Allen Shull reviewed The Centauri Device by M. John Harrison
Between Bester, Delany, and Banks
4 stars
This book definitely has the anti-ideology of Bester's The Stars My Destination, complete with unlikeable loser of a main character, but also with the far-out, drugged-up, hardscrabble technicolor of Delany's spacescapes, especially dock towns. Certainly I see the influence of this novel on Iain M. Banks's Culture series, not merely for the flash of the writing style (vocabulary, scenes, and dialogue) and the gotta-get-there drive of the plot, but also for the way the narrative plays with our expectations, subverting and confounding the reader.
