Elizabeth Lynn: A Different Light

Elizabeth Lynn's 1978 novel A Different Light is science fictional in form and content, but it is at its core a novel about the artistic vision.

Jimson Alleca is one of the great artists of his time. His work is shown and sold across the known galaxy, but he is trapped on his home planet. In a future where almost all physical illness is treatable and people can live for hundreds of years, Jimson is dying from a rare incurable cancer - one that will almost certainly mutate and kill him even faster if he tries to travel in hyperspace ("the Hype").

Eventually his yearning to see and create art in the light of a different sun leads him to take that risk and to make a new, if temporary, home for himself on Nexus - where he is also reunited with his former lover, Russell, now a starcaptain known as Pirate. Russell had been hired by a wealthy art collector to traverse a dangerous section of the Hype and steal an artifact from a world unlisted on any starmap. Jimson decides to go with him and his crew, even though the adventure will kill him.

Lynn's ability to put visual art and the sight that inspires it into words is remarkable, and the story she tells about art, love, longing and identity is a powerful one.