Seeklight

Seeklight is a splendid debut by K.W. Jeter. Barry Malzberg wrote the introduction for Laser Books calling it one of the three or four best SF novels he has read from an emerging author. If you’ve read Malzberg, the aesthetic connection with Seeklight will be apparent within a few pages; both writers navigate that existential lattice concerned with the darker aspects of the human condition.

Rarely do first novels show this level of focus and intent. Clearly, Seeklight is a personal statement made by an author who had long been living next to his ideas and worldview before publishing.

The story follows Daenek, son of an assassinated and posthumously disgraced thane, living as a pariah in his village and marked for death at 17 by the new regent. The atmosphere is in the dying-earth tradition, but while landscapes and structures are withering, it’s the human spirit that is the fulcrum which breaks the world around. The environment is not so much an aesthetic choice as a mirror for internal desolation, patina-molded cities and souls that have given up without a fight.

Jeter populates this existential wasteland with some of the more unique and tamely bizarre creations I have come across in the genre. This is not a novel of ideas, but when the science fiction elements show face, it’s done with impressive originality. There are the Sociologists, angelic figures who descend upon random citizens to collect data for unknown purposes, and a mysterious syndicate of cabalistic robotic priests that roam either in detached peace or commit horrific acts of violence. The presence of these symbolic renderings transforms the novel from medieval fatalism into science fiction proper (with a touch of what Jeter would later deem steampunk), though Jeter keeps their true nature tantalizingly and effectively obscured.

Where Malzberg often pushes to the limits of what any person can reasonably handle, Jeter leaves it open to possibility. But he doesn’t fold this into some hero’s journey wrapped in a Christ complex or religious allegory. Instead, he offers a real-world diagnosis of why people accept their conditions, how they become stall-warted by the very systems that oppress them. The cure may lie not in heroic action but in the radical belief that life can change, if only you cared enough to change it.

Seeklight is entertaining, meaningful, and melancholic, while never taking cheap shortcuts. Even when Jeter decides to info-dump, he connects the dots with surprise and confident thematic development. Given this is only my first novel by Jeter, if he grows from here, and matures and refines his style, he will be a mainstay on my ever-growing bookshelf.