Light

M. John Harrison's The Centauri Device (1974) was a new wave space opera that was acknowledged as a major influence by writers as varied as Iain M. Banks and China Mieville. But after that he didn't return to the form until Light, the first part of this trilogy, was published in 2002. It tells the story of a serial killer in contemporary Britain who is also the co-inventor of calculations that allow humans to reach the Kefahuchi Tract. In this strange area of space where the incomprehensible debris from countless lost civilizations has washed up, we follow a girl who has had herself inextricably wired in to her ship, and her addict brother who is on the run from criminal gangs, as they confront the strange forces on the loose in the Tract. Light won the James Tiptree Award; the second volume, Nova Swing (2006), won both the Arthur C. Clarke Award and the Philip K. Dick award. It is set entirely within the Tract, where the alien "Zone" has touched down at Saudade City and where people emerge mysteriously from the Zone. The final novel, Empty Space: A Haunting (2012), begins with strange deaths in Saudade, but ends with the widow of the serial killer from Light being drawn into the future.Why it's on the list: Quite simply, the trilogy takes science fiction apart and reconstructs it in a disturbing new form. Harrison borrows freely from sources as varied as Anne McCaffrey and the Strugatski Brothers, but remakes their inventions into something entirely new. Cumulatively, this amounts to one of the most innovative and important works of science fiction this century.