| This month features M. John Harrison, Light, Gollancz, 0575070269 |
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‘She hung there a further nanosecond, warming herself in the fourteen-dimensional night.’
There are people who could never bring themselves to read a novel comprised even partly of such sentences.
M. John Harrison is an acknowledged master of science fiction (The Centauri Device) and fantasy (Viriconium) - and, in his time, he has written a hell of a lot of those type of sentences.
Here’s another, slightly different: ‘Downtown was black and gold towers, designer goods in the deserted pastel malls, mute fluorescent light skidding off the precise curves of matt plastic surfaces, the foams of lace and oyster satin.’
This, by the way, is 2400AD. It’s also an incredibly succinct synopsis of the look (or looks) of the 1980s.
And right here is one of the big problems that non-readers have with science fiction: that it’s the future (fourteen-dimensional night) at the same time that it’s not (fluorescent light - surely if they’d got fourteen dimensions, they’d have come up with something better than fluorescence?).
M. John Harrison is well aware of this. He is aware, for instance, that the fashion sense of people in SF novels and films has always been dubious (check the futuro-punks in almost any Hollywood movie). And so, he makes jokes about it - at the same time as trying to find a way out of the future/not-future impasse: in the future the fashion is for 1980s retro - for a preppy, weekend look; pastel jumpers draped over the shoulders.
There is a reason for this, built into the form of the novel. Light is made up of three stands.
The first, set in 1999, follows Michael Kearney, serial killer, haunted man and co-discoverer of a way of putting the quantum world to practical use. The future, therefore, has good reason to be nostalgic about the late twentieth century: it was the start of everything.
The second strand follows ‘K-captain Seria Mau Genlicher’ and her spaceship the White Cat. Or rather, it follows Seria Mau who is her spaceship - the young girl having signed up for space academy, been incorporated into the ship’s structure and mathematics, and run away at near light-speed to escape her past.
Star of the third strand is Chianese Ed, a ‘twink’ - an addict of virtual reality tanks, a futuristic escapist junkie.
Needless to say, all strands are cunningly brought together by the book’s conclusion - or rather, as the final words say, ‘The Beginning’. Which suggests Light might be followed by Space or Time or perhaps Dark.
Is there another way for science fiction to escape the future/not-future impasse? A way apart from becoming self-referential? It’s very hard to see.
Either one writes a ‘hip’ version of the future, in which technical terms are unexplained - becoming clear only through context: ‘He pointed the SquinkDoodle-7.5 at the alien and blew its head off.’
Or one writes a version of the future, as narrated from the past: ‘The DinkSquoodle-7.5 looked a bit like a AK-47, in leopardskin.’
Or one does as M. John Harrison and most SF writers do, and mixes up one with the other.
For, of course, if one is writing in basically contemporary English (or French or Japanese), then one is ducking the biggest challenge of all: what will language be like in 2400AD? How will novels work?
A quantum world is likely to require, eventually, a quantum grammar. How does one describe a single event that happens twice, simultaneously?
To make a serious attempt at true futurism would be to risk complete incomprehensibility.
Which is why most SF writers hedge, and why - like historical fiction - they can fall back on the defence that what they write is really about the present.
Throughout Light M. John Harrison sneakily quotes The Waterboys’ song ‘A Pagan Place’: ‘There is always more/There is always more after that.’
He’s right, you know.
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Author interviews
