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I had to Google
(other global technological monopolies are, conversely, available) who came
first, Iain M Banks or M John Harrison, when it came to sentient space vessels
(roughly speaking Banks’ Culture series began the late 80s, and
Harrison’s Light was post-Y2K – I also checked Robert Reed’s Marrow,
just for context [similarly post-millennial]) and also for abbreviating
forenames (Menzies vs Michael – M John beats Iain M by nearly two decades,
given he’s been alive that much longer but I am happy to stand corrected).
Having established that Culture pre-dates the Kefahuchi Tract (although
Harrison’s short fiction did start trickling out in the mid-to-late
seventies….), I posit that perhaps veteran sci-fi writer Harrison owes a small
debt to his contemporary.
Ah! I pretend
to hear you say, but what about Helva and Anne McCaffrey’s Brainships? They’ve
been around since the sixties.
Well, ignoring
your outburst, for the first divergence of similarities, Banks’ Culture Ships
are sentient machines, considered the corporeal reality of the Minds, with
their own quirks and idiosyncrasies, including the unusual and self-selected
monikers (for example, the improbably named Mistake Not My Current State
Of Joshing Gentle Peevishness For The Awesome And Terrible Majesty Of The
Towering Seas Of Ire That Are Themselves The Milquetoast Shallows Fringing My
Vast Oceans Of Wrath). White Cat, Harrison’s rogue, fitfully murderous and
impulsive K-Ship, is piloted by a cybernetically altered juvenile human,
originator of said unpredictability, named Seria Mau, “living” in an
inertia-proof vat of slime, worried at by the haunting presence of shadow
operators and mathematics.
Ok, for
balance, McCaffrey’s The Ship Who Sang also had a human brain at its
controls, albeit one stored away at infancy for the specific purpose of
providing an organic hub for the titular Brainship. And I bet someone did this
before her too. We (they) are all stood on the shoulders of those gone before.
But where is
this comparative study heading? Down only one leg of Harrison’s trousers*, for
appearing alongside Seria Mau in the 25th century is “Chinese” Ed
Chianese, a former interstellar pilot and virtual reality junkie who until the
start of his strand of narrative spends his time and money in a hard-boiled detective
wonderland. When he emerges from his VR tank his life is exponentially
complicated by a run-in with a criminal gang to whom he owes money and he
washes up on the shores of the Kefahuchi Tract and a date with destiny.
This is also
not to forget Michael Kearney, a current-day (give or take a decade or three)
physicist and one half of a scientific team whose discoveries pave the way for
space exploration by humankind. Kearney is also a psychopathic murderer,
pursued by an hallucination he calls The Shrander, a spectre he keeps at bay by
continuing to murder people.
Yeah, so much
for sympathetic protagonists.
A word on the
Kefahuchi Tract – the Tract is a vast, ancient… thing in space emitting strange
energies and into which many civilizations sent explorers only for none to
return. Its shore-line, to continue using Harrison’s own oceanographic
metaphor, is littered with ancient flotsam and jetsam, laboratories and
watch-posts (lifeguard stations?) long discarded, eroded by immense time and
the massive forces washing over them. It looms large over all three character
arcs, portentous and brooding, and has a fitting place in the resolution,
pleasingly complete, of all this narrative freneticism.
I understand there are two further Kefahuchi Tract novels, and a new biography just out, so it would appear that Harrison has now hi-jacked my TBR pile (there are unread VanderMeers on there for goodness sake), such is the strong feeling I have for this novel. Fans of Banks could do a lot worse than give this a try – to go back to my failed thought experiment, there is very much that is different and excellently so from the Culture novels – and it feels like Harrison’s writing is secure in its experimentation and mature in thought and execution. For all the madness and confusion, the little bleeds of rationality, Light is very satisfying to read.
My next thought experiment is floating initial Ms and their correlation to superb science fiction writing. Stay tuned for more, likely never.
*Given there are three converging plot lines, perhaps not the most apt item of clothing to have used as a metaphor
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