Quick Review: The Adventures of the Stainless Steel Rat, by Harry Harrison

[jeriendhal]

In this collection of the first three adventures written by Harry Harrison, we meet inerstellar con-man turn super spy, James "The Stainless Steel Rat" DiGriz, as he gives his life of crime (barely) to fight crime, and watch him booze, smoke and pill pop his way across the galaxy fighting interstellar evil.

Review: Another series that shows it age in certain ways (a female criminal in the 330th century?! Shocking!) but overall holds together as good adventures.

Note, I said "adventure", not "comedy". There's a tendency to view the SSR series as a funny series, but I think that's a mistake. It's POV is certainly humorous. Jim DiGriz makes for an amusing companion, as he cheerily and egotisticaly dissects the boring, peaceful inhabitants of the planets he robs blind, but the situations he finds himself in are deadly serious, and he never forgets the consequences of failure.

Consider the three short novels in this collection:

The Stainless Steel Rat: DiGriz is recruited in the Special Corps, the galaxy's secret peacekeeping arm, and almost immediately goes on the hunt for a psychologicaly damaged mass murderess.

The Stainless Steel Rat's Revenge: He has to stop a group of mysterious grey men who use their finely honed techniques of psycological torture (as in, making you believe you just had your hands cut off and reattached) to wage interstellar war.

The Stainless Steel Rat Save the World DiGriz has to stop a time travelling madmen from destroying the Special Corps by erasing the past, and along the way journeys to a nightmarish post-apocalypse Earth 20,000 years into our future.

Laugh a minute concepts they are, I tell ya.

Comments

[secoh.livejournal.com]

I should probably re-read these. It's been way too long since I read them for me to remember them properly.

[jeriendhal.livejournal.com]

I've been picking up a lot of books I haven't touched for the past ten or fifteen years for some reason. May have to go the library to see if I cna find a copy of RAH's "The Rolling Stones"