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Light

(Kefahuchi Tract #1)

M. John Harrison

3.60 · Rating details · 5,019 ratings · 573 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

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Trade Paperback, 310 pages

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

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Jul 06, 2008 Evan rated it did not like it

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 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. ...more

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Jul 31, 2016 Bradley rated it it was amazing

Shelves: mindfuq, sci-fi, space-opera, 2016-shelf

Surprising and grand, I'm always thrilled and amazed when I get to read a serious SF about the soft and squishy underbelly of the universe. The world-building and the span of time and the characterizations are tops, too. The writing is actually pretty spiffy, too, with very clever idea-connections between every chapter and deep mirroring going on, not to mention a thousand and a half great SF ideas and themes running around and deepening the tale.

I would never have read this if Gaiman hadn't sel Surprising and grand, I'm always thrilled and amazed when I get to read a serious SF about the soft and squishy underbelly of the universe. The world-building and the span of time and the characterizations are tops, too. The writing is actually pretty spiffy, too, with very clever idea-connections between every chapter and deep mirroring going on, not to mention a thousand and a half great SF ideas and themes running around and deepening the tale.

I would never have read this if Gaiman hadn't selected it for our notice, honestly, and that's a real shame because it's pretty damn high in not only literary quality and style, but also all the little things that make up a very memorable tale. Virtual reality, post-cyberpunk, dreams and alternate dimension-spaces, and broken physics. That's some great stuff, let me tell you. It's broken in terms of how certain particular math-branches see it, but each alien race manages to make a full math proof that disproves all the others and yet EVERYTHING works. It reminds me of all the alien races in Brin's Uplift saga with so many ways to break space, including the ones that Believe and then Make. :) Quantum Awesomeness.

Quantum mechanics in SF can be rather streamlined and silly, sometimes, but then we get works like this that don't focus so much on descriptions of how it works or any small engineering applications, but instead become a grand world-building exercise of what happens to so many alien species (and human) when they simply want to know why or what a portion of deep space is doing when it goes very wrong.

The Kefahuchi Tract. How many aliens and now humanity has broken themselves trying to understand what is happening there? Go in, and never come back out. Anything that can be imagined or tried, from super smart races to BDOs have been thrown at it, and every race fails. Humanity is in the process of it's greedy drive to understand and crack open its secrets, too.

We have three characters that run square up against some sort of entity called the Shrander. One is a modern physicist that also happens to be a serial murderer. One is an odd adventurer and virtual slacker from the future, and another is a heavily modded female captain of one of the really *broken* alien physics crafts that travel in 14 dimensions, with four of time, and all of the tales are pretty amazing.

Lots of sex, too. Not gratuitous, but it is part of the theme and it works very well, literarily, into the final message. Things are quite dark, but there is also light. :)

This is a novel that should be very welcome to hardcore Space Opera fans who love Iain M Banks, Reynolds, and some of the wilder and weirder authors of Science Fiction. It's not for the faint of heart, either. It's rich, rich, rich with ideas. :) I can't wait to read the rest of the trilogy, now!

...more

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Oct 25, 2011 Kat Hooper rated it liked it

Shelves: audiobook

ORIGINALLY POSTED AT Fantasy Literature.

Michael Kearney is a physicist. He’s also a serial killer. Obsessed with numbers and patterns since he was three, he sees something behind them. Something is there, something dark and ominous that starts to emerge sometimes. He calls it the Shrander and the only way to hold it back is to kill someone. Trying to appease the Shrander, Michael uses Tarot cards and a special pair of bone dice to try to figure out what he’s supposed to do next. He’s also teamed ORIGINALLY POSTED AT Fantasy Literature.

Michael Kearney is a physicist. He’s also a serial killer. Obsessed with numbers and patterns since he was three, he sees something behind them. Something is there, something dark and ominous that starts to emerge sometimes. He calls it the Shrander and the only way to hold it back is to kill someone. Trying to appease the Shrander, Michael uses Tarot cards and a special pair of bone dice to try to figure out what he’s supposed to do next. He’s also teamed up with a colleague named Brian Tate to study the relationship between mathematics and prophecy.

Three hundred years later, explorers are using the “Tate-Kearney transformations” to navigate the space phenomenon they call the Kefahuchi (K) Tract where ancient alien races have left artifacts from their advanced civilizations. One of these explorers is Seria Mau, who was molested by her father and escaped by transferring her consciousness to a K-ship. Now, as a sentient starship, she presides over a crew of brooding self-aware algorithms as she explores the Kefahuchi Tract. Her brother, Ed Chianese, used to be an explorer, but now he’s a Twink — he lives most of his life floating in a tank and plugged into a virtual reality that he likes better than real life.

