Wednesday, 10th of December, 2003

I finished this complex and compelling book a couple of weeks ago, and it’s taken me a while to ingest its contents in order to write a concise enough review that does it justice. Yesterday the December issue of Locus (”The [excellent, essential] Magazine Of The Science Fiction & Fantasy Field”) arrived in the mail and who should be on the cover but M John Harrison himself! His interview (try excerpts here) is fascinating, and gave me enough impetus to get this review out there now.
From its very title, Light’s multiplicitous complexity is revealed; the word contains so many connotations it must have been irresistible, and Light is indubitably both dark and heavy. Meanwhile, MJH is able to refer to his “let there be light” moment, conceiving of Light after a conversation with another genre-crossing sf iconoclast, Iain M Banks, who accused him of not having enough fun. And fun Harrison does have, not least with genre tropes a-plenty. Light comprises three (initially) separate story-lines, one set in the turn-of-the-millennium present, two set in 2400 AD.
The contemporary storyline could almost pass for mainstream fiction, with a decidedly gothic horror twist underlying it. Its protagonist is the deeply confused Michael Kearney, apparently a brilliant physicist (although he does no physics at all in the book, leaving that to his increasingly harried partner Brian Tate). It’s revealed in the first chapter that he is also a dispassionate serial killer, driven by his deep terror of a being called the Shrander.
The first of the future storylines features Seria Mau Genlicher, another insane sometime-killer who is a K-captain - that is, she’s been so removed from her physical being (she floats grotesquely in a tank in the middle of her K-ship) that she practically is the ship some of the time. I was absolutely delighted to read in the Locus interview that she represents MJH’s “long-delayed response to Anne McCaffrey’s The Ship Who Sang, a book I hated because I felt it was so inauthentic”. Seria Mau is a bizarre character, and no less bizarre are the accompanying “characters” in her world: the “mathematics”, which is an independent (and probably conscious? - more on that later) entity with its source in the K-tech (more on that later too) that the ship is based on, and the wonderful “shadow operators”, which flit around the ship, taking care of myriad smaller tasks, exhibiting characteristics that may imply full personhood or may simply be algorithmic faux-personhood. Harrison is, of course, far too intelligent an author to introduce such ambiguity for no reason.
But before we get into the deep philosophy, we’ll leave the most explicitly space opera segment of the book for the third strand, that of Chinese Ed, or Ed Chianese, who lives on a planet under the constant light of the Kefahuchi Tract, the mysterious, huge and fecund naked singularity that drives and unites the book’s narrative. Ed is a twink - that is, he spends most of his time in a tank, inhabiting a virtual reality; in this case a ridiculously clichéd hardboiled detective setup. That setting in itself is a snide swipe (or is it a gentle homage?) at the cyberpunk trappings of this particular storyline. Harrison is alarmingly proficient stylistically, and pulls off the cyberpunk language just as perfectly as the mainstream-meets-horror and the space opera. The cast of characters in Ed’s story are also engaging, from Tig Vesicle (one of the New Men, as Vonneguttian an alien species as you could ask for) to the sinister Cray Sisters (who for some reason call to my mind the horrifying creations of Al Columbia).

The thing is, Harrison manages to take the tropes from all these genres and more, and create something updated and new all the same. As yet mostly unmentioned is the idea of the alien; the New Men are an almost throwaway concept: aliens who take over the Earth and then blend in, adapting Earth customs in a way reminiscent of Japan’s weird love of English… On the other hand, the Kefahuchi Tract provides a seemingly limitless source of puzzling (and puzzlingly useful) alien artifacts, and the K-tech used to create the K-ships, for instance, results in a weird hybridisation of human and alien in the form of Seria Mau and her mathematics… There are at least two other examples of aliens, not to mention the weirdly transformed rickshaw-operator Annie Glyph. In the midst of this, all the human characters are deeply flawed, out of touch with their humanity, refusing to grow up. Harrison claims in the Locus interview to be deliberately illustrating human values “by describing their absence”. On reflection, I think I probably did notice that, although I was still troubled by the characterisation. It’s safe to assume, though, that not one word of this book is there by accident, nor any higher-level features. And there is a pervading humour which I was surprised to find; it’s at once unrelentingly dark and also frequently delightful. (Indeed the New Men aren’t the only Vonneguttian characteristics of this book: it’s wide-screen yet intensely personal, emotionally detached, playful yet dark, all representative of Vonnegut too.)

By the end of the book, the connections between the three strands (which rotate throughout) have been teased out (I picked up on some of the salient connections a few chapters before they were explicitly revealed, which was kinda fun), and a sort of narrative closure is reached. I was reminded of Alan Moore, who is a master of the art of Story (indeed I’m surprised I can’t find a review of this book by John Clute, Story-obsessive in extremis…) Such concepts as complexity & chaos theory, the underlying quantum nature of reality, quantum computing and the idea of all reality as information, all jostle around in a book that is steeped in metaphor: American beaches are juxtaposed with the Beach (the huge extent of space where wanders wash up from the K-tract), for instance. Parallels across strands which seem to be metaphorical turn out to be more literally connected, while higher-level ironies are revealed (Ed the twink’s world turns out to be almost entirely artifice…)
Consciousness, artificial intelligence and free will, abiding tropes of sf, also feature. The shadow operators, strange creations of nanotech (perhaps) are described as mere algorithms, but I suspect that Harrison wants us to think about what differentiates a “real person” from an algorithmic, feigned one; by the end we see that none of the human protagonists really had much free will at all within the narrative (and what freedom they had probably resulted in their fucking up of their lives - ah, joy)…
There are so many layers to this book that it’s almost impossible to do it justice in a review (especially a blog review - ha!) and I’d better stop, in case I reveal any more than the last sentence of the previous paragraph but one threatens to. Suffice to say, Light is literature of the highest order. Anyone tempted to dismiss it as “just” science fiction, or “just” anything else (not to mention “too cold/cruel/dark/complex/obscure”) should try a little harder, as the rewards are many. Whether it succeeds in everything it’s trying to do, I’m not sure, but any misgivings I have are probably because I want it to be something it’s not: I’d like it to be a little more hard science fiction, so I found the sketchy science, only just hinted at in the contemporary sequences, a little frustrating. Similarly, Kearney’s seemingly-gratuitous murders end up being… gratuitous murders; perhaps this is just the point though.
This is a book to be re-read and studied and written about. It will give more to those already acquainted genre fiction & its various subgenres, but by immersing itself in genre it transcends it, in a way that a mainstream/literary author could never manage.

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