50bookchallenge #7/50: Light, M. John Harrison

One of the prob­lems of read­ing books that have been rec­om­mend­ed is the fall to real­i­ty from the expec­ta­tions gen­er­at­ed by high praise. Light almost cer­tain­ly suf­fered from this.

Although I found it to be an enjoy­able read, I did not find Light to be engag­ing. The char­ac­ters were large­ly dif­fi­cult to empathize with, and instead of char­ac­ter devel­op­ment Har­ri­son sends his char­ac­ters off in mul­ti­ple direc­tions with­out much rea­son. Indeed, the res­o­lu­tion of the book is so inde­ter­mi­nate that it hard­ly pro­vides the sat­is­fac­tion the cli­max of a sto­ry should.

A com­mon game in sci-fi is the sleight of infor­ma­tion­al hand. When you can­not real­ly explain what you want to describe, you can always intro­duce a supe­ri­or being, per­haps one from an advanced civ­i­liza­tion, who sounds good and claims to have the answers but in the end does­n’t real­ly offer any infor­ma­tion at all.

Har­ri­son takes this one step fur­ther by not even explain­ing why we should won­der about the answers in the first place. There’s some amaz­ing phe­nom­e­non that many have been amazed by for cen­turies with­out under­stand­ing how it can have these amaz­ing prop­er­ties. But we nev­er real­ly heard what’s so amaz­ing about it so when it was not real­ly explained I did­n’t real­ly care. And all the mys­ti­cal mul­ti­di­men­sion­al hoo-hah about the entire uni­verse being only the sur­face of a con­tin­u­um that can be turned inside-out… Yawn. If you want my atten­tion, either make the char­ac­ters engag­ing or the sci­ence mind-boggling.

This one just did­n’t do much for me.