These three characters are all connected by the Shrander. What is it, and why is it interested in these humans’ lives? What is the energetic light-spewing singularity that’s located in the center of the Kefahuchi Tract? Explorers who go there never come back.

When I read over my summary of Light, I think this sounds like an awesome book. I picked it up because I’ve wanted to read M. John Harrison for years. Then Neil Gaiman got into the audiobook business and started a new line called Neil Gaiman Presents in which he works with authors, narrators, and Audible.com to produce some of his favorite works in audio format. Light is one of his very first offerings so, naturally, I jumped. While I did admire Harrison’s characterization and writing style, and Julian Elfer’s narration was spot-on (I hope Gaiman uses him again), I did not like Light as much as I thought I would for two reasons.

First, it’s written in that self-conscious Teflon style that’s slick, vague and nebulous, maybe full of symbolism, and you’re never sure you’ve really got a grasp on what’s going on until the end. Or maybe not even then. And you wonder, “Is this book too smart for me? Or maybe I just have to try harder?” This can imbue the story with a heady atmosphere of wonder and mystery, or it can frustrate the reader who’s just looking for a good story. In the case of Light, things only start to clear up in the last few pages, which doesn’t feel like enough pay off. I didn’t read any reviews before I read Light because I didn’t want to spoil anything, but I would have enjoyed the plot more if I’d first read a summary such as the one I wrote above.

I could have overlooked the hazy plot if I had liked M. John Harrison’s characters. Unfortunately, and this is my biggest problem with Light, the characters are all, with the exception of one who dies not long after we meet him, completely unlikable. Neil Gaiman warns us in his introduction that we won’t like Michael Kearney, but he doesn’t mention that we won’t like any of the characters. Perhaps it’s shallow to insist on having some character to admire or root for, or maybe it’s simply a reflection of my own optimistic personality, but I know many readers feel the way I do, so I’ll warn them.

All of the characters have sad, desperate, pathetic lives. Many are suicidal and most have some sort of sexual hang-up. They can’t keep their hands off their own genitals, or they keep presenting their genitals for others to handle. Almost every single sex act (and there are a lot of them) is ugly, animalistic, and devoid of all positive emotion. Sex is about pity, power, self-loathing and grief. There is no beauty, passion, love, or hope here. I think that M. John Harrison’s symbolism with light and the singularity shaped like a birth canal is meant to convey some feeling of hope at the end of the novel, but I just felt drained.

I’m giving Light 3 stars because I admire Harrison’s vivid writing style, there are some cool cyberpunk elements (though some were too similar to William Gibson’s work) and this was a terrific audio production. My issues with Light are due to my own personal reading preferences. I recommend Light to readers who aren’t so small-minded that they insist on liking some of the characters. Meanwhile, I’ll be trying a different novel by M. John Harrison, including another produced by Neil Gaiman Presents.
Originally posted at www.fantasyliterature.com ...more

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Oct 24, 2007 John rated it really liked it

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 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. ...more

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Jan 18, 2018 Apatt rated it liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: sci-fi

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Dec 27, 2014 Jason rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: e-books, read-2016

5 Stars

Light by M John Harrison is a science fiction worth full marks. This is not an easy read. Harrison dumps the reader into three separate story lines as well as multiple time differences. The reader has to push through the tough start and trust in the author as well as the reviewers that it is worth your time and your energy. Three losers for protagonists, one is a junkie another is a sociopath and the last is a mathematical genius serial killer. None of them are good people yet you can id 5 Stars

Light by M John Harrison is a science fiction worth full marks. This is not an easy read. Harrison dumps the reader into three separate story lines as well as multiple time differences. The reader has to push through the tough start and trust in the author as well as the reviewers that it is worth your time and your energy. Three losers for protagonists, one is a junkie another is a sociopath and the last is a mathematical genius serial killer. None of them are good people yet you can identify with them and they are worth your time. Light is a powerful science fiction story that asks the big questions and leaves you wondering. This is not a character driven novel nor is it a book of trickery or twists and turns. But it is incredible well written, literary, poetic in a way. It is definitely unforgettable. Light is a frenetic powerful science fiction space opera cyberpunk adventure that would probably be easier to understand if you were high.

