Light

Somebody left this behind at a sale I ran a while back, still had a receipt tucked in as a bookmark, three months old, never finished apparently. I understand why now. Harrison’s running three plotlines that don’t obviously connect for most of the book, a serial-killer physicist in the near present, a washed up ex-mercenary and his cat-woman partner running cons in a far future spaceport, and a virtual reality addict circling the same singularity from a different angle, and it takes real patience to trust they’re headed somewhere.

They do, mostly, though the connection only really resolves in the last stretch of pages, which some readers I’ve come across found like a cheat and others found like the whole point. I land somewhere in the middle. The prose itself is the thing that kept me reading past the parts where I wasn’t sure the structure was working, genuinely strange and vivid writing, more interested in texture and unease than in explaining itself, closer to literary fiction wearing space opera’s clothes than the other way around.

The Kefahuchi Tract, this singularity without an event horizon sitting at the center of everything, is a properly unsettling idea and Harrison mostly lets it stay unsettling instead of resolving it into something tidy, which I appreciated. Less appreciated, and I’ll say this plainly, some of the sexual content around the female characters felt gratuitous in a way that didn’t serve the book, a complaint I’ve seen echoed by other readers rather than something I’m alone in noticing.

Not an easy recommend. If you want your space opera to explain its rules up front, this’ll frustrate you. If you can sit with confusion as a feature rather than a flaw for a couple hundred pages, there’s something genuinely strange and good waiting on the other side of it.