Light by M. John Harrison

The way I think of it is this: when you've
done all the things worth doing, you're
forced to start on the things that aren't.

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

(Paid link)