Harry Harrison

Blog time came up and I realized I’d never covered this particular author, who deserves more attention than he gets:  Harry Harrison.

Ross.  This story has a beginning.  For those of you who don’t care, fast forward.  For the rest of you, listen…

Back in the 1880s, I went to college at the University of Maryland, College Park.  After freshman year, spring of 1887, we received a letter from Resident Life asking if we wanted to move to a nice newer dorm in the South Hill neighborhood of College Park Shire.   We readily responded, “Indeed!”  Therefore, upon returning to the campus in late August 1887, to start my sophomore year, I found my new home. 

Soon I sought out my comrade Baron, who had been living in a double in Wicomico Hall, in the slightly less upscale North Hill neighborhood.  It turns out his upgrade was not as fancy:  to a single in the front T section on the top floor.   I visited him often.  The Resident Adviors (RAs) in this dorm wouldn’t blink if they saw a sophomore with a beer. 

At the end of his hall was Ross.   Ross was cool.  (1)  He went to high school with half of Delta Sigma Phi, so we got to hang out with his frat buddies there.  (2) VERY IMPORTANT:  He knew the Scorpions had been around longer than Matthias Jabs had been in the band, and clued me into Fly To The Rainbow, which he had on vinyl.   Ken alerted me to Lonesome Crow, and another adventure began.  (3) He told me about Harry Harrison, a sci-fi author from the US.

HH started writing in the early 1960s.  He started from a Heinlein baseline and added some Philip K. Dick -type irreverence, though not going nearly as far in the TOTALLY F’IN WEIRD department as PKD does – then again, no one short of Cixin Liu (The Three Body Problem) has managed that.

He was well-liked by fellow sci-fi authors and is somewhat of a cult figure in Russia – the latest SSR stories are only in Russian.  Politically he was quasi-libertarian and atheist. 

Stainless Steel Rat.   If there’s a #1 character associated with Harrison, it’s the Stainless Steel Rat.  He’s a thief in the future, who has to survive amidst a technically advanced society with all sorts of sophisticated surveillance.   Just as the rats of the Middle Ages crawled amidst the sewers and wood, the rat of the future has to survive amidst stainless steel.  The SSR, James DiGriz, justifies his livelihood by explaining that he steals from big companies which have theft insurance, so it’s all covered.   I’ve read several of the stories and found him modestly sympathetic and entertaining.  Given how much I enjoy his writing even now (recently finished Make Room) I should probably revisit these.   This guy wound up as a character in the British sci-fi comic magazine 2000AD, best known as the source for Judge Dredd. 

Bill the Galactic Hero.   This started as a spoof on Starship Troopers and continued.  It’s modestly entertaining.

Deathworld.   Bad ass planet where literally everything will kill you instantly – every life form and even the plants hate your guts.  Aside from that I can’t recall much about it.

Those are the series.  He has a few one-off books which are good:

The Technicolor Time Machine.  A movie studio has a limited budget and a tight schedule BUT they have a killer secret weapon: a real time machine.  This lets them shoot their Viking epic ON LOCATION, not merely geographically but also temporally.  They pay the main Viking dude in whiskey, which the Vikings never had.  The time machine also lets them essentially do the entire movie in 5 minutes.  It’s very clever.

A Transatlantic Tunnel! Hurrah!   A Steampunk story about an alternate world in which the Brits won the Revolutionary War.  Washington’s distant descendent is a top notch engineer, and he successfully orchestrates construction of a transatlantic tunnel from England to the colonies.   Pretty fun.

Make Room!  Make Room!   The most recent one I read.  This was written in the mid-60s and takes place in NYC in our own time.  Food is scarce.  The weather is hot.   Aside from that, not much happens.  They claim it forms the basis for “Soylent Green”, the sci-fi horror movie with Charlton Heston, but having seen that one and read this from cover to cover, I’d say the connection is practically nil.  That would be the only film adaptation of any of his stories.