
Light
A Novel
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Narrated by:
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Julian Elfer
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By:
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M. John Harrison
About this listen
In M. John Harrison’s dangerously illuminating new novel, three quantum outlaws face a universe of their own creation, a universe where you make up the rules as you go along and break them just as fast, where there’s only one thing more mysterious than darkness.
In contemporary London, Michael Kearney is a serial killer on the run from the entity that drives him to kill. He is seeking escape in a future that doesn’t yet exist - a quantum world that he and his physicist partner hope to access through a breach of time and space itself. In this future, Seria Mau Genlicher has already sacrificed her body to merge into the systems of her starship, the White Cat. But the “inhuman” K-ship captain has gone rogue, pirating the galaxy while playing cat and mouse with the authorities who made her what she is. In this future, Ed Chianese, a drifter and adventurer, has ridden dynaflow ships, run old alien mazes, surfed stellar envelopes. He “went deep” - and lived to tell about it. Once crazy for life, he’s now just a twink on New Venusport, addicted to the bizarre alternate realities found in the tanks - and in debt to all the wrong people.
Haunting them all through this maze of menace and mystery is the shadowy presence of the Shrander - and three enigmatic clues left on the barren surface of an asteroid under an ocean of light known as the Kefahuchi Tract: a deserted spaceship, a pair of bone dice, and a human skeleton.
Praise for Light
“Uproarious, breath-taking, exhilarating.... This is a novel of full spectrum literary dominance.... It is a work of - and about - the highest order.” (Guardian)
“An increasingly complex and dazzling narrative...Light depicts its author as a wit, an awesomely fluent and versatile prose stylist, and an SF thinker as dedicated to probing beneath surfaces as William Gibson is to describing how the world looks when reflected in them.... SF fans and skeptics alike are advised to head toward this Light.” (Independent)
“Light is a literary singularity: at one and the same time a grim, gaudy space opera that respects the physics, and a contemporary novel that unflinchingly revisits the choices that warp a life. It’s almost unbearably good.” (Ken MacLeod, author of Engine City)
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Critic reviews
“Surely one of the best novels of the year.... Deeply satisfying...the final chapters are a marvel of transcendence, reconciliation and redemption.” (San Francisco Chronicle Books)
“Succeeds in evoking the sense of wonder that science fiction readers look for in the best of the genre...Harrison brings an up-to-date sensibility to the hoary conceits of science fiction.” (The New York Times Book Review)
“Brilliant, reality-bending SF.... This is space opera for the intelligensia.” (Publishers Weekly, starred review)
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- Narrated by: Matt Addis
- Length: 11 hrs and 57 mins
- Unabridged
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The Starship Sa Niro and the Starship Sß Oubliette were in orbit around a black hole, one afternoon...by the end of the day, the crews of both starships were dead, victims of a single killer: Captain Alpha Raine. Raine claims he's acting under the command of a voice emanating from the black hole: Mr Modo. No one believes him.Everyone knows that things go into black holes; nothing comes out. But something inexplicable has been happening to Raine, and whatever it is seems to be spreading.
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Simple prose, mind bending plot
- By DrEHarris on 02-10-25
By: Adam Roberts
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Star Maker
- By: Olaf Stapledon
- Narrated by: Andrew Wincott
- Length: 10 hrs and 41 mins
- Unabridged
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One moment a man sits on a suburban hill, gazing curiously at the stars. The next, he is whirling through the firmament, and perhaps the most remarkable of all science fiction journeys has begun. Even Stapledon's other great work, 'Last and First Men' pales in ambition next to 'Star Maker' which presents nothing less than an entire imagined history of life in the universe, encompassing billions of years.
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meditative classic
- By Darryl on 09-18-12
By: Olaf Stapledon
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Perdido Street Station
- By: China Mieville
- Narrated by: John Lee
- Length: 24 hrs and 21 mins
- Unabridged
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The metropolis of New Crobuzon sprawls at the center of the world. Humans and mutants and arcane races brood in the gloom beneath its chimneys, where the river is sluggish with unnatural effluent and foundries pound into the night. For a thousand years, the Parliament and its brutal militias have ruled over a vast economy of workers and artists, spies and soldiers, magicians, crooks, and junkies. Now a stranger has arrived, with a pocketful of gold and an impossible demand. And something unthinkable is released.
