Blue Light - Hardcover

Mosley, Walter

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0316570982 ISBN 13: 9780316570985

Publisher: Little, Brown and Company, 1998

Synopsis

The human race has just begun. In the Bay Area in the mid-1960s, several people are struck by a cosmic blue light that quickens their DNA, causing them instantaneously to evolve far beyond the present state of the human race. They become the full actual

About this title

Review

Despite the success of his colour-coded Easy Rawlins series, Walter Mosley dares with Blue Light, to go where few mystery writers have gone before. The novel is pure (if not simple) science fiction, less evocative of Philip Marlow than Philip K. Dick. It begins during the 1960s, when flashes of extraterrestrial blue light enter the bodies of several Northern Californians. Those struck by the flashes immediately take on superhuman abilities. Mosley's narrator, Chance, is not himself a recipient of the heaven-sent beams, but after a blood transfusion from the leader of the Blues, his consciousness expands. The bi-racial, suicidal Thucydides scholar becomes a supernal historian of his new, blue-inflected peer group. He dreams of a "far-flung future, when science is not estranged from the soul" and where human beings will see the world with the purified vision of his enlightened brethren. Still, he is powerless in the face of the Gray Man--a vicious incarnation of evil who seems intent on wiping out the entire Blue population. Somber and violent, bizarre and oddly reverent, Blue Light marks a promising new direction for Mosley. What's more, the dangling threads at the end intimate a vast epic to come (Mosley has suggested that a trilogy awaits) and a literary challenge that's anything but easy.--Patrick O'Kelley

Review

?A mad jaunt into the fantastic - urban transcendentalism with a soundtrack by George Clinton

Jonathan Lethem ?A visionary meditation on spirituality, evil, race and the ultimate fate of mankind? New York Times ?Undeniable power. Everything - violence, consummate evil, angelic compassion, sex - is magnified with operatic intensity... Tight, tough and focused? Locus 'Blue Light will capture you before you know it, surprise you just as you think you know what sort of story it is and give you a hell of a ride through the recent past (Octavia E. Butler author of Kindred)

Edition details

• Publisher: Little, Brown and Company
• Publication date: 1998
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0316570982
• ISBN 13: 9780316570985
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 304