A Different Light

By Elizabeth A. Lynn

Book Overview

In a future world, cancer has been all but eradicated. Jimson Alleca can live another 20 years with drugs and a peaceful lifestyle -- if he stays in space-normal. But he's willing to risk it all to make the jump into the Hype, the shimmering "not space" for one year among the stars. From two-time World Fantasy Award Winner Elizabeth A. Lynn.

• Format: Mass Market Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0441007902
• ISBN13: 9780441007905
• Release Date: December 2000
• Publisher: Ace Books
• Length: 183 Pages
• Weight: 0.25 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.6" x 4.2" x 6.9"

Customer Reviews

A Different Light is Beautiful Science Fiction

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.

A book so good a chain of bookstores was named after it!

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.

Touching sci-fi story

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.