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Brilliant, wonderful book -- horrible recording
- By James on 08-19-09
By: China Mieville
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The Flight of the Aphrodite
- By: S J Morden
- Narrated by: Elliot Fitzpatrick
- Length: 11 hrs and 49 mins
- Unabridged
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Commander Mariucci and his hand-picked research team know they will have to muster all of their expertise, creativity and teamwork to survive the very harshest of conditions in orbit around the king of planets. But when they intercept a peculiar radio transmission, they have to investigate. Nothing should work in these impossible conditions, so what is sending the signal...and why? With a degrading ship and crew at breaking point, there's every chance they will tear themselves apart before they ever find the answer to the ultimate question.
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good story but slow burn and a bit anticlimactic
- By P. Palmieri on 07-27-24
By: S J Morden
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Deep Black
- By: Miles Cameron
- Narrated by: Nneka Okoye
- Length: 15 hrs and 55 mins
- Unabridged
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Marca Nbaro had always dreamed of serving aboard the Greatships, with their vast cargo holds and a crew that could fill a city. They are the lifeblood of human-occupied space, transporting an unimaginable volume - and value - of goods from City, the greatest human orbital, all the way to Tradepoint at the other, to trade for xenoglas with an unknowable alien species. And now, out in the darkness of space, something is targeting them.
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Dissapointing
- By Amazon Customer on 02-26-25
By: Miles Cameron
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Diaspora
- By: Greg Egan
- Narrated by: Adam Epstein
- Length: 11 hrs and 5 mins
- Unabridged
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Behold the orphan. Born into a world that is not a world. A digital being grown from a mind seed, a genderless cybernetic citizen in a vast network of probes, satellites, and servers knitting the Solar System into one scape, from the outer planets to the fiery surface of the Sun. Since the Introdus in the 21st century, humanity has reconfigured itself drastically. Most chose immortality, joining the polises to become conscious software.
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Fabulous Story, Disappointing Performance
- By Ben on 12-08-13
By: Greg Egan
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The Dying Earth
- Tales of the Dying Earth, Book 1
- By: Jack Vance
- Narrated by: Arthur Morey
- Length: 6 hrs and 41 mins
- Unabridged
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The stories in The Dying Earth introduce dozens of seekers of wisom and beauty, lovely lost women, wizards of every shade of eccentricity with their runic amulets and spells. We meet the melancholy deodands, who feed on human flesh and the twk-men, who ride dragonflies and trade information for salt. There are monsters and demons. Each being is morally ambiguous: The evil are charming, the good are dangerous. All are at home.
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A Decadent and Hopeful Dying Earth
- By Jefferson on 06-27-10
By: Jack Vance
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A Fire Upon the Deep
- By: Vernor Vinge
- Narrated by: Peter Larkin
- Length: 21 hrs and 37 mins
- Unabridged
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A Fire Upon the Deep is the big, breakout book that fulfills the promise of Vinge's career to date: a gripping tale of galactic war told on a cosmic scale. Thousands of years hence, many races inhabit a universe where a mind's potential is determined by its location in space, from superintelligent entities in the Transcend, to the limited minds of the Unthinking Depths, where only simple creatures and technology can function.
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What a wild, wacky, awesome book!
- By Noah Smith on 06-20-10
By: Vernor Vinge
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More Than Human
- By: Theodore Sturgeon
- Narrated by: Stefan Rudnicki, Harlan Ellison
- Length: 8 hrs and 18 mins
- Unabridged
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In this genre-bending novel, among the first to have launched sci fi into literature, a group of remarkable social outcasts band together for survival and discover that their combined powers render them superhuman. Together, they may represent the next step in evolution - or the final chapter in the history of the human race. As they struggle to find whether they are meant to help humanity or destroy it, Sturgeon explores questions of power and morality, individuality and belonging.
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Must listen
- By Dion on 01-16-10
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Anathem
- By: Neal Stephenson
- Narrated by: Oliver Wyman, Tavia Gilbert, William Dufris, and others
- Length: 32 hrs and 25 mins
- Unabridged
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Fraa Erasmus is a young avout living in the Concent of Saunt Edhar, a sanctuary for mathematicians, scientists, and philosophers, protected from the corrupting influences of the "Saecular" world by ancient stone, honored traditions, and complex rituals. Over the centuries, cities, and governments have risen and fallen beyond the concent's walls. Three times during history's darkest epochs, bloody violence born of superstition and ignorance has invaded and devastated the cloistered mathic community.
