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Light

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Overview

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.

Editorial Reviews

Harrison's talent for brilliant, reality-bending SF is on display yet again with this three-tiered tale, published (and highly praised) in the U.K. in 2002. It's 1999, and British scientist Michael Kearney and his American partner, Brian Tate, are studying laboratory quantum physics; unbeknownst to them, they'll become the fathers of interplanetary travel. Kearney nervously holds a pair of predictive dice he's stolen from a frightening specter called the Shrander, whom he keeps at bay by committing random murders. Four hundred years in the future, K-ship captain Seria Mau Genlicher has gravely erred in splicing herself with a hijacked spacecraft called the White Cat and now she wants out. There's also Ed Chianese, a burned-out interstellar surfer now spending his life within a reality simulation machine. His problem Monetary debt to the nasty Cray sisters. As Kearney continues to narrowly evade the Shrander, he discovers that company CEO Gordon Meadows has sold the lab to Sony. All three story lines converge and find heavenly closure at the cosmological wonder known as the Kefahuchi Tract, a wormhole with alien origins bordered by a vast, astral "beach" where time and space are braided and interchangeable. This is space opera for the intelligentsia, as Harrison (Things That Never Happen) tweaks aspects of astrophysics, fantasy and humanism to hum right along with the blinking holograms in a welcome and long overdue return. Agent, Susan Howe. (Sept. 7) Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information. -- PUBLISHERS WEEKLY.

Author Information

Bio of M. John Harrison

M. John Harrison is the award-winning author of eight previous novels and four collections of short stories. His fifth novel, Viriconium, was shortlisted for the Guardian Fiction Prize and his sixth, Climbers, won the Boardman Tasker Award. Light was recently awarded the James Tiptree Jr. Award and shortlisted for the 2002 Arthur C. Clarke Award.

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Additional Info

Imprint

Spectra

Filesize

937.75 KB

Number of Pages

320

eBook ISBN

9780553900699

Awards

  • Arthur C. Clarke Award
  • James Tiptree Jr. Award

Excerpt from: Light by M. John Harrison

1
Disillusioned by the Actual
1999:
Towards the end of things, someone asked Michael Kearney, "How do you see yourself spending the first minute of the new millennium " This was their idea of an after-dinner game up in some bleak Midlands town where he had gone to give a talk. Wintry rain dashed at the windows of the private dining room and ran down them in the orange streetlight. Answers followed one another round the table with a luminous predictability, some sly, some decent, all optimistic. They would drink until they fell down, have sex, watch fireworks or the endless sunrise from a moving jet. Then someone volunteered:

"With the bloody children, I expect."

This caused a shout of laughter, and was followed immediately by: "With somebody young enough to be one of my children."

More laughter. General applause.

Of the dozen people at the table, most of them had some idea like that. Kearney didn't think much of any of them, and he wanted them to know it; he was angry with the woman who had brought him there, and he wanted her to know that. So when it came to his turn, he said:

"Driving someone else's car between two cities I don't know."

He let the silence develop, then added deliberately, "It would have to be a good car."

There was a scatter of laughter.

"Oh dear," someone said. She smiled round the table. "How dour."

Someone else changed the subject.

Kearney let them go. He lit a cigarette and considered the idea, which had rather surprised him. In the moment of articulating it ' of admitting it to himself ' he had recognised how corrosive it was. Not because of the loneliness, the egocentricity, of the image, here in this enclave of mild academic and political self-satisfaction: but because of its puerility. The freedoms represented ' the warmth and emptiness of the car, its smell of plastic and cigarettes, the sound of a radio playing softly in the night, the green glow of dials, the sense of it as an instrument or a series of instrumental decisions, aimed and made use of at every turn in the road ' were as puerile as they were satisfying. They were a description of his life to that date.

As they were leaving, his companion said:

"Well, that wasn't very grown-up."

Kearney gave her his most boyish smile. "It wasn't, was it "

Her name was Clara. She was in her late thirties, red-haired, still quite young in the body but with a face already beginning to be lined and haggard with the effort of keeping up. She had to be busy in her career. She had to be a successful single parent. She had to jog five miles every morning. She had to be good at sex, and still need it, and enjoy it, and know how to say, in a kind of whining murmur, "Oh. That. Yes, that. Oh yes," in the night. Was she puzzled to find herself here in a redbrick-and-terracotta Victorian hotel with a man who didn't seem to understand any of these achievements Kearney didn't know. He looked round at the shiny off-white corridor walls, which reminded him of the junior schools of his childhood.