Recent reads

Stainless Steel Visions, by Harry Harrison.  This is a 1993 collection of science fiction short stories by Harry Harrison, best known to most as the author of Make Room, Make Room!, the novel that inspired the classic 1973 dystopian film Soylent Green, and second best known, among readers of science fiction, for his long series of comical stories featuring futuristic supercriminal "Slippery Jim" DiGriz, the "Stainless Steel Rat".

Both of these commercial high points are represented here.  The collection includes Roommates, the 1971 short story that Harrison later expanded into Make Room, Make Room!, and, as suggested by the allusive title, it also includes a new (in 1993) short story about Slippery Jim, The Golden Years of the Stainless Steel Rat.

The former is still gritty and galling, and well worth the price of admission to anyone who hasn't read it before.  The invasion of the detestable Belichers into the protagonist's living space at the end of the story is a psychically crushing and deadening blow after the other slow-grinding losses and defeats he has suffered, as it was meant to be -- even though middle aged readers, with some life experience at dealing with bureaucracies, might wonder why Andy and Shirl didn't pre-empt the situation by having her apply to move into the recently vacated space as his new "roommate" immediately as soon as it became available.  Forethought in such situations does pay off in real life, but of course it does not lead to so dramatic an ending.

The latter, in which the infamous Stainless Steel Rat is sent to a prison for retired supercriminals and predictably organizes a breakout, is so slight and flimsy that it might as well not be there.  I remember the Stainless Steel Rat stories I read in the past as being full of clever conceit in both senses of the word, with Slippery Jim opining frequently about his own brilliance and the dunderheadedness of the authority figures whom he outwits.  But in this outing, I couldn't help but note that intelligence seems to be utterly absent in the prison guards and in practically everyone else he encounters.  Conceitedness has given way to a kind of authorially-imposed solipsism in which it seems the protagonist is for all practical purposes the only functioning intelligence in his universe.  This may be amusing for the protagonist, but it hardly makes for exciting storytelling.

Both stories, of course, reflect an attitude that was and is quite common in science fiction, the presumption, correct within the world of the story, that the protagonist is intellectually superior to most of those around him.  Many science fiction readers no doubt believe this to be true of themselves, consciously or unconsciously.  On average, they might be correct.

This is also true of the other high point of the collection, Harrison's 1962 The Streets of Ashkelon.  Thanks to the mental debris of long-ago Sunday Schools and many interminable sermons in which I amused myself by poring over the colorful maps appended to my childhood copy of the Bible, I vaguely recognized the name Ashkelon, but I failed to pinpoint the exact source of Harrison's allusion, which is 2nd Samuel 1:20:

Tell it not in Gath, publish it not in the streets of Askelon; lest the daughters of the Philistines rejoice, lest the daughters of the uncircumcised triumph.

The applicability of that verse in its original context to the plot of Harrison's story is actually a bit murky, but it's a good story nonetheless.  As the story opens, the protagonist, an atheistic spacegoing trader, is slowly and methodically educating some ponderously literal-minded aliens in the scientific method.  He is greatly annoyed when a zealous missionary arrives and sets out to convert them to Christianity.  The result of this conflict of ideas was shocking enough in 1962 that, as Harrison describes in his introduction, he had great difficulty finding a publisher for the story, especially in the United States.  Since that time, standards of shock have changed.  Streets of Ashkelon remains, perhaps not shocking, but thought-provoking.

Most of the other stories come from Harrison's long career as a writer for the pulp SF magazines of the 1950s, 60s, and 70s.  As such they have limitations.  As Harrison observes, they rely greatly on such staples of magazine fiction as the "O. Henry" twist ending, and they also have the limitation of being perforce self-contained without the opportunity to tell an extended story or deal with any long-term or complex interactions.  But they are all good entertainment.  One of the most interesting parts of the entire collection is reading Harrison's account in the introduction of some of the tricks of the trade that he learned during his long career as a short story writer and editor -- and then seeing, up close and personal, how he applied his own advice in his stories.

Those who own or have read Harrison's previous short story collections should note that there is nothing here, other than the introduction and the slight-to-the-point-of-vanishing Golden Years of the Stainless Steel Rat, that has not been previously published in another collection (see this list).  But for casual readers new to his work, it's well worth a glance.  Or, in my case, a dollar to pick up a discarded public-library copy, enjoy it, and melancholicly reflect that each such withdrawn copy means that fewer readers in the future will have the same opportunity.