Sign in with Facebook
Szplug's Reviews > Light
Light (Kefahuchi Tract, #1)
by
by
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 open in the present, in the presence of a cooly amoral serial killer and breakthrough-poised physicist, Michael Kearney, seemingly driven to his deadly pattern by an entity called "the Shrander". Interspersed with the latter's story are those of the far future's Seria Mau Genlicher, an ultra-tech K-ship pilot, available to the highest (alien or human) bidder, who prowls the dimensional borderlands of the mysterious and artifact-cluttered singularity of the Kefahuchi Tract, and Ed Chianese, a wastrel virtual reality addict, or "twink", on the run from the spiritual menace of the past and the physical menace the geriatric Cray sisters. Though the first story is separated from the other two by some four hundred years, they are all linked through contact with the enigmatic Shrander. Harrison drives us towards the heart of the mystery with lovely prose and great creativity. If the ending doesn't seem completely satisfactory - and in particular, if Kearney's story doesn't quite add up - the book as a whole is very good, and the Kefahuchi tract is a fascinating and tantalizing concept. Harrison is particularly adept at describing the quantum-level mathematics and time-space fluctuations of the K-ship - I found Genlicher's third of the tale to be the most interesting.
Harrison has written a second novel that involves his fictional future milieu, called Nova Swing, which I'm going to be picking up, either first- or second-hand, within the next few months. Harrison is good enough to have been placed in my "must read" list of science fiction authors.
We open in the present, in the presence of a cooly amoral serial killer and breakthrough-poised physicist, Michael Kearney, seemingly driven to his deadly pattern by an entity called "the Shrander". Interspersed with the latter's story are those of the far future's Seria Mau Genlicher, an ultra-tech K-ship pilot, available to the highest (alien or human) bidder, who prowls the dimensional borderlands of the mysterious and artifact-cluttered singularity of the Kefahuchi Tract, and Ed Chianese, a wastrel virtual reality addict, or "twink", on the run from the spiritual menace of the past and the physical menace the geriatric Cray sisters. Though the first story is separated from the other two by some four hundred years, they are all linked through contact with the enigmatic Shrander. Harrison drives us towards the heart of the mystery with lovely prose and great creativity. If the ending doesn't seem completely satisfactory - and in particular, if Kearney's story doesn't quite add up - the book as a whole is very good, and the Kefahuchi tract is a fascinating and tantalizing concept. Harrison is particularly adept at describing the quantum-level mathematics and time-space fluctuations of the K-ship - I found Genlicher's third of the tale to be the most interesting.
Harrison has written a second novel that involves his fictional future milieu, called Nova Swing, which I'm going to be picking up, either first- or second-hand, within the next few months. Harrison is good enough to have been placed in my "must read" list of science fiction authors.
Sign into Å·±¦ÓéÀÖ to see if any of your friends have read
Light.
Sign In »
Reading Progress
Finished Reading
November 2, 2009
– Shelved
