[extropy-chat] Light, By M. John Harrison

[Damien Broderick]

[FWIW, here's my own review from LOCUS:]

Half a century ago, sf satirists parodied a brainless future where people 
handed over tedious choices to machines but failed to rue their decision 
because the marrow was leached from their lives. Ironic, then, that the 
same fate encroaches upon sf itself. Shelves are crammed with what we might 
call Stepford Sci-Fi. That mightn’t matter­-people have a right to their 
denatured comfort food­-if publishing conglomerates’ accountancy programs 
leave enough lebensraum for challenging books, the rich meat, texts that 
don’t give up their meaning in a single glazed pass. True, such books have 
not yet all gone, but they struggle, at least in the USA, against 
strangling odds.

That numbing grip can be seen in the slowed or blocked passage into 
American editions of many fine novels from the UK. Charles Stross, 
currently a darling of reviewers, took years to get his novels into print. 
Iain M. Banks, Ken MacLeod, M. John Harrison, others­-you had to wonder if 
the British specificity of their locales (even their galactic locales), 
their independent accents, made such work abominable to readers who mistook 
their own backyards for the cosmos.

So we have the extraordinary sight of Harrison’s Tiptree award-winning 
novel from 2002 only just now arriving in a (handsome) Bantam trade 
paperback, although without the nifty chapter-head flourishes of the 
Gollancz edition. The Tiptree judges (whose remit is to find the year’s 
premier work exploring gender issues in sf and fantasy) declared it `rich, 
horrible, sad, and absurd,’ a novel that `says a lot about how the body and 
sex inform one's humanity. It will reward rereading.’ Indeed, it almost 
demands rereading. Now, finally, most sf readers get a chance at their 
first look at it. I suspect many will recoil in revulsion, or at the 
demands it imposes.

Worse yet, the redeeming feature for some will be Harrison’s consummately 
wrought space battles, fought in infinitesimal fractions of a second by a 
brutally truncated woman starship captain wedded to her ancient sentient 
K-ship White Cat. These scenes are genuinely prodigious, intense genre 
textuality at full throttle yet shaped with a pre-Raphaelite tenderness. 
But Harrison is deconstructing exactly the visceral, stoned excitement we 
gain from such scenes; he is showing us the bitter emptiness at the core of 
K-captain Seria Mau Genlicher slaughtering people out of the leached 
yearning of her own void.


"Out in the flat gray void beyond, a huge actinic flare erupted. In an 
attempt to protect its client hardware, the White Cat's massive array shut 
down for a nanosecond and a half. By this time, the ordnance had already 
cooked off at the higher wavelengths. X-rays briefly raised the temperature 
in local space to 25,000 degrees Kelvin, while the other particles blinded 
every kind of sensor, and temporary sub-spaces boiled away from the 
weapons-grade singularity as fractal dimensions. Shockwaves sang through 
the dynaflow medium like the voices of angels, the way the first music 
resonated through the viscous substrate of the early universe before proton 
and electron recombined."


One benefit of such a protracted delay in US release is that, in the epoch 
of the blog, we have access to Harrison’s own mordant, rich commentary on 
his intentions in creating this lapidary work of art. It is not especially 
surprising that a working draft title was Empty Space. What fills the novel 
to flooding is the paradoxical fullness and emptiness of space: the foamed, 
invisible dazzle of quantum virtual particles rushing in and out of 
reality, sustaining our apparent solidity. At the core of the narrative is 
the Kefahuchi Tract, fecund waste land boundary of the black hole seething 
in its infinitely dense vacancy at the heart of the galaxy. On its shores, 
its Beach, are the derelict traces of extinct species drawn to its 
transfinite, transgressive promise: whole abandoned star-plying planets, 
great enigmatic machines.

Everywhere in this cosmic absence and emptiness is always more, and then, 
as Harrison insists, always more after that. His serial killer 
mathemagician, the obsessed and terror-haunted Michael Kearney, plunged 
dizzyingly as a child into the fractal endlessness of the sea’s edge, an 
aperture of insight that finally gives humanity faster than light travel. 
Ed Chianese, the book’s third chief player, is client and then tormenter 
and cuckolder of a mock human New Man named, absurdly, Tig Vesicle. 
`Chinese Ed’ retreats from the intoxicating confusion and fertility of his 
and Seria’s 25th century interstellar world (pursued by the standover Cray 
Sisters, a British joke perhaps opaque to outsiders) into a VR cartoon of 
noir mean streets. Ed the twink, as usual in such picaresques, is being 
educated: like some zany in a Phil Dick Ace double, he is being programmed 
as a medium, a precog, a shaman of the Tract.

But in the cauldron of this simmering bouillabaisse of broken people, other 
fishies mingle, flesh peeling from their hearts, perhaps curing their 
egregious and haunted lovers. Kearney’s waif wife Anna, in her abiding 
sexual solicitude, her regaining of her self, is not a character one would 
find in Stepford Sci-Fi. Nor is the great-limbed Annie, Ed’s simple-minded 
rickshaw girl saint. (I’m less sure about W. Anker, Seria’s bully boy 
thrillseeker and victim.) It would be easy to read this casting of 
characters as mean-spirited, even misogynist; that would miss the point 
utterly, as the Tiptree judges understood. But so, too, would the 
temptation to see Light as just a recuperation for the 21st century of, 
say, Alfred Bester’s The Stars My Destination, for all that Kearney cries 
out like synaesthetic Gully Foyle, in the moment of his apotheosis:


"`Too bright,’ he said
  The light roared in on him unconfined: he felt it 
on his skin, he heard it as a sound
 The vacuum around him smelled of 
lemons. It looked like roses."


And the Shrander, the awful horse-skull entity in its maroon wool winter 
coat haunting his blighted trajectory to heaven, explains: `Everywhere you 
look it unpacks to infinity. What you look for, you find.’ It’s like that 
with Harrison’s marvelous novel, indeed his entire oeuvre, which 
constitutes a reproach to the McSci-Fi racks and a healing proof that the 
form of science fiction is not exhausted after all. More, and then always 
more after that.

=================

Damien Broderick