Light - Hardcover

Harrison, M John

3.61

6,083 ratings by Goodreads

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0575070250 ISBN 13: 9780575070257

Publisher: Gollancz, 2002

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Beneath the unbearable light of the Kefahuchi Tract -- a huge, fulminating ocean of radiant energy deep in the galaxy -- three objects lie on the barren surface of an asteroid: an abandoned spacecraft, a pair of what look like bone dice, and a human skeleton. What they are, and what they mean, are the mysteries explored and unwrapped in LIGHT, M. John Harrison's astonishing return to the imaginative terrain of science fiction. Three intertwining strands of narrative -- one contemporary, ther others set in different parts of the galaxy in the year 2400 -- make up the novel. In the here and now is Michael Kearney, destined to take part in a discovery which will make possible interstellar travel, but at present a tortured individual confronted by a strange and possibly alien entity known as the Shrander. In the future there are Seria-Mau Genlicher, spaceship pilot, surgically and biologically modified to interact directly with her ship, the White Cat; and Ed Chianese, drifter and sensation seeker, currently down and out in New Venusport, with everybody in the universe apparently keen to take from him what he owes. This is a science fiction novel written with a level of imaginative intensity and literary mastery the genre has seldom glimpsed before. It is, in every sense, dazzling.

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From the Inside Flap:

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.

About the Author:

M. John Harrison was born in the Peak District in 1945 and now lives in London.

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