Light

“Sentence by sentence [Harrison] is almost certainly one of the most skilled SF writers alive . . . an unusually strong and even, for all its brutality, touching example of how character and physics can illuminate each other in the best hard SF. Light is likely to be one of the most rewarding and challenging novels of the year, and goes a long way toward explaining just what it is that Harrison can do that other writers find so astonishing.”

Locus

“Here we have ‘space opera’ that brilliantly transcends its humble pulp origins while simultaneously glorying in them. The result is a gripping, thrilling, meditative novel which can be read and enjoyed on multiple levels. . . . In direct line from Cordwainer Smith and Keith Laumer, Michael Moorcock and Norman Spinrad, Harrison has adapted the conceits of space opera until the form is big enough to hold all the marvels he jams within.”

Sci Fi Weekly (Editor’s A+ Pick)

“M. John Harrison’s Light is not just among the best SF novels of the year—it’s without a question the best read of the year. . . . Not since Stepan Chapman’s The Troika and Iain M. Banks’s Use of Weapons has a novel managed to so single-handedly revitalize and re-energize the SF field. . . . Harrison has combined his astute, ruthless characterization with the SF form, to create a work that bristles and seethes with energy and intelligence, a work both playful and sublimely serious . . . Imagine the best pure adrenaline SF novel twinned to a stunning mainstream novel to get an idea of the overall effect. . . . The pleasures of this book are wide and numerous. I cannot recommend Light highly enough.”

SFSite

“A wonderful, playful and solidly genre-based masterpiece . . . Don’t hesitate. Buy this book and read it. You will thank me.”

Interzone

“The ride is uproarious, breathtaking, exhilarating. . . . Gem-like images blink into existence, perfect in their place, both wise and sly. . . . This is a novel of full spectrum literary dominance, making the transition from the grainily commonplace now to a wild far future seem not just easy but natural, and connecting the minimal and the spectacular with grace and elegance. It is a work of—and about—the highest order.”

Guardian

“An increasingly complex and dazzling narrative . . . Light depicts its author as a wit, an awesomely fluent and versatile prose stylist, and an SF thinker as dedicated to probing beneath surfaces as William Gibson is to describing how the world looks when reflected in them. . . . SF fans and skeptics alike are advised to head towards this Light.”

Independent

“Who writes better than M. John Harrison? Of the, let’s say, four hundred writers of English prose alive today worthy of serious and sustained critical attention, the answer is: very few. . . . Passage after passage in this novel astonishes the reader; beautiful, striking, imaginative by turns . . . M. John Harrison’s novel, always challenging, often ugly, usually brilliant, rarely comfortable, is a serious work. Light, we might say, is heavy.”

Infinity Plus

“M. John Harrison’s Light is a remarkable book—easily my favorite SF novel in the last decade, maybe longer—and the image that remains in my head after the book was done is that of light as foam, like the sea foam ‘ between the water and the dry land’ . . . a book that exists in the spaces between things . . . very lovely.”

Neil Gaiman, New York Times bestselling author of Endless Nights and American Gods

“M. John Harrison proves what only those crippled by respectability still doubt—that science fiction can be literature, of the very greatest kind. Light puts most science fiction to shame. It’s a magnificent book.”

China Miéville, award-winning author of Perdido Street Station and The Scar

“M. John Harrison is the only writer on Earth equally attuned to the essential strangeness both of quantum physics and the attritional banalities of modern urban life. This is space opera for these dark times, and Light is brilliant.”

Iain M. Banks, author of Complicity, The Bridge, and Consider Phlebas

“I loved it . . . the story is somehow both bewildering and utterly clear, razor-sharp and wide enough to encompass worlds, and the language is beautiful, nailing both the bizarre and the mundane with eerie skill. On every other page there’s a line which makes you think ‘it can’t get better than this,’ and then it does. An amazing book: not just a triumphant return to science fiction, but an injection of style and content that will light up the genre.”

Michael Marshall Smith, author of Spares and One of Us

“Post-cyberpunk, post-slipstream, post-everything, Light is the leanest, meanest space opera since Nova. Visually acute, shot through with wonder and horror in equal measure, in Light’s dual-stranded narrative M. John Harrison pulls off the difficult trick of making the present seem every bit as baroque and strange as his neon-lit deep future. Set the controls for Radio Bay and prepare to get lost in the K-Tract. You won’t regret it.”

Alastair Reynolds, award-winning author of Revelation Space and Chasm City

“Light is a literary singularity: at one and the same time a grim, gaudy space opera that respects the physics, and a contemporary novel that unflinchingly revisits the choices that warp a life. It’s almost unbearably good.”

Ken MacLeod, author of The Star Fraction and Cosmonaut Keep

“At last M. John Harrison takes on quantum mechanics. The first classic of the quantum century, Light is a folded-down future history bound together by quantum exotica and human endurance. Taut as Hemingway, viscerally intelligent, startlingly uplifting, Harrison’s ideas have a beauty that unpacks to infinity.”

Stephen Baxter, award-winning author of The Time Ships