I was blown away by the writing. Even at the start when I was confused as hell, I knew that my efforts would be worth it. This is unbelievably my first M John Harrison novel. I am not sure what took me so long but I am diving into his works now. I enjoyed all three story lines and looked forward to each. They are really messed up. Once things get going Light is tough to put down. The ending is mind blowing good.

One example of the incredible writing :

"“Things went exactly as she had predicted. Before the Nastic vessel could react, Seria Mau had engaged the mathematics; the mathematics had engaged whatever stood in for reality; and the White Cat had vanished from that sector of space, leaving only a deteriorating eddy of charged particles. “You see?” said Seria Mau. After that it was the usual boring journey. The White Cat’s massive array—aerials an astronomical unit long, fractally folded to dimension-and-a-half so they could be laminated into a twenty-metre patch on the hull—detected nothing but a whisper of photinos. A few shadow operators, tutting and fussing, collected by the portholes and stared out into the dynaflow as if they had lost something there. Perhaps they had. “At the moment,” the mathematics announced, “I’m solving Schrödinger’s equation for every point on a grid of ten spatial and four temporal dimensions. No one else can do that.”

A near masterpiece of a book and thankfully only book one in the series. Awesome.
...more

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Sep 18, 2008 Rook rated it liked it

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 ...more

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Jul 21, 2008 Terence rated it liked it

Shelves: sf-fantasy

This review has been hidden because it contains spoilers. To view it, click here. FAIR WARNING: There are spoilers galore below and for the "faint of heart" I do get a bit more sexually graphic in describing parts of the book than is my wont, so take care if you like to read these things with your kids :-)

I liked this book...I think.

All right, I won't be so namby-pamby: I liked this book (period).

Light is, however, not an easily comprehensible book nor one you can simply race through in an afternoon. The plot is rather simple ("nonexistent" in the opinion of some GR reviewers FAIR WARNING: There are spoilers galore below and for the "faint of heart" I do get a bit more sexually graphic in describing parts of the book than is my wont, so take care if you like to read these things with your kids :-)

I liked this book...I think.

All right, I won't be so namby-pamby: I liked this book (period).

Light is, however, not an easily comprehensible book nor one you can simply race through in an afternoon. The plot is rather simple ("nonexistent" in the opinion of some GR reviewers): Late in the 20th century (1999), Michael Kearney is a physicist and serial killer, who, with his partner, have stumbled on the beginnings of a Theory of Everything. He's also haunted by a creature he calls "the Shrander" that drives him to murder as he desperately tries to escape it. Interwoven with the modern-day story are those of Seria Mau and Ed Chianese in the late 25th (2400). Humans have spread throughout the galaxy but the novel focuses on an "impossible" phenomenon known as the Kefahuchi Tract, where all the laws of physics are bent if not broken and the relics of thousands of alien civilizations give mute testimony to intelligences' attempts to understand the phenomenon. Seria Mau is a sentient starship, a once-human girl overlaid on the technology of the earliest known race to investigate the Tract. (These enigmatic aliens were simply designated "Kefahuchi" and their technology, K-tech.) Ed, who turns out to be Seria's brother, became one of those humans who court death by exploring the Tract and getting as close to the singularity at its heart, though never going "all the way." We're introduced to him at the lowest point in his life, when he's become a "twink," addicted to VR. Unknown to these two, the Shrander has been manipulating their lives as well in order to bring events to a culmination where humans can begin to get a handle on the Tract.

Ah, the Tract. It turns out that the universe is, quite literally, what we make it. When humans ventured out into space they discovered a host of alien civilizations, most with physics that were incompatible with their own - sometimes in direct contradiction to "established" fact. The Tract is a mad place of dark energies & matter, weird energies and a naked singularity down which many have gone but none returned.

The Shrander is the last relic of K-tech. It's been manipulating alien cultures for 65 million years (at least) because it too needs to know what the Tract is. The original K aliens were "defeated" by the Tract. They came, they saw, but they couldn't conquer it so they made intelligent life more probable on a number of worlds and hoped that one of their "descendants" would understand it. (In a way, it's like The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy : a super-advanced race of beings creates the ultimate computer to answer the ultimate question.) The 65-million-year figure is interesting because that's when the last dinosaurs went extinct on Earth, opening up all those juicy ecological niches to our family - the mammals.

