Licht - Die Trilogie: Drei Romane

With The Centauri Device, M. John Harrison provided the foundation text of the British Renaissance, or the New Space Opera, or both (depending on who you listen to). Then he turned to writing fantasy while writers as varied as Iain M. Banks and China Miéville built on that foundation. With the Kefahuchi Tract Trilogy, he returned to space opera with a work that took it to a whole new levelIn the first volume, Light, Michael Kearney is a serial killer in contemporary London who is also a theoretical physicist who is working with his partner on calculations that will eventually pave the way for humans to get into space. At one point their black and white cats seem to pass through the screen of their computer, and of the characters at the centre of the other two strands of the novel Seria Mau is associated with a white cat while Ed Chianese is associated with a black cat. These two strands take place 400 years in the future in a region of space known as the Kefahuchi Tract where all sorts of strange alien technology has washed up.The second volume, Nova Swing, takes place in Saudade City where an edge of the tract has touched down. The zone has a strange effect on the city, where people seem to appear as if from nowhere then fade away after a few days. Meanwhile some adventurers try to enter the zone for the mysterious technology to be found there, but at tremendous cost.Finally, in Empty Space, all of these strands come together with a story that again ricochets between the present and the future, or rather that collapses the differences between present and future. The Kefahuchi Tract is an extraordinary invention, but in the end we are left wondering how much of it simply exists within the minds of Harrison's characters.Light won the Tiptree Award and Nova Swing won the Arthur C. Clarke Award, yet in a sense winning science fiction awards is a curious thing, because the books destroy our expectations of science fiction and rebuild them as something else. They are complex, self-referent, full of puzzles that seem to mean something different every time you re-read the books. It's a work, in short, that makes you think and then makes you doubt what you're thinking.