Throwback Thursday: Heading to Radio Bay With M. John Harrison’s Light
For readers, there’s nothing quite like finding a unicorn, one those ridiculously rare, perfect-specimen books that knock you flat. The problem is, the more seasoned a reader you become, the harder it is to find a genuine unicorn, so when you do find one, it becomes something like a moral imperative to share them (sometimes forcefully) with as many people as possible. Even strangers. I started writing about books so I could do just that (hello, strangers!): share the really cool ideas I encounter, and the books that rewire my brain. Books like M. John Harrison’s Light.
Light
Paperback
$7.54
$7.99
Light
Paperback
$7.54
$7.99
Light introduces us to three characters linked by a celestial anomaly known as the Kefahuchi Tract: Michael Kearney, a deranged former quantum physicist haunted by The Shrander, a skeletal elder god; Seria Mau Genlicher, the consciousness ensconced in the freelance starship White Cat, who searches the K-Tract for the technology that will restore her to a living body; and Ed Chianese, a washed-up ace pilot addicted to film noir VR simulations, too much in debt to the wrong people, too little prepared for the meat-space intrigue he encounters as he moves from fugitive to stranger things still.
While the three never exactly meet (Kearney is separated from the others by about 400 years), they impact each other’s journeys in weird ways, floating through a tale of lunatics, tarot readings, psychic fish tanks, existential rumination, six-dimensional dogfights, cyberpunk shootouts, body modification, quantum experiments, callous megacorporations, serial murder, anagrams, and the reality-warping properties of cats. The K-Tract contains mysteries for all three of them, and what they encounter will change them in impossible ways.
If that doesn’t sound like your kind of thing, I understand [Editor’s note: I don’t.]. But I urge you to give it a shot, because (one of) the crazy things about this book is that the above description only scratches the surface. It plays genre roulette on almost every page, sometimes shifting from mode to mode between paragraphs, rewriting the rules of each as it goes. While the overarching feel is a loose kind of pulp sci-fi, it’s also a family drama, a cosmic horror novel, a pitch-black comedy (even for me, and I get pretty dark), a cyberpunk thriller, and an existential fantasy. And more. To paraphrase the old line about the band Naked City: “If you don’t like what you read, wait ten seconds.”
But the biggest reason to read Harrison is his language: I’ve encountered few books about which I could say that not a single word is out of place. He can write a sentence that does more than most authors can do with an entire page. Three storylines, each easily meaty enough for its own book, each stretching across vast reaches of time and space, are laid out in under 300 pages. While the K-Tract is never completely mapped, the numerous descriptions suggest a massive, ragged white halo hanging in space. The Shrander is also suitably bizarre, described as a large horse skeleton covered in ribbons and coins. Some passages tumble into a kind of prose-poetry that feels elegant, lightweight, and intricate, even when the words might not be.
I would love to go on about the embarrassment of riches this book holds (unicorn, remember?)—the sheer wonder of it, the cool ideas like the precognitive fish tank, and the revelation of the true nature of the universe, and the insane way everything wraps up—but that would be to give away the best parts, and that is something I would never do. Part of the fun of Light is discovering each new layer and each bizarre turn of the plot, and describing them out of context would only make me sound insane anyway. Instead, I’ll just say: read this book. You may not like it as much as I do. But you never know.
Oh, and one last thing: God does not play dice with the universe. Make of that what you like.
Light introduces us to three characters linked by a celestial anomaly known as the Kefahuchi Tract: Michael Kearney, a deranged former quantum physicist haunted by The Shrander, a skeletal elder god; Seria Mau Genlicher, the consciousness ensconced in the freelance starship White Cat, who searches the K-Tract for the technology that will restore her to a living body; and Ed Chianese, a washed-up ace pilot addicted to film noir VR simulations, too much in debt to the wrong people, too little prepared for the meat-space intrigue he encounters as he moves from fugitive to stranger things still.
While the three never exactly meet (Kearney is separated from the others by about 400 years), they impact each other’s journeys in weird ways, floating through a tale of lunatics, tarot readings, psychic fish tanks, existential rumination, six-dimensional dogfights, cyberpunk shootouts, body modification, quantum experiments, callous megacorporations, serial murder, anagrams, and the reality-warping properties of cats. The K-Tract contains mysteries for all three of them, and what they encounter will change them in impossible ways.
If that doesn’t sound like your kind of thing, I understand [Editor’s note: I don’t.]. But I urge you to give it a shot, because (one of) the crazy things about this book is that the above description only scratches the surface. It plays genre roulette on almost every page, sometimes shifting from mode to mode between paragraphs, rewriting the rules of each as it goes. While the overarching feel is a loose kind of pulp sci-fi, it’s also a family drama, a cosmic horror novel, a pitch-black comedy (even for me, and I get pretty dark), a cyberpunk thriller, and an existential fantasy. And more. To paraphrase the old line about the band Naked City: “If you don’t like what you read, wait ten seconds.”
But the biggest reason to read Harrison is his language: I’ve encountered few books about which I could say that not a single word is out of place. He can write a sentence that does more than most authors can do with an entire page. Three storylines, each easily meaty enough for its own book, each stretching across vast reaches of time and space, are laid out in under 300 pages. While the K-Tract is never completely mapped, the numerous descriptions suggest a massive, ragged white halo hanging in space. The Shrander is also suitably bizarre, described as a large horse skeleton covered in ribbons and coins. Some passages tumble into a kind of prose-poetry that feels elegant, lightweight, and intricate, even when the words might not be.
I would love to go on about the embarrassment of riches this book holds (unicorn, remember?)—the sheer wonder of it, the cool ideas like the precognitive fish tank, and the revelation of the true nature of the universe, and the insane way everything wraps up—but that would be to give away the best parts, and that is something I would never do. Part of the fun of Light is discovering each new layer and each bizarre turn of the plot, and describing them out of context would only make me sound insane anyway. Instead, I’ll just say: read this book. You may not like it as much as I do. But you never know.
Oh, and one last thing: God does not play dice with the universe. Make of that what you like.