The Centauri Device

The jacket copy on the back of this book begins "Bastard son of a port whore ...," and gives an impression of this book's contents that is unusually accurate among 1970s SF paperbacks. Its setting is a twenty-fourth century in which an interstellar cold war is heating up, and the rival superpowers are both terrestrially-based: the Israeli World Government and the Union of Arabic Socialist Republics. Protagonist John Truck is an alienated loser, who the reader soon finds out is also descended from an alien survivor of human-perpetrated genocide. The "device" of the title is an enigmatic find from the ruined Centauran homeworld, which the agents of the competing powers each think will give them the edge. Other players in the game where show more Truck seems to be a pawn include a cabal of space anarchists led by an aesthete, an interstellar drug business and its kingpin, and the evangelical cult of the Openers, who have windows surgically installed to reveal their innards.

Although Harrison seems not to be especially proud of this early effort, saying it was from before he "learned to write," it still stands out as bucking the trends of space opera in interesting ways. The antihero John Truck is not too unusual for the new wave science fiction set in which Harrison participated. I enjoyed the surprising passel of Swinburne references, especially to Atalanta in Calydon, along with allusions to Huysmanns and other decadents. Admittedly, most of what Harrison does well in this book, he does again far better in the more recent Kefahuchi Tract novels. show less

[n.b. A ‘no star’ rating for books I review does not imply criticism—I rarely give ratings, as giving stars is an unhelpfully blunt instrument and all too often involves comparing apples with oranges.]

Harrison says he never much liked this book, but that it achieved what he had intended, which was ‘to take the piss out of’ certain tenets of SFF at the time: that the main character drives the action, that the universe is knowable, and the universe is anthropocentric.

'The Centauri Device' takes the piss and pours it all over the place. John Truck is the main character and never seems to know what is going on. He is dragged into the plot to get the device because he is half-Centauri, and he is manipulated, lied to, threatened, show more and generally kicked about by all political shades. He is not a hero at all, and he only reluctantly speaks for ‘all who breathe the air of tragedy’ when none on the political spectrum can offer anything else.

Women characters are hardly worth the effort, being limited to ‘port ladies’, Truck’s limp wife, and one-eyed Alice Gaw, a sort of pulp-punk Sister George. Everything in the worlds Truck encounters is compromised, vulgar, and demeaned. There is quite a bit of violence, in fact anything that is physical seems to be violent, or to invite violence, but the register in which everything is written is sophisticated and even, very unlike the heightened register (often involving very unlikely similes) of more contemporary works.

There is a very noir-ish, Tiger Lillies aesthetic and some great characters, including the full-blooded grotesque Grishkin, Truck’s friends Tiny—the ‘last great musician’, who incurs the wonderful characterisation of having ‘all the moral sensibility of a maggot in a cemetery’—and Fix the bo’sun.

Truck has no authority, no power, and seems to have no real aim in life except not to die. He is the grubbiest, most ramshackle, and most inept of Chosen Ones, but not without depth when pressed. Whatever meaning there might be lies in that response, and the ultimate decision about the deployment of the device is with Truck because of it. Even unreflective Truck, and the wretchedness experienced by those living on the abrasive edges of corrupt worlds, have an occasional desolate richness; not poetry but resonances of poetry in being both brief and illuminating: Truck recognising his fellow hustlers and losers “shivering with cold and fear of the long, incomprehensible future’, and his desolate struggle back to his ship, his encounter with the undramatic but profoundly alien Device.

'The Centauri Device' is a space opera (at the 'The Stars My Destination' end of the spectrum), but despite the drugs, the legions of dead bodies, and the spaceships, there are unexpected echoes—or, rather, adumbrations—of the alienating elegance of 'The Sunken Land Begins to Rise Again'. show less

Gritty, acerbic, and blancmange are all words that come to mind as I think back over this book. Although that last one's probably because I haven't had any coffee yet today.

An alien device is found on a planet whose inhabitants were almost entirely wiped out in a war with humanity, and the leaders of the two world superpowers believe it to be the key to their side gaining dominance. Unfortunately for them it can only be controlled by someone with the alien genetic code. Enter John Truck, the only living person they can find who has any of these alien genes, and a bit of a loser to boot.

