Product Description

John Truck was to outward appearances just another lowlife spaceship captain. But he was also the last of the Centaurans - or at least, half of him was - which meant that he was the only person who could operate the Centauri Device, a sentient bomb which might hold the key to settling a vicious space war. M. John Harrison's classic novel turns the conventions of space opera on their head, and is written with the precision and brilliance for which is famed.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #254297 in Books
• Published on: 2000-07-13
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 208 pages

About the Author
SALES POINTS * #30 in the Millennium SF Masterworks series, a library of the finest science fiction ever written. * 'M. John Harrison is a blazing original . . . a great imaginer and an extraordinary writer' Clive Barker * 'No one can use words like M. John Harrison' Michael Marshall Smith * 'A Zen Master of Prose' Iain Banks * 'I worship the work of M. John Harrison' Pat Cadigan

Customer Reviews

A lamb in wolf's clothing...
I must disagree with all of my fellow reviewers! This is, without any doubt on my part, the worst book, out of a dozen or so, I have read in this series so far. Being fairly well read in SF, I was a little surprised to find the name of an author completely unknown to me herein. If this is the best of his work, I certainly have no wish to read any more.

Far from 'empathizing' with his characters, I found almost all, at best, unengaging, and, at worst, actively repellent. Being a huge fan of Iain M. Banks, I am unable to find any comparison between this work & his own. I am at a loss as to why he should apparently admire this dreadful book.

"...never verbose or pretentious..."? Au contraire, it is never anything else, and the prose is empty and meaningless, when it is not utter rubbish. It puts me in mind of the archetypical Main Street of a Western film set, where the buildings are merely facades with nothing behind them. At worst, he describes a room as 'frugal & austere' and then procedes with 'little chintzy curtains, a stained wooden floor and carpets of Turkey' Chintz curtains - frugal? Turkish carpets - austere? Uh, I think not!

The book is riddled with clumsy deus ex machina, one of my pet hates. The 'hero' is moved smoothly from chapter to chapter, not because he would naturally do so, but because people (usually one 'villain' or another) conveniently turn up, for no apparent reason other than that the author needs them to do so. He could easily have suggested, for instance, that the various groups pursuing Truck had bugged his clothing, but no, he seems more concerned with his florid phrases. Characters, particularly the military, behave in a singularly stupid fahion, because the author wishes them to do so. One group in the book has conveniently 'found' some alien ships in deep space & have, apparently, easily been able to utilise them (because the plot requires it). Speaking of which, Mr Harrison's grasp of military tactics & the advance of technology is pathetic - he describes the culminating space battle, in unlikely terms, as though it were a WWI dogfight! If it were written in the 40's it would be a poor effort, as it was written in the 70's it is simply woeful. Thankfully, he leaves the hard science of how things work very, very vague, since what little he does say suggests a surfeit of flowery language & a deficit of any scientific knowledge at all.

From first to last, this is a pitiful effort. If I may alliterate, this is poor pulp packaged in pretentious prose. It seems to me as if, throughout the entirety of the book, the author is crying "look what wonderful phrases I can write!" The phrases aren't wonderful, and there is nothing else to the book. As my title says, a lamb in wolf's clothing, it should never, in my opinion, have got anywhere near a 'masterworks' series.

Masterwork????
I got the distinct impression whilst reading this book that Harrison would never knowingly use one word when he could think of 17. I rather suspect that he had recntly taken shares in a company who's major product was a thesaurus.

OK. I didn't like the book. I haven't liked a couple of others in the series, but this is the first that I really felt was poor. none of the characters come across as anything other than cardboard cutouts, and it is rather hard to care what, if anything, happens to any of them. In many ways, the shame is that they fail to all die 100 pages earlier.

There are good elements to the story. The actual plot, in it's summarised version, is quite interesting (shame that it has so little to do with the story, then - the last 20 pages or so are used to dispose of a plot for which he couldn't be bothered to think of a conclusion). The portrayal of a grimy, unpleasant world is, in places, quite evocative, and reminiscent of Bladerunner.

But his desire to show off his vocabulary, and to shoe-horn the story into set pieces where he can do so, heavily detracts from the novel. His characters are uninteresting, and Truck doesn't even work well as an anti-hero.

One of the quotes on the blurb on the back of the book reads "No one uses words like M. John Harrison." For this, I am extremely grateful.

Be warned!
If you were introduced to this author by his later books avoid this one, which is like a bad parody of a Star Wars film. I read M John Harrison's reviews of Amis, Updike and so on in the Times Literary Supplement, then the witty, intelligent short story he published there in 1999. Since then I've enjoyed Travel Arrangements, The Course of the Heart and, above all, the amazing Climbers. These novels and short stories are true and real; but The Centauri Device is the kind of silly, deliberately grating thing a teenager might write--someone old enough to know better but not old enough to do better. I was terribly disappointed.