Read for the Hard-Core Sci-Fi Challenge, the Space Opera Challenge, the SF Masterworks Challenge, and the Science Fiction Masterworks Book Club here on Goodreads.This crazy book reads like a combination of Philip K. Dick, Alfred Bester, and Douglas Adams. Part madcap comedy of the absurd, part noir, and part epic space opera, this book has you laughing at the protagonist in one scene, crying for him the next.John Truck is a space trucker who's always been down on his luck. He has a checkered pas...

A jumbled, confused, confusing, excessively overwritten piece in yet another dive port town on the edge of another nowhere, this time laced with drugs with vast reams of complex names without any context that after a short while I skipped over as meaningless. Character is suborned to creation of ghoulish atmosphere, energies (of what must be a smart mind) dissipated in favour of cramming in as much clutter as in the imagination of a delirious inmate. We don't really know much about this loser, a...

Gritty, acerbic, and blancmange are all words that come to mind as I think back over this book. Although that last one's probably because I haven't had any coffee yet today.An alien device is found on a planet whose inhabitants were almost entirely wiped out in a war with humanity, and the leaders of the two world superpowers believe it to be the key to their side gaining dominance. Unfortunately for them it can only be controlled by someone with the alien genetic code. Enter John Truck, the onl...

One of Harrison's early science fiction works, you can see glimpses here of what he accomplishes in Light. Includes one of my top 10 favorite opening lines of all time: "It was St. Crisipn's ve on Sad al Bari IV when Captain John Truck, impelled by something he was forced to describe to himself as 'sentiment,' decided to visit the Spacer's Rave, on the cornoer of Proton Alley and Circuit (that chilly junction where the higher class of port lady goes to find her customers)."

DNF at 25%. Sub-PKD nonsense.

I'm afraid that I didn't much like this book. It is written in a style that doesn't appeal to me, it contains characters who I couldn't care less about, and I found the plot to be wafer thin. All in all, there's not a lot going on for me there.The story portrays a future in which I wouldn't want to be. It's grimy and gritty, full of voracious characters who will eat up anyone who might help them to get ahead. I don't like this type of science fiction. I like my future to be optimistic. The best

This is my first time reading M. John Harrison. It may be my last. I get that it’s heralded as a pioneering and influential “anti-space-opera”, and there’s little doubt Harrison has a kind of lyricism to his writing. But for me, the latter really gets in the way of the story – which is not a good thing when yr describing a universe 600 years in the future. It’s a shame too because the story – in which space captain John Truck, the only man alive who can operate the title device, is being pursued...

Purple prose and a listless, largely unsympathetic protagonist make a surprisingly action-packed political thriller cum space opera an unexpectedly difficult read. Additionally, I'm not sure what message I'm meant to take home, other than ideology and individuals in power do not serve the people at large. The final 30p or so are completely baffling. I here-by formally give up on Harrison SF novels.

A book of such concentrated grittiness and scuzziness you feel you missed a bath reading it. A proto-cyberpunk, Bester inspired space opera that Harrison turns into a prose poem and a long shriek of despair. Bizarre and dark, this is not one of his best but fans of his and of Banks and Reynolds will find it worth a look.

The Centauri Device by M. John Harrison is not my cup of tea. Harrison was a force in the new wave of science fiction. I like the golden age. The Centauri Device has been called 'proto-cyberpunk'. I prefer literary. The Centauri Device seemed to me to be a second rate pastiche of the styles of Philip K Dick, William S Burroughs, and maybe Douglas Adams. It occasionally crawled into the light of cogency only to stagger and stumble back into the garbage strewn dark alleys of scrambled imagery. The...

"The reader must judge for himself." A final insult, from a vile, beautiful, gross, nihilist book that rejects everything about its own existence - it rejects science fiction, it rejects the future, the present, the past. Its hero is characterized by his indecisiveness and lack of character. Its moral is that no ideology can or will stop the suffering. Its moral is that the sufferers will seek out their own doom. It speaks to ghosts as a ghost.This book gets five stars for being something at war...

On the face of it, this is a science fiction novel about the legacy of an alien device discovered after they had been wiped out by the forces of earth.Underlying that is a story of a man caught up in a whirlwind of conflicting ideologies and grasps for power.I found the writing style quite disengaging and abrasive. I was annoyed by the use of psudo intellectual metaphores. But it picked up a bit towards the end and all in all, wasn't a bad book.

This is a SF Masterwork?An odd thing happened during the first few hours in Stomach. John Truck was later to regard it as symbolical (to the extent that he could regard anything in so astract a way - it came in the end to little more than an itch down among the sordid experiential and intellectual gleanings of a spacer's skull), but at the time it filled him with a peculiar horror.The florid, overwritten, prose with its snide contemptuous sub-clauses completely fails to disguise the almost total...

I don't know exactly what it is that draws me to Harrison's writing so strongly. I think it's a mix of his prose and his take on the nature of mankind. As with Viriconium, Light, and Nova Swing this sci-fi Materworks novel has an excessively dark and some would say depressing, yet entirely compelling, take on the nature of man. Harrison paints a somewhat sympathetic picture of the lower class- which he always portrays as hopelessly disposable, in their own eyes and the eyes of those in power, an...

I couldn't get on with this, I found I had to read quite a lot of sentences over and over a few times. I can't put my finger on it but maybe someone else who has read it and has more knowledge of grammar than me would be able to point out why the construction of the sentences are so frustrating at times to read. The language didn't flow for me. Like a car stalling. It felt constantly like the words were going somewhere and then it would come abruptly to a halt. I found it hard to follow who was

This little chesnut was almost hilariously bad at times. From beginning to end this whole SF circus seems intent on pushing you away from it at every turn. It's full of over-crowded and smugly written metaphoric descriptions of characters and locations that stop the (thin, thin, thin) plot dead in its tracks. The way he writes action scenes is even confusing in this book, forcing you to re-read a sentence because you realized what you thought was just another confusing description of the charact...

Several things I read about Harrison's book described it as proto-cyberpunk. I thought of it as sf noir, which come to think of it maybe makes it proto-cyberpunk. The future Harrison describes is one dark place. Escalations of the Arab/Israeli conflict has divided the Earth, which is no longer hardly worth visiting, between the two forces. Other planets offer their own special hells, often little more than spaceports and port cities filled with junkies and prostitutes. John Truck, our hero, has

The Centauri Device is a bitter anti-space opera and a vital precursor to cyberpunk. Important reading for anyone interested in sf.The plot concerns the voyages of Captain Truck as he shambles around the galaxy being pursued by military superpowers. The latter convince the former to help find the title's ancient superdevice. In the end (view spoiler)[and after much suffering Truck finds the device, then uses it to destroy the Earth and nearby stars (hide spoiler)].There's a lot going on in Centa...

A decent but flawed science fiction novel. I thought it was worth reading but not especially remarkable. The Centauri Device is a classic McGuffin used to drive the seemingly arbitrary plot involving the everyman protagonist John Truck and a lot of paper thin characters. There are influences from decadent literature and William Burroughs and affinities with his friend Michael Moorcock. There are some great images and some great flourishes of prose. I thought the Openers religious sect was quite

Dear God this was difficult to get through.It was just... so incredibly boring.And I get that it was a Sci-fi, but nothing about this universe was really explained it just sort of was in a really annoying way where the author used weird words and phrases and you just sort of had to nod along like you had a clue what was going on.Which brings me to the plot of 'WTF is happening?! No one knows!'. It was a clusterfuck. The main character passed out basically at the end of every chapter and overall