The Centauri Device

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. There were obvious attempts and subtle satire, but it was a swollen tongue stuck through rotten teeth into a pimply cheek. The second half had marginally less blithering than the first but that hardly justified my not having abandoned this book. I didn't much care for it.