Harry Harrison Died
American science fiction author Harry Harrison, who also created the Stainless Steel Rat comic space opera series, has died aged 87.
His 1966 dystopian novel Make Room! Make Room! also inspired 1973 film Soylent Green starring Charlton Heston.
Harrison died in the early hours of Wednesday, 15 August.
"His passing leaves a huge gap in the universe, but thankfully he didn't leave us empty-handed," said friend and fellow author Michael Carroll.
"Dozens of novels and over a hundred short stories are as fine a legacy as we could hope for," continued Caroll, who also runs Harrison's website.
He told the BBC that Harrison became a "friend, inspiration and mentor", and that his novels were "a gem, a rich conglomeration of intelligence and adventure that so few other writers have been able to match."
Harrison's first novel, Deathworld, was published in 1960, while the first book in the Stainless Steel Rat series was published a year later.
The last of the series was published just two years ago in 2010 and the books are widely regarded as producing one of science fiction's great anti-heroes, Slippery Jim diGriz, aka The Stainless Steel Rat.
The author also parodied the sci-fi genre in his seven Bill the Galactic Hero books, which were first seen in 1965. He saw his work as anti-war and anti-militaristic.
When Hollywood turned Make Room! Make Room! into Soylent Green, Harrison said the film "at times bore a faint resemblance to the book".
Directed by Richard Fleischer, it took the book's central idea of a near-future world - in the year 2000 - where massive overpopulation had created a critical food shortage in New York, and a food substitute was needed instead.
Harrison was an advocate of the international language Esperanto, which appeared in several of his books after he learned it during service in World War II.
He was born in Stamford, Connecticut, in 1925 but also lived in Mexico, England, Ireland, Italy and Denmark.
He studied art at Hunter College in New York in the 1940s and ran a studio selling illustrations to comics and science fiction magazines before turning to writing.
Harrison was an extremely popular figure in the science fiction world, renowned for being amiable, outspoken and amusing, and was named a Grand Master by the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America (SFWA).
He worked alongside British writer Brian Aldiss throughout his career. They published several journals and anthologies of short stories together.
One of Harrison's last projects was to write his autobiography.
The writer married wife Joan in 1954 in New York and they had two children, Todd and Moira, who survive him.
Joan died from cancer in 2002, which led to the author's full-time return to Britain.
R.I.P. Harry Harrison, creator of the Stainless Steel Rat, Bill the Galactic Hero, and Soylent Green
If Harry Harrison had only created "Slippery" Jim DiGriz, the roguish hero of the Stainless Steel Rat books, he would deserve a high place in science fiction history. But he also wrote dozens of other novels, including the hilarious Bill the Galactic Hero saga, the proto-Steampunk classic A Transatlantic Tunnel, Hurrah!, and the novel that became the movie Soylent Green, Make Room! Make Room!.
Amazingly, Harrison kept writing great novels, with the last Stainless Steel Rat book coming out just two years ago. He died today, aged 87, according to his official website. No details are yet known.
There are few really great comic space opera novels, aside from Douglas Adams. And Harrison's Stainless Steel Rat books qualify — Jim DiGriz is a really inspired creation, a rogue smuggler created years before Han Solo existed. Even as "Slippery" Jim sort of goes straight in the later books, he never stops being a source of ridiculous fun, and his romance with the equally criminal and devious Angelina is a really sweet, heartfelt relationship. I read the Stainless Steel Rat books at a very impressionable age, and a lot of clever bits stick in my mind — like the bit where "Slippery" Jim explains that intergalactic empires are impossible due to the problems with travel at relativistic speeds. This series was always smarter than a lot of other space operas, even alongside its gratifying levels of silliness.
He achieves a very different sort of humor, parodying bad science fiction, in the Bill the Galactic Hero books.
And meanwhile, Harrison also wrote one of the most influential future dystopias, a book about an overcrowded starving future facing huge environmental disasters. The movie version focused heavily on the eponymous "soylent green" storyline, but the actual novel Make Room! Make Room! is much more concerned with portraying the full horror of an overgrown future "megalopolis" of New York, crammed with 35 million people living in intense heat and drinking dirty brown water. Reading Harrison's decidedly unfunny prose in Make Room, you can feel the heat of the city streets and the grime under your fingernails. Everybody who's writing or reading future dystopias today owes a huge debt to Harrison for proving just how grim and visceral a future nightmare could be.
And long before steampunk was considered a whole book genre, Harrison was writing Victorian alternate history with fantastical technologies in Transatlantic Tunnel, a book that's just starting to be rediscovered thanks to a nifty new edition.
Harrison was also a prolific artist, who worked in comics as an artist and writer in the 1940s, working with such greats as Wally Wood and Jules Feiffer. He helped to pioneer the science fiction anthology comic, with a title called Weird Science.
Harrison told Locus his books often have a pacifistic theme, in part thanks to his own experiences in the military:
"Over time the [Stainless Steel] Rat grew up, and got very pacifistic. In the first book he killed one person, but no one else dies in the whole damn series. It was the anti-Jerry Pournelle and Jim Baen kind of story, where it's 'Kill! Kill! Kill!' Bill, the Galactic Hero was my first book of that sort. I'd been in the army and hated it. Though almost all my books are anti-military, anti-war (the Deathworld series very much so), I try not to repeat myself.
"After the Stainless Steel Rat book that was published in 2010, Harrison was working on another new book, which he described as "a big secret." But we're not sure whether he finished it or not. In any case, he left behind an amazing body of work, and he was still creating right up until the end, which is in itself a fantastic achievement." [via Jonathan Strahan]
Tonight, I mourn. Harry Harrison was one of my childhood heroes. When college was getting unbearable back in the Eighties, the Stainless Steel Rat was one of the few sources of love and joy that kept me going. I have good friends from that time, who will remember how things were for me - and who will remember how, unlike some pretentious hobby that people drop "to fit in," science fiction was, for me, my raison d'etre.
The news of Harry Harrison's passing this morning hit me like a freight train. I find myself remembering how I met him, once, back in the Norbreck Castle Hotel in Blackpool, the weekend I dated one of my exes, Ann Bingley. I remember altering the breakfast menu at the carvery, appending "made with fresh Soylent Green" to the bottom.
I remember being so utterly tongue tied I could hardly get a word out. Something that some people might find hard to imagine, but it was so.
And now I will never see him again. And nor will anybody else. And wherever he is, I hope his spirit will wander far from us, across the stars, and maybe incarnate in the body of a healthy, vibrant, anarchic, light-fingered, adventurous sort, some time out there in the far, far future, out amongst the stars.
A bold, slippery young Stainless Steel Rat called Jim.
Ripozu en paco, Harry. Night night. I will miss you.
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