1

Form and Content in The Centauri Device

Rjurik Davidson

Introduction: the New Wave, M. John Harrison and The Centauri Device
During the sixties and seventies M. John Harrison brought to speculative fiction a formal and
stylistic innovation in tune with the aims of the British New Wave. More than simply a literary
movement, the New Waves – both British and American – were part of the political
counterculture that sought to break the boundaries of technocratic and reified thought and art,
that tried to develop new forms and modes of perception. Although they had their own discrete
internal laws and emphases, the New Waves were part of a ground swell of artistic and cultural
innovation that included psychedelic rock, free and fusion jazz, innovations in theatre and new
forms of writing, including the New Journalism. To fully understand the British New Wave as a
movement one must set it against the background of political and cultural radicalism, typified in
England by the “London Underground” scene which, in some form or another, combined a
number of radical tendencies – political, social, cultural – for at least ten years.1 New Worlds, a
hitherto-conventional sf magazine, rapidly transformed under Michael Moorcock’s editorship
into an ambitious vehicle for a new literary avant-garde emerging within and against sf.
Moorcock aimed to revolutionise both science fiction and literary fiction through the destruction
of boundaries between the two, a task that included liberating science fiction from previous
taboos, traditions and norms. His first editorial proclaimed that New Worlds would publish “a
kind of sf which is unconventional in every sense”.2 It was intended, Moorcock later explained,
to “attempt a cross-fertilisation of popular sf, science and the work of the literary and artistic
avant garde”3 and to attack “the ‘literary establishment’ as well as social institutions and
scientific orthodoxy”.4
According to Harrison, “The New Worlds idea, or my version of it, overtook me
completely. I became immediately, completely and totally committed to it”.5 Following an urge
“less to transgress boundaries than insult them, in the medical sense”,6 he took the New Wave’s
critical elements and, in his fiction, made them his own. During the seventies he tackled a series
of major “speculative” forms – the archetypically British post-apocalyptic novel in The
Committed Men (1971), the heroic fantasy in The Pastel City (1971) and the space opera in The
Centauri Device (1974) – and tried to rebuild them. This essay will focus on the last of these,
exploring not only the difficulty of the task Harrison set himself but also how formal and stylistic
innovations represent different social or ideological content, different perceptions of the world.
The New Waves precipitated a profound shift in sensibilities and priorities within sf away
from the forms of technocratic liberalism that to a large extent underpinned the Golden Age
(already a step away from the pulp space opera of E.E. “Doc” Smith), with its visions of
humanity’s scientific and technological progress from the suburbs to the stars. Gone were the
two-dimensional, puzzle-solving, untroubled individualistic doers of an Asimov or Heinlein.
Gone, too, was the equation of humanity with a discernible and definable “good”. And gone was
the sense of a stable, empirical world, easily and rationally understood by “science”. These
elements, the ideological underpinnings of the Golden Age space opera, were America’s coded
images of itself; and, as post-war certainties came apart under pressure from the radical upsurges
of the sixties, space opera’s creative exhaustion indexed the crisis in American ideology.
The major precedent to The Centauri Device was Samuel R. Delany’s Nova (1968),
which also attempted a reconstruction of the space opera by rephrasing it within an American
New Wave sensibility – literary experimentation, marginalised characters, concerns with culture,
 2

philosophy and language.7 Superficially, The Centauri Device might be taken to resemble Nova:
both authors are self-consciously stylists; both at times allow the language to overwhelm the
structure of their work; both share an expansive romanticism that is characteristic of the “long
sixties”,8 that period of “anti-disciplinary protest”9 spanning roughly 1958 to 1974.
The most rounded of Delany’s early novels, Nova was a science-fictional rewriting of the
grail quest. The story follows Captain Lorq Von Ray’s efforts to fly into a collapsing Nova, and
from there to scoop Illyrium, the most powerful of chemical elements. Von Ray exemplifies
Delany’s stylish outsiders:

Someone had tried to hack the face open. The scar zagged from the chin, near the cusp of
heavy lips, rose through the cheek muscles – the yellow eye miraculously alive – and cut
the left brow; where it disappeared into red, Negro hair, a blaze of silkier yellow flamed.
The flesh pulled into the scar like beaten copper into a vein of bronze.10

