Reviews for Light

The average rating for Light based on 2 reviews is 3 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2008-07-06 00:00:00 John Jennings M. John Harrison is under the impression that plot and character can be totally abandoned in favor of a frantic and sloppy exercise in "cyberpunk" style. Far future cyberpunk just doesn't work. First of all, the voice of the book is off: some deep future hep cat telling you like it is about quasars, dark matter, and quantum physics, baby, in language so opaque and "snappy" that a sense of wonder or even simple coherence is never achieved. If you're going to do cyberpunk, and Harrison is very obviously trying, you need to offer a plausible immersion in a future world. Yes, I know good SF is never really about prediction, but good cyberpunk needs a faithful adherence to an illusion of reality. It can't just be a collage of weirdness for it's own sake, or a collection of hastily slapped together future slang, as this book is. The chosen style, such as it is, is consistently employed, but totally unsuited to the material. You can't set a story 400 years in the future, and then keep coming up with reasons, on practically every page, for the environments to be drenched in "retro" detail. We don't read SF to immerse ourselves in a collage of weirdness we already know. Cyberpunk works because of its near-future mode, both strange and familiar, that engages cultural details and patterns of the reader's present and recent past. It requires highly specific descriptions of objects and fashions that have a kind of unfamiliar coherence. Harrison gives us absolutely none of that. He just lists a bunch of random objects and styles without really describing them or making them work together, so the "weirdness" just seems relentless, forced, and silly. Sort of like an interminable episode of Dr. Who. The frantic onslaught of detail seems to come from a lack of confidence, a fear that the reader will realize that there is no actual story being told. We never get comfortable with the characters, or see them inhabit a coherent setting long enough for them to change or face challenges. All fiction has to do this to some degree. Even Ulysses by James Joyce does this. Harrison is no Joyce, or even William Gibson, and his readers don't come to his books expecting experimental art. They want SF, and his offering is in bad faith. I can't believe this book is as praised as it is. Harrison's characters just scamper around facile collage landscapes, batted about by a Deus ex machina that, though revealed in the final chapter, has no organic, story-based reason for not being revealed in the very first chapter. There are one or two very conventional SF ideas that are stretched out over an entire, exhausting novel. And all of this is a shame, because the first few chapters of the Michael Kearney section read like a first-rate horror novel. Harrison can obviously write well if he wants, and how he went so wrong is a mystery. I am willing to abandon all of my genre expectations if a book is good enough to sustain itself as a work of art. Stanislaw Lem does this. Thomas M. Disch does this. Harrison does not. William S. Burroughs could get away with a frantic collage of strangeness because his writing is so beautiful that you forget the need for any of the traditional offerings of the novel. Perhaps Harrison thought he could do the same thing, but he was most certainly wrong.

Review # 2 was written on 2016-07-31 00:00:00 Derrick Southward 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 between every chapter and deep mirroring going on, not to mention a thousand and a half great SF ideas and themes running around and deepening the tale. I would never have read this if Gaiman hadn't selected it for our notice, honestly, and that's a real shame because it's pretty damn high in not only literary quality and style, but also all the little things that make up a very memorable tale. Virtual reality, post-cyberpunk, dreams and alternate dimension-spaces, and broken physics. That's some great stuff, let me tell you. It's broken in terms of how certain particular math-branches see it, but each alien race manages to make a full math proof that disproves all the others and yet EVERYTHING works. It reminds me of all the alien races in Brin's Uplift saga with so many ways to break space, including the ones that Believe and then Make. :) Quantum Awesomeness. Quantum mechanics in SF can be rather streamlined and silly, sometimes, but then we get works like this that don't focus so much on descriptions of how it works or any small engineering applications, but instead become a grand world-building exercise of what happens to so many alien species (and human) when they simply want to know why or what a portion of deep space is doing when it goes very wrong. The Kefahuchi Tract. How many aliens and now humanity has broken themselves trying to understand what is happening there? Go in, and never come back out. Anything that can be imagined or tried, from super smart races to BDOs have been thrown at it, and every race fails. Humanity is in the process of it's greedy drive to understand and crack open its secrets, too. We have three characters that run square up against some sort of entity called the Shrander. One is a modern physicist that also happens to be a serial murderer. One is an odd adventurer and virtual slacker from the future, and another is a heavily modded female captain of one of the really *broken* alien physics crafts that travel in 14 dimensions, with four of time, and all of the tales are pretty amazing. Lots of sex, too. Not gratuitous, but it is part of the theme and it works very well, literarily, into the final message. Things are quite dark, but there is also light. :) This is a novel that should be very welcome to hardcore Space Opera fans who love Iain M Banks, Reynolds, and some of the wilder and weirder authors of Science Fiction. It's not for the faint of heart, either. It's rich, rich, rich with ideas. :) I can't wait to read the rest of the trilogy, now!