" Light is a story of three individuals: a physicist/serial killer named Michael Kearney; Seria Mau Genlicher, a human turned sentient spaceship; and Ed Chianese, a twink--a guy who deliberately puts himself into a sort suspended animation every time he gets. And each one is drawn in a different way to the light of the Kefahuchi Tract, and three objects: an abandoned spacecraft, a human skeleton, and a pair of bone dice. Some sci-fi novels start with one big concept, and play the rest of the story straight, extrapolating what society would be like if such a thing (usually a technological innovation like mass market cloning or space travel) became possible. And often, they play it straight right up until the end where they pull the rug out from under the reader by a series of incredible events. I always felt that such a book was cheating--if you're going to create a new world with new rules, you need to stick with those rules. Light, to its credit, doesn't commit that sin by virtue of it being insane from beginning to end. There's genetically modified rickshaw girls, empathic alien ether, and aliens that modelled themselves on distorted notions of human pop culture. What it's lacking, though, are sympathetic characters. And while the ending is extremely high concept, and maybe even a little deus ex machina, the book started off the same way, so I feel like it earned such an ending. It's not just that all three of the protagonists do fairly despicable things--Peter Watts' Starfish, for example, had a lot of despicable yet still compelling characters. Rather, it's that they came across to me as somewhat one dimensional and cartoonish, rather than people whose wellbeing I was invested in. There's some really compelling ideas and symbolism here, but the overall book fell a little flat for me. "
— Mjhancock, 1/31/2014