On Light by M. John Harrison

Light is written by M. John Harrison and bears ringing endorsements from practically every sci-fi author of note, including 2 personal favourites of mine: Iain M Banks and Alastair Reynolds. Having also won some awards, my expectations were high. That the story opens in a “bleak Midlands town” is perhaps even more personally significant than at first glance, given the author was also born here in Rugby. 

The 3 main characters are visited in turn as the brief chapters rotate between them, each headed with a recurrent symbol to identify which, and all containing murder and sex in spades. The prose is deliberately mysterious, seemingly promising revelations just as soon as one gets to the next chapter, but then merely repeating the intrigue: frustrating. With this chapter format, one would usually expect integration at towards the end, but Mr M. scorns us here too, concluding as blunt and randomly as many of the death's along the way. One of the story lines apparently has no utility other than adding extra texture and depth to this imagined universe, as if John had some clever link in mind at the outset, but then grew lost and confused (perhaps in sympathy with the repetitive dream sequences of the other 2 plots), forgetting this purpose before he could finish... This plot is also the most atmospheric, trying but largely failing (for me) to build a sense of dread, in a similar way to what Reynolds has often pulled off.

There are plenty of mentions of fractals and chaos; buzz phrases of the latest scientific paradigm shift, well under way at the turn of the millennium, which is one of the 2 temporal settings in the book (oddly pre-dating the writing of the book by just a couple of years). There are no technological singularities in sight, and the solar system scale engineering is reminiscent of Niven and Clarke with a thin veneer of contemporary sentiments. Harrison persistently refers to space battle events happening inexact numbers of nanoseconds, giving an instant feel of obsolescence for all but the most naïve reader. These parts also appear to have gaping inconsistencies where entire conversations are had, in normal human time, about something that's going to happen within the next microsecond! :os

So, while it was easily entertaining enough to keep reading, I didn't really enjoy doing so. Perhaps I'm missing the point; it is clearly not meant to be a linear page-turner with a crescendo of peril as a loveable character (one can empathise with) overcomes the odds, saving the world and getting the happy ending.

On: Darwinia by Robert Charles Wilson

For someone like myself who is a long time reader of 'Space Opera' with a splash of cyber-punk, this book takes a long time to get at all interesting. In fact, if I hadn't already known the hidden depth of the plot (from a review of this Hugo award nominee) I probably wouldn't have bothered wading through the first 14 chapters; set in the 1920s, there's no indication that the book wasn't written in the same period until the “Interlude” where the cool, cosmological scale stuff is finally, abruptly, revealed. 

The end was as expected, reasonably solid, with no extra twists or turns. Heart stings are pulled sparingly, and the fighting is also more about boringly grim realism than all gun's blazing heroics.

Major spoilers: I presume this wasn't a plot hole (because they needed to be there at the right time) but: Tom Compton and Guilford Law are down the Psion's hole, in the abandoned city, mid way through the book, when they both have ghost's riding in them to an extent, it seems silly that they leave and then have to fight their way back 45 years later, perhaps Wilson should have made that a aspect clearer. The explanation of how the simulated Earth became split in the first place is half hearted. But of course, any arbitrary event is equally as feasible during a war between God-like intelligences in a simulated universe at the end of real time: an inherent problem of writing a book in such a setting. It's not clear what happened to all the souls of Eurasia in the “Miracle”, it seemed implied that the Psions had access to them with Vale communing with the dead. But as long as the makers of the Achieve ('good guys') have complete backups of the galactic history it contains, then only the individuals that had chance to deviate from their original selves (thanks to the evil Psions) represent potential casualties.

This book seems to be trying to be fully hardened science fiction: apart from techno-babble about (currently hypothetical) Higgs fields, the galactic Achieve is built in a universe suffering 'heat death' from continued expansion (what cosmologists now expect), rather than a Tiplerian Singularity at the end of a closed space-time. Similarly, the standpoint on artificial conciousness appears to be a compromise between fully Strong A.I. and the limitations Roger Penrose claims exist: Wilson has it that a machine can indeed be conscious as long as it's thought processes utilise certain quantum effects (indeterminacy & waveform collapsing, etc), exploiting the obvious hole I've always seen in Penrose's arguments. While the 'bad guys' in the book are only pseudo conscious, algorithm based entities. They are cunning enough to understand human motivations and adaptable enough to fight an information based war against the collective mind of an entire post galactic super-civilisation, but they apparently don't have that 'je ne sais quoi'.... Wilson doesn't explain further.