By 1974, when M. John Harrison dropped The Centauri Device on an unsuspecting literary world, nothing in sci-fi smelled worse than the astronaut adventure. More stale than an old, forgotten box of Space Food Sticks, these stories seemed trapped in a perpetual time warp, repeating the tired recipes of the Golden Age of Sci-Fi. After reading a few pages, I usually feel driven to put down these formula-driven books and proclaim, to whomever happens to be close enough to hear: "Houston, we definitely have a problem!"
Meanwhile reality had gone in a different direction by 1974—if aimlessness counts as a direction. The Apollo program had ended two years earlier, successfully transporting some cool photographs back to planet Earth, along with 842 pounds of rocks. Dreams of human exploration of the rest of the solar system and beyond, which had fueled thousands of visionary stories over the years, now seemed just that: dreams, empty and without substance. Shortly after Harrison published his novel, George Lucas would spend millions reinvigorating the space opera, but any shrewd observer could see that the sub-genre had turned into sheer escapism akin to a thrill park ride in a high tech amusement park.
Harrison himself had made his name as a critic of banal, formulaic science fiction, unsparing in his vitriol but bold enough to try his hand at reinventing the tired space opera. "No genre is beyond redemption," British sci-fi author Colin Greenland has noted, not even the astronaut adventure. In this regard, Greenland held up Harrison's The Centauri Device for particular praise as the "book I held in highest esteem….It's weird, it's fun, it's literate, it's humane, it's even political, and it's space opera." But he adds: "I once made the mistake of telling Mr. Harrison how much I was inspired by The Centauri Device . He looked decidedly affronted. ‘Well you shouldn’t be,’ he said truculently. ‘It’s a very bad book.’”
Yet The Centauri Device cannot be dismissed so glibly, even by its author. He may not have succeeded in revitalizing the space opera—as the mindless and endless stream of Star Wars books would soon prove—but he made a valiant effort to blaze a new trail. Few would imitate Harrison's initiative, but this for the simplest of reasons: who could?
To start, Harrison creates a protagonist, John Truck, who is neither hero nor antihero, but the greatest anomaly of them all, a sci-fi catalyst whose most salient traits are apathy, listlessness and passive acceptance of the status quo. Yet Truck somehow manages to parlay these qualities into galaxy-changing virtues. No, Harrison hardly invented the notion of the passive hero (see Hamlet , for the most famous example), but readers of genre fiction in general and outer space stories in particular, would rightly wonder whether the Prince of Denmark, or anyone imitating his indecision, might survive long on an intergalactic battlefield.
Truck makes his living running a low-level interstellar freight operation, but suddenly finds himself in the midst of a power struggle between warring factions. Each wants his cooperation in securing and activating a weapon invented by the Centaurans, a now extinct species killed in a genocidal war by human adversaries. The Centauri device, a mysterious sentient bomb with unfathomable properties, can only be controlled by someone with Centauran DNA. Truck is apparently the last person in the universe with some Centauran blood in his veins. He is, unwittingly, the indispensable man, and is forced to play a hand in this high stakes games despite his indifference to politics and military affairs.
He is, as noted above, an unsuitable hero by the traditional standards of sci-fi. But Harrison rejects other key aspects of the space opera tradition he inherited. A pacifist streak permeates The Centauri Device , and every ideology proffered as 'worth fighting for' in these pages is questioned and found wanting. The reader hoping to root for the 'good guys' against the 'bad guys' will struggle to find a cause worth supporting in this intergalactic struggle. Harrison provides us with a panoply of interests—socialist, free market, Israeli, Arab, human, non-human, religious, opportunist—and finds them all equally spurious in their claims and untrustworthy in their agendas. Harrison briefly wavers in his non-aligned status, and allows his readers to cheer on a group of aesthete anarchists, who intermittently emerge as combatants, and come as close to positive role models as you will find in this work. But this proves an illusory hope. Anarchists once again show that the only thing they can predictably deliver is….well, anarchy. Few of them emerge from this novel in one piece, or prove capable of winning peace.
Harrison seems on the brink of embracing nihilism as the central value of The Centauri Device . But gradually the reader comprehends a different agenda at work here, and it is neither left nor right, anarchic or nihilistic. Harrison actually takes on the most radical value of them all, namely anointing losers as winners. As the reader comes to learn, the Centaurans represent more than a historical lesson or technological McGuffin-makers in this book. They are patron saints of all the outcasts, drifters and victims in the universe. If Donald Fagen were around, he would call them Deacon Blues . But though they may have lost the war, and their very lives, perhaps they left something behind that will tip the balance of power.
Harrison has bit off more than a mouthful in undertaking such a self-cancelling adventure story. He struggles again and again to find ways of energizing the plot, and can hardly rely on his protagonist, who is a captive pawn and spectator throughout most of the novel. As a storyteller, Harrison will never put Heinlein, Asimov or Clarke out of business. But he compensates through the power of his prose and the zany qualities of his characters. Judged on a sentence by sentence basis, The Centauri Device ranks among the best written sci-fi books of its era. And a handful of secondary personages here—Dr. Grishkin the Opener and Himation, the conjurer-astronaut-anarchist—are as intriguing and provocative as anything you will find in genre fiction.
Despite these virtues, The Centauri Device often feels like a novella stretched out beyond its author's ability to support it. Harrison continually places his non-hero as a captive in the hands of incompetent wardens, who allow him to escape, only to be seized by another party. After the fifth or sixth time this happens, readers justifiably grow impatient with their passive protagonist, and even the juiciest metaphors and modifying clauses can't prevent a sense of ennui settling in over the story.
But the author—and perhaps the Centauri bomb itself—does hold some explosive power in reserve for the ending. Yes, our indifferent astronaut does finally make a bold move…and perhaps not the one we expected. Readers can decide for themselves whether this conclusion reinforces the themes of passivity and pacification that permeate the book, or simply shows them up as one more failed ideology.
Ted Gioia writes on music, literature and pop culture. His next book, a history of love songs, is forthcoming from Oxford University Press.