[A] big yellow duck started to push its head into the car through Ed’s open side-window. This time, Rita didn’t seem to notice, even though it was speaking.
‘Come in, Number Seven,’ it was saying. ‘Your time is up.’
Ed reached inside his baseball jacket, the back of which read Lungers 8-ball Superstox, and took out one of his Colts.
‘Hey,’ the duck said. ‘I’m joking. Just a reminder. You got eleven minutes’ credit to run before this facility closes down. Ed, as a valued customer of our organisation, you can put more money in or you can make the most of what’s left.’
The duck cocked its head on one side and looked at Rita out of one beady eye.
‘I know which I’d do,’ it said.
Since its publication in 2002, I’ve been reading excellent reviews of Harrison’s long-awaited return to science fiction and space opera (why he chose to escape into exile to write about rock-climbing of all things remains something of a Sphinx-mute mystery). The Times Literary Supplement, never the greatest admirer of SF, much less space opera, went bananas. Iain M. Banks writing for the Guardian described it as “Brilliant”, and a match for Harrison’s earlier anti-space opera
The Centauri Device. I must admit that I didn’t warm to that novel as others did, but this is beside the point because
Light really is brilliant and worthy of all its plaudits.
The narrative is split into three strands. Cambridge physicists Michael Kearney and Brian Tate are on the verge of discovering the quantum nature of information and – unbeknown to them – the secret of interstellar travel. Kearney, a seething mass of neurotic obsessions, hides a sinister secret and is on the run from a relentless metaphysical creature known as the Shrander, whose pair of bone dice he stole decades earlier.
Fast forward four hundred years to the Radio Bay star cluster. A gathering point for humans, aliens and a kaleidoscope of gene-wrought oddities feeding off the high-tech (or K-tech) detritus of long dead civilisations who vainly sought to penetrate the secrets of the Kefahuchi Tract, an iridescent temporospatial anomaly that refuses all prospectors. Haunted by terrors of the past, one-time daredevil singularity surfer Ed Chianese lives out his days inside a VR ‘Twink’ tank, where reality is whatever you want to escape into. Meanwhile, out amongst the folding layers of quantum space, privateer merc starship,
The White Cat, a graceful and deadly fusion of machine efficiency and human emotional instability, sets forth on a dangerous journey to discover the purpose of an item of inscrutable alien technology.
Harrison left SF as arguably the best prose stylist the genre has seen since William Gibson. He returns with
Light better than ever. The top writers just have that untutorable instinct for tuning words to the point of musicality. Here Harrison delicately weaves together the customary swashbuckling tropes of this (understandably) derided sub-genre and Gothic themes of pernicious obsession, physical and scientific transgression, and the bitter waste of escapism. Are human beings capable of evolving beyond the sum of their neuroses?
Like
Neuromancer,
Light stands as a lesson in how to develop a living, breathing environment that emerges from the page into the sensorium of the mind. The eye-searing glare of the Tract, blazing through time and space; the smell of salt-scored driftwood from the beaches alongside the alien freakshow of Madame Chen’s Circus of Pathet Lao, the gathering whine of the White Cat’s quantum dynaflow engines. It’s easy to get lost in it all.
The successful conjuring trick here in appeasing the militaristic, high-adventure fetishes ascribed by the publisher to the genre addict, whilst offering much to the patient and scrupulous reader who prefers something with a little more intellectual substance. Harrison’s vividly drawn characters surprise, amuse and appall on their journeys toward self-discovery.
The science isn’t lacking, either (a complement rarely aimed at a genre which often plays fast and loose with such). I’ve recently finished Brian Greene’s excellent
Fabric of the Cosmos and I was particularly impressed by this book’s expert familiarity with current scientific theory on quantum mechanics and Superstring Theory.
Light is one of the most stylish, intelligent and immersive pieces of high-octane SF I’ve read. The only negative I’ll raise is the publisher’s decision to very nearly ruin the whole experience with a plot-busting spoiler on the rear jacket (UK edition). Why?
Could you tell us why you think Light is a “big pile of overly wordy doo-doo", or is this Caesar's decree?
