Book Review: Light (M. John Harrison)
Light changes everything. It’s a central theme to M.J Harrison’s utterly triumphant, vivacious return to high-sci-fi and also a statement on the way it’s altered how I think about the genre.
Quick proviso: if I’m vague about something, it’s so as not to spoil the details — a lot of which Harrison builds up to cleverly and only fully unveils in the last few chapters.
This first book of the trilogy is essentially the story of two ‘contemporary’ characters, whom you eventually discover to have a deep connection. Seria-Mau is the mostly-disembodied pilot of a K-Ship, essentially a semi-sentient, half-alien god of death. Her counterpoint is Ed Chianese, whose past life as one of the most renowned and fearless ‘Entradistas’ (think danger-loving wormhole explorer) somehow leads him into massive drug dependency at the outset of the novel. There is a third main character, a very near future human scientist named Michael Kearney whose chapters are much more bleak and surreal, introspective and obliquely mystical. They make for an engaging trio, with vastly varying motivations that make each a delight to follow. There’s an additional supporting cast of tragically flawed lovers, charismatic enemies and mind-bending neutral parties that more than compensate for the occasional, uneventful chapter arc.
What makes Light such a wildly impressive read however is the sheer scope of the futurism. It’s almost completely unhinged, chock full of immersive jargon, insane concepts (information as a substance, the ubiquitous, unknowable and vast galactic phenomenon the Kefahuchi Tract, weird AIs and every conceivable form of bio-hacking, to name but a few) but just plauisble enough not to veer into satire. Harrison writes haphazardly too, throwing the reader in at the broiling deep end, which can be disorienting but respects the reader, in time, and actually quickly naturalises you to the alien, uncaring universe.
And nothing less than the universe is what seems at stake — Light is a set of personal stories that have big effects, and though not a space opera in the grim sense of Battlestar Galactica or the action packed, wildly varying planets and races of Hyperion say, the scale is massive but the action is lean to a point. There were plenty of moments some more exposition would have been welcome, but one senses that Harrison is happy for the description to start on the page and end in the head of the reader, as Stephen King once said, and there’s an allure to trying to fill in a little of the mystery context for oneself.
Equally subtle is the book’s cyberpunk vibe. The genre’s main tropes — hacking, evil corporations, bionic limbs and unending, rainy gloom — are mostly absent, but the sense of squalor, deregulated scientific ‘progress’ and galactic entrepreneurialism is vivid, often grotesquely hilarious and never overdone.
Overall, Light sits with Hyperion for me as one of the most utterly bat-shit crazy but lean and affecting sci-fi books of the last few decades. Audacious, stylish as hell, and with an unusually pitch-perfect cliff-hanger ending, The Kefahuchi Tract and it’s indelible, cosmic light has been seared permanently into my memory.