And then there's the sex. Having had twenty-four hours to mull over the book, I'm beginning to see where the sex fits in to the story as a whole. None of the three protagonists are very well adjusted, and their sexual hang-ups explain many of their actions. Kearney has sublimated his sexual desires into a fantasy house where he masturbates to his cousins' sexual play. It's only late in the book when he's able to have "normal" sex with his ex-wife Anne that he's able to face the Shrander and his phobias. Seria Mau was molested as a girl by a father who couldn't handle his wife's death; and there are two episodes in the novel where she murders her human passengers in a jealous fit of pique because they're having sex. Again, it's when she's able to reinhabit a physical body and at least have the opportunity for sex that she conquers her fears. I haven't quite figured out all sexual connection in terms of Ed's character, though his sex life is certainly far from normal, and seems to fixate around mother figures and dependency.

I was annoyed by the Shrander - another near-omnipotent, alien deus ex machina that's been subtly manipulating mankind for eons - stepping in at just the right moment. And it made the ending a bit too hopeful, considering all that had come before. Outside of that, though, I thought the book was worth reading. It's an intuitive guess at this point but I'm leaning toward the opinion that this is a "failed" novel. Harrison is trying to say something profound about "life, the universe & everything" but this book isn't strong enough to carry that weight. ...more

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Mar 08, 2015 deilann rated it did not like it

Making sense is a stylistic choice. A stylistic choice that this book firmly opted out of. That’s not to say that’s always a bad thing. There are a few books where “not making sense” works rather well. This is not one of them.
M. John Harrison appears to be trying to write cyberpunkish weird fiction and in doing so, misses the mark on both. The cyberpunk isn’t cyberpunk and the weird isn’t weird. It’s just an incoherent far-future what-the-fuckery mess. Now, I usually like the worldbuilding style Making sense is a stylistic choice. A stylistic choice that this book firmly opted out of. That’s not to say that’s always a bad thing. There are a few books where “not making sense” works rather well. This is not one of them.
M. John Harrison appears to be trying to write cyberpunkish weird fiction and in doing so, misses the mark on both. The cyberpunk isn’t cyberpunk and the weird isn’t weird. It’s just an incoherent far-future what-the-fuckery mess. Now, I usually like the worldbuilding style where you don’t explain the world and let the reader understand it through immersion. But here’s the thing: the reader needs to be able to understand it eventually.

Light seems to just constantly throw more nonsensical technobabble and futurespeak at us by the second, and never really looks back to see if things are clear. Considering how disjointed and unexamined the writing is, that makes sense. The problem is, I think the disjointed, frantic writing was once again, a choice. I think Harrison is trying to emulate the styles of Stephenson and Gibson, but what he doesn’t understand is that writing was well-crafted and purposefully put together. It wasn’t cobbled together in a fit, even though that’s how it feels.

To be honest, this book feels like I’m reading badly written fanfiction for a fandom I’m not familiar with and the author is trying to expand the scope of the medium. And failing badly.

Also, like much of fanfiction, there’s a lot of sex (and masturbation) happening all the time. While I think there’s nothing wrong with sex (or masturbation), constant references seem like a bit of a hangup. There is more on-page sex in this than in a lot of erotica. And a lot of the sexualized characters are described as looking underage, in a lusty tone. Then you have a sex-crazed anorexic named Anna with daddy issues, written with what seems to be a completely straight face...

In fact, much of it reads like someone who was trying to be too hard to be edgy. The book kind of sort of attempts to deal with some real issues, like anorexia, suicide, mental illness, abuse... but it all comes off as kind of glib and just ends up being offensive rather than anything useful. The characters aren’t even caricatures. They’d need more personality for that. Maybe these “issues” were an attempt to make the characters more complex or compelling. If it was, it failed. Like pretty much everything in this book.

The end is also stupid. ...more

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Jun 08, 2016 Antigone rated it really liked it

Shelves: fantasy

There's a rogue rim of science fiction inhabited by experimentalists. Harrison is one. Moorcock another. A few less distinct figures slip in and out of the wings. Theirs is a careening brand of storytelling that skates the edge of comprehension, fueled by twisted psychological truths and the madness that fumes at the root of the math that makes travel of any kind (spatial, temporal, evolutionary) eerily possible. Light finds Harrison at the top of his game, and can best be described as desperati There's a rogue rim of science fiction inhabited by experimentalists. Harrison is one. Moorcock another. A few less distinct figures slip in and out of the wings. Theirs is a careening brand of storytelling that skates the edge of comprehension, fueled by twisted psychological truths and the madness that fumes at the root of the math that makes travel of any kind (spatial, temporal, evolutionary) eerily possible. Light finds Harrison at the top of his game, and can best be described as desperation on crack.

