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标题：'Light is letting-through': reading M. John Harrison's Light and Heidegger's The Essence of Truth
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作者：James Holden
期刊名称：Writing Technologies
电子版ISSN：1754-9035
出版年度：2009
卷号：2
期号：2
出版社：Nottingham Trent University
摘要：In this essay I want to offer a reading of a key contemporary sciencefiction novel, M. John Harrison’s Light (2002). More specifically, I want to focus on the many descriptions of light and enlightenment in this text. These beautiful passages form an integral part of the plot – they are part of both its speculation on quantum computation and its depiction of a peculiar galactic landscape. They also reflect back upon the psychology of the protagonists that occupy this space. There is, though, more than simple story-telling going on in these sections. This science-fiction novel cannot help but draw upon a tradition of similar images of light in literature, philosophy and religion. In the following argument I want to read the text against the grain by exploring the extent to which its images can be read alongside, against and through the analysis of light provided by Martin Heidegger in his work The Essence of Truth (delivered as a series of lectures, winter semester 1930-1931; first published 1988) and elsewhere.