Light

A Novel

By: M. John Harrison

Narrated by: Julian Elfer

In M. John Harrison’s dangerously illuminating new novel, three quantum outlaws face a universe of their own creation, a universe where you make up the rules as you go along and break them just as fast, where there’s only one thing more mysterious than darkness.

In contemporary London, Michael Kearney is a serial killer on the run from the entity that drives him to kill. He is seeking escape in a future that doesn’t yet exist—a quantum world that he and his physicist partner hope to access through a breach of time and space itself. In this future, Seria Mau Genlicher has already sacrificed her body to merge into the systems of her starship, the White Cat. But the “inhuman” K-ship captain has gone rogue, pirating the galaxy while playing cat and mouse with the authorities who made her what she is. In this future, Ed Chianese, a drifter and adventurer, has ridden dynaflow ships, run old alien mazes, surfed stellar envelopes. He “went deep”—and lived to tell about it. Once crazy for life, he’s now just a twink on New Venusport, addicted to the bizarre alternate realities found in the tanks—and in debt to all the wrong people.

Haunting them all through this maze of menace and mystery is the shadowy presence of the Shrander—and three enigmatic clues left on the barren surface of an asteroid under an ocean of light known as the Kefahuchi Tract: a deserted spaceship, a pair of bone dice, and a human skeleton.

Praise for Light

“Uproarious, breath-taking, exhilarating . . . This is a novel of full spectrum literary dominance. . . . It is a work of—and about—the highest order.”—Guardian

“An increasingly complex and dazzling narrative . . . Light depicts its author as a wit, an awesomely fluent and versatile prose stylist, and an SF thinker as dedicated to probing beneath surfaces as William Gibson is to describing how the world looks when reflected in them. . . . SF fans and skeptics alike are advised to head towards this Light.”—Independent

“Light is a literary singularity: at one and the same time a grim, gaudy space opera that respects the physics, and a contemporary novel that unflinchingly revisits the choices that warp a life. It’s almost unbearably good.”—Ken MacLeod, author of Engine City

Critic reviews

“Uproarious, breath-taking, exhilarating . . . This is a novel of full spectrum literary dominance. . . . It is a work of—and about—the highest order.”—Guardian

“An increasingly complex and dazzling narrative . . . Light depicts its author as a wit, an awesomely fluent and versatile prose stylist, and an SF thinker as dedicated to probing beneath surfaces as William Gibson is to describing how the world looks when reflected in them. . . . SF fans and skeptics alike are advised to head towards this Light.”—Independent

“Light is a literary singularity: at one and the same time a grim, gaudy space opera that respects the physics, and a contemporary novel that unflinchingly revisits the choices that warp a life. It’s almost unbearably good.”—Ken MacLeod, author of Engine City

“At last M. John Harrison takes on quantum mechanics. The first classic of the quantum century, Light is a folded-down future history bound together by quantum exotica and human endurance. Taut as Hemingway, viscerally intelligent, startlingly uplifting, Harrison’s ideas have a beauty that unpacks to infinity.”—Stephen Baxter, award-winning author of Evolution and Coalescent

“Harrison’s novel is a cleverly assembled contemplation of how choices make lives and of opening quantum mechanical doors on bizarre potential futures.”—Booklist

“Surely one of the best novels of the year . . . Deeply satisfying . . . the final chapters are a marvel of transcendence, reconciliation and redemption.”—San Francisco Chronicle Books

“Brilliant, reality-bending SF . . . This is space opera for the intelligensia.”—Publishers Weekly (starred review)

“Succeeds in evoking the sense of wonder that science fiction readers look for in the best of the genre . . . Harrison brings an up-to-date sensibility to the hoary conceits of science fiction.”—The New York Times Book Review

“Light is mind-bending in both its conceptual framework and literary deftness.”—Entertainment Weekly

Wildly creative and fascinating

Some very original, fascinating ideas in this book. It has existing sci-fi tropes peppered in here and there, but it’s wrapped in a genuinely novel perspective. I’ve never read anything like it, the quantum strangeness is baked in to the core, which takes getting used to. Very original character studies as well, they’re morally ambiguous in a way that kept me on my toes. The whole thing is like a lucid dream, potent while experiencing it and very hard to explain once you wake up. The reader is amazing as well.

Wonderful SF to think with

I’m sure this book feels mostly opaque to a lot of people but there’s something so pure in its expression it’s obviously a masterful work of fiction. Folding time, formally and dramturgically, is no small feat and to do it with jokes is all the better.

You’ll never see anything the same way again

Each chapter is filled to the brim with ugliness, but this book as a whole is a beautiful masterwork, the weight of it’s artistic significance comparable to anything made by the minds of Mozart, Picasso, Dickens, Bowie. There is nothing, absolutely nothing, like this book. It’s more than science fiction, more than space opera. It is nothing short of a clean-sheet rewrite of the very concept of existence and all that it entails. “Anything is possible” is a cliché phrase, but how far is one author willing to go to illustrate what that truly means? This book is challenging, and you won’t love the experience, but when it’s all said and done and you realize the author’s vision of the present and the future is completely grounded in reality despite the seeming impossibility of it all, you won’t be able to carry on like you did pre-Light. Nothing will ever be the same. A demonic all powerful evil, transcending space and time is fairly mundane. Some rubber thing soaking in the kitchen sink becomes more unsettling and sinister than you could have imagined. The impossible is so familiar, the familiar so exotic once you begin to realize how the universe really works.

Pointless and meandering

I almost stopped listening but decided to use it as a sleep aid and eventually finished.

pointless

this is one of the most pointless stories I've ever listened to. none of the threads are cohesive. I don't care about any of the people in it. they're not doing anything interesting or worthwhile. I went on through chapter 7 and finally had to give up.