When mystery writers decide to stake out new territory, they don't tend to range too far afield. Not so with Walter Mosley, who sets himself on an entirely new path with Blue Light, his first science fiction novel.
Blue Light is the story of an unearthly beam of energy -- a literal "color out of space" -- that, according to Chance, aide and biographer of the Blue prophet Ordé, struck the Earth in the late 1960s. On its path from the stars to the ground, the Light touched random individuals in its path, changing them into prophets of its cargo of information.
Of course, most new religions need traitors. In the case of the Blues, the people transformed by the data infusion, the snake in the garden is Grey Redstar. Unlike the rest of the Blues, who embody a fusion of human and alien insights, the Grey Man was already dead when the Light passed into him, and once reanimated takes it as his mission to destroy the rest of those touched by the beam. His murderous confrontation with a congregation of Blues and their human initiates closes out the first part of the book.
The second part of the book deals with the investigation into the aftermath of the Grey Man's attack. Interestingly, Mosley doesn't frame this as a question of proving that "the truth is out there" -- instead, he's concerned with how the searchers for truth become drawn into the Blues' orbit, where even second-hand exposure to the Light transforms them into "halflings."
Then, in the final third of the story, Mosley deals with the flight of the survivors of the Grey Man's assault, the completion of the evolution of the Blues and halflings, their literal and figurative passions, and their final confrontation with the being who would be Death.
Heavenly blessed and worldly wise
Blue Light is not about alien abduction, but rather alien induction. Rather than taking those it strikes away from the world, it adds something to them, infusing them with with understanding, purpose and power.
In attempting to explain what she has become, one of the Blues says of the human condition, "We're just empty husks, like, waiting for the light of life to enter us." At the moment of their epiphany, the Blues become both fully human and completely transcendent, the participants in an extraterrestrial Pentecost.
Christian themes abound throughout the book. The novel represents "The Gospel According to Chance," an apostolic account of the Blue experience told by a witness to the events.
Like other halflings, narrator Chance is a disciple of the Light, but the grace he receives is intermediate in form -- for him, the gifts of communion are through a sharing of blood rather than a direct connection to the divine.
Mosley himself is not only a skilled writer, but an uncommonly intelligent and thoughtful one. His descriptions of the Blue Light and the guiding "consciousness" behind it are especially well handled, being written mostly in the metaphoric language of parables as though ordinary language can't fully contain the message.
Setting the story in San Francisco in the late 1960s is another masterstroke on Mosley's part. Amid the sound and fury of the counterculture, the Blue Light super-culture seems like nothing more than another fringe group. Later, the sect's disappearance goes all but unnoticed amid the debris of an entire generation playing at enlightenment, leaving Mosley free to explore the next phase of human evolution outside the context of everyday history.
Despite the author's careful structure and craft, this exploration is not without its flaws, particularly in the last third of the book.
As Chance and his companions make their way to sanctuary, Blue Light falls prey to the fundamental weakness of the Quest story and, like many battles against dark overlords from Sauron to the Wicked Witch of the West, the Blues' last stand against the Grey Man ends up feeling anticlimactic. True, this victory comes at a cost, but the price seems a bargain rate for overcoming the darkness.
Otherwise, Mosley's version of this age-old story is compellingly written. He deserves credit for not only trying something new and different, but also for turning in a story that transcends novelty. Blue Light shines on its own merits.
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