In M. John Harrisonโs 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 thereโs 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 doesnโt yet existโa 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 โinhumanโ 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 โwent deepโโand lived to tell about it. Once crazy for life, heโs now just a twink on New Venusport, addicted to the bizarre alternate realities found in the tanksโand in debt to all the wrong people.
Haunting them all through this maze of menace and mystery is the shadowy presence of the Shranderโand 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
โUproarious, breath-taking, exhilarating . . . This is a novel of full spectrum literary dominance. . . . It is a work ofโand aboutโthe highest order.โโGuardian
โAn increasingly complex and dazzling narrative . . .ย Lightย 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 thisย Light.โโIndependent
โLightย 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. Itโs almost unbearably good.โโKen MacLeod, author ofย Engine Cityย
Sciencefiction en fantasy