
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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Story
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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Suldrun’s Garden
- Lyonesse: Book 1
- By: Jack Vance
- Narrated by: Kevin T. Collins
- Length: 18 hrs and 49 mins
- Unabridged
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The Elder Isles, located in what is now the Bay of Biscay off the coast of Old Gaul, are made up of 10 contending kingdoms, all vying with each other for control. At the centre of much of the intrigue is Casmir, the ruthless and ambitious king of Lyonnesse. His beautiful but otherworldly daughter, Suldrun, is part of his plans. He intends to cement an alliance or two by marrying her well. But Suldrun is as determined as he and defies him.
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Not my cup of tea
- By Ann on 01-10-11
By: Jack Vance
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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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The Quantum Thief
- By: Hannu Rajaniemi
- Narrated by: Scott Brick
- Length: 10 hrs and 53 mins
- Unabridged
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Jean le Flambeur is a post-human criminal, mind burglar, confidence artist, and trickster. His origins are shrouded in mystery, but his exploits are known throughout the Heterarchy - from breaking into the vast Zeusbrains of the Inner System to stealing rare Earth antiques from the aristocrats of Mars. Now he’s confined inside the Dilemma Prison, where every day he has to get up and kill himself before his other self can kill him.
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Starts Confusing, Gets Exciting, Ends Awesome
- By Matthew on 10-21-11
By: Hannu Rajaniemi
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The Book of Disquiet
- By: Fernando Pessoa
- Narrated by: Adam Sims
- Length: 17 hrs and 28 mins
- Unabridged
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Assembled from notes and jottings left unpublished at the time of the author’s death, The Book of Disquiet is a collection of aphoristic prose-poetry musings on dreams, solitude, time and memory. Credited to Pessoa’s alter ego, Bernardo Soares, who chronicles his contemplations in this so-called "factless" autobiography, the work is a journey of one man’s soul and, by extension, of all human souls that allow their minds and hearts to roam far and free.
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The book that saved my life
- By Hutchinson on 03-09-21
By: Fernando Pessoa
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The Book of Elsewhere
- A Novel
- By: Keanu Reeves, China Miéville
- Narrated by: Allan Corduner, Asia Kate Dillon, China Miéville, and others
- Length: 12 hrs and 1 min
- Unabridged
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There have always been whispers. Legends. The warrior who cannot be killed. Who’s seen a thousand civilizations rise and fall. He has had many names: Unute, Child of Lightning, Death himself. These days, he’s known simply as “B.” And he wants to be able to die. In the present day, a U.S. black-ops group has promised him they can help with that. And all he needs to do is help them in return. But when an all-too-mortal soldier comes back to life, the impossible event ultimately points toward a force even more mysterious than B himself. One at least as strong. And one with a plan all its own.
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Confusing at first but quite amazing
- By Brett on 07-27-24
By: Keanu Reeves, and others
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Solenoid
- By: Mircea Cărtărescu, Sean Cotter - translator
- Narrated by: Paul Boehmer
- Length: 34 hrs and 4 mins
- Unabridged
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Based on Cartarescu's own role as a high school teacher, Solenoid begins with the mundane details of a diarist's life and quickly spirals into a philosophical account of life, history, philosophy, and mathematics. One character asks another: when you rush into the burning building, will you save the newborn or the artwork? On a broad scale, the novel's investigations of other universes, dimensions, and timelines reconcile the realms of life and art.
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Our Universal Phantasmagoria
- By Isaac Linder on 03-11-24
By: Mircea Cărtărescu, and others
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Ilium
- By: Dan Simmons
- Narrated by: Kevin Pariseau
- Length: 29 hrs and 41 mins
- Unabridged
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From the towering heights of Olympos Mons on Mars, the mighty Zeus and his immortal family of gods, goddesses, and demigods look down upon a momentous battle, observing - and often influencing - the legendary exploits of Paris, Achilles, Hector, Odysseus, and the clashing armies of Greece and Troy. Thomas Hockenberry, former 21st-century professor and Iliad scholar, watches as well. It is Hockenberry's duty to observe and report on the Trojan War's progress to the so-called deities who saw fit to return him from the dead.
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Achaeans and robots and post-humans, oh my
- By Ryan on 04-11-14
By: Dan Simmons
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Shroud
- By: Adrian Tchaikovsky
- Narrated by: Sophie Aldred
- Length: 14 hrs and 37 mins
- Unabridged
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On a planet shrouded in darkness, a stranded crew must fight for survival. But, the darkness may have plans of its own in this wildly original story from Adrian Tchaikovsky, Hugo and Arthur C. Clarke Award–winning author of Children of Time.
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Awesome
- By PingThePong on 06-24-25
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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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Hyperion
- By: Dan Simmons
- Narrated by: Marc Vietor, Allyson Johnson, Kevin Pariseau, and others
- Length: 20 hrs and 44 mins
- Unabridged
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On the world called Hyperion, beyond the law of the Hegemony of Man, there waits the creature called the Shrike. There are those who worship it. There are those who fear it. And there are those who have vowed to destroy it. In the Valley of the Time Tombs, where huge, brooding structures move backward through time, the Shrike waits for them all.
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The Shrike Awaits. Enter The Time Tombs...
- By Michael on 10-13-12
By: Dan Simmons
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Alien Clay
- By: Adrian Tchaikovsky
- Narrated by: Ben Allen
- Length: 13 hrs and 56 mins
- Unabridged
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The planet of Kiln is where the tyrannical Mandate keeps its prison colony, and for inmates, the journey there is always a one-way trip. One such prisoner is Professor Arton Daghdev, xeno-ecologist and political dissident. Soon after arrival, he discovers that Kiln has a secret. Humanity is not the first intelligent life to set foot there. In the midst of a ravenous, chaotic ecosystem are the ruins of a civilization, but who were the vanished builders and where did they go?
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Super good!
- By Jessi on 11-26-24
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Ambergris
- City of Saints and Madmen, Shriek, Finch
- By: Jeff VanderMeer
- Narrated by: Bronson Pinchot, Cassandra Campbell, Oliver Wyman
- Length: 43 hrs and 7 mins
- Unabridged
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Before Area X, there was Ambergris. Jeff VanderMeer conceived what would become his first cult classic series of speculative works: the Ambergris trilogy. Now, for the first time ever, the story of the sprawling metropolis of Ambergris is collected into a single volume, including City of Saints and Madmen, Shriek: An Afterword, and Finch.
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Entrancing “weird” novel
- By Joe on 12-04-20
By: Jeff VanderMeer
Wildly creative and fascinating
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Wonderful SF to think with
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You’ll never see anything the same way again
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Pointless and meandering
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