There's little time to say hello to Michael Kearney, a physicist whose fear of making a discovery has him serial-killing his way through London to keep the future at bay. He is stalked by the Schrander, a demon whose dice he's stolen to roll in the darker corners of train stations and airports in an urgent attempt to divine his fate's destination. He's already on the run when we meet, and we're all-too-soon clutching at his coattails (in tandem with his anorexic first wife) just to keep up.

Any foothold here is an illusion. The story jumps at will to a universe four hundred years in the future to join Seria Mau Genlicher - a young woman who, much like Herbert's Guild Navigators, has bargained away her physical integrity to bond with a space ship. Seria's surfing the wild and wooly Kefahuchi Tract, resurrecting her sanity daily in an effort to hunt down the key to an ancient artifact she's recently acquired. A swift shift and we're in for a visit with Chinese Ed, tank addict a la Total Recall, who's run out of time and money and mission and has no idea how to make his life work again. Will Rickshaw-girl Annie Glyph convey him to safety, or simply somewhere less interesting?

It's a jigsaw of a story. Connections exist to be made through clues in dreams, in fantasies; in the falling away of marginally masquerading disguise. Harrison kept me on my toes, and stretched a few boundaries to boot. The only issue I had with Light was its frequent collapse into scenes of squalid, knee-jerk sexuality. Once or twice and I can take the point, but too much of a bad thing is...a bad thing.

This aside? I found it a searingly inventive piece of work.
...more

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Oct 14, 2009 Amanda rated it it was amazing

Shelves: best-of-the-best

i frigin' love M John Harrison! WOWEE, this book..umm..this book is so far beyond a simple sci-fi! it is about the choices we make (in the case of the characters, mostly bad choices) for various inner reasons or for fear of living or whatnot and how they shape or warp our existence. Do u really want to shape your life for the better or just pretend to and secretly, or openly, sabotage it at every chance. While i was reading Light i thought of a bunch of good things for the review and now i don't ...more

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Jun 21, 2007 Ross Lockhart rated it really liked it · 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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Nov 02, 2009 Szplug rated it really liked it · review of another edition

I picked up this novel at a thrift shop as an impulse buy, believing that I would be getting something in the same vein as an Iain M. Banks story. I'm glad that I did: Harrison is perhaps a better writer than Banks (with or without the "M."), even as he possesses the same black sense of humour and ability to write wryly and casually about the grotesque and the vicious. Well-crafted science fiction provides a perfect way to pass a weekend, and I thoroughly enjoyed Harrison's tripartite tale.

We op I picked up this novel at a thrift shop as an impulse buy, believing that I would be getting something in the same vein as an Iain M. Banks story. I'm glad that I did: Harrison is perhaps a better writer than Banks (with or without the "M."), even as he possesses the same black sense of humour and ability to write wryly and casually about the grotesque and the vicious. Well-crafted science fiction provides a perfect way to pass a weekend, and I thoroughly enjoyed Harrison's tripartite tale.

We open in the present, in the presence of a cooly amoral serial killer and breakthrough-poised physicist, Michael Kearney, seemingly driven to his deadly pattern by an entity called "the Shrander". Interspersed with the latter's story are those of the far future's Seria Mau Genlicher, an ultra-tech K-ship pilot, available to the highest (alien or human) bidder, who prowls the dimensional borderlands of the mysterious and artifact-cluttered singularity of the Kefahuchi Tract, and Ed Chianese, a wastrel virtual reality addict, or "twink", on the run from the spiritual menace of the past and the physical menace the geriatric Cray sisters. Though the first story is separated from the other two by some four hundred years, they are all linked through contact with the enigmatic Shrander. Harrison drives us towards the heart of the mystery with lovely prose and great creativity. If the ending doesn't seem completely satisfactory - and in particular, if Kearney's story doesn't quite add up - the book as a whole is very good, and the Kefahuchi tract is a fascinating and tantalizing concept. Harrison is particularly adept at describing the quantum-level mathematics and time-space fluctuations of the K-ship - I found Genlicher's third of the tale to be the most interesting.

Harrison has written a second novel that involves his fictional future milieu, called Nova Swing, which I'm going to be picking up, either first- or second-hand, within the next few months. Harrison is good enough to have been placed in my "must read" list of science fiction authors.

