Customer Reviews

A Different Light

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

I admit I'm not a fan of sci-fi and the first time I saw it, I was kind of ticked off by the cover. If it wasn't by Elizabeth A. Lynn, I'd have left it alone. But when I started reading it in the bookstore, I just HAD to take it home. It's a wonderful story of a painter, Jimson Alleca, who's fate is to die during a time when a being may achieve immortality. He may live for thirty more years if he stays in his world, but he longs for freedom and wishes to find his love, Russel O'Neill. And maybe, just maybe, he'll also find a cure for his sickness. A truly wonderful story that can only be written by Elizabeth A. Lynn. I read this almost everyday.

Unlike the other reviewer I am a regular reader of sf & f, especially feminist and/ or GLBT-themed sf & f. I love(d) this book!!! I loved it when I first bought it in the late 70's and it is not at all dated. (I re-read it last year and was touched and amazed and overjoyed all over again.) The love story, the space opera and the primary conflict between the two men is as real and vital now as it was when it was first written.

Elizabeth Lynn bring a poetry to the often hard-scrabble of science fiction. In a future near-perfect, renown artist Jimson Alleca suffers from a debilitating disease that forces him to remain planet-bound while his lover leaves to experience the different light. When Jimson received a post-card equivelant of a message, he elects to take his life into his own hands, travel off-planet. It is, for Jimson, the journey of a lifetime, as he explores "the hype" meets and learns from "spacers" and even manages to find his first love.

Lynn's prose has a soft elegance to it, flowing from metaphor and allusion into the reality of the surrounding science fiction world that seems so real and has so much depth. There always seems more to explore, more to see, and more to do.

i will not discuss ms lynn's writing skill: one page melts in the other and her style is always smooth, delicate, sober, her expressions deceivingly simple sometimes even lyrical. it is a writing made of small touches, light shades, always convincing if not always moving.

the problem here lies in the story: hard as i tried i could not get involved, i could not get to love her characters.
the main issue is that of a love sick young artist doomed by cancer to die early in a world where an intimidating science nearly always guarantees a healthy, long lasting life. this issue, if a bit cerebral, could in itself be touching but in this case it left me cold.
i wanted to feel for the main hero, his lost lover being another man should have helped me identifying, but i simply could not.

it seems to me ms lynn was absent minded while writing this story: while retaining her usual skill she was not and could not move.