Light, M. John Harrison
Light, M. John Harrison
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Light

Author: M. John Harrison

Narrator: Julian Elfer

Unabridged: 10 hr 27 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Published: 08/24/2021


Synopsis

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. He “went deep”—and lived to tell about it. Once crazy for life, he’s now just a twink on New Venusport, addicted to the bizarre alternate realities found in the tanks—and in debt to all the wrong people.

Haunting them all through this maze of menace and mystery is the shadowy presence of the Shrander—and three enigmatic clues left on the barren surface of an asteroid under an ocean of light known as the Kefahuchi Tract: a deserted spaceship, a pair of bone dice, and a human skeleton.

Praise for Light

“Uproarious, breath-taking, exhilarating . . . This is a novel of full spectrum literary dominance. . . . It is a work of—and about—the highest order.”—Guardian

“An increasingly complex and dazzling narrative . . . Light depicts its author as a wit, an awesomely fluent and versatile prose stylist, and an SF thinker as dedicated to probing beneath surfaces as William Gibson is to describing how the world looks when reflected in them. . . . SF fans and skeptics alike are advised to head towards this Light.”—Independent

“Light is a literary singularity: at one and the same time a grim, gaudy space opera that respects the physics, and a contemporary novel that unflinchingly revisits the choices that warp a life. It’s almost unbearably good.”—Ken MacLeod, author of Engine City 

About M. John Harrison

M. John Harrison is an English author and literary critic. He has won the J. Tiptree Jr. Award, the Arthur C. Clarke Award, the Philip K. Dick Award, and the Goldsmiths Prize. He was also a judge for the Booker Prize in 2022. His work includes the Viriconium sequence of novels and short stories, Climbers, and the Kefahuchi Tract trilogy, which consists of Light, Nova Swing, and Empty Space.


Reviews

Goodreads review by Bradley on February 09, 2017

Surprising and grand, I'm always thrilled and amazed when I get to read a serious SF about the soft and squishy underbelly of the universe. The world-building and the span of time and the characterizations are tops, too. The writing is actually pretty spiffy, too, with very clever idea-connections b......more

Goodreads review by Kat on February 27, 2012

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 on......more

Goodreads review by Apatt on January 18, 2018

“Behind all this bad behaviour was an insecurity magnificent in scope, metaphysical in nature. Space was big, and the boys from Earth were awed despite themselves by the things they found there: but worse, their science was a mess. Every race they met on their way through the Core had a star drive b......more

Goodreads review by Jason on July 10, 2016

5 Stars Light by M John Harrison is a science fiction worth full marks. This is not an easy read. Harrison dumps the reader into three separate story lines as well as multiple time differences. The reader has to push through the tough start and trust in the author as well as the reviewers that it is......more


Quotes

“Uproarious, breath-taking, exhilarating . . . This is a novel of full spectrum literary dominance. . . . It is a work of—and about—the highest order.”Guardian

“An increasingly complex and dazzling narrative . . . Light depicts its author as a wit, an awesomely fluent and versatile prose stylist, and an SF thinker as dedicated to probing beneath surfaces as William Gibson is to describing how the world looks when reflected in them. . . . SF fans and skeptics alike are advised to head towards this Light.”Independent

Light is a literary singularity: at one and the same time a grim, gaudy space opera that respects the physics, and a contemporary novel that unflinchingly revisits the choices that warp a life. It’s almost unbearably good.”—Ken MacLeod, author of Engine City

“At last M. John Harrison takes on quantum mechanics. The first classic of the quantum century, Light is a folded-down future history bound together by quantum exotica and human endurance. Taut as Hemingway, viscerally intelligent, startlingly uplifting, Harrison’s ideas have a beauty that unpacks to infinity.”—Stephen Baxter, award-winning author of Evolution and Coalescent

“Harrison’s novel is a cleverly assembled contemplation of how choices make lives and of opening quantum mechanical doors on bizarre potential futures.”Booklist

“Surely one of the best novels of the year . . . Deeply satisfying . . . the final chapters are a marvel of transcendence, reconciliation and redemption.”San Francisco Chronicle Books

“Brilliant, reality-bending SF . . . This is space opera for the intelligensia.”Publishers Weekly (starred review)

“Succeeds in evoking the sense of wonder that science fiction readers look for in the best of the genre . . . Harrison brings an up-to-date sensibility to the hoary conceits of science fiction.”The New York Times Book Review

Light is mind-bending in both its conceptual framework and literary deftness.”Entertainment Weekly