His scar symbolises his spiritual state and singles him out as driven, damaged and different.
Displayed like a badge, it is a sign, a glamour. Stylishly self-assertive, Von Ray is an expression
of the identity politics emerging in the specifically American counterculture in which Delany
participated;11 but regardless of whether or not Nova succeeded in rebuilding space opera as a
form capable of housing countercultural aesthetics and radical identity politics, Harrison found it
“highly unsatisfying”, arguing that “however finely realised, [it] is bedded in the genre’s most
stifling traditions”.12
If Nova is comfortable with the space opera form, as Harrison suggests, The Centauri
Device is not. One reason for this lies in the precise historical moments of their composition:
Nova at the height of the sixties, The Centauri Device at the very end of the “long sixties” when
experimentation was petering out, political movements were declining and the British New
Wave was effectively over. Nova is thus saturated with the élan of the sixties counterculture,
while The Centauri Device is altogether more equivocal, marked by a greater critical spirit but
also by a sense of exhaustion and frustration.

A new protagonist: the loser

Harrison’s decisive operation in The Centauri Device is to replace the traditional space opera
protagonist, usually a man of action, thoughtful and decisive, authoritative and authoritarian,
with the loser, John Truck. If Delany’s thieves, artists and outlaws, his representatives of la
différence, are on the margins, they are generally well-adjusted – along for the ride, if not exactly
action heroes. In contrast, Truck feels at home with beggars, street-people and slum-dwellers not
because he is cruising for “real” life but because “they so resembled himself”.13 While Delany
celebrates the margins as the most exciting place to be, for Harrison it is just a question of
affinity: it is with those pushed to the margins that we should empathise.
Truck’s backstory is one of failure and disappointment, drifting from drug-addict and
dealer to mercenary to merchant. He is the last Centauran – his mother having been a full
Centauran – and the presence of this vanished race hangs like a conscience over the novel. The
Centaurans are the epitome of the losers: those who survived genocide at the hands of humans
“bolted off like rats and scattered themselves over the newly-colonized planets”, where, lacking
“cultural strength” (TCD, p. 15), they were absorbed. Truck, then, is not just a loser as an
individual, but is the last representative of a losing race. Completely passive in the first half of
the novel, he is time and again battered by other forces: “Events would carry him: it was only left
 3

to him to discover in which direction” (TCD, p. 14). This passivity, uncomfortable in the space
opera form, is as much a weakness in the novel as its strength. Starships and galactic wars make
an odd environment for a passive character: Truck is captured, for example, and then “helped”
by others to escape; things are done to him, he does not do.
And yet his failed marriage to Ruth Berenici – who had “allowed the universe to wound
her at every turn: because of this, she possessed nothing but a sad grace, a yielding internal
calm” (TCD, p. 26) – brings something new to space opera: not heroes, but complex, damaged
people:

Truck reached out to touch her right cheek. She closed her eyes, and the left side of the
mouth smiled.
“It’s still there, John.”
The hesitant turn of the head: the full face revealed: he bit the inside of his cheek
in a kind of sexual shock.
“Why are you shivering,” he asked. He experienced a brief memory of her
ascending the cellar steps of the Boot Palace some years before: a sectional assumption in
the weak light of the Carter’s Snort dawn. He found one of her long hands, trapped it.
“There are times when” – she disengaged her hand, spread the fingers, pressed
them flat against his chest – “I know you.” She shook her head. Profound bruised areas
about her eyes, mark of the eternal victim. “No, you’re not coming in –”
The hand moved away, leaving no bruises on his second-best hide, no marks of
any kind.
“- Unless you’re staying this time.”
Ruth recognised the significance of moments. It was her only defence.
“I am this time,” he lied. (TCD, pp. 26-7)

Here Harrison builds a scene out of fragmentary conversation, silences, words which imply long
painful histories, gestures of definite yet indeterminate import. We do not yet know what is “still
there” (it is a scar on Berenici’s cheek), but we know that in some way that it defines their
relationship: while Von Ray’s scar is visible and explicit, Berenici’s is hidden, a symbol of
defeat.14 Truck’s trapping of Berenici’s hand implies his immediate need for intimacy or
acceptance and for dominance in the relationship; Ruth’s “disengagement” suggests trepidation
or wariness. Ruth’s recognition of “the significance of moments” – and that this is “her only
defence” – simultaneously suggests a deeply perceptive character and acknowledges that this
perception is a poor barrier against the damage that the universe does to the losers. There is an
emotional complexity to this moment which relies on detail, on local scale – in some
fundamental way, it does not belong in a space opera.

