The Stainless Steel Rat by Harry Harrison

July 11, 2024 5:40 AM

In the vastness of space, the crimes just get bigger and Slippery Jim diGriz, the Stainless Steel Rat, is the biggest criminal of them all. He can con humans, aliens and any number of robots time after time. Jim is so slippery that all the inter-galactic cops can do is make him one of their own.
posted by Literaryhero (20 comments total)

Ok, certain things are catnip to me, and a book written in the 50s with a protagonist named Slippery Jim (full name James Bolivar diGriz) is something I am unable to resist.

The book is a pretty good read if you like the style of the super competent guy that knows everything and is better than everyone else (which for some reason is also catnip to me), but even though Slippery Jim is constantly looking down at Angelina she has the better of him at more or less every turn. These books always have the same plot holes, which is basically if these dudes are so competent then why do others who are clearly incompetent keep getting one over on them. This book is no different, but it is something I can overlook.

The gender dynamics (as far as I recall, Angelina is the only woman in the entire book) are pretty bad, but up until the final few pages she outwits him at every turn, which makes it read almost like a critique of the gender roles of the time. Until the last few pages when suddenly Angela becomes clueless and weak to (I think) move the plot along.

I am not going to read the second book right away, but I might check it out a bit down the road. I guess we will see.
posted by Literaryhero at 5:50 AM on July 11 [3 favorites]

I loved these books as a pre-teen (shout out to Science Fiction Book Club mini hardcovers), and also enjoyed (to a slightly lesser extent) the much weirder Bill, the Galactic Hero series also by Harry Harrison.

The fact that The Stainless Steel Rat (amazing title, by the way) hasn't been made into a TV show or movie is actually kind of baffling. Slippery Jim seems like the type of role an actor with a production company would love to develop for themselves.

Dang, I think it might be time for a reread.
posted by joelhunt at 6:41 AM on July 11 [7 favorites]

I too loved this series as a boy growing up in the early 1980s. Harry Harrison and Fred Saberhagen were my favorite reliable hacks (in the best sense of the word) with plenty of pulpy material to plow through.

The Stainless Steel Rat books benefited from being an obvious pastiche of tropes from heist thrillers and screwball comedies from an earlier age. The setting was outer space but the interpersonal stuff was all throwbacks to stuff like The Thin Man, so I didn’t expect it to reflect anything more enlightened.

I love sci-fi that tells smaller stories rather than galaxy-spanning epics. These days I’d rather read Becky Chambers or a Murderbot novella than Harry Harrison, but it’s easy to see the roots of one in the other.
posted by rikschell at 7:35 AM on July 11 [7 favorites]

I haven't read these since the 80s. It seemed like pretty good fare for your typical smarty-pants kid, but I'm not sure I want to revisit it. I'm rereading a lot of my favorite science fiction from childhood in hopes of passing it along to my kids, and honestly it's been pretty cringeworthy going. (I'm looking at you, Phillip Jose "literally writing about Mark Twain in blackface" Farmer.) Are the gender politics here "not so great" or are we in "keep it away from modern kids" territory?

I also remember Harrison's prose as feeling very clumsy-- was he one of those sci-fi authors who refused to use contractions? I feel like that was A Thing for a while.
posted by phooky at 8:09 AM on July 11 [3 favorites]

I read this a long time ago and don't remember the plot details, but I do remember from this and other Harrison books that Harrison really, really thought that Esperanto was going to happen. By the time I read the book, it was very clear that Esperanto was not, in fact, going to happen (apologies to anyone reading this who is actually fluent in Esperanto).
posted by confluency at 9:01 AM on July 11 [9 favorites]

I too read the Stainless Steel Rat books in the 80s, and I remember them being entertaining, but I don't remember much more about them.
posted by adamrice at 10:20 AM on July 11

I haven't read these since the 80s. It seemed like pretty good fare for your typical smarty-pants kid, but I'm not sure I want to revisit it.

Same... I liked them a lot at 14 but at... well a certain age... I think I'd have a hard time revisiting. Tho as I got older i can see the ties to stuff like Donald Westlake's Dortmunder stories. In anycase my memories are largely fond but am comfortable in not upsetting the ripples in those memories. I too am a bit surprised they never got made into a television or movie series - it seems like a natural fit. I guess Han Solo is influenced by that character so there's that but the books have a different vibe to Star Wars. Regardless it wouldn't be that hard to update the books for contemporary audiences. The key would be a charismatic lead and light touch with the direction.
posted by Ashwagandha at 11:46 AM on July 11 [4 favorites]

joelhunt: I loved these books as a pre-teen...

Me, too, along with his Deathworld series. They all kind of blend together in my mind, honestly.

