Loved Light. Thank you for mentioning Jack Vance and Gene Wolfe and Jeff VanderMeer’s Area X and Arkady and Boris Strugatsky’s Roadside Picnic. If I could make some recommends it would be Anne Kavan’s Ice and Vladimir Sorokin’s Telluria. From Light- “…and when he looked down again, some shift of vision had altered his perspective: he saw clearly that the gaps between the larger stones made the same sorts of shapes as the gaps between the smaller ones. The more he looked, the more the arrangement repeated itself. Suddenly he understood this as a condition of things- if you could see the patterns the waves made, or remember the shapes of a million small white clouds, there it would be, a boiling, inexplicable, vertiginous similarity in all the processes of the world, roaring silently away from you in ever-shifting repetitions, always the same, never the same thing twice.”
Thanks for this. While 'Light' is easily in my top 5 SF novels, I'm not sure I want to expose myself to potential disappointment by reading the others in the sequence. I say that, because I often find reading MJH frustrating, for the reason you allude to in your summary: the vagueness of plot and character motivation. 'The Sunken Land Begins to Rise Again', for example, is a masterpiece of prose, but I finished it feeling completely dissatisfied by the experience; just not enough substance for me. I will read more of his work, however; definitely his short story collection, 'You Should Come With me Now', and perhaps exploring the Viriconium novels and stories.
Loved Light. Thank you for mentioning Jack Vance and Gene Wolfe and Jeff VanderMeer’s Area X and Arkady and Boris Strugatsky’s Roadside Picnic. If I could make some recommends it would be Anne Kavan’s Ice and Vladimir Sorokin’s Telluria.
From Light-
“…and when he looked down again, some shift of vision had altered his perspective: he saw clearly that the gaps between the larger stones made the same sorts of shapes as the gaps between the smaller ones. The more he looked, the more the arrangement repeated itself. Suddenly he understood this as a condition of things- if you could see the patterns the waves made, or remember the shapes of a million small white clouds, there it would be, a boiling, inexplicable, vertiginous similarity in all the processes of the world, roaring silently away from you in ever-shifting repetitions, always the same, never the same thing twice.”
Thanks for this. While 'Light' is easily in my top 5 SF novels, I'm not sure I want to expose myself to potential disappointment by reading the others in the sequence. I say that, because I often find reading MJH frustrating, for the reason you allude to in your summary: the vagueness of plot and character motivation. 'The Sunken Land Begins to Rise Again', for example, is a masterpiece of prose, but I finished it feeling completely dissatisfied by the experience; just not enough substance for me. I will read more of his work, however; definitely his short story collection, 'You Should Come With me Now', and perhaps exploring the Viriconium novels and stories.