for identity and to take the form of something other than themselves, the emotional pitch is a curiously flat one. This is largely because even though Harrison's builds an immense universe, most of these characters seem to be each other in various guises, so that the total population seems only to be about five people. A character has a single emotional register in one guise, yearns to be be something different and then achieves it either by taking on a new persona and physicality, or in death. And that's that, easy peasy lemony squeezy...

Moving between two temporal eras, our own and a far future one, yet the characters are all brought together by the end and their links to one another revealed, in a rather unsatisfying manner to my mind. For a book about quantum probabilities and improbablities, the narrative structure was too hidebound to facilitate this I felt.

There are some fine writing and insights to be gleaned from this book: "Every so often her eyes went across tate with the calm contempt of one neurotic for another", but the sum of the parts add up to considerably less than the whole.(less)

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About M. John Harrison

aka Gabriel King (with Jane Johnson)

Michael John Harrison was born in Rugby, Warwickshire in 1945 and now lives in London.
Harrison is stylistically an Imagist and his early work relies heavily on the use of strange juxtapositions characteristic of absurdism.

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Quotes from Light

“Behind all this bad behaviour was an insecurity magnificent in scope, metaphysical in nature. Space was big, and the boys from Earth were awed despite themselves by the things they found there: but worse, their science was a mess. Every race they met on their way through the Core had a star drive based on a different theory. All those theories worked, even when they ruled out one another's basic assumptions. You could travel between the stars, it began to seem, by assuming anything [. . . .]

It was affronting to discover that. So when they fetched up on the edge of the Tract, looked it in the eye, and began to despatch their doomed entradas, the Earthlings were hoping to find, among other things, some answers. They wondered why the universe, which seemed so harsh on top, was underneath so pliable. Anything worked. Wherever you looked, you found. They were hoping to find out why.” — 1 person liked it

“She was a tall woman with a wide smile,
good tits and a way of licking mayonnaise out the corner of her mouth which suggested she might be
equally good at licking mayonnaise out the corner of yours.” — 1 person liked it

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Light (Light #1)

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