Nova Swing

by M. John Harrison

Bantam trade paperback $16.00

Nova Swing is the sequel to the Tiptree-award winning novel Light. While not a direct sequel, I would not recommend reading this one without it; there is too much in the first one you need to know. Both books take place in a region of space at the edge of the galaxy called the Kefahuchi Tract, a region that is filled with gravitational anomalies, wormholes, odd stars and various contradictions of the laws of physics. People do live out there, mining odd elements, picking up bits of alien technology and selling them, etc. An unspecified number of years after the events of Light, a piece of the Kefahuchi Tract has fallen on a planet called Saudade. This has created an event site; an area in which nothing is quite as it seems, dangerously so. While it is. in fact, illegal to go in or bring anything out, people, of course, do so anyway - guiding tourists and brokering artifacts. Recently, the site crime detective Aschemann has noticed activity even odder than usual around the site - people seem to be appearing from it, wandering around the city, and then disappearing again. He believes this has something to do with a tour guide named Vic Serotonin and an artifact broker called Paulie DeRaad. He investigates them, along with his assistant, while Vic is trying to please his latest client who really wants to enter the site. I did not enjoy this nearly as much as I did Light - I never found Vic or Aschemann as compelling as the characters from the earlier book. However, M. John Harrison’s prose is gorgeous, and I enjoyed the world-building and the sense of mystery created around the site. The book itself feels more like setup for another book as the plot peters out well before the end of the book, and none of its questions are answered. I am in no way competent to comment on the physics, but they seem plausible, definitely a bonus. If you’re looking for a novel using quantum physics in an interesting way, this will fill the bill; however, definitely pick up Light first. - Nadine Armstrong