A Different Light

Elizabeth A. Lynn

Completed 4/17/2018, Reviewed 4/18/2018

3 stars

This book was written in 1978.  It was at the forefront of LGBTQ science fiction in that it depicted a relationship between men without much fanfare or sensationalism.  It was so celebrated in its time, a small chain of bookstores was named after it.  It’s a short book, rather light on plot.  Its strength is in the prose and the relationships between the characters.  It’s one of the few books I wish was a little longer, with more time spent on the characters. 

Jimson is an artist, one of the most renowned in the known galaxy.  He lives in a future where cancer has been eradicated, except for him.  If he stays on his home planet, he could live another twenty years.  If he leaves, without access to his needed medication, he’d only have about a year to live.  But he wants to see other worlds, experiencing them in a different light, that is, the light from different suns.  He also wants to find love, particularly his lover of fourteen years ago, Russell.  Now a spaceship captain, Russel finds Jim, and Jim begs him to take him on his next adventure.  Together with a small crew of two others, they go on a mission to retrieve a beautiful mask from a distant planet. 

Jimson is bisexual.  He’s currently having a relationship with Leiko, a woman who is also a starship navigator.  She knows Jim is looking for Russell.  When Russel finds Jim and puts together a crew, he brings Leiko on as the ship’s navigator.  He also brings on Ysao as the engineer, who Russell also had a relationship with.  That’s what makes the book’s relationships so interesting.  They are not actually love triangles, but rather they build on the relationships they already had.  It’s also not really a romantic novel, just as it’s not a full blown space opera.  It’s sort of a light combination of the two.

I wished the book was longer.  At 169 pages, the adventure that the four of them go on seems more like an episode in a larger novel rather than a plot to support a whole book.  I think that if the author had spent more time developing the space adventure, it could have been a better longer book.  Instead, what we get are almost a series of vignettes rather than a continuous tale.  One thing that threw me while reading was that Jim’s location changes between chapters and the succeeding chapter doesn’t really give you any indication that the location has changed until you are a bit into it.  So for a while, at the beginning of each chapter, I was confused as to where Jim actually was, on his home planet, on Nexus, on the spaceship.  While I eventually caught on as to where the characters were, I thought the chapter transitions could have been a lot smoother.

I liked the book.  I wanted to love it because it is considered a classic in the LGBTQ world.  I only give the book three stars out of five, which means good.  I think it would have been a lot better if the author spent more time and wrote more words.   I think she’s a good writer.  I did enjoy the prose.  I just wanted to spend more time with the characters and go on more adventures with them.