Our first thread concerns physicist Michael Kearney at the end of the 20th century. Kearney is a costive soul, locked inside himself due to childhood neuroses he's never unknotted. He is also a serial killer, one who's never gotten caught. The fact that he and his partner, Brian Tate, are on the point of revolutionizing science and opening up a path to the stars is almost negligible. Kearney is too busy decaying mentally to be fully present for the birth of the new era. He is on the run from the Shrander, an alien presence which has haunted him since youth. Fleeing to his ex-wife Anne for solace, Kearney is able to stave off the Shrander—from whom he has stolen a queer pair of dice—for a little while longer. The assistance of the black-magician Valentine Sprake helps Kearney for a time. But once Sprake dies in the midst of a weird ritual, the Shrander is unconfined—if indeed it ever knew any restraint. Fleeing England for America with Anne, Kearney comes to rest at a deserted seaside Massachusetts resort. There the Shrander will ultimately come to reclaim what is its own.
In the year 2400, a certain K-ship—one of the half-understood miraculous vessels cobbled together from ancient K-culture technology—known as the White Cat is piloted by Seria Mau Genlicher, who has sacrificed her human existence to be physically and mentally bonded with her craft. A kind of mercenary for hire, Seria Mau is half-mad and utterly amoral, killing promiscuously as she prowls the edges of the Beach, those safe stars bordering the Kefahuchi Tract: "a singularity without an event horizon ... the wrong physics let loose in the universe." Coming into possession of a K-culture artifact which stubbornly refuses to disclose its secrets, Seria Mau visits various beings seeking answers. From mean Uncle Zip, the tailor, to his easygoing clone, Billy Anker, Seria Mau learns just enough to show her that she will have to risk everything to fathom the whole truth.
Contemporary with Seria Mau lives Ed Chianese, on the down-and-dirty planet of New Venusport. A "twink" who's content to live out his wasted life in virtual-reality dreams, Ed is yanked from his tank by the vengeful actions of two local mobsters. But this proves to be the best thing that's happened to Ed lately. Fleeing the gangsters, Ed goes to ground in a number of places, until finally washing up at The Circus of Pathet Lao. There, living with big Annie Glyph, a rickshaw girl, and under the tutelage of the cruel circus owner Sandra Shen, Ed will discover his skills as a prophet. His major prediction is one of war, a war that will envelop the worlds of the Beach. What he doesn't see for a while is that there's a way out of the chaos for him personally—and maybe for the galaxy as well.
Space opera that really sings
Space opera was never really only about spectacle. The Big Dumb Objects and Cosmological Conundrums, the strange alien races and modified humans, the manifold weird worlds and bizarre cultures—sure, we lusted after all those eye-popping, mind-blowing treats, wanted to lose ourselves in the "widescreen baroque," as Brian Aldiss categorized it. But above all, what we craved was a sense of immersion, of immanence, of immediacy. We wanted authors who were not only brave and daring dreamers and noisy circus barkers, but who could through the gift of their prose place us into the future as solidly if it were the familiar present. We demanded, although we sometimes denied it, a mimetic writer who could replicate all the sensory joys and heartaches of the contemporary quotidian life and make us feel how marvelous living was, while also imagining into existence far-off space oddities.
But such writers were few and far between. That's why Samuel Delany, with his Nova (1968), and to a lesser extent some of his other interstellar forays, has always been touted as the absolute model of modern space opera. That's why the first Star Wars film captivated millions. It was the lived-in quality of the dreamworlds, the sense that life as we cherished it was going to keep on bubbling and percolating even on the furthest planets of the settled galaxy, that allowed us to get swept up in such tales. To whatever greater or lesser extent a space opera supplied this identification of reader and protagonist at the common denominator of waking up to face each unknown day, so far was a novel acclaimed.
This is the wonderful thing about Harrison's achievement in Light, particularly in the Ed Chianese chapters. The flopsweat, Bukowskian tenor of Ed's life is so immediately apprehensible that we bridge the centuries easily. Seria Mau's life too, thanks to flashbacks to her girlhood, is instantly empathetic to us, despite her posthuman condition. As for Kearney's existence, despite the familiar "real-time" setting, his life as tormented killer-genius could offer just as many barriers to our sentiments, were Harrison not as deft as he is. But by utilizing just the proper touches of characterization, description and action, Harrison brings alive all three protagonists and their very different milieus, before wrapping them up into one incredible bow at the end.
A major contributor to Harrison's success is his vibrant prose. All the tropes Harrison juggles—cyborg pilot, interstellar circus, warped Sargasso Sea of the cosmos—have been put into play by other writers. (Not that he doesn't impart a different spin on them.) But the meticulous and colorful descriptive language Harrison employs, as well as the pithy speech in various argots, is what really drives home, sentence by sentence, the tangibility of his creation. The world is language, and future worlds demand future semiotics. Only Steve Aylett and John Clute (in his Appleseed) are doing something similarly brave these days.
In direct line from Cordwainer Smith and Keith Laumer, Michael Moorcock and Norman Spinrad, Harrison has adapted and perfected the conceits of space opera until the form is big enough to hold all the marvels he jams within. — Paul