And so we follow Captain Truck as he staggers, vomits, and haphazardly shoots his way around the galaxy, variously trying to run from the myriad factions show more that want him to use the device for them, and giving himself up to one of the factions just to remove the responsibility from himself.

Truck's not the kind of hero that it's easy to appreciate, but then I think that's the point: he is the downtrodden everyman, not Jack Bauer. Harrison's prose is certainly rollicking, and the story holds promise, but overall it just lacked that certain something to elevate it beyond pretty-good-ness. show less

Gritty, acerbic, and blancmange are all words that come to mind as I think back over this book. Although that last one's probably because I haven't had any coffee yet today.

An alien device is found on a planet whose inhabitants were almost entirely wiped out in a war with humanity, and the leaders of the two world superpowers believe it to be the key to their side gaining dominance. Unfortunately for them it can only be controlled by someone with the alien genetic code. Enter John Truck, the only living person they can find who has any of these alien genes, and a bit of a loser to boot.

And so we follow Captain Truck as he staggers, vomits, and haphazardly shoots his way around the galaxy, variously trying to run from the myriad factions show more that want him to use the device for them, and giving himself up to one of the factions just to remove the responsibility from himself.

Truck's not the kind of hero that it's easy to appreciate, but then I think that's the point: he is the downtrodden everyman, not Jack Bauer. Harrison's prose is certainly rollicking, and the story holds promise, but overall it just lacked that certain something to elevate it beyond pretty-good-ness. show less

I picked this up from the library because I'd heard it referred to as a classic of Sci-Fi. The writing is certainly a cut above, but the story, settings, language are pure 70's... and, to my taste, haven't aged well. The blurb on the front gives this much away:
"A last-chance loner from the back alleys of space hold the fate of the earth in his hands."
Well then.

I suppose... think "Escape from New York" but in space. And "Escape from New York" is a classic, too, in its way; but it is very much aged, and not entirely for the better.

The first Harrison novel I have been disappointed by. The author himself is on record as saying that this is probably his worst book, and he's right. A space opera with a hero who gets thrown from one chaotic scene to the next in search of a mysterious Device after a genocidal war, this was a turgid slog of a read. All the usual Harrison tropes are here but nothing seems to gel, to work. You end up not caring about any of the characters. I virtually forced myself to finish it which has not been the case with other Harrison stories.

Heaven knows why this was selected as part of the SF Masterworks series. It is a huge step down from the delights of Viriconium, The Course of The Heart and the Light Trilogy.

For completists only.

The Centauri Device is the third novel by English author [a:M. John Harrison|10765|M. John Harrison|https://d202m5krfqbpi5.cloudfront.net/authors/1277603037p2/10765.jpg].

I got halfway through this book and lost interest.

The main protagonist, John Truck, flops his way around the universe before being dragged into a conflict between the Earth's superpowers, Anarchists, a religious cult and several other groups. Written in the mid 1970s Truck comes across as the archetypical hippie. Drugs and mentioned throughout and this becomes extremely tiresome.

I'll not spoil the reason why all these groups want a piece of John but the clue is in the title of the book. The majority of the text is about John evading capture from one set of individuals show more while falling into the hands of another evil bunch. Villains conveniently appear and push John into the next chapter. Why? Because the author wants the book to progress, none of it seems natural and it's all very contrived.

I was first attracted to the novel as I like space operas but here the prose is too flowery (why use a short, punchy word when seventeen long words can be used instead?), the characters aren't particularly well fleshed out and the plot is really non-existent; it's just a series of plodding encounters over time. Personally, I like protagonists who are complex, multi-layered and have a well thought through backstory, whereas John is just a passive character. I think the book is making the point that ideologies can be warped and distorted until they ultimately become self-defeating and destructive. However, perhaps I'm wrong as because I just lost the will to keep on reading.

I guess it says something about the novel that perhaps the most significant detractor of the book is [a:M. John Harrison|10765|M. John Harrison|https://d202m5krfqbpi5.cloudfront.net/authors/1277603037p2/10765.jpg] himself who, in a 2001 interview with SF Site, described it as:

"the crappiest thing I ever wrote."

In summary, a stale, hollow and ultimately a joyless read. show less