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Dec 10, 2008 Matthew Gatheringwater rated it did not like it

Shelves: science-fiction-and-fantasy

The most persistent reminder I have of my mortality is the nagging consciousness of all the good books I will never read. From this perspective, Light is my least favorite kind of book: one I regret having taken the time to finish. I usually follow a 100-page rule but, in this case, the reviews were so good I felt sure that I must be missing something, or the quality of the writing would make up for the adolescent themes, or everything would come together in a brilliant conclusion that redeemed The most persistent reminder I have of my mortality is the nagging consciousness of all the good books I will never read. From this perspective, Light is my least favorite kind of book: one I regret having taken the time to finish. I usually follow a 100-page rule but, in this case, the reviews were so good I felt sure that I must be missing something, or the quality of the writing would make up for the adolescent themes, or everything would come together in a brilliant conclusion that redeemed the earlier parts of the book. It didn't happen.

I realize there are books I don't care for that are still good books. Perhaps this is one of them. All I know is that this wasn't a book for me, no doubt because I am insufficiently turned on by the idea of growing tusks, injecting myself with the ribosomes of exotic animals, or libertarianism practiced on a galactic scale. In fact, there are a lot of things the author fetishizes that I just think of as effete themes in science fiction: girls who are spaceships, inscrutable "oriental" women, doll-like women, gigantic women, women genetically altered to resemble Japanese pornography of the 20th century, anorexic women, an incident of sexual molestation as a child being the key to understanding a woman's identity, and prostitution as a viable career for women in an interplanetary economy.

I know that bosoms and ray-guns go together in this genre, so I'm willing to overlook a lot of dumb ideas about women if there are at least some interesting ideas about science, but Light reads more like The Secret than science fiction. Consider: There is a cosmic bogeyman influencing human destiny. Most people don't actually perceive reality. Beyond what most people perceive as real there is a deeper level of reality where anything is possible. The deeper level of reality is governed by our thoughts, wishes, and intentions. The underlying reality can be perceived by the very simple (cats and madmen) and by the wise (physicists). The message we hear when we perceive the underlying reality of the universe is to forgive ourselves. In the "real" universe, where anything can happen, self-actualization is our highest end. What a load of New Age humbug given license by vague references to quantum physics!

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Oct 19, 2007 Jon Lyndon rated it it was amazing

Recommends it for: SciFi & Literary readers.

"The Persian poet Rumi wrote, 'Open your hands if you wish to be held.' Almost the same could be said about M. John Harrison... Open your mind if you wish to be enthralled."—Jonathan Carroll

Few writers have have written better passages with descriptive and poetic prose, especially combined with an estranging vividness "capturing the strange mixture of beauty, banality and menace in everyday life".

"Light" is an aesthetic vision. Imaginative, startling and only barely Science Fiction. OK, it is ha "The Persian poet Rumi wrote, 'Open your hands if you wish to be held.' Almost the same could be said about M. John Harrison... Open your mind if you wish to be enthralled."—Jonathan Carroll

Few writers have have written better passages with descriptive and poetic prose, especially combined with an estranging vividness "capturing the strange mixture of beauty, banality and menace in everyday life".

"Light" is an aesthetic vision. Imaginative, startling and only barely Science Fiction. OK, it is half SiFi and half literary genius. It is also a genius in both genres. Like Iain M. Banks (and now William Gibson) Harrison truly knows how to combine and handle the speculative ideas of the near/far future shocks along with poignant politics of everyday reality. He is a writer of pure beauty and emotion who is not afraid to be strange, to warp us into bizarre constellations and take us for stimulating rides.

This book should have won the Arthur C. Clarke Award (it was Short-Listed). It's follow up, "Nova Swing", which is more involved w/ the world of SciFi and less rounded actually won the award. As much as I like "Nova Swing", I do not love it as I do "Light".

"Light" possesses fabrics of the mystery & magic.
[A short excerpt]: "Inside nothing had changed. Nothing had changed since the 1970s, and nothing ever would. The walls were papered a yellowish colour like the soles of feet. Low wattage bulbs on timers allowed you twenty seconds of light before they plunged the stairs back into darkness. There was a smell of gas outside the bathroom, stale boiled food from the second floor rooms. Then aniseed everywhere, coating the membranes of the nose. Near the top of the stairwell a skylight let in the angry orange glare of the London night."
[193].

