Join today and start reading your favorite books for Free!
Rate this book!
Write a review?
i frigin' love M John Harrison! WOWEE, this book..umm..this book is so far beyond a simple sci-fi! it is about the choices we make (in the case of the characters, mostly bad choices) for various inner reasons or for fear of living or whatnot and how they shape or warp our existence. Do u really want to shape your life for the better or just pretend to and secretly, or openly, sabotage it at every chance. While i was reading Light i thought of a bunch of good things for the review and now i don't...
Added because in the acknowledgements of Perdido Street Station, M John Harrison is one of only two authors credited (the other being the wonderful Mervyn Peake).Comments in the Mievillians group suggest this may be a good one to start with: https://www.goodreads.com/topic/show/...
I don't understand why any of this happened, and ye gods the sex stuff made my skin crawl, but it was very interesting for the last 100 pages.
5 Stars Light by M John Harrison is a science fiction worth full marks. This is not an easy read. Harrison dumps the reader into three separate story lines as well as multiple time differences. The reader has to push through the tough start and trust in the author as well as the reviewers that it is worth your time and your energy. Three losers for protagonists, one is a junkie another is a sociopath and the last is a mathematical genius serial killer. None of them are good people yet you can id...
ORIGINALLY POSTED AT Fantasy Literature.Michael Kearney is a physicist. He’s also a serial killer. Obsessed with numbers and patterns since he was three, he sees something behind them. Something is there, something dark and ominous that starts to emerge sometimes. He calls it the Shrander and the only way to hold it back is to kill someone. Trying to appease the Shrander, Michael uses Tarot cards and a special pair of bone dice to try to figure out what he’s supposed to do next. He’s also teamed...
Surprising and grand, I'm always thrilled and amazed when I get to read a serious SF about the soft and squishy underbelly of the universe. The world-building and the span of time and the characterizations are tops, too. The writing is actually pretty spiffy, too, with very clever idea-connections between every chapter and deep mirroring going on, not to mention a thousand and a half great SF ideas and themes running around and deepening the tale.I would never have read this if Gaiman hadn't sel...
The most persistent reminder I have of my mortality is the nagging consciousness of all the good books I will never read. From this perspective, Light is my least favorite kind of book: one I regret having taken the time to finish. I usually follow a 100-page rule but, in this case, the reviews were so good I felt sure that I must be missing something, or the quality of the writing would make up for the adolescent themes, or everything would come together in a brilliant conclusion that redeemed
“Behind all this bad behaviour was an insecurity magnificent in scope, metaphysical in nature. Space was big, and the boys from Earth were awed despite themselves by the things they found there: but worse, their science was a mess. Every race they met on their way through the Core had a star drive based on a different theory. All those theories worked, even when they ruled out one another's basic assumptions. You could travel between the stars, it began to seem, by assuming anything”This is one
For anyone holding to the self-evident truth that genre fiction should be eligible for the big literary prizes, one hurdle remains. Which book, exactly, should win? In any year there are plenty of science fiction books (and doubtless crime ones, if I kept up with crime, and so forth) which bear comparison to the Booker shortlist - but ones which could win over the infidels? Ones unassailable enough to bear the extra scrutiny they'd inevitably receive? Banks' Use of Weapons was one obvious conten...
Picking up this book was like waking up tired and groggy then talking to someone who has already been awake for three hours and drank a pot of coffee. In other words, it throws you into this weird world without much explanation, moving very quickly through a fairly complex bifurcated story structure (one part set in the present, another in space several centuries into the future). But despite the minimal amount of exposition here, you eventually figure out what is going on, and maybe even come t...
I picked up this novel at a thrift shop as an impulse buy, believing that I would be getting something in the same vein as an Iain M. Banks story. I'm glad that I did: Harrison is perhaps a better writer than Banks (with or without the "M."), even as he possesses the same black sense of humour and ability to write wryly and casually about the grotesque and the vicious. Well-crafted science fiction provides a perfect way to pass a weekend, and I thoroughly enjoyed Harrison's tripartite tale.We op...
Light is easily one of the darkest books I’ve ever read, and that’s saying something. With a taut narrative split between three protagonists, a near-future serial killer/brilliant physicist (why are SF characters almost never mediocre physicists?), a far-future woman/starship with the impulse control of a spoiled and heavily armed child, and a "twink," a sort of futuristic virtual reality addict, Light moves along at breakneck speed, combining SF sensawunda, bleak noir cruelty, and lush, violent...
I normally don't take the time to add specifics to the rating I give a book, but this one necessitates it.There are things about that frustrated me deeply. For most of the book, the point and the plot were discouragingly unclear. It was difficult to tell what anything had to do with anything, in the most general of senses. There was also a kind of oversexualization of the world setting that seems common nowadays, I think because of the lifting of the Western taboo on sex as a subject. It often
FAIR WARNING: There are spoilers galore below and for the "faint of heart" I do get a bit more sexually graphic in describing parts of the book than is my wont, so take care if you like to read these things with your kids :-)I liked this book...I think.All right, I won't be so namby-pamby: I liked this book (period).Light is, however, not an easily comprehensible book nor one you can simply race through in an afternoon. The plot is rather simple ("nonexistent" in the opinion of some GR reviewers...
There's a rogue rim of science fiction inhabited by experimentalists. Harrison is one. Moorcock another. A few less distinct figures slip in and out of the wings. Theirs is a careening brand of storytelling that skates the edge of comprehension, fueled by twisted psychological truths and the madness that fumes at the root of the math that makes travel of any kind (spatial, temporal, evolutionary) eerily possible. Light finds Harrison at the top of his game, and can best be described as desperati...
Well, now...If I am scratching my head when you see me next, it's because I am still trying to digest Light, a rather amazing work of literature disguised as a genre piece that will probably get a fifth star upon re-read. Light is just that good.Problem is, it took me until I was about two-thirds of the way through the novel before I figured out (or, rather, started to figure out) what was going on. Now I feel compelled to re-read it if only to fully experience the clues Harrison weaves into the...
Making sense is a stylistic choice. A stylistic choice that this book firmly opted out of. That’s not to say that’s always a bad thing. There are a few books where “not making sense” works rather well. This is not one of them.M. John Harrison appears to be trying to write cyberpunkish weird fiction and in doing so, misses the mark on both. The cyberpunk isn’t cyberpunk and the weird isn’t weird. It’s just an incoherent far-future what-the-fuckery mess. Now, I usually like the worldbuilding style...
John M Harrison specialises in stories where the meaning seems to be just out of reach so if you are looking for a straightforward story then do not enter.However if you're up for some intriguing playfulness with genre tropes and enjoy the journey then come on in.
M. John Harrison is under the impression that plot and character can be totally abandoned in favor of a frantic and sloppy exercise in "cyberpunk" style.Far future cyberpunk just doesn't work.First of all, the voice of the book is off: some deep future hep cat telling you like it is about quasars, dark matter, and quantum physics, baby, in language so opaque and "snappy" that a sense of wonder or even simple coherence is never achieved. If you're going to do cyberpunk, and Harrison is very obvio...
"The Persian poet Rumi wrote, 'Open your hands if you wish to be held.' Almost the same could be said about M. John Harrison... Open your mind if you wish to be enthralled."—Jonathan CarrollFew writers have have written better passages with descriptive and poetic prose, especially combined with an estranging vividness "capturing the strange mixture of beauty, banality and menace in everyday life"."Light" is an aesthetic vision. Imaginative, startling and only barely Science Fiction. OK, it is ha...