The Centauri Device
Ratings2
Average rating1.5
15
Ratings2
Average rating1.5
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.
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A bleak, nihilistic, and dark satire on the space opera genre. The drug and violence fuelled excesses of William Burroughs, meet and corrupt, shades of Banks and Reynolds. The plot is weak, the characters shallow, and the (anti-)hero totally miserable and unlikeable. All of this buried in impenetrable, florid prose.
An SF classic? May have been when it was written in 1974, but now it's just wearisome.
Don't read this, unless you are particularly masochistic . Score 1.5
