Harrison falls back on the having them engage in sad, dissociating sex or voyeurism, seemingly under the impression that misery and sex with a disjointed narrative do a post-modern classic make. Likewise, the characters in Light seem, essentially, to do nothing but hover about, waiting for the big reveal in the final few chapters.
It’s lazy writing, lacking basic structure and foreshadowing. Indeed, it’s telling that even simple concepts such as the bio-tech ‘cultivars’ that populate the worlds of Seria and Ed are not explained until the last few chapters of the novel, when Harrison decides one is needed as a plot point.
As the plot advances, it becomes difficult for the reader to dismiss the suspicion that Harrison is something of a hack, a conman, spinning lies out of nothing and answering none of the questions he purports to.
Rather than give the reader clues, he spins a wisp of post-modern style and science fiction spectacle. Harrison’s problem, however, lies in how he constructs the mystery around the Kefahuchi Tract, and really how he constructs mystery in general. In Kearney’s plot strand, it is only just discovered, appearing through tv and radio reports, while Seria and Ed live in a world where holograms and posters of the Tract plaster every surface, the populous having an almost mundanely religious awe of it, the source of their technology and riches. Mysterious and omnipresent hangs the fantastical backdrop of the Kefahuchi Tract, a region of space full of ancient technologies that the sentient races of the galaxy have only begun to penetrate. Weaving a range of temporarlly dislocated plot threads together, Light concerns the fates of one Michael Kearney, physicist and serial killer, Seria Mau Genlicher, biologically engineered starship pilot, and Ed Chianese, VR junky and sometime prophet. By the end of it all you’ll be unsurprised to realise that Harrison’s novel doesn’t quite live up to the hype. What they intend to tell you, dear reader, is that Light is not ‘typical science fiction,’ that chimera existing only in the minds of science fiction skeptics who imagine all the genre has to offer is tale after tale of Captain Kirk slaying aliens with his lightsabre.
Neil Gaiman gushes and newspapers throw the words cyberpunk and post-cyberpunk around with nary a care for their meanings. It’s a Big Book, it’s a literary achievement above and beyond what we expect from petty genre works. Light, we are told with varying degrees of enthusiasm, will redefine how you think of it science fiction. John Harrison’s Light is just how many pages of effuse praise you have to flick through to reach the novel itself. The first thing you’ll notice upon picking up a copy of M.
0 kommentar(er)
