Light

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

If you're into dense sci-fi, exposition, and lots of description of women's bodies, this is your jam!

I don't get it. I read this because I've seen it hyped as a sci-fi masterpiece. I even saw a few publications list it as one of the best novels of the century. But I don't think it's good.

There are four loosely connected stories and they all move at a snail's pace, all bogged down by excessive descriptions that somehow don't help you understand what's being described and excessive exposition that somehow doesn't help you understand the world. The novel seems purposely difficult, but not in a fun way like “House of Leaves.”

Also, the characters are all horrible, like the worst people imaginable. I hate all of them and care what happens to none of them.

I will say that the story is unique and Harrison certainly did a lot of world-building in his head, but he didn't do a good job of putting that world on paper.

Before the story starts, there is a forward written by someone who says he didn't like the book the first time he read it, but after reading it subsequent times, it grew on him. That's who they asked to write the forward. I think that tells you a lot about the book.

Light (Kefahuchi Tract 1) by M. John Harrison

Please give my Amazon review a helpful vote - https://www.amazon.com/gp/customer-reviews/R15WHX0Z0RAK0M?ref=pf_ov_at_pdctrvw_srp

This is a hard book for me to evaluate. I liked it, but I also disliked it.

Let's start with an overview. “Light” is the first installment of Harrison's “Kefahuchi Tract” trilogy. The Kefahuchi Tract is a space structure, which I assume stretches for light-years since it streams halfway across the sky, but on other occasions it glares down like an angry eye. Harrison describes it as a singularity with no event horizon, whatever that means. So, the central artifact of the book is frustratingly nebulous.

In any event, this structure has attracted the attention of the alien species of the galaxy for tens of millions of years, many of which have set up shop on the “beach,” which must be an area of the galaxy from which the tract can be observed. Many of these cultures have engaged in might works of galactic engineering, involving moving stars around or planetary reconstruction just to keep an eye on the tract. The “K culture” was the earliest such species. It had the ability to create a hard, tangible form of “mathematics,” which cannot be copied, but can be mined, and is incredibly valuable for the construction of spaceships and other devices. All of this makes the Kefahuchi Tract worth exploiting.

That summary is the most coherent explanation about the background book you are going to get, and far more coherent than anything in the book. On the other hand, this backgrounder does not do justice to the sense of wonder and scope that Harrison manages to wring from his ambiguous descriptions and ambiguities. My favorite was the solar system of Perkin's Rent:

“What was memorable about the system, which was called Perkins' Rent, was the train of alien vehicles that hung nose to tail in a long cometary orbit which at aphelion was halfway to the next star. They were between a kilometre and thirty kilometers long, with hulls as tough and thick as rinds, colored a kind of lustreless grey, shaped as randomly as asteroids—potato shapes, dumb-bell shapes, off-center shapes with holes in them—and every one under two feet of the sifted-down dust blown out of some predictable and not very recent stellar catastrophe. The dust of life, though there was no life here. Whoever they belonged to abandoned them before proteins appeared on Earth.”

The story revolves around three substories, one in a version of 1999 and the other two set in the 24th century.

The first story arc involves a physicist named Michael Kearney, who, with his partner, Brian Tate, will be remembered for discovering that math that allows interstellar travel. We don't see any of that. We see Kearney as a serial murderer who is killing women to keep a being with the head of a horse's skull at a distance.

The second story arc involves Ed Chianese, who starts as a “twink,” someone who puts themself into a box to live in virtual reality. But “Chinese Ed” is a daredevil space pilot who knows the human part of the beach. He gets involved with New Men and then with a “Rickshaw Girl,” who later becomes a “mona,” and then with the circus, where he learns to see the future. In this section, we get some introduction to the kaleidoscopic, splintered, almost cyberpunk world of the future.

The third arc involves the pilot of a K-ship named Seria Mau Genlicher, who at thirteen was surgically altered to exist in a tank as part of the ship. In this section, we see Seria involved in space battles that are waged in nanoseconds with the highest of technology.

It turns out that the three story arcs lead to the same place with the same entity.

All of this sounds good, and it really is. Unfortunately, there is so much that is repulsive, as well. For example, the characters are not likable. They are all psychopathic users concerned about themselves first and last. This makes it difficult to care about any of them. Ultimately what pulled me along was finding out what was going on.

Likewise, there is so much wasted text. As little as I cared about Kearney, I cared even less for his wife Anna or his sexual hangups. Likewise, I'm sure that Sandra Shen's training of Ed Chianese with the tank he used to see the future was important, but it went on for far too long, as did the interlude with the New Men (and his adulterous screwing of the New Man's wife.)

Another thing I got tired of was the sex. The story was obsessed with sex like it was at the forefront of the New Wave in the 1960s when that kind of thing was avant-garde. Now, it just seems like a dirty old man getting his rocks off - it didn't advance the plot, it was repetitive, it wasn't even interesting.

So, there were good things in the book that interested and captivated me and there were things that repelled and annoyed me. I don't regret reading the book. I may go back and re-read the second installment, Nova Swing, to see if I get more out of it this time.