The Centauri Device (Millennium SF Masterworks S)

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.returnreturnHarrison 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. returnreturn'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, 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. returnreturnWomen 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. returnreturnThere 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. returnreturnTruck 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. returnreturn'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'.