Light by M. John Harrison
I came to this the way a lot of readers seem to, through Neil Gaiman, since my copy has Neil Gaiman's endorsement on the cover and he started a new line called Neil Gaiman Presents that put it back in front of people. This one I do not fully understand and I think that is the correct response, Harrison is not writing to be solved, you are glimpsing events that are beyond your understanding. The story is told in three strands which occasionally overlap and eventually come together, and they do not obviously connect for most of the book: a serial killer in the modern day who is also a physicist and may have called something up, a woman bonded to a starship called the White Cat in the far future, and a burnout who lives most of his life floating in a tank and plugged into a virtual reality in the neon squalor of a place called Saudade City. Over all of them hangs the Kefahuchi Tract, where all the laws of physics are bent if not broken, and humanity has broken themselves trying to understand what is happening there, a region littered with abandoned worlds and suns, as if jaded races had just given up and died, at the rim of what is barely knowable by the human mind. Ignore the back cover blurb, by the way, I found the blurb on the back of the book to be the most misleading I have ever come across, it promises three objects on an asteroid, an abandoned spacecraft, a pair of bone dice and a human skeleton, but those objects are not the central narrative drive or quest of the characters at all and are only almost incidentally explained in the very ending. The prose is the reason to be here, beautiful, bordering on poetic, this one is about pushing the language and the form of fiction, you read for the sheer pleasure of sentence mechanics, he can make a spaceport feel like a hangover. One niggle: it is 1960s retro 400 years in the future, and Harrison keeps coming up with reasons, on practically every page, for the environments to be drenched in retro detail, which reads as deliberate but wore on me. Could I give an account of what actually happens and how the plot-lines are interconnected?? no. The strands run alongside each other for most of the novel and are brought together only at the very end, the recurring imagery of black or white cats, the Shrander, coincidence stacked on coincidence, and the whole story ends in mysticism and deus ex machina, more felt than earned. I finished it and I am still trying to figure out what this book was about, but everything feels immediate and real, dirty and transcendent at once. Read Harrison for the language and the mood, just go along and not worry that you don't know what a K-Ship is. The trick is to stop fighting, to let it all wash over you.