Started: May 13, 2012
Finished: May 24, 2012
Pages: 418
Light is a hard, spiky book. It uses the trope of three parallel stories told in a cycle of three chapters, with the added complication that the third storyline begins as the tank-dreams of a hallucination junkie. But it's almost a relief to encounter those: story one follows a serial killer physicist trying to invent quantum computing in 1999. Story two takes place in the far future where a petulant ship's intelligence carelessly murders other expeditions that are also cruising the pyschedelic fringes of the galactic core. Story three is just hard to make any sense of.
As you may have gathered by now, I found it difficult to engage with Light. The book bursts with a disturbing weirdness. The serial killer is driven by an obsession with chance and a fear of the Shranker....who may not even exist. The intelligent ship is a deeply unsympathetic character who inhabits a universe where space-faring species do no more than scavenge the grandiose and inexplicable remains of vanished cultures. And when the tank-dream junkie returns to the "real" world, it's one where he remembers nothing of his life except that everyone is trying to kill him.
Light is not a comfortable read. I'm not at all sure what it was "about". But the writing was excellent and the characters and images were striking. So, while not exactly recommended, not exactly dis-recommended either.
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