Nova Swing: A Novel (Kefahuchi Tract Book 2)

Though Harrison himself admits that 'Nova Swing' can stand on it's own, it's best enjoyed if you've read his previous book 'Light', which introduces the legendary pilot Ed Chianese and the strange phenomenon known as 'The Kefahuchi Tract' - an area in space of alternate reality and strange physics. 'Nova Swing' uses this base with a new twist ... The Kefahuchi Tract has shifted, and part of it has fallen to earth in what is known as the Saudade Event Site.'Nova Swing' is a complex novel, a generous novel; a character driven novel though it's still centered around an event that is slowly expanding. The characters are not only unique in their formation but also in the very naming of them - Harrison affectedly creating character in the very names of his protagonists.Vic Serotonin is a travel agent; but not the sort you'd expect to run into booking a tour with one of the great space-cruise ships docked in the non-corporate port of Saudade. For the right price, Vic will take you into the Event Site. On his heels though, is police investigator Lens Aschemann who bears a striking resemblance to the elder Albert Einstein. With Lens is an "enhanced" assistant, data streams running down the inside of her arm, who transferred over from Sports Crime.Vic can be seen at anytime in Liv Hula's bar called Black Cat White Cat, dangerously close to the Event Site, and named so after the streams of black and white cats that flow from the Event Site every morning. It's in Liv Hula's bar that Mrs. Elizabeth Kielar contracts Vic to take her into the site. Not only Vic but Liv is suspicious, due to the fact that Kielar - in her glamorous clothing and real fur coat - don't fit the stereotypical "traveler". She's an enigma, and why she insists on entering the site is a mystery.Vic's ever-present sidekick, Fat Antoyne Messner, deserts him after Irene The Mona begins to pay attention to him. (A Mona is a woman who's undergone body redesign to become Barbie-like with peppermint smelling hair).After Vic, in other ways, are Paulie DeRaad, a smuggler who paid good money for an artifact from the Event Site that is now changing him into something unthinkable. Emil Bonadventure, suffering his own side effects from years as a renegade pilot and expeditions into the Event Site, tries and fails to warn Vic, just as Emil's "daughter" (read to fully understand this) eventually writes off Vic and refuses to give him Emil's secret journal.In a world of "smart tattoos", body redesign and re-engineering, space cruises along the Beach and Radio Bay - Vic continues his tours and Paulie continues to decay, Aschermann cruises Saudade's streets in his vintage pink Cadillac and Liv Hula runs her bar night and day - the Event Site continues to expand and pour forth ruinous people and things from the most unlikely locations. Does an ending really come to all things, or is an ending a beginning to some?Despite its multifaceted and intricate plot, 'Nova Swing' is a very enjoyable read, though one you will have to pay attention to. This is not a light space opera to enjoy in brief spurts, this is a melding of SciFi and Fantasy that requires usage of your gray matter inside your skull. Not quite as fulfilling as Harrison's previous 'Viriconium', your palate will nonetheless be satisfied with it's characterizations and brief but puzzling forays into the Saudade Event Site. A solid five stars for lovers of a "thinking" SciFi/Space Fantasy. Enjoy!

Continuing with “ten spatial and four temporal dimensions” of the trilogy, 'Nova Swing' differs radically from 'Light'.Compared to the pan-dimensional space and time hopping and the converging of the three protagonists in the first part, the sequential action in the sequel is restricted to one planet or rather to a small neighbourhood on the periphery of an event horizon or worm hole – call it what you want to – the concept takes getting used to. The flavour is darker, surrealistic, and dreamy, featuring a cast of dead-beat characters. The setting is more like a staged drama.No one seems to work, the streets are lined with bars. Bacchanalia and loveless meaningless sexual coupling seem to be the normal daily activities.The idea of Kefahuchi Tract seems to be similar to Peter Hamilton’s Void – both are equally vast and mysterious. However, this book is less SF and more a nightmare in the realms of quantum dysfunction. Some bits do get tiresome, especially the obsession with cats – either black or white.I did not really like the book. All that connects it to the first part is the ominous and omnipresent Kefahuchi Tract and a reprise of the serial murder of women. The earlier characters have all vanished. Let us hope there is a connection between the two books in the concluding part.

