Light (41 page)

“Ed, it’s a fine name.”

“So ramp me up.”

The mathematics was delighted to do that. Ed went on shiptime. Ten spatial dimensions spread themselves like legs for him; four of time. Dark matter boiled and flared. Out in the last place in the ordinary world, the
Black Cat
rose from the surface of the asteroid. She hunted like a compass needle, then turned herself slowly until she stood on her tail. For thirty nanoseconds, which is a million years down there where things are small, nothing happened. Then fusion product burst out of her stern. She leapt forward on a line of bright white light and shortly made a hole in nowhere.

“Well the engine’s on. Let’s just point the fucker.”

“Let’s just do that, Ed.”

“Which of these switches is the music?”

The asteroid now stood empty, but for the bone dice and the dead physicist. The dice lay as they had fallen for Ed Chianese, and the dust sifted over them. Michael Kearney’s bones browned a little further. Seria Mau Genlicher returned a number of times, sometimes happy, sometimes like a living winter, and looked down, and went away again. Years passed. Centuries passed. Then the sky began to change colour, subtly and slowly at first, then faster and wilder than anyone could dream.

THE BEGINNING

THE COMMITTED MEN
THE CENTAURI DEVICE
THE ICE MONKEY
VIRICONIUM
CLIMBERS
THE LUCK IN THE HEAD with Ian Miller
THE COURSE OF THE HEART
SIGNS OF LIFE
TRAVEL ARRANGEMENTS

“Sentence by sentence [Harrison] is almost certainly one of the most skilled SF writers alive . . . an unusually strong and even, for all its brutality, touching example of how character and physics can illuminate each other in the best hard SF.
Light
is likely to be one of the most rewarding and challenging novels of the year, and goes a long way toward explaining just what it is that Harrison can do that other writers find so astonishing.”

—
Locus

“Here we have ‘space opera’ that brilliantly transcends its humble pulp origins while simultaneously glorying in them. The result is a gripping, thrilling, meditative novel which can be read and enjoyed on multiple levels. . . . In direct line from Cordwainer Smith and Keith Laumer, Michael Moorcock and Norman Spinrad, Harrison has adapted the conceits of space opera until the form is big enough to hold all the marvels he jams within.”

—
Sci Fi Weekly
(Editor’s A+ Pick)

“M. John Harrison’s
Light
is not just among the best SF novels of the year—it’s without a question the best read of the year. . . . Not since Stepan Chapman’s
The Troika
and Iain M. Banks’s
Use of Weapons
has a novel managed to so single-handedly revitalize and re-energize the SF field. . . . Harrison has combined his astute, ruthless characterization with the SF form, to create a work that bristles and seethes with energy and intelligence, a work both playful and sublimely serious . . . Imagine the best pure adrenaline SF novel twinned to a stunning mainstream novel to get an idea of the overall effect. . . . The pleasures of this book are wide and numerous. I cannot recommend
Light
highly enough.”

—SFSite

“A wonderful, playful and solidly genre-based masterpiece . . . Don’t hesitate. Buy this book and read it. You will thank me.”

—
Interzone

“The ride is uproarious, breathtaking, exhilarating. . . . Gem-like images blink into existence, perfect in their place, both wise and sly. . . . This is a novel of full spectrum literary dominance, making the transition from the grainily commonplace now to a wild far future seem not just easy but natural, and connecting the minimal and the spectacular with grace and elegance. 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

“Who writes better than M. John Harrison? Of the, let’s say, four hundred writers of English prose alive today worthy of serious and sustained critical attention, the answer is: very few. . . . Passage after passage in this novel astonishes the reader; beautiful, striking, imaginative by turns . . . M. John Harrison’s novel, always challenging, often ugly, usually brilliant, rarely comfortable, is a serious work.
Light,
we might say, is heavy.”

—
Infinity Plus

“M. John Harrison’s
Light
is a remarkable book—easily my favorite SF novel in the last decade, maybe longer—and the image that remains in my head after the book was done is that of light as foam, like the sea foam ‘ between the water and the dry land’ . . . a book that exists in the spaces between things . . . very lovely.”

—Neil Gaiman,
New York Times
bestselling author of
Endless Nights
and
American Gods

“M. John Harrison proves what only those crippled by respectability still doubt—that science fiction can be literature, of the very greatest kind.
Light
puts most science fiction to shame. It’s a magnificent book.”

—China Miéville, award-winning author of
Perdido Street Station
and
The Scar

“M. John Harrison is the only writer on Earth equally attuned to the essential strangeness both of quantum physics and the attritional banalities of modern urban life. This is space opera for these dark times, and
Light
is brilliant.”

—Iain M. Banks, author of
Complicity, The Bridge,
and
Consider Phlebas

“I loved it . . . the story is somehow both bewildering and utterly clear, razor-sharp and wide enough to encompass worlds, and the language is beautiful, nailing both the bizarre and the mundane with eerie skill. On every other page there’s a line which makes you think ‘ it can’t get better than this,’ and then it does. An amazing book: not just a triumphant return to science fiction, but an injection of style and content that will light up the genre.”

—Michael Marshall Smith, author of
Spares
and
One of Us

“Post-cyberpunk, post-slipstream, post-everything,
Light
is the leanest, meanest space opera since
Nova
. Visually acute, shot through with wonder and horror in equal measure, in
Light
’s dual-stranded narrative M. John Harrison pulls off the difficult trick of making the present seem every bit as baroque and strange as his neon-lit deep future. Set the controls for Radio Bay and prepare to get lost in the K-Tract. You won’t regret it.”

—Alastair Reynolds, award-winning author of
Revelation Space
and
Chasm City

“
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
The Star Fraction
and
Cosmonaut Keep

“At last M. John Harrison takes on quantum mechanics. The first classic of the quantum century,
Light
is a folded-down future history bound together by quantum exotica and human endurance. Taut as Hemingway, viscerally intelligent, startlingly uplifting, Harrison’s ideas have a beauty that unpacks to infinity.”

—Stephen Baxter, award-winning author of
The Time Ships

LIGHT
A Bantam Spectra Book

PUBLISHING HISTORY
Gollancz edition published in Great Britain in 2002
Bantam trade paperback edition / September 2004

Published by
Bantam Dell
A division of Random House, Inc.
New York, New York

All rights reserved
Copyright © 2002 by M. John Harrison

Book design by Glen M. Edelstein

No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without the written permission of the publisher, except where permitted by law.

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eISBN 0-553-90069-2

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