Ideology and politics: anarchism and exhaustion

Before their demise the Centaurans left a mysterious device, now only operable by Truck, on
their home planet, and so the last Centauran is pursued by two warring factions, the Israeli World
Government (IWG) and the Union of Arab Socialist Republics (UASR), who are convinced the
device is a weapon, and by Grishkin, from the Opener sect, who believes the device to be a
religious artefact. Caught between these three forces – capitalist, communist, religious – Truck
desperately tries to resist passively.
 4

The only political allegiance evident in the novel is to anarchism; it is the anarchist,
Sinclair-Pater, who tries to resolve these ideological wars by taking the Centauri Device from the
IWG. In a significant passage, he explains,

We live in a sick charade of political polarities; of death, bad art and wasted time – all in
the cause of ideologies that were a century out of date in their heyday. I sense that you of
all people have it in you to end that, and make me as obsolete as Earth (for I’ll be
redundant if IWG and UASR give up their corpse’s grip.) (TCD, p. 67).

The combination of bad art and sick political polarities is important – Pater, their opposite,
appears first as an artist and then as the sole political agent who does not want to use Truck for
his own ends. He represents the only discernible force for good in the galaxy, but he is not the
protagonist; and although Truck allies himself with Pater for a time, he does not adopt Pater’s
anarchism. The allegiance to anarchism is thus deferred: it remains out of the grasp of the losers,
somehow elsewhere, away from the rest of us. Truck’s inability to act stems from exhaustion
with the great ideological battles. He might be sympathetic to the anarchists, but he simply wants
to escape it all. Late in the novel, he comes to understand that

the squabble over Truck and the Device was nothing more than a polite difference
between friends as to who should have the largest slice.
Ben Barka [of the UASR] and Gaw [of the IWG] would survive; Veronica [the
drug-king] would be replaced; Grishkin [the Opener] would come waddling on behind.
Whole again, the triumvirate of Drugs Actual, Political, and Spiritual would dance and
trample its way over the corpses of spacers in hopeless hinterland streets (blinked out like
cooling suns, their precious fire gone) ...
The Ruled never suspect what is being done to them in their own name; how
would they dare? (TCD, p. 130)

Truck’s decision to find the device morphs him into the form of the hero, a man of action – not
one untroubled or optimistic or authoritative, but no longer a passive resister. This act of joining
disjoints the novel. As Harrison notes,

What rather devalues the book is that there is a conflict between the central idea, which is
of passive resistance, and the fact that, in the end, the only way that John Truck can resist
is to resist actively and blow something up ... That’s the contradiction that really shakes
The Centauri Device apart. Truck ends up as a politico. The moment he presses the
button [on the Centauri Device in the final scene] he’s done something political: he
ceases to be a loser. He becomes one of the winners.15

The conflict between passive resistance and decisive action is exacerbated by the space opera
form. Where another form might require less violent actions, the space opera demands a hero,
someone who can and will blow things up.

Ideology and Truck’s final solution

Truck uses the Centauri Device and destroys the galaxy. It is a strange sort of space opera hero
whose winning action is to destroy not only others, or himself, but everything; having become
one of the winners, he loses and in losing, wins (sort of). This revenge of the losers on the
 5

winners is the absolute reversal of the space opera form (in which the protagonists conquer their
enemies and rebuild the world or galaxy or universe in their own image). Harrison’s own attitude
in 1977 was clear:

We’re extorted these days to belong to one side or another, and to see everything in terms
of the conflict between those two sides. You can’t eat your breakfast these days without it
being a political, ideological action. This is a con, a way of controlling large populations
by frightening them. It’s quite possible to see the world without being a capitalist or a
communist. It’s quite possible to open your eyes and look at things as a human being
rather than as a political animal. It offends me to be told or to be persuaded to view life in
a particular way. It offends me deeply.16

Harrison’s words suggest the novel’s sense of exhaustion. These ideological divisions (along
with references to Trotskyists, Anarcho-syndicalists, Situationists and Anarchists) belong to a
Cold War paradigm that was coming to an end. On both sides of the “iron curtain” social
movements had been defeated, most spectacularly in France and Czechoslovakia, while the Cold
War itself continued through the deflated seventies.
The Centauri Device is thus caught between a sixties renovation of the space opera and a
seventies disillusionment with politics and ideology; and its discomfort reflects this, asking,
where can one turn in a world which is riven with ideological conflict? in which one is forced to
take sides? Truck’s failure to find an escape suggests that, for Harrison, we are all condemned to
be buffeted by uncaring ideological forces. While activating the Centauri Device might knock
the whole game off the table, the losers cannot be separated out or spared, and so destruction is
self-destruction. To be embroiled in ideology or non-existence is, in the bleak end, the problem.

