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''The Centauri Device'' is the third novel by English author M. John Harrison. The novel, originally conceived as an "anti-space opera" would ultimately go on to make a major contribution to revitalising the subgenre and influencing the works of later authors such as Iain M. Banks and Alastair Reynolds. ==Outline== Harrison has said that the book breaks what were then the central tenets of space opera, namely that the protagonist plays an active role in driving the plot forward, that the universe is comprehensible to humans and that the universe is anthropocentric.〔(【引用サイトリンク】 the centauri device )〕 These preconceptions were still common in the more literary space operas of the time, such as Samuel R. Delany's ''Nova'' (which Harrison described as "a waste of time and talent") and, in terms of tone, Harrison's novel more closely hews to the uncoventional genre-bending of Alfred Bester's ''The Stars My Destination'' and ''The Paradox Men'' by Charles L. Harness, with the bleak cosmic outlook being influenced by Barrington J. Bayley's ''The Star Virus''. The viewpoint character, John Truck, is a passive hero, a space captain in the year 2367 who ships drugs when he can find them and legitimate cargo when he cannot. The twentieth century is long forgotten and misremembered, with Leonid Brezhnev and Richard Nixon described as "lords" and Hermann Göring as an artist. The dyne-field connects planets and yet seems to merge them, the decayed industrial wasteland "Carter's Snort" in Britain merges with the slums of Junk City on Avernus. These worlds are stagnant, controlled by corrupt politics, organised crime and the bizarre "Opener" religion, who see "honesty of bodily function () the sole valid praise of God." These landscapes are Truck's natural home and a hiding place from General Alice Gaw of the Israeli World Government and Colonel Gadaffi ben Barka of the United Arab Socialist Republics. (True to the strong vein of Anarchism in Harrison's work, neither of these political entities resemble their twentieth century counterparts.) Truck is being hunted because of his ancestry, as he is half-Centauran (the rest of his race having been killed by human bombing some decades earlier) and the only person who can activate the newly unearthed Centauri Device. The UASR want the device as they believe it to be a useful propaganda tool, the Openers believe it to be God, the Aesthete Anarchists (an exuberant civilization of spacefarers who travel the void in spaceships named after works of art) do not know what it is but want to possess it anyway while the World Government have correctly surmised that it is a bomb. As the Device is useless without Truck all four factions try to hunt him down. Unable to hide, he tries to fight but the forces are prepared to kill those around him. In his desperation, he takes the only step open to him and activates the devices, destroying himself, the Solar System and the Alpha Centauri system in a Hypernova. The epilogue is designed to distance the reader from the text still further, reducing the events of the book to nothing more than "a dramatised account" and offering a variety of theories on the matter, mostly, it admits, based on nothing more than guesswork. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「The Centauri Device」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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