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Light: A Novel Audiobook
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(3.00) - 1,767 listener ratings
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Publisher Description
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. Praise for Light “Uproarious, breath-taking, exhilarating . . . This is a novel of full spectrum literary dominance. . . . It is a work of—and about—the highest order.”—Guardian “An increasingly complex and dazzling narrative . . . Light depicts its author as a wit, an awesomely fluent and versatile prose stylist, and an SF thinker as dedicated to probing beneath surfaces as William Gibson is to describing how the world looks when reflected in them. . . . SF fans and skeptics alike are advised to head towards this Light.”—Independent “Light is a literary singularity: at one and the same time a grim, gaudy space opera that respects the physics, and a contemporary novel that unflinchingly revisits the choices that warp a life. It’s almost unbearably good.”—Ken MacLeod, author of Engine City
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"A brilliant novel with a fractal plot. It's rich with poetry and dream logic. You have to stop forcing into novel shape and go for the ride. This is really 4.5 stars for me, and I only take the 0.5 off for a minor issue I had with the conclusion. "
— Daniel (4 out of 5 stars)
Light Listener Reviews
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" Cool sci fi book...very strange...hard to explain...good ending. "
— Doug, 2/16/2014 -
" Gorgeous prose, interesting structure, have no idea why it won the Tiptree as am bugged by background world-building gender and cultural details and by tendency of Harrison's women to be self-destructive, anorexic, and literally turned into birds. "
— Mely, 2/5/2014 -
" 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 -
" Hard to keep track of but it all comes together at the end. "
— Broucks, 1/14/2014 -
" Strange, but interesting. Contains a fair amount of theoretical physics that I didn't entirely understand, but I was able to follow most of what was happening. If you can get past the gratuitous language and the numerous awkward, bizarre sex scenes, it's pretty decent story. I enjoyed it overall. "
— Danielle, 1/10/2014 -
" in my whole life, i've never read a book where i haven't understood the plot from the first sentence to the last. this book is mind-boggling. it's incoherent. it will make you feel like an idiot because apparently, there are people in the world who not only get the plot, but LOVE it. "
— Jay, 1/8/2014 -
" This book felt garbled, pretentious and unrestrained. Despite being a fan of the genre and open to new styles of writing, I found this work deeply unsatisfying and a genuine struggle to finish. "
— Andrew, 1/1/2014 -
" Interesting premise, boring and strangely executed story. "
— Rose, 1/1/2014 -
" Gross, pretentious, and pointless. All the women are objects, one of them literally so. I don't think I liked a single character. "
— Jeff, 12/26/2013 -
" A compulsive read marred by its scifi softness and unsatisfying ending. "
— Tom, 12/16/2013 -
" "Hi, my name is M. John Harrison, and I hate women! Don't believe me? I'll write a sex scene!" "
— Lilly, 9/6/2013 -
" Normally, when I feel a book is this bad I don't bother to "grade" it, but the word awful does come to mind. I tried to like this story, I really did, I pushed on to page 25 and just gave up. "
— George, 5/31/2013 -
" It took me a while to click to this book, but once I did it was pretty amazing. Harrison's plot has as much poetry as his language and narrative. I found myself underlining passages. I'll definitely read more of his stuff. "
— Frank, 5/21/2013 -
" Amazing. He takes all that crazy string theory and all that crazy new physics and does sci fi with it. And he doesn't just throw science in for technical backing or to impress: he makes poetry out of it. "
— Joel, 3/24/2013 -
" Light is a unique science fiction novel tangled with physiological darkness, the occult and smart well researched science. Three intertwining stories are told mirroring each other in respect to struggle and definition of self. "
— Kimberly, 1/16/2013 -
" This is a great read! Beautifully written and very vivid! "
— Gareth, 11/2/2012 -
" This book was a bit of a mindfuck, and I don't even remember a lot of it. Having sex with a giant girl who is half rickshaw sounds like it might be interesting, though. "
— Bob(by), 10/8/2012 -
" This is science fiction on acid--so beyond science it warps and wraps itself into fantasy. This is more "2001" than "Star Trek." This is something else and it both wonderful and boggling at the same time. "
— Marc, 2/26/2012 -
" Very creative and original ... but too 'out there' to really be enjoyable. "
— Rob, 1/30/2012 -
" This is a must-read in regards to expanding the understanding of how technology will someday come to change us all, as told through a science-fiction lens of how it changes other people. "
— Delascabezas, 1/1/2012 -
" Hard to keep track of but it all comes together at the end. "
— Broucks, 9/23/2011 -
" His style is trippy and a little hard to follow, but is definitely worth it. The word he creates is raw, sleazy, and a mixed of strange technology that borders on magic. "
— Jeff, 7/30/2011 -
" I loved this book so much. "
— Bruno, 7/27/2011
About the Narrators
Julian Elfer is an award-winning, classically trained British actor with extensive stage experience. He studied at the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Arts and the British Academy at Oxford University, where he studied with the likes of Derek Jacobi, Fiona Shaw, and Alan Rickman. Elfer currently resides and acts in New York City.
Simon Vance (a.k.a. Robert Whitfield) is an award-winning actor and narrator. He has earned more than fifty Earphones Awards and won the prestigious Audie Award for best narration thirteen times. He was named Booklist’s very first Voice of Choice in 2008 and has been named an AudioFile Golden Voice as well as an AudioFile Best Voice of 2009. He has narrated more than eight hundred audiobooks over almost thirty years, beginning when he was a radio newsreader for the BBC in London. He is also an actor who has appeared on both stage and television.