re:mote voices

Title: The Centauri Device
Author: M. John Harrison
Publisher: Gollancz

The SF and Fantasy Masterwork series from Gollancz strives to keep what some consider to be the most important works from each of the genres in print. With those series there is some cross over, M. John Harrison being one of those handful of authors who have novels in both series. In the Fantasy Masterworks, Harrison has Virconium, the collection of his 4 Virconium novels. While in the SF Masterworks we have this novel, The Centauri Device.

John Truck is a loser. The son of a port whore. An ex-mercenary. An ex-drug dealer. Through his experiences he has some how managed to buy his own spaceship, so that he is now a captain, carrying cargo all over the galaxy. But even having managed to raise himself up to these dizzy heights - John Truck is a loser. And he is now the most wanted man in the universe.

In the past there was a war between the Earth and the residents of Centauri VII. The Centaurans were pretty much annihilated, the refugees scattered across the galaxy, absorbed by the human race. But they left behind a mysterious device, which only a Centauran can operate. John Truck is so unlucky that it just so happens he appears to be last Centauran in the galaxy, a half-breed like him the best that can be found. But what is the device? The IWG think it is a massive bomb, so dangerous that the Centaurans decided to face genocide rather than use it. The UASR believe that it is ultimate propaganda machine, while the Church of the Openers believes that it is God. As for the anarchists, they would just rather that no one got their hands on the Centauri Device.

John Truck staggers around the galaxy. Falling into the clutches of each side, becoming increasingly convinced that there is no one sane left. Just a spacer, a loser, he has no idea of what to do, has no idea what the device actually is. Thus he can only hope to keep ahead, keep getting the breaks that free him each time someone catches up with him. But, undoubtedly, events are going to reach a climax, on the surface of a burnt out Centauri VII, wading through the ash of his people, his birthright awaits him.

From the end of the Second World War to the fall of the Soviet Union there will have been dozens, perhaps hundreds of science fiction and non-science fiction novels that have revolved around the Cold War tensions. The Centauri Device is not one of those novels, Harrison pitching a different future, based on a current and lasting conflict. The Centauri Device was first published in 1975, where the conflict between Israel and Palestine was probably at its peak, compared to now. But there are certainly still troubles there, and the Middle East is still a place of conflict as the current war in Iraq shows. Reading this novel at the time that Ridley Scott's Kingdom Of Heaven is in the cinemas, depicting trouble in the Middle East from 1000 years ago.

So perhaps it shouldn't be a surprise that Harrison uses this conflict as his launching point for world powers? On the one side the Israeli World Government took over West European territory, and North and South American territory. While the Union of Arab Socialist Republics swept out of the Arab countries across the Middle East, Asia and Eastern Europe. Although with this comes one of the most important points for me, the idea that in being able to absorb all these other states/religions to spread a Cold War across the galaxy each side loses those particular properties that made them who they were in the first place.

The Centauri Device is the second novel I have read by M. John Harrison, following his recent return to science fiction in the form of Light after some years off. Having read Light, and some of the stories in his Travel Arrangements, it is clear that Harrison is a slippery and insinuating writer. His words get inside your hear, even when he appears to be going into almost incoherent and intangible territory there is still something striking about how he phrases his madness.

Even so, The Centauri Device is likely one of the most bleak and grimy novels I have ever read. All his characters here are losers or burnt out haggard politicos driven by a consuming need to forward their own cause. Planets filled with dealers and whores, everywhere burnt out industrial ports - abraded hinterlands. Where the floating, frozen corpses mark space battles; the planet/device at the novels core is a memorial to genocide. Where our hero's friends are a dyslexic, violent dwarf, a nostalgia-ridden musician, and his wife is mutilated and neurotic. An oppressive read, the darkness at its core I suspect reflecting the idea of how political rhetoric burns out and the mutually assured destruction that coils through Cold Wars.