Its atmosphere is marvelously galactic, dark, literal and metaphorical... always changing, always brilliant. Light was released in 2003, but should easily already be considered a true classic. As bright and dark as Light is, it is also quite heavy (pun intended).

Read it. ...more

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Oct 11, 2013 Alex Sarll added it · review of another edition

For anyone holding to the self-evident truth that genre fiction should be eligible for the big literary prizes, one hurdle remains. Which book, exactly, should win? In any year there are plenty of science fiction books (and doubtless crime ones, if I kept up with crime, and so forth) which bear comparison to the Booker shortlist - but ones which could win over the infidels? Ones unassailable enough to bear the extra scrutiny they'd inevitably receive? Banks' Use of Weapons was one obvious conten ...more

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Jun 14, 2014 Cecily marked it as to-read

Shelves: scifi-future-speculative-fict

Added because in the acknowledgements of Perdido Street Station, M John Harrison is one of only two authors credited (the other being the wonderful Mervyn Peake).

Comments in the Mievillians group suggest this may be a good one to start with: https://www.goodreads.com/topic/show/...

...more

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Jun 10, 2009 Bill Purdy rated it really liked it

Well, now...

If I am scratching my head when you see me next, it's because I am still trying to digest Light, a rather amazing work of literature disguised as a genre piece that will probably get a fifth star upon re-read. Light is just that good.

Problem is, it took me until I was about two-thirds of the way through the novel before I figured out (or, rather, started to figure out) what was going on. Now I feel compelled to re-read it if only to fully experience the clues Harrison weaves into the ...more

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Sep 28, 2012 Jenny (Reading Envy) marked it as did-not-finish

Shelves: sci-fi-fantasy, speed-date-4

I chose this for my fourth speed dating project, in a hopeless attempt to clean out some of my to-read collection at home.

It is with mixed feeling that I abandon this book. I know many find it a challenge for various reasons. The sex doesn't bother me, the quantum mechanics is fine, in fact I don't even mind all that much that I don't know all the details. I'm intrigued by the creatures that seem to predate the characters, always in the shadows.

But I can't really find any interest in the charact ...more

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May 16, 2011 Magdelanye rated it it was amazing

Shelves: existential-crises, displacement, travel, creative-process, language-thought-reality, alternate-reality, culture-conflict, fantasy

This a remarkable book and rather impossible to summarize, it being an adventure through the shifting nature of reality.
It starts grim, and if I wasnt so starved for reading material I might have missed out on this thought provoking romp.
I promise when I have the book in front of me to post here some of the great quotes I highlighted.

Okay,have done some,I have put them in the comments

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Dec 13, 2018 Erica Clou rated it it was ok

Shelves: book-club-dad, own-read, 2000-09, fiction, read-male, dad-fiction, own-male, scifi, horror, 0-konmaried

This was not good. Neil Gaiman recommended this, and I'm not going to trust his recommendations going forward.

Imagine if Stephen King wrote A Wrinkle In Time but you didn't even know what was going on until close to the end? That's this novel. ...more

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Jun 28, 2012 Kyle Muntz rated it it was amazing

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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Jan 13, 2013 Andrea rated it it was amazing

Shelves: library-requests, sci-fi

oh WOW! Bloody marvellous space opera with multiple threads of space, deep time, life, death, fear, exultation, exploration, mystery, aliens, adventure, discovery, loss and cats.
Confused and fearful at times, the gentle reader is hurtled along space-time with the protagonists.
And what a ride it is.

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Mar 07, 2017 Elise rated it really liked it

Shelves: sf, 2000s, read-in-2017

A sweeping and hallucinatory amalgam of space opera, cyberpunk, and horror. There are a lot of exasperating, unfortunate sex scenes--pretty much every time a female secondary character shows up, she's horny--but the quality of the prose and bombardment of very cool SF ideas make up for that, mostly. ...more

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Jul 25, 2007 Adam rated it it was amazing

Shelves: literature-disguised-as-science-fic

This book will continue to reverberate in your head years after you read...something has entered me from this book but what is it...a must read.

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Apr 11, 2009 Josh rated it really liked it

Right after I finished it I didn't like it. It bothered me. I couldn't stop thinking about it. About a week or two later I realized I actually liked it a lot. It sneaks up on you. ...more

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Mar 17, 2017 Rachel (Kalanadi) rated it liked it

Shelves: science-fiction

I don't understand why any of this happened, and ye gods the sex stuff made my skin crawl, but it was very interesting for the last 100 pages. ...more

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Apr 26, 2020 Ben Chandler rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: favorites

Light is a book of great breadth. Broad in scope, broad in concept, even too broad to define as any one thing. It's inventive, grand, tragic, cruel, and extremely weird. It's also damn good.

