Harry Harrison is a science fiction deity. Born in 1925, Harrison was the genius behind some of the most significant reads of my childhood—1966’s Make Room! Make Room! was a chillingly visionary exploration into the consequences of overpopulation (and was later made into the Charlton Heston flick Soylent Green); and his wildly entertaining and frequently imitated Deathworld trilogy, about colonists on a hostile planet with predatory flora and fauna, forever changed the way I looked at world-building in genre fiction; but it’s his Stainless Steel Rat novels that most readers undoubtedly mention when Harrison’s name is brought up in conversation.
The satirical space adventure saga featuring conman extraordinaire Slippery Jim DiGriz began back in 1961 with the aptly titled The Stainless Steel Rat and over the last 49 years has grown to ten novels, numerous short stories, a comic book series, and even a board game! But it’s been more than a decade since the last Slippery Jim adventure has been published (1999’s The Stainless Steel Rat Joins the Circus).
When I recently heard that Harrison—now 85—was releasing a new Stainless Steel Rat novel this summer, I was conflicted. The Slippery Jim DiGriz novels are a cherished childhood memory and I’ll gladly seek out and read any new Stainless Steel Rat novel that Harrison writes but the science fiction landscape has changed drastically in the last half century. These days, most of the lighthearted and satirical stuff is being written as fantasy, specifically paranormal fantasy—readers seeking frothy literary escapism definitely do not generally seek out new science fiction releases.
The science fiction genre—and its readers—is downright paradoxical these days. As a longtime moderator on BarnesandNoble.com’s Fantasy & Science Fiction forum, the only science fiction features that have any substantial traffic at all are thematically weighty, thought-provoking novels like Paolo Bacigalupi’s The Windup Girl and reissued classics like Walter M. Miller, Jr.'s A Canticle for Leibowitz. But if I feature any remotely popular paranormal fantasy release or an epic fantasy like The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms by N.K. Jemisin or The Psalms of Isaak novels by Ken Scholes, the readers literally come out of the woodwork! If this were a beauty pageant, paranormal fantasy and epic fantasy would be vying for the crown and sash—science fiction wouldn’t even make it to the swimsuit round.
Holding a copy of Harrison’s newest —The Stainless Steel Rat Returns—in my hands, I could only wonder how well this latest adventure featuring Slippery Jim was going to sell in 2010. Does stainless steel rust? Is the Stainless Steel Rat saga still relevant after half a century?
The novel was, as expected, a fast-paced, whimsical, and entertaining adventure. Slippery Jim and his wife Angelina are living the good life on the holiday planet Moolaplenty. As the story begins, Jim is listening to Bach and sipping 300-year-old bourbon with million-year-old ice shipped in from the outer planets. But his tranquil retirement is rudely interrupted by the arrival of a long-lost cousin who, with a spaceship full of redneck relatives and an unruly herd of porcuswine (a cross between a wild pig and a porcupine), guilt Jim into helping them find a home.
So, after Jim and Angelina spend all of their savings buying and refurbishing the rusty old spaceship—and christening it the Porcuswine Express—they set off in search of an inhabitable agrarian planet that is in search of more colonists. On their intergalactic road trip, they stumble across planets with major societal dysfunction—one planet is ruled by a paranoid religious cult who oppress all other inhabitants who are unbelievers, another planet is embroiled in a racist conflict where green-skinned humans tyrannize all those with different skin color, etc. But even in the most desperate of situations, Slippery Jim—and his spaceship full of rednecks and prickly pigs—finds a way to get out of trouble and save the day…
Lighthearted science fiction adventures may not be as in vogue as they used to be—does anyone remember Simon R. Green’s Deathstalker novels or Douglas Adams’s Hitchhiker’s saga?—but the truth of the matter is that series like the Stainless Steel Rat share many comparable narrative elements (satirical and irreverent tone, endearing antihero, etc.) to some popular contemporary fantasy (like Terry Pratchett’s Discworld) and paranormal fantasy series (J.F. Lewis’ Void City, Charlie Huston’s Joe Pitt Casebooks, etc.).
But The Stainless Steel Rat Returns is science fiction—and science fiction just isn’t sexy to the majority of today’s readers. There is nothing visionary about this novel, nothing particularly thought provoking or life changing—it’s not apocalyptic or dystopian: it’s pigs (porcuswine) in space. That said, it was a fast, fun read, and a solid addition to this series.
So to answer the question, is the Stainless Steel Rat saga still relevant? I suppose it depends on whom you ask. Will readers under the age of 20 seek out and read Harrison’s latest? Highly unlikely. Will discerning (i.e. old) science fiction fans like myself read it and enjoy it for what it is? Hopefully.
The bottom line is this: there is a lot more to contemporary science fiction than cerebral, socially conscious science-powered speculation. Science fiction does look good in a swimsuit—it’s too bad a large segment of younger readers will never experience the genre’s sleek and provocative curves…
Paul Goat Allen has been a full-time book reviewer specializing in genre fiction for almost the last two decades and has written more than 6,000 reviews for companies like Publishers Weekly, The Chicago Tribune, and BarnesandNoble.com. In his free time, he reads.