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I love Neal, but Good lord... ugh!
- By SpiderGrrl on 10-08-19
By: Neal Stephenson
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Blood Music
- By: Greg Bear
- Narrated by: George Guidall
- Length: 10 hrs and 49 mins
- Unabridged
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An amazing breakthrough in genetic engineering made by Vergil Ulam is considered too dangerous for further research, but rather than destroy his work, he injects himself with his creation and walks out of his lab, unaware of just how his actions will change the world.
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THOUGHT UNIVERSE
- By Jim "The Impatient" on 08-01-15
By: Greg Bear
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The Icarus Hunt
- A Novel
- By: Timothy Zahn
- Narrated by: Marc Thompson
- Length: 17 hrs and 44 mins
- Unabridged
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Jordan McKell has a problem with authority. Unfortunately for him, the iron-fisted authority of the powerful Patthaaunutth controls virtually every aspect of galactic shipping. In order to survive, Jordan ekes out a living dabbling in interstellar smuggling for outlaw concerns that represent the last vestiges of free trade in the galaxy. So when Jordan and his partner, Ixil - an alien with two ferret-like "outhunters" linked to his neural system - are hired by a mysterious gentleman to fly a ship and its special cargo to Earth, they jump at the job.
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I've been waiting a long time for this.
- By Aerindel on 02-03-22
By: Timothy Zahn
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Solaris
- The Definitive Edition
- By: Stanislaw Lem, Bill Johnston - translator
- Narrated by: Alessandro Juliani
- Length: 7 hrs and 42 mins
- Unabridged
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At last, one of the world’s greatest works of science fiction is available - just as author Stanislaw Lem intended it. To mark the 50th anniversary of the publication of Solaris, Audible, in cooperation with the Lem Estate, has commissioned a brand-new translation - complete for the first time, and the first ever directly from the original Polish to English. Beautifully narrated by Alessandro Juliani ( Battlestar Galactica), Lem’s provocative novel comes alive for a new generation.
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A comment on negative reviews
- By Burns on 09-20-11
By: Stanislaw Lem, and others
What listeners say about Light
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- Rhubarb Wilting Kelp
- 01-25-24
Wonderful SF to think with
I’m sure this book feels mostly opaque to a lot of people but there’s something so pure in its expression it’s obviously a masterful work of fiction. Folding time, formally and dramturgically, is no small feat and to do it with jokes is all the better.
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- Jamey C
- 01-04-24
Wildly creative and fascinating
Some very original, fascinating ideas in this book. It has existing sci-fi tropes peppered in here and there, but it’s wrapped in a genuinely novel perspective. I’ve never read anything like it, the quantum strangeness is baked in to the core, which takes getting used to. Very original character studies as well, they’re morally ambiguous in a way that kept me on my toes. The whole thing is like a lucid dream, potent while experiencing it and very hard to explain once you wake up. The reader is amazing as well.
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- Amazon Customer
- 01-30-22
You’ll never see anything the same way again
Each chapter is filled to the brim with ugliness, but this book as a whole is a beautiful masterwork, the weight of it’s artistic significance comparable to anything made by the minds of Mozart, Picasso, Dickens, Bowie. There is nothing, absolutely nothing, like this book. It’s more than science fiction, more than space opera. It is nothing short of a clean-sheet rewrite of the very concept of existence and all that it entails. “Anything is possible” is a cliché phrase, but how far is one author willing to go to illustrate what that truly means? This book is challenging, and you won’t love the experience, but when it’s all said and done and you realize the author’s vision of the present and the future is completely grounded in reality despite the seeming impossibility of it all, you won’t be able to carry on like you did pre-Light. Nothing will ever be the same. A demonic all powerful evil, transcending space and time is fairly mundane. Some rubber thing soaking in the kitchen sink becomes more unsettling and sinister than you could have imagined. The impossible is so familiar, the familiar so exotic once you begin to realize how the universe really works.
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2 people found this helpful
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- Ramsey Knowles
- 06-29-22
Pointless and meandering
I almost stopped listening but decided to use it as a sleep aid and eventually finished.
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