Style and action, imagery and ideology

The transformation of Truck from passive to active foregrounds the novel’s opposing tendencies
and interests: on the one hand, those detailed and dense domestic scenes when Truck returns to
his wife, and on the other, spaceships, running around and explosions. These sit uneasily
together, unintegrated and dissonant, but in the later type of scene Harrison’s prose comes into
its own, creating a series of brilliant images. For example, as a “blue-grey waxy light” ran like

tepid fire down the slippery perspectives of an extraGalactic geometry, forming optical
verglas on planes of alien metalwork, tracing the formal interlacing designs that covered
the inner hull. Every four or five seconds, banks of stroboscopic lamps fired off, freezing
and quantifying jagged areas of shadow, but defining no shape the eye could appreciate.
Nothing was perpendicular or dependable ... A subsonic ground bass reverberated
through the body cavities; other voices chattered and decayed in the foreground like the
cries of autistic children heard in a dream ... The command-bridge howled and wept, the
crew leapt and gyrated among their alien machinery like salmon in white water ... Trilby
and the Strange Great Sins collided, embraced, tore through IWG like an impromptu
scythe ... Corpses with frosty eyes knocked gently on the hull of the Green Carnation,
and anarchist ships like filleted golden carp floated across her screens; while out beyond
the eddy of wreckage IWG depended – a colony of fat spiders – from invisible threads ...
cylindrical ships resembling mammoth nuts and bolts (they were in fact complete with
 6

threads, down which the command and power sections could be screwed at will) (TCD,
pp. 73-4, 78, 79, 80)

Space opera meets psychedelia, presenting the world as a kaleidoscope of wonder and terror.
Spaceships become spiders, bolts and fish, implying a connection between things, a broader
transcendent understanding concerned not with logic but with the sensuous. This is a far cry from
the technocratic rationalism of an Asimov or the gung-ho certainties of a Heinlein (in neither of
whom would find people or places, either).
This transformation in the envisioning of space opera is based in the cultural shift of
which the New Waves themselves were a part. For many in the sixties, the technocratic
rationalism wielded by governments or experts or managers had reified all relations, and against
it the counterculture developed a new vision of the world that sought to break the old boundaries
of social values and mores, of cultural acceptability, of musical and literary forms. It was
naturally experimental as it searched for new ways of being and perceiving. Harrison describes
how some elements of The Centauri Device developed from his own participation in this
sensibility and scene:

I decided on the “hippy” aspect of the book simply because I was involved with a band
called Hawkwind at the time. Indeed they make a guest appearance as the crew of one of
the starships. And the operation of the starships, the views we get of the interiors of the
starships when they’re operating, are all based on Hawkwind light shows and sound
shows. I was on the periphery of the Portobello Road drug subculture. That’s how I
decided the basic background.17

In the moments of brilliant description and action, The Centauri Device comes closest to both
Delany’s vision and to more traditional space opera. But if both Delany and Harrison, with their
sixties sensibilities, are already one step beyond the more traditional mode, Harrison pushes it
even further. At those moments when The Centauri Device moves from space opera’s grand
sweep to more local and detailed passages, it suffers the greatest strain. Such moments are brief,
as Harrison shifts quickly from scene to scene. His images suddenly light up the novel, and just
as quickly disappear, as suits a novel composed of set-pieces, one discrete moment following
another, structurally unrelated except by the presence of Truck. Many of the images and scenes –
the androgynes of Glorotha, the “longest party in the history of the world”, “Carter’s Snort” the
ruined industrial sector of Albion Megaport, Pater’s alien space ships and the alien from whom
he received them – are but surface-play. They are not explored in any depth, but make brief and
startling appearances, only to disappear moments later. Each fascinating moment, which suggests
a multitude of new relations between things and people, disappears into the background no
sooner than Harrison conceives it. The result is a sense of jalopy. One never knows what might
come around the corner.
But in the words of Althusser, a brilliant light blinds as much as illuminates. Beneath the
playfulness is the death of affect so often associated with postmodern culture.18 Each
environment is new and different and yet somehow also the same: wherever Truck goes there are
elites and losers, the same relations between people, the same emotional make-ups. These
environments are not structured into the narrative as real, determinate forces but as flat surfaces
over which to skate, and underlying this mélange is the heterogeneous, endlessly-morphing
structure of late capitalism, capable of integrating all kinds of moments and social relations and
 7

