M. Harrison: THE CENTAURI DEVICE

But admit also that while he found life unpleasant, he found death worse. He loathed killing and conscious hurt, hypocrisy and cant, and the glib lip-service solution of human misery provided by ideology — but could find no means to articulate that loathing. This most honest of dishonesties could only find its expression in surliness, in bravado, in a constant search for impermanent oblivion. He had in fact, despite it all, innocence. Only that innocence or Grace made his gesture possible: only innocence can ever make such gestures possible, or acceptable.

Did he see his action as a belated revenge for the Centauri atrocity? Was he simply disgusted by the irrelevance to reality of the politics of his time? He has been cast in both these roles in previous accounts, and both are forceful human activators. Again, though: a more simple, direct revenge for the killings he had seen or taken part in during the last few weeks of his life may have motivated him — or he may simply have triggered the Device accidentally, while delirious from the injuries he received in the Gottingen early-warning station.

There are even grounds for that peculiar and poetic myth of the spaceport subculture — the belief that John Truck destroyed Earth as a proxy of the 'new Centaurans,' those fabulous underground denizens of the dockland slums and the dyne fields, who will someday emerge as the true inheritors of the Galaxy. The reader must judge for himself.

M. John Harrison was born in 1945. His first story appeared in 1966, and he subsequently became closely involved in the magazine New Worlds during the late sixties, when it was under the editorship of Michael Moorcock. As well as writing stories he also wrote criticism for the magazine, and spent some time as it literary editor. He first published novel was The Committed Men (1971). The Pastel City was the first of his books about Virconium, and he revisited the city several times during the eighties. His fifth book, In Virconium, was shortlisted for the Guardian Fiction Prize and his sixth, Climbers, won the Boardman Tasker Award in 1989. In 1999 he received the Richard Evans Award. He has written for several periodicals including the Spectator, and currently reviews new fiction for the TLS.