When reading this series I felt that#1 Light was amazing and one of the best SF books I have read. Regarding ideas, style and structure, world-building as well as characters.#2 Nova Swing while still high quality with excellent style and ideas, was much weaker regarding plot, characters and it's general idea. In fact, I found it annoying in parts: I just could not understand where the various plot lines or characters were going, and generally what the entire point of all of it was. It felt as if looking at a picture with a magnifying glass and being amazed by the beautifully crafted detail, but then, when stepping away and looking at the big picture it turns out that it's just a well-made picture of sunset, but the sun is green and there is snow under palm trees and we can't quite just make out why, though we feel like we should be able to.#3 Empty Space takes it up a level again, and while not as good as Light it all starts to come together again, at least regarding 2 of of the plot-lines. I am still very bored and annoyed reading the Anna's plotline in contemporary'ish London, which I feel is well written, but a bit pointless. It just feels like Harrison merge a totally different novel into this plot-line, adding a couple of surrealist elements to make it fit the overall book.Generally though, this series is certainly one of the more avantgarde and skillfully crafted literary works in SciFi. Read it if you like strange, intelligent, well written literature. It's full of dark, sexy, violent thoughts and deplorable characters and disgusting technology. Stay away from it if you want an easy Hollowood / Broadway read. Harrison will not serve anything on a platter, you will have to work to understand what he is on about.Was anything annoying? A couple of minor things: it drags in parts, Anna's plotline felt not quite right, and some of the characters issues got on my nerves. What really annoyed me though, but fortunately was just a detail, was that Harrison seems to repeat himself. Certain phrases he repeats multiple times across the books, and somehow I felt this was like a bad deja vue, and totally un-necessary. It felt like he liked certain phrases or terms so much that he had to just rub his genius in again and again. I am sure I am unfair, but that's how it came across. Finally, and that's maybe the biggest issue I have with this type of literature (see next paragraph about similar books) is that some sentences if being read in flow, perfectly fit, sound extremely poetic, but when you read them again, and try to understand them, really don't make any sense. A bit like grunge poetry or lyrics. Whether that's a good or bad thing I am not sure, on the one hand I liked it, on the other it felt a bit like intellectual showing off or masturbation... would I discourage it? certainly not, we all like to have a wank from time to time...Having said, this, this book actually reminds me strongly of - The Quantum Thief which uses similar concepts and very similar style, meaning that the author does not explain things or sets the scene, but that you are learning while the plot develops. This is something I like very much. Both Series are also very much at the forefront of ideas. Where they differ is that Quantum Thief is much ore humorous while Harrison's work is dark.- Harrison's series has been called Cyberpunk and at the same time being criticised for wanting to be Cyberpunk but not following its structure. Really, I don't care about labelling, but if you define Cyberpunk as 'Anything that can be done to a rat can be done to a human being. And we can do most anything to rats.' (sorry not sure where I stole this from) then this series is certainly Cyberpunk in the truest sense. Reminds me very much of Heatseeker in that respect. Read the book if you can deal with tortured protagonists (tortured by what they have done to themselves through technology or their mind), stay away from it if you want to read about happy people :)- It feels to me as if there was a new type of literary style out there which depicted our current reality with a certain sort of emptyness. I can't word it any better and still haven't fully figured it out. But reading Dream London and some other novels, I felt that in Empty Space also, our world, in this case mainly London, was described with a very unnerving emptyness as if in a dream where we are surrounded by a lot of people, but can not interact with them. I have to think more about this one, but though I'd share anyway.Would I recommend it? Certainly!Why? Because it's just 'out there'.Could I tell you what it was really about? I think it's about human aspiration and dreams, and how we see ourselves as individuals.Could I summarise the overall plot? yes, that's straight forward. Could I give an account of what actually happens and how the plot-lines are interconnected: no way, far too skillfully and magically crafted.