enabling a succession of wildly varied forms. The novel is, thus, a reconfiguration of the
concurrent social moment, where geographical space is characterised not by change “in any
temporal understanding of the form, as rather variety and infinity, metonymy and – to reach
some more influential and seemingly definitive and all encompassing version – heterogeneity”;19
for it is possible for late capitalism, “the most standardized and uniform social reality in history,
by the merest ideological flick of the thumbnail, the most imperceptible of displacements, to
emerge as the rich oil-smear sheen of absolute diversity and of the most unimaginable and
classifiable forms of human freedom. Here homogeneity has become heterogeneity”.20 Despite
presenting the “contemporary capitalist city as [a] well-nigh Bakhtinian carnival of
heterogeneities, of differences, libidinal excitement and hyperindividuality”,21 there is an empty
heart to this heterogeneity, which in fact standardises everything, from commodities to emotions
to power-relations. Similarly, in The Centauri Device, social and power relations remain the
same, flattening out the novel’s apparently different and various environments.
The shift from the modern to postmodern in sf is clear: compare the liberal capitalism of
Asimov’s Foundation trilogy, in which a unified, monolithic system attempts to overcome
surrounding feudalisms, with the discrete and heterogeneous collection of social environments in
The Centauri Device. While Asimov’s social systems are distinct and their moral judgements
self-evident (liberal capitalism, rationally complemented by the rule of a technological elite, is
intrinsically and unquestionably better than feudalism), Harrison presents a concatenation of
images and moments without moral implication which enacts the late capitalist fragmentation of
culture and experience. It is a future history which cannot imagine history.
But, after all, Harrison does not intend to map or explore the universe of his tale. And this
is the secret of the novel’s discomfort, for by the time Harrison composed The Centauri Device,
space opera was not enough. In its traditional form, it could not house the new content struggling
to emerge. The novel searches ceaselessly amongst its materials for the space where this content
might develop, without ever quite settling down. The Centauri Device is thus not only one of the
final artefacts of the New Wave, but also an anticipation.

Conclusion
Caught between the explosive energy of the New Wave and the more sure-footed and down-beat
science fiction of the eighties, The Centauri Device wrestles with some new utterance it cannot
quite master. It is uneven, kaleidoscopic, decentred and restless. Its content is always seeking to
break out elsewhere, yet with each motion is drawn back into the form’s constricting contours.
But even if Harrison himself dismisses it as “the crappiest thing I ever wrote” which “tootles
along under the rubric ‘Masterwork’”,22 it continues to be relevant.
After the more sedate “post-ideological” world of the nineties, ideology again seems
again to be at the forefront of the political stage. Samuel P. Huntington’s The Clash of
Civilisations and the Remaking of World Order (1996) – and Tariq Ali’s more accurate The
Clash of Fundamentalisms (2002) – indicate the re-emergence of mass cultural and ideological
wars. We are living in interesting times. Already it is a world of many Trucks, and Harrison’s
warnings about ideological manipulations, of the way losers are used and controlled, regain their
force. For some time such ideas have been percolating through the left, through the anti-
corporate-globalisation movement and the praxis developed and influenced by the Zapatistas.
The idea, for example, that political power is a trap to be avoided is advocated by Zapatista
spokesperson Subcomandante Marcos: the “worst that could happen [to the Zapatista army] ...
would be to come to power and install itself there as a revolutionary army ... For us that is a
 8

struggle between hegemonies, in which the winners are good and the losers bad, but for the rest
of society things don’t basically change”.23
Meanwhile, space opera – in the work of Iain M. Banks, Colin Greenland, Ken MacLeod
and others – continues to develop beyond the self-image of America. The Centauri Device’s
importance to space opera is as a transition, a feeling out of how a new content could fit within
and transform the form, an anticipation of things to come. Light (2002) is the novel where
Harrison would make the space opera his own, interweaving science fictional and realist modes
with an awesome grasp of and control over those apparently contradictory elements which sit so
uncomfortably side by side in the earlier novel. Dissonance has become resonance. Whether
Light is a space opera or something else is a matter for debate, but it is the novel Harrison was
straining towards when he wrote The Centauri Device.

