Entertaining the Alien

37. Light, M. John Harrison

I'm really not sure what to make of this book. It's a Tiptree winner, and it's been getting some serious reviews by "serious" critics as this major crossover work from genre to literature. So I absolutely cannot deny that it is an "important" book. But I didn't love it. I wanted to love it. There were bits that I loved, things that I thought were brilliant, but ultimately it reminded me of the first time I read William Gibson: kind of an emotional shrug, and an intellectual "hm, that's interesting."

There are three parallel storylines that hop from 1999 to five hundred years later, and only in the last few pages of the book do we find the connection between them. There's all sorts of genre paraphenalia floating around: genetic manipulation, virtual reality addicts, aliens, advanced space travel, all sorts of physics that I simply don't understand... but it's all veiled, like Harrison is deliberately keeping the reader at arms' length.

It's very modernistic, and the good bits reminded me of Jeanette Winterson, very dense, oblique prose; deft turns of phrase pop out at you here and there. I'm not entirely sure it's a book you're meant to connect with emotionally. It's definitely worth a read (I wouldn't be shocked to see it on the Hugo ballot next year, assuming that it's eligible), but keep in mind that it's an intellectual exercise with occasional gleams of pretention, as much as it is a story.