Just like the last three years we will be having only one December meeting, on our usual second Monday of the month, and I am very pleased to say that once again it’s chosen by our President the late great Mr Iain M. Banks.
Not only was M. John Harrison one of Iain M. Banks favourite writers, whom he would praise at every opportunity, but over the years he also became a personal friend. So it’s with great pleasure that we present our 2nd Mr Presidents Annual Book Choice, M. John Harrrison’s Light.
In M. John Harrison’s dangerously illuminating novel, three quantum outlaws face a universe of their own creation, a universe where you make up the rules as you go along and break them just as fast, where there’s only one thing more mysterious than darkness.
In contemporary London, Michael Kearney is a serial killer on the run from the entity that drives him to kill. He is seeking escape in a future that doesn’t yet exist—a quantum world that he and his physicist partner hope to access through a breach of time and space itself. In this future, Seria Mau Genlicher has already sacrificed her body to merge into the systems of her starship, the White Cat. But the “inhuman” K-ship captain has gone rogue, pirating the galaxy while playing cat and mouse with the authorities who made her what she is. In this future, Ed Chianese, a drifter and adventurer, has ridden dynaflow ships, run old alien mazes, surfed stellar envelopes. He “went deep”—and lived to tell about it. Once crazy for life, he’s now just a twink on New Venusport, addicted to the bizarre alternate realities found in the tanks—and in debt to all the wrong people.
Haunting them all through this maze of menace and mystery is the shadowy presence of the Shrander—and three enigmatic clues left on the barren surface of an asteroid under an ocean of light known as the Kefahuchi Tract: a deserted spaceship, a pair of bone dice, and a human skeleton.
Light received the following awards and nominations:
James Tiptree Jr. Award (2002)
Tähtivaeltaja Award (2005)