1
For a fascinating documentation of this counterculture, see Jonathon Green, Days in the Life: Voices from the
English Underground, 1961-1971 (London: Pimlico, 1998).
2
Quoted in Michael Moorcock, “New Worlds: A Personal History”, Foundation: The Review of Science Fiction 15
(1979), pp. 5-18, p. 7.
3
Moorcock, “New Worlds”, p. 6.
4
Moorcock, “New Worlds”, p. 7.
5
Christopher Fowler, “The Last Rebel: An Interview with M. John Harrison”, Foundation: The Review of Science
Fiction 23 (1981), pp. 5-30, p. 7.
6
Gabriel Chouinard, “A Conversation with M. John Harrison”, <http://www.sfsite.com/12b/mjh142.html>,
23.8.2004.
7
In an ultimately unconvincing act, Delany himself denies being a part of the New Wave (see Samuel R. Delany,
Silent Interviews: On Language, Race, Sex, Science Fiction, and Some Comics (Hanover: Wesleyan University
Press, 1994), p. 69)., Thomas Disch, however, a onetime housemate of Delany’s and himself a New Wave luminary,
writes of Delany as the pre-eminent New Wave writer (see Thomas M. Disch, The Dreams Our Stuff is Made Of:
How Science Fiction Conquered the World (New York: The Free Press, 1998), p. 223).
8
See Arthur Marwick, The Sixties (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998) and Frederic Jameson, “Periodizing the
Sixties” in Sohnya Sayre, Anders Stephanson, Stanley Aronowitz and Fredric Jameson, eds, The 60s Without
Apology (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), p. 183.
9
See Julie Stephens, Anti-Disciplinary Protest: Sixties Radicalism and Postmodernism (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1998). Thus “fusion jazz”, for example, was often criticised for having too many musicians
playing at once, and the early Pink Floyd for allowing jams like “Interstellar Overdrive” to dissolve into
formlessness.
10
Samuel R. Delany, Nova (London: Sphere, 1971), p. 18.
11
See Samuel R. Delany, The Motion of Light in Water: East Village Sex and Science Fiction Writing, 1960-1965
(London: Paladin, 1990) and Heavenly Breakfast: An Essay on the Winter of Love (Flint: Bamberger Books, 1997).
Throughout his early works – The Jewels of Aptor (1962), The Einstein Intersection (1967), Nova (1968) – Delany’s
mythic-questing characters (who are often artists, musicians, poets) express individuality and authenticity through
creative acts. They embody the “double consciousness” (Jane Branham Weedman, Samuel R. Delany (Washington:
Starmont House, 1982), p. 11) of the character who, simultaneously part of society and outside it, reflects upon and
critiques its dominant cultural paradigms and “test[s] its limits” Robert Elliot Fox, Conscientious Sorcerers: The
Black Postmodernist Fiction of LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka, Ishmael Reed and Samuel Delany (Westport:
Greenwood Press, 1987), p. 96.).
12
M. John Harrison, “A Devil of a Job”, New Worlds 185 (Dec 1968), p. 61. Harrison notes (see Fowler, “Last
Rebel”, p. 11) the influence of Alfred Bester’s The Stars My Destination (1956), whose protagonist Gully Foyle was
also a criminal, and whose style was much admired by the New Wave.
13
M. John Harrison, The Centauri Device (New York: Doubleday, 1974), p. 2. Further references in the text as
TCD.
 9

14
Ruth Berenici is prefigured by Vanessa Wendover in The Committed Men and Carron Baan in The Pastel City,
and is related to Maureen in “The Ice Monkey” (1980); but it is with Anna Kearney in Light (2002) that Harrison
finally builds this defeated female figure seamlessly and brilliantly into the structure of the space opera.
15
Fowler, “Last Rebel”, pp. 12-13.
16
Fowler, “Last Rebel”, p. 13.
17
Fowler, “Last Rebel”, p. 11. The novel does not present drug culture with Delanyesque romanticism but as a
Burroughsian mechanism for keeping the losers underfoot.
18
Postmodernism is here used to denote that culture which emerges as a part of “late capitalism”, theorised most
powerfully by Frederic Jameson in Postmodernism or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (London: Verso, 1991)
and The Cultural Turn: Selected Writings on the Postmodern, 1983-1998 (London: Verso, 1998).
19
Frederic Jameson, “The Antinomies of Postmodernism”, in The Cultural Turn, p. 63.
20
Jameson, “Antinomies”, p. 72.
21
Jameson, “Antinomies”, p. 72.
22
Chouinard, “Conversation”.
23
Subcomandante Marcos, “The Punch Card and the Hourglass: Interviewed by Gabriel García Marquez and
Roberto Pombo”, New Left Review 9 (second series) (2001), p. 70.