I have the usual fond memories of these, and I've deliberately avoided re-reading them in case The Suck Fairy has FTL.
posted by wenestvedt at 12:23 PM on July 11 [4 favorites]

Still a soft spot for these, but the "I will marry this hot girl after she goes through mandatory therapy and starts sharing my worldview" plotline has aged horribly.

I get what he was trying to do. Take the noir trope of the hard boiled detective and femme fatale, with their passionate but doomed relationship, then update it based on the logical implications of how it would work in a more "just" society. One where the Hayes Code logic demanded dramatic punishment for the woman. Harrison was a pacifist and opposed the death penalty; if you can rehabilitate criminals you shouldn't need retributive punishment. So it has some internal logic. But man, so many problems in that setup that wouldn't be touched by writers today.

Various things work better in the later books, the Rat/Angelina relationship being more Nick and Nora than whatever it was in this book is the top of the list.
posted by mark k at 6:18 PM on July 11 [6 favorites]

Loved these as a kid, scoured the library to make sure that I read every one of them.

I have no idea how well they hold up (thanks mark k~) but I imagine they aged a little better than their contemporaries, given Harry Harrison.
posted by porpoise at 7:50 PM on July 11

Also came in comic form via the early 200AD.

Interestingly - Project Gutenberg has this as being out of copyright in the USA, along with the original short story - so no need to give Bezos any more money to see how well it holds up.

As an aside: I have a distinct remembering that Harrison sharecropped the later Bill the Galactic Hero books and regretted it.
posted by Sparx at 8:09 PM on July 11 [3 favorites]

Ooh. I have a dead-tree copy of 'Bill the Galactic Hero' book that I bought at a physical store (probably from a 'Book Warehouse').

Or maybe Ok, it's bonfire and goat pit time. Roll out!
posted by porpoise at 1:22 AM on July 12 [1 favorite]

One more "Loved these in High School" here. And the first book is current $0.99 on Kindle, so I'm gonna give it a try! Here's hoping it at least kinda-sorta holds up. I'll report back!
posted by Frayed Knot at 7:53 AM on July 12 [2 favorites]

someone bringing up Dortmunder made me realize that mefi's own John Scalzi's latest book Starter Villain has roots to both Dormunder and Slippery Jim in terms of being a light hearted heist with SF elements.
posted by jkosmicki at 11:00 AM on July 12 [1 favorite]

Speaking of Bill the Galactic Hero - Alex Cox, yes, that Alex Cox, made a movie of that book using his film students in Colorado a few years back. it's surprisingly well done given its background as a class project. This is IMDB page Cox is currently Kickstarting his final film, a Western version of Dead Souls, which is not Harry Harrison adjacent, but still pretty cool.
posted by jkosmicki at 11:06 AM on July 12 [2 favorites]

In the collection of short autobiographies of SF authors Harrison edited with Brian Aldiss in the seventies (Hell's Cartographers) Harrison wrote that he got into the habit of writing the most startling and intriguing first paragraphs he could to try and hook editors. Often he wouldn't do anything with them, it was just for practice, but when he wrote the scene with Jim collapsing the ceiling on the cop trying to arrest him and the cop keeps talking he kept writing to see what happened next.
posted by thatwhichfalls at 8:14 PM on July 12 [4 favorites]

I also loved these in school. I remember feeling like they were never enough, in both a good way and a bad way. I always wanted more but I was always a little disappointed. Maybe I was too young, and I should give them a reread.

I've never thought these should have a movie/TV adaptation somehow. Unlike say Startide Rising or the Berserker and Bolo books or like Red Limit Freeway. But then again I'm still not recovered from the Starwolf books being adapted in Japan then ending up on MST3K.
posted by fleacircus at 3:16 PM on July 14

In the summer of 1990, In New Orleans, Harry Harrison hustled my 19-year-old self and my 15-year-old brother out of $50 playing pool at the hotel where the local SF convention was being held. He was both jovial and grumpy. This is the perfect Harry Harrison anecdote and I wlll always consider it $50 well-spent.
posted by slappy_pinchbottom at 8:25 PM on July 14 [6 favorites]

It's not so much that the books need a TV/movie adaptation but that it's surprising nobody tried. And oh, yes, all of the Esperanto. So much Esperanto.
posted by Karmakaze at 10:47 AM on July 20 [1 favorite]

I also remember Harrison's prose as feeling very clumsy-- was he one of those sci-fi authors who refused to use contractions?

I just read this last year, and my memory's already refusing to give me more than a "maybe" about the contractions, but I do remember that it's one of a few books I've gone through semi-recently where a) I noticed it was just stuffed with comma splices b) their presence clearly didn't slow me down a bit. (The other I remember offhand is This Book Is Full Of Spiders, which I finished in a sitting. Rat took me more like a whole day, despite being shorter, but then I had a lot more happening in real life.)
posted by dick dale the vampire at 11:51 AM on July 28