This brilliant and absorbing fever dream (masquerading as a science fiction novel) was first published in the UK in 2002—Harrison’s a British author with eight previous novels to his credit—and came out as a Spectra paperback in the States in 2004. I presume I was asked to review it because Harrison’s next book, Viriconium, was published last November. (I’ll review that, too, if time permits.)
Light falls into a category of science fiction I call extrapoliction, a kind of scifi where the author pushes human advancement inexorably forward until things sort of splinter apart and go beyond all possible human understanding.
I was just kidding about calling anything extrapoliction, but the fact remains that books like Schismatrix, the Dune series, and, well, Light, take the truly long view of human evolution in a way that other science fiction novels don’t. Not content to simply imagine a future point in mankind’s understanding and intellectual development, they push forward on the understanding that, as the mantra goes in Light: “There will always be more in the universe. There will always be more after that.”
What makes Light so special, and so very much worth your attention, is that no matter how “far out” Harrison takes things—very far out indeed, if you’re wondering—he remains primarily concerned with human stories, human dilemmas. There are three main characters in this book who (almost) never interact in the course of the story, though their lives are all intertwined and eventually come together. Each chapter moves one of the three threads along.
Michael Kearney, a British physicist and mathematician living in 1999 whose visions of the fractral truth of the universe (and run-ins with a mysterious force or creature known as the Shrander) drive him to become a serial killer. (Amazingly, Harrison manages to keep Kearney’s portrayal sympathetic despite the body count.) Ed Chianese, once a legendary explorer and pilot in the far future, has been reduced to a “twink,” or VR addict. Contemporary with Ed, Seria Mau Genlicher is the (barely) human pilot of a quantum battleship known as the White Cat. Harrison’s colorful descriptions of galactic dogfights in ten spatial and four temporal dimensions are one of the particular delights of the novel.
Quantum physics, fractals, and the rest play important roles in the texture of Harrison’s imagined future—Kearney’s breakthroughs in quantum physics, it turns out, are what eventually get mankind to the stars—but in the author’s universe, these tropes only represent one possible way of doing things. In the universe of Light, everything seems to work. Superstring theory works. Newtonian physics works. If you’ve got a sensible theory about how the universe operates, that theory seems to work in practice even if it conflicts with all the other theories out there. “There will always be more in the universe,” the characters in Light say. “There will always be more after that.”
Ed Chianese and Seria Mau Genlicher both find themselves on the Beach, a stretch of galaxy on the brink of the Kefahuchi Tract. The Tract is a vast astronomical entity that has fascinated alien races for millions of years. Many humans explore the planets of the Beach simply to plunder all of the ancient alien artifacts left behind when previous efforts to understand the Tract failed. What makes the Tract special, the reason it draws every intelligent race in the galaxy to study its mysteries, is that it appears to be a singularity without an event horizon. The Tract is doorway leading outside the universe as we know it, where all the rules break down. Life seems to be teetering on the edge of a reality vastly greater than the one it inhabits.
Harrison writes beautiful, literary prose that would be equally at place in a piece of mainstream fiction, but his wild, unorthodox creative imagination is what makes this novel truly extraordinary. His characters aren’t very sympathetic, but they’re real people, and for that reason alone Harrison deserves a Hugo. Light will leave you thinking and it will leave you breathless.
Light by M. John Harrison
Publisher : Spectra (August 31, 2004)
Paperback : 310 pages
ISBN-10 : 0553382950
ISBN-13 : 978-0553382952
Genre: Far future sci fi
