“M. John Harrison is the only writer on Earth equally attuned to the essential strangeness both of quantum physics and the attritional banalities of modern urban life. This is space opera for these dark times, and Light is brilliant.”

—Iain M. Banks, author of Complicity, The Bridge, and Consider Phlebas

“I loved it . . . the story is somehow both bewildering and utterly clear, razor-sharp and wide enough to encompass worlds, and the language is beautiful, nailing both the bizarre and the mundane with eerie skill. On every other page there’s a line which makes you think ‘ it can’t get better than this,’ and then it does. An amazing book: not just a triumphant return to science fiction, but an injection of style and content that will light up the genre.”

—Michael Marshall Smith, author of Spares and One of Us

“Post-cyberpunk, post-slipstream, post-everything, Light is the leanest, meanest space opera since Nova. Visually acute, shot through with wonder and horror in equal measure, in Light’s dual-stranded narrative M. John Harrison pulls off the difficult trick of making the present seem every bit as baroque and strange as his neon-lit deep future. Set the controls for Radio Bay and prepare to get lost in the K-Tract. You won’t regret it.”

—Alastair Reynolds, award-winning author of Revelation Space and Chasm City

“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 The Star Fraction and Cosmonaut Keep

“At last M. John Harrison takes on quantum mechanics. The first classic of the quantum century, Light is a folded-down future history bound together by quantum exotica and human endurance. Taut as Hemingway, viscerally intelligent, startlingly uplifting, Harrison’s ideas have a beauty that unpacks to infinity.”

—Stephen Baxter, award-winning author of The Time Ships