Perhaps the most remarkable achievement isn't that Harrison deftly weaves three separate strands of narrative together into a cohesive, monumental whole - more that while doing so, he keeps each thread uniquely important, compelling and surprising. And when the twists come, it never feels like a betrayal or a ...more

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Aug 04, 2019 David H. rated it it was ok · review of another edition

Shelves: science-fiction, book-club

If you can't deliver the point of a story prior to the final ten pages of the novel, why bother? Most stories are a combination of journey and destination--you want to appreciate the story as you read it, and you want to appreciate the ending. But don't make the journey so unappetizing that I'd rather read a synopsis than the actual novel. There are some neat stuff in here in all three of the novel's plotlines (well, maybe not Kearney's). I only wish it had been worth the rest of it. ...more

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Feb 19, 2012 Larou added it · review of another edition

Shelves: science-fiction, favorites

If I was polemically inclined, I would start this post off with saying that Light is Science Fiction for readers with a brain. Since I am not, I would of course never do that, but even so I would like to say that this is one of the more intelligent Sci Fi novels around and that it requires a reader for whom reading is a process of active participation rather than passive consumption to fully enjoy it. I (in case you were wondering) can be either, depending on my current mood and on the book I’m If I was polemically inclined, I would start this post off with saying that Light is Science Fiction for readers with a brain. Since I am not, I would of course never do that, but even so I would like to say that this is one of the more intelligent Sci Fi novels around and that it requires a reader for whom reading is a process of active participation rather than passive consumption to fully enjoy it. I (in case you were wondering) can be either, depending on my current mood and on the book I’m reading, and yes, I enjoyed Light very much, thank you.

Light plays out along three narrative strands that run alongside each other for most of the novel and are brought together only at the very end. At least on the level of plot (of which there is not all that much in the first place), but an even slightly closer look reveals that they are tightly interwoven with each other on the levels of theme and imagery, the most obvious one being probably the repeated mentioning of the Kefahuchi Tract (which gives the trilogy Light is the first part of its name) in each of the three strands. Slightly harder to discern (unless you happen to be a buff at anagram-solving) is the recurring presence of an entity (named “the Shrander” in the present day strand), who during the novel’s finale turns out to have played a central role during events. And there is much, much more, like the gestures of rubbing one’s mouth or face that both Michael Kearney and Ed Chianese use constantly as if they needes to ascertain themselves of their own corporeality. This would make it appear that they in some way have issues with their bodies, maybe even their existence, which ties in with the protagonist of the third strand, Seria Mau Genlicher, who has given up her body to become one with her spaceship and kills humans to create “evidence of herself”. Which in turns contrasts with Kearny’s strand as he is a serial killer, but the bodies he leaves seem to show no evidence pointing towards him at all.

The closer you look, the more interrelations between the seemingly decoherent strands are there to be discovered, there is always another level, another stratum of threads weaving back and forth between them; the effect is almost fractal. This means that the reader has to pay close attention, not just to what is going on in terms of plot but to what is actually written on the page, the words themselves, and also has to do some thinking, if she or he wants to catch even a part of it. This is not gratuitous, not merely self-absorbed puzzle-solving, but Harrison using the means of literary language and literary structure to create something that cannot be conceived of in referential terms.

And I have not even touched on the cultural references this novel is brimming over with, or on my suspicion that each of its three strands may be a pastiche of a different Science Fiction writer (I am really unsure about that part – but Seria Mau Genlicher’s parts seem to owe a lot to Cordwainer Smith, while I was getting some strong Philip K. Dick vibes from Ed Chianese’s strand. I can’t place the Michael Kearney strand with any confidence, though – maybe J.G. Ballard?). There is a wealth of things to discover in this brightly shining novel, and as far as I’m concerned, Light is the best Science Fiction novel since at least Feersum Endjinn, possibly even since Nova. ...more

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About M. John Harrison

M. John Harrison

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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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Other books in the series

Kefahuchi Tract (3 books)

Books by M. John Harrison

Empty Space: A Haunting (Kefahuchi Tract, #3)

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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.” — 6 likes

“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.” — 3 likes

More quotes…