Light

If you're into dense sci-fi, exposition, and lots of description of women's bodies, this is your jam!

I don't get it. I read this because I've seen it hyped as a sci-fi masterpiece. I even saw a few publications list it as one of the best novels of the century. But I don't think it's good.

There are four loosely connected stories and they all move at a snail's pace, all bogged down by excessive descriptions that somehow don't help you understand what's being described and excessive exposition that somehow doesn't help you understand the world. The novel seems purposely difficult, but not in a fun way like “House of Leaves.”

Also, the characters are all horrible, like the worst people imaginable. I hate all of them and care what happens to none of them.

I will say that the story is unique and Harrison certainly did a lot of world-building in his head, but he didn't do a good job of putting that world on paper.

Before the story starts, there is a forward written by someone who says he didn't like the book the first time he read it, but after reading it subsequent times, it grew on him. That's who they asked to write the forward. I think that tells you a lot about the book.

Light (Kefahuchi Tract 1) by M. John Harrison

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This is a hard book for me to evaluate. I liked it, but I also disliked it.

Let's start with an overview. “Light” is the first installment of Harrison's “Kefahuchi Tract” trilogy. The Kefahuchi Tract is a space structure, which I assume stretches for light-years since it streams halfway across the sky, but on other occasions it glares down like an angry eye. Harrison describes it as a singularity with no event horizon, whatever that means. So, the central artifact of the book is frustratingly nebulous.

In any event, this structure has attracted the attention of the alien species of the galaxy for tens of millions of years, many of which have set up shop on the “beach,” which must be an area of the galaxy from which the tract can be observed. Many of these cultures have engaged in might works of galactic engineering, involving moving stars around or planetary reconstruction just to keep an eye on the tract. The “K culture” was the earliest such species. It had the ability to create a hard, tangible form of “mathematics,” which cannot be copied, but can be mined, and is incredibly valuable for the construction of spaceships and other devices. All of this makes the Kefahuchi Tract worth exploiting.

That summary is the most coherent explanation about the background book you are going to get, and far more coherent than anything in the book. On the other hand, this backgrounder does not do justice to the sense of wonder and scope that Harrison manages to wring from his ambiguous descriptions and ambiguities. My favorite was the solar system of Perkin's Rent:

“What was memorable about the system, which was called Perkins' Rent, was the train of alien vehicles that hung nose to tail in a long cometary orbit which at aphelion was halfway to the next star. They were between a kilometre and thirty kilometers long, with hulls as tough and thick as rinds, colored a kind of lustreless grey, shaped as randomly as asteroids—potato shapes, dumb-bell shapes, off-center shapes with holes in them—and every one under two feet of the sifted-down dust blown out of some predictable and not very recent stellar catastrophe. The dust of life, though there was no life here. Whoever they belonged to abandoned them before proteins appeared on Earth.”

The story revolves around three substories, one in a version of 1999 and the other two set in the 24th century.

The first story arc involves a physicist named Michael Kearney, who, with his partner, Brian Tate, will be remembered for discovering that math that allows interstellar travel. We don't see any of that. We see Kearney as a serial murderer who is killing women to keep a being with the head of a horse's skull at a distance.

The second story arc involves Ed Chianese, who starts as a “twink,” someone who puts themself into a box to live in virtual reality. But “Chinese Ed” is a daredevil space pilot who knows the human part of the beach. He gets involved with New Men and then with a “Rickshaw Girl,” who later becomes a “mona,” and then with the circus, where he learns to see the future. In this section, we get some introduction to the kaleidoscopic, splintered, almost cyberpunk world of the future.

The third arc involves the pilot of a K-ship named Seria Mau Genlicher, who at thirteen was surgically altered to exist in a tank as part of the ship. In this section, we see Seria involved in space battles that are waged in nanoseconds with the highest of technology.

It turns out that the three story arcs lead to the same place with the same entity.

All of this sounds good, and it really is. Unfortunately, there is so much that is repulsive, as well. For example, the characters are not likable. They are all psychopathic users concerned about themselves first and last. This makes it difficult to care about any of them. Ultimately what pulled me along was finding out what was going on.

Likewise, there is so much wasted text. As little as I cared about Kearney, I cared even less for his wife Anna or his sexual hangups. Likewise, I'm sure that Sandra Shen's training of Ed Chianese with the tank he used to see the future was important, but it went on for far too long, as did the interlude with the New Men (and his adulterous screwing of the New Man's wife.)

Another thing I got tired of was the sex. The story was obsessed with sex like it was at the forefront of the New Wave in the 1960s when that kind of thing was avant-garde. Now, it just seems like a dirty old man getting his rocks off - it didn't advance the plot, it was repetitive, it wasn't even interesting.

So, there were good things in the book that interested and captivated me and there were things that repelled and annoyed me. I don't regret reading the book. I may go back and re-read the second installment, Nova Swing, to see if I get more out of it this time.

I thoroughly enjoyed the writing. It flowed really well, which made me keep reading even when the story was not as clear as it could be. In may ways its an antidote to typical hard SF space operas - in this book the technology doesn't matter. The imagery is vivid, but not detailed or boring, so the mind can fill it in.