Welcome to Saudade, found on a distant planet in a galaxy light years away, somewhere beneath the Kefahuchi Tract. A far future city awash with retro bars, genetic chop-shops and eager tourists. At it’s heart lies the mysterious ‘event zone’ where physics and reality are altered in inexplicable ways. The zone exists as a result of a piece of the Kefahuchi Tract (a space-time anomaly), falling to the planet and is a nexus of sorts for the events of the novel, much like the Zone from Arkady and Boris Strugatsky’s Roadside Picnic. You may be more familiar with Andrei Tarkovsky’s film adaptation Stalker or perhaps even the 2011 PC game of the same name. Or perhaps not…Nova Swing won both the Arthur C. Clarke and Phillip K. Dick awards in 2007. It is set in the same universe as and follows on from Harrison’s 2002 novel Light. I had not read Light and had only a basic idea of what it was about before reading Nova Swing. This didn’t seem to be a problem as I was still able to understand and follow the events of the novel without feeling like I was missing information so feel free to dive right in.Vic Serotonin is a tour guide of sorts, taking tourists on illegal expeditions into the zone for cash. Vic is lured into the zone once more at the request of an attractive tourist who is not all that she seems. Paulie deRaad is a successful trafficker who exploits the zone for personal and financial gain, illegally buying and selling the artifacts discovered within it. When Vic sells him a problematic artifact it sets in motion a disturbing chain of events. Meanwhile Lens Aschemann, a local law enforcement agent who has altered his appearance to look like Einstein is tasked with monitoring and enforcing restrictions on the zone. His attention is drawn towards Vic and Paulie as he investigates strange new artifacts that have begun emerging from the zone.All three characters are obsessed with the zone in some way and the novel shows us how they and their obsession with trying to understand the inexplicable affects them and the large cast that surrounds them. The story is presented in a noir style complete with all the tropes that you would expect to come with it. Flawed heroes, seedy bars and dangerous and seductive women are all present. Not a first time pairing for sci-fi and noir, but Harrison uses these tropes in a unique way that somehow skewers both genres. There are plenty of future oddities and technological marvels crammed into the city of Saudade to satisfy the sci-fi buffs but I'll leave out the details as I found it was a lot of fun being thrust into the futuristically alien and borderline psychedelic world that the novel inhabits without any prior concepts of it. But as a noir novel this is essentially a mystery story with a mystery that is by it’s very nature inexplicable and undefinable at it’s heart.If you have ever read any of the authors previous work you would be familiar with his tendency to twist the genre in which he is working to a point where one suspects he actually disdains it. A stylistic trait which can be frustrating if you’re not expecting it and is present throughout Nova Swing. The one sci-fi action sequence is called to mind, as well as a significant change of focus occurring late in the novel. Ultimately though it is this approach that I find so appealing, intriguing and thought provoking about the author's work.If you’re looking for a standard sci-fi action lark then you’re in the wrong place. Nova Swing is a strange and challenging novel but well worth persevering with as the ideas, themes and even the very execution of the novel will have you thinking for a long time afterwards.From my blog: http://otherworldssffreviews.blogspot...
What do You think about Nova Swing (2007)?
So little to say about this book. While I've heard some good things about Harrison, I didn't gain any enjoyment or pleasure from reading this. While, yes, there were many times when my mind wandered and was curious about certain phrases he used or ideas he spouted, but.... Actual pleasure from this book? I think not. There was no point to it, no real life. I enjoyed the story of the Monas and most especially the too-few pages on the Saudade Event Site, but other than that:Nada. Nothing. A complete blank. I have no clue as to how it ever won the Arthur C. Clarke Award. I have yet to read Light, which was clearly a failure on my part to realize this was something of a sequel, so hopefully that may make more sense to me and I may come back and reevaluate this review. But as of now, no. I don't recommend it.
—Gina Durst
I nearly gave up on this one. It's hard to read over 1/4 of a novel before any hint of a plot shows up. I accepted that as evidence that plot was not the point, and soldiered on. Now that I've read all the way through, I'm still unsure of the point. The low-brow genre reader side of me is tempted to dismiss this as an exercise by Harrison to demonstrate how his style is so cool that he can make a novel-length piece out of a short-story plot. He can expand it into aerogel with descriptions of sense impressions that are interesting enough to keep a reader going.A slightly more critical side of me suspects that he's trying to make a valid SF point. That point: that when we reach that Clarke level where our own Terra-grown technology looks to us 21st-century primitives like magic, and then we encounter something truly ALIEN, that alien technology may appear chaotically disjoint from even our then-advanced approach to causality, continuity, and the ordered principles of physics. If that's what he's aiming for, I just barely caught it through the jumble.The other way I have attempted to deal with this is as an attempt to get across the disordered jumble of dreams and hallucinations. Usually, when others try to describe their dreams to you (or you to them), boiling it down to words drains it of 99.5% of the meaning and vitality of the experience. That's why it's so damn boring and pointless. If you think of this novel as Harrison's attempt to tell us his dream, I'd judge he cut that loss ratio down to 50%. That's big. That counts as successful communication. But it still left me feeling like I was getting the description (oh, tons of description!) of sensations and a few paltry events but not getting the vital essence that would make me share his perception that this dream was so important. And that is indeed the struggle of the characters in this work: how do you convey to outsiders the chaotic essence of what you experience in The Site? Beyond "you had to have been there," even if you were there, you wouldn't have had the same experience, or grasped it as representing the same meaning, or even have been able to tell whether you experiencing something accidental and transitory or earthshakingly Real.Now, if Harrison's point is that our own reality is actually as chaotic and impossible to comprehend as quantum mechanical uncertainty, my shovel and garden soil beg to disagree.
—John
Two stars means 'It was OK' according to goodreads which really sums up 95% of this novel. I'm not going to go to town on this review. In fact, it's more of a personal reminder or a general overview of why I didn't quite dislike it, but certainly didn't rate it at all. So here it is then. This is the story of an anomaly or part of it anyway that basically drops off the main anomaly and causes a kind of rent or tear through to somewhere else. Predictably, things come through from that side and people go through to that side. If it sounds like I'm bored writing this its because I am. A book that can make me bored all over again when I write the review is definitely a book to avoid. Some of it was pretty good. There were parts that made me smile or sent my thoughts off at a tangent, and for that I am thankful but seriously now, most of this novel is very, very slow going and is little more than an exercise in character development. This wouldn't be a bad thing at all if there was a story to go with it, but what story there is didn't hold my interest.I liked 'Light', but this just dragged a little to much for my taste and in the end didn't really go anywhere, at least nowhere that I wasn't expecting all along.Not great, but not terrible either. Just OK.
—Shane
