A Son of the Rock

Another of the prominent Science Fiction writers of my youth and young adulthood, Harry Harrison, has died.

He was probably known best for his Stainless Steel Rat books and also for the stories of Bill, the Galactic Hero, whose title gives a flavour of Harrison’s sardonic wit. In these books Harrison played against the usual conventions of the SF action adventure.

Ouside the narrower SF world his most familiar work – via the film Soylent Green starring Charlton Heston – is probably the novel Make Room! Make Room!, one of the first to touch on overpopulation as an imminent problem. Harrison said the film, “at times bore a faint resemblance to the book.”

He was also one of the earliest purveyors of Altered History. His A Transatlantic Tunnel, Hurrah! was published in 1972, with his Eden trilogy, where dinosaurs never died out, following in the 1980s. The Stars and Stripes trilogy (1998- 2001) imagined a British intervention on the American continent during the American Civil War leading to war between a Reunited States and Britain. (The US won. Of course.)

He edited more than a few important SF anthologies with English SF author Brian Aldiss with whom he also helped introduce serious criticism to the genre.

Henry Maxwell (Harry) Harrison: 12/3/1925 – 15/8/2012. So it goes.