Today is March 12, the birthday of Harry Harrison (1925-2012). Harrison was once a big name in the field, but he has like so many faded into obscurity.
Harrison is best remembered for his Stainless Steel Rat series, but he wrote much more than that. Many of his works were satires of popular tropes, often tropes of space opera.
But Harrison also wrote series stories at both short and novel lengths. “The Streets of Ashkelon” is probably his best known sderious story, although it’s not really to my taste.
His novel Make Room! Make Room!, about overpopulation, was the inspiration of the film Soylent Green.
It’s been years since I read much Harrison. I read the first two volumes of his To the Stars trilogy last year, but I’ve not worked the third volume into my schedule yet.
Harrison wrote solid science fiction, and it would be nice if someone woul d bring his works back into print.
I did think about re-reading the Stainless Steel Rat* sequence again last year. I really enjoyed these books as a teenager but there seems to be a consensus that they haven’t aged well (the sexual politics etc, etc) and I didn’t want to spoil my fond memories of them. Funnily enough, Harrison lived not far from me – Ireland had tax-free status for artists and writers at the time – but I never met him, or tried to. Still, the idea that the creator of slippery Jim diGriz was living only forty or so miles away was kind of awesome.
* I’m pretty sure my first exposure to the Stainless Steel Rat (and by extension, to Harrison) was via 2000AD, which serialised the stories in graphic form.
Have nearly finished the first book and it stands up pretty well? Harrison seems to be making it up as he goes along, and the writing is just about fit for purpose, but it has plenty of momentum and doesn’t take itself too seriously.
I am going to have to give t hese a try.
Well, maybe my judgement is clouded by nostalgia, but I reckon it actually wears its age pretty well? All the more so as the first book was serialised back in the late Fifties. Most of us can make a rough guess when a SF story was written by how certain features are anomalous (e.g. call phones are still a thing in Neuromancer). Newspapers are still a thing in The Stainless Steel Rat but other than –
That’s part of the charm of older science fiction, looking at all the things that are different.