Set in the same universe as Mr. Harrison's "Light," but centuries later, a portion of the Kefahuchi Tract, featured in the former book, has fallen to earth (the author does not capitalize the term), creating a discontinuity known as the Saudade Event site.This tale deals with the goings-on near the site, and with the Runyonesque characters who dwell there. You'll meet Vic Serotonin, illegal site guide; the Mysterious Woman Client of a thousand hardboiled detective novels; the detective Lens Aschemann, who looks like Einstein, as well as his crazed assistant.There are entities who come in through the bathroom door, hordes of monochrome cats, pink Caddys, rickshaw Annies, and music called the old New Nueva Tango. And, oh yes, there's a starship named the Jayne Anne Phillips.The prose is crisp and dazzling; occasionally it's moving. You'll care what happens to the characters. The story is convoluted, and not everything is explained; but that hardly matters--the journey's way more fun than the destination. Mr. Harrison proves yet again that there's nobody quite like him writing science fiction these days.

a beautifully wrought distillation of the same anxieties that propel ROADSIDE PICNIC and SOLARIS, furnished w/ many of the familiar, kitschy accoutrements of SF & noir, these accoutrements repurposed to work w/ something less generic, less familiar, particularly for those not experienced w/ M. John Harrison's work, resulting in the most propulsive, fun installment of his (MJH's) EMPTY SPACE a.k.a. LIGHT, KEFAHUCHI trilogy (n.b. each book in the trilogy is capable of standing alone, though ofc work best in the (re)context(ing) of the others), somehow (as per the previous installment, LIGHT) both inhabiting/conveying & rejecting/recontexting golden age SF optimism

I very much like the somewhat unusual narrative and plot style. It does in the end run a bit long. Which is where the pointless nature comes in. It doesn't seem to have anywhere to go. Nor any reason to get anywhere. I would give it a 3.5 if I could. But the nature of the writing is simply good enough in style to go on with a 4 rather than a 3 star rating.

I liked the first book in the series, Light, but not enough to rush out and buy Nova Swing. I feared the obscure plot lines of Light would become further entwined to produce something altogether impenetrable. Happily, that wasn't to be. Even though a little background is helpful the novel works brilliantly as a stand-alone and suffers little of the nebulous narrative that confused the first. Harrison's imagination is a delight and his prose beautifully woven to create a world so bizarre you both recoil from it and want to be part of it at the same time. Harrison does tend to play fast and loose with the concept of science fiction and his genre boundaries - just like those of the event site in the novel - are far from clearly defined, so whilst I won't go so far as to say the book is great science fiction, I will say it that it's science fiction, and great.

So much of the tradition of SF lies in technological wizardry that it comes as a pleasant shock to encounter a novel whose story, for all that it takes place on an alien world in the far future, and involves miraculous (if largely unexplained) technologies, is actually about people. Not heroes or villains, just ordinary, fallible, people with human desires and needs, who could, like the characters of Philip K Dick whom they rather resemble, be encountered in the street tomorrow. The book is beautifully written, and is tightly constructed, if you see plot as something that grows out of characters, rather than something external, applied to them. Altogether, a masterpiece and at least as good as "Light".

Nova Swing is a book of remnants and reminders - a strange mix of Paul Auster, or perhaps the young Peter Ackroyd, one of the more human Big Concept guys - Alistair Reynolds, maybe - and something else, indefinable, a layer of surrealism like thin dry snow. The plot, such as it, concerns a tour guide to an eruption of Otherness called, mostly, the site, which is in some way important; a detective, who in some way is charged with protecting the site; and a woman who in some way is obsessed with the site; around the site, a world of decayed noirish cyberpunk, body mods, sentient code & all. Nothing is ever really explained; the guide, the detective, and the client may disappear, and then, later, may not come back, and it slowly becomes clear that the real story is about the characters who surround the central three; in various ways, the events of the story seem, with a human kindness rare in science fiction, to have set them free, as people who have lived in one way can suddenly be allowed to live another one, and better.Haunting.

Dissimilar to its predecessor 'Light' in pace and structure, this is a less spectacular but perhaps even greater delight. The characters and settings are vividly real, despite their pervasive strangeness: and the substantial lack of a conventional action plot/resolution feels just right in something so atmospheric. It's one of those rare books that I didn't want to end, and I would recommend it highly to anyone who enjoys a fine novel (whether sci-fi or otherwise) - but it's best enjoyed after first reading 'Light'.

I liked it, but will I read it again? Not sure.There's some continuity of characters and places with the first book in the trilogy; but no continuity of plot. If fact there's hardly any plot in this book at all. Nothing much seems to happen. Rather, it's a detailed life in the day of type description of how several people live their inter-locked lives in the shadow of an alien artifact.