Light

Starred review from August 23, 2004
Harrison's talent for brilliant, reality-bending SF is on display yet again with this three-tiered tale, published (and highly praised) in the U.K. in 2002. It's 1999, and British scientist Michael Kearney and his American partner, Brian Tate, are studying laboratory quantum physics; unbeknownst to them, they'll become the fathers of interplanetary travel. Kearney nervously holds a pair of predictive dice he's stolen from a frightening specter called the Shrander, whom he keeps at bay by committing random murders. Four hundred years in the future, K-ship captain Seria Mau Genlicher has gravely erred in splicing herself with a hijacked spacecraft called the White Cat
—and now she wants out. There's also Ed Chianese, a burned-out interstellar surfer now spending his life within a reality simulation machine. His problem? Monetary debt to the nasty Cray sisters. As Kearney continues to narrowly evade the Shrander, he discovers that company CEO Gordon Meadows has sold the lab to Sony. All three story lines converge and find heavenly closure at the cosmological wonder known as the Kefahuchi Tract, a wormhole with alien origins bordered by a vast, astral "beach" where time and space are braided and interchangeable. This is space opera for the intelligentsia, as Harrison (Things That Never Happen
) tweaks aspects of astrophysics, fantasy and humanism to hum right along with the blinking holograms in a welcome and long overdue return. Agent, Susan Howe.

September 1, 2004
Michael Kierney works in developing useful quantum computing. He is also a serial killer who uses an alien set of dice stolen from the Shander, a monster he has spent years fleeing, to randomize choices in his life. His work and the help of a white cat that sees something in data-noise make the society of Seria Mau Genlicher and Ed Chianese possible. Seria Mau is part of a k-ship; she gave up her body and then stole the k-ship, which, like several other strange things, is an alien artifact. Ed Chianese was a virtual reality junkie until he ran out of money and had to start coping with the real world, a strange enough place even without withdrawal pains. The Shander, which is a monster only because Kierney fears what he doesn't comprehend, links these three in the end. Sometimes space opera, sometimes a kind of noir fiction, Harrison's novel is a cleverly assembled contemplation of how choices make lives and of opening quantum mechanical doors on bizarre potential futures. (Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2004, American Library Association.)