Taken From "The Guardian" Nov 30th 1988.
Harry Harrison
Has SF come out of the closet - read this and see what you think. (Sorry it's so long,
and no he hasn't died although it did
appear on the obituaries page).
Reproduced (without permission) from `The Guardian' Nov 30th 1988.
In 1944 an Irish-Jewish teenager from New York found himself drafted into the US Army Air
Force and sent to Laredo, Texas. He emerged two years later as a sergeant with the rating
678-3, `specialist in the power-operated turret and computing gunsight'. It was an
experience which left Harry Harrison with two abiding motifs on which to build a writing
career: hatred of complex human organisations, especially military ones, and delight in
complex electro-mechanical systems, including ones which have not yet been invented.
The hero by whom he first made his name was Slippery Jim DiGriz, alias `The
Stainless Steel Rat', so called because while ordinary rats may make a living in the
joists and cellars of plain old wooden houses, for the buildings and bureaucracies of the
future, something more indestructible is required. The `Rat' books (now six of them, with
a computer game in the works) have kept going since 1957, appealing continuously through
their lack of reverence for any social contract whatsoever. The same quality, though, long
past controllability, has kept him dancing on the edge of disaster. Earlier this
year, for instance, a squad of Marines in training were being chivvied along the beach at
San Diego, largest naval base in the world. But to the snarls of their sergeant were
added, suddenly, equally authentic-sounding but contradictory snarls. As the beach filled
with angry Marines and embarrassed spectators, a white-haired respectable figure was
hustled off on a metaphorical choke-chain, frothing and growling. When he recovered to
face his friends' reproaches, Harrison said: `I've no sympathy for those guys. You know
what those guys are?' Pause for contempt.`Volunteers !'
Risk hung round the literary career too. In the early 1960s science fiction was full of
right-wing militarism, Robert Heinlein creating a best-seller on the premise that only
military service gave the right to vote, and on the plot (very like An Officer and A
Gentleman) of the spoilt brat learning to love his sergeant. By the time this had
gone through Harrison's hand (in Bill, The
Galactic Hero), literature also had the figure of Deathwish Drang, bullying NCO par
excellence, and the touching scene where Bill finds out the good old Deathwish's
projecting canines are in fact artificially implanted, to show what a softy he is
underneath, Heinlein and his friends were not amused. So had they ever been sergeants,
asked Harrison?
Harry Harrison has won few literary awards, but stayed in print constantly with scores of
books. The prize-giving ceremony for
Soylent Green, the Charlton Heston film made from Make Room! Make Room!, was marred by
public dispute between author and scriptwriter, the former irked that the latter had
decided to make New York in 2000 AD more exciting by working in cannibalism. `What's wrong
with cannibalism ? I'll tell you what's wrong with it. Won't work. Humans put on meat too
slowly.' Harrison's view of the future was more chilling, in reality, because it was based
on the premise that all human indicators, like population growth, would stay the same, but
that there would be no technology to match. That there will be, or could be,
technology to save the day is also a Harrison article of faith, though again it seems less
like faith than uncontrollable yearning. Who can forget the coal-fired flying boat of A
Transatlantic Tunnel, Hurrah? The submarine to Mars ? The cannon-ball firing spaceships
(he is a Hornblower fan) ? The innumerable gadgets of the latest West of Eden
series, developed by intelligent dinosaurs on an entirely biological basis ?
More prosaically, Harrison now owns seven computers, scattered around the world from his
base in Co. Wicklow, Ireland, the end of a long search through Europe and America -
previous candidates Denmark, Italy, Mexico - for a government that would leave him alone
and never draft him, his children, grandchildren or remote descendents ever again. He
speaks several languages fluently, but has for 40 years been a devoted Esperantist, for
which language he has written its first science fiction story `Ni venos, Dr. Zamenhof, ni
venos' (`we will come, founder of Esperanto, we will come').
The day when governments don't exist and we all talk Esperanto is a long time coming, and
if iy comes it might be rather dull.
There is no doubt, though, of Harrison's visceral antipathy to nations and nationalism,
nor of the tensions which come
from being intellectually unmilitary and temperamentally warlike. A passionate
opponent of blood sports, Harrison is a dead shot with all weapons.
By Tom Shippey