Harry Harrison R.I.P.
I can’t believe that Harry Harrison has passed away.
If there was any justice, the untimely death of an author would result in a rush to buy his or her books and stories the same way that the untimely death of a singer results in an increase in sales of their music.
This would mean that the death of Harry Harrison would have at least one good effect, knocking ‘fifty shades of shite’ and its spawn off the top of the bestseller chart.
But the death of an author does not have the same effect because those that already know and love them have their books and so reread them instead of reading them for the first time. Because while Mr Harrison’s sad passing may not have a beneficial effect, his life certainly did, as even my feeble collection of his books can attest.
Harry Harrison wrote grand science fiction for boys. The Stainless Steel Rat books were rattling good yarns. They had space ships, they had ray guns, they had humour and subtle social satire lost on me, lying in my bunk in a caravan during the summer holidays, reading with the intensity that only a young boy can, devouring adventure. Maybe it’s just the pages getting yellow, or the glue getting brittle, but I like to think that that paperback actually has that caravan-in-the-summertime smell, like hot Tupperware and air so hot and still you have to fan it to breath.
Reading ‘The Stainless Steel Rat’ was more fun than going to the beach.
And Slippery Jim diGriz wasn’t just confined to the pages of a paperback, he was a comic book hero. 2000AD, my staple stapled reading, was home to the comic book adaptation. Because I got my 2000AD on a Saturday morning my back issues smell predominantly of bacon roll and grease rather than caravan and sun cream, but I still thrill at the spaceships, the ray guns and the hero who is a crook and more moral than any upright citizen.
Harry Harrison wrote dystopian visions. A trilogy of books: ‘Homeworld’, ‘Wheelworld’ and ‘Starworld’. Read decades ago for the first time and then re-read in a burst of literary gluttony a couple of years ago and seeing the books with adult eyes, the effect like seeing a painting restored. The social commentary, and not just any commentary, but my kind of commentary. Highlighting injustice and prejudice and seeing science fiction reading like an edge of the seat thriller, with ray guns!
‘Technicolor time machine’, ‘Bill the galactic hero’ and ‘Star smashers of the galaxy rangers’ are to me the literary equivalents of favourite movies, ones that you ration yourself watching, but from which random scenes pop into your head at the oddest moment - and from which scenes you recognise in other books, in movies, in comics or on television.
Any science fiction fan learns after the first ten or twelve times not to explain to their date that the scene where the hero does that thing, with the girl…that’s from (insert short story written in the 1970s here). Any science fiction fan knows that Hollywood screenwriters spend 10% of their time at a typewriter and the remainder playing Dr Frankenstein with bits of genre stories they think nobody else has read.
Mr Harrison was influential.
He influenced me, at least. Made me a more voracious reader, probably made me a better person, or a more tolerant one anyway.
Everyone will be suggesting the best Harry Harrison story, or their favourite, so let me be no exception and join the celebration. There’s a story from 1965 called ‘Mute Milton’ which, in my collection of ‘The best of Harry Harrison’ (I pity the editor who had to make the choice of what constituted that, back in the day when I bought this, when a paperback cost £1.50 band new in a proper shop when the NET book agreement was still in place, before you could just publish a 10,000 pager in kindle edition). Mr Harrison himself introduces it as ‘an angry story’.
I read it, I got angry, I was a better person by the time I finished reading it.
Harry Harrison, Rest In Peace.
If there was any justice, the untimely death of an author would result in a rush to buy his or her books and stories the same way that the untimely death of a singer results in an increase in sales of their music.
This would mean that the death of Harry Harrison would have at least one good effect, knocking ‘fifty shades of shite’ and its spawn off the top of the bestseller chart.
But the death of an author does not have the same effect because those that already know and love them have their books and so reread them instead of reading them for the first time. Because while Mr Harrison’s sad passing may not have a beneficial effect, his life certainly did, as even my feeble collection of his books can attest.
Harry Harrison wrote grand science fiction for boys. The Stainless Steel Rat books were rattling good yarns. They had space ships, they had ray guns, they had humour and subtle social satire lost on me, lying in my bunk in a caravan during the summer holidays, reading with the intensity that only a young boy can, devouring adventure. Maybe it’s just the pages getting yellow, or the glue getting brittle, but I like to think that that paperback actually has that caravan-in-the-summertime smell, like hot Tupperware and air so hot and still you have to fan it to breath.
Reading ‘The Stainless Steel Rat’ was more fun than going to the beach.
And Slippery Jim diGriz wasn’t just confined to the pages of a paperback, he was a comic book hero. 2000AD, my staple stapled reading, was home to the comic book adaptation. Because I got my 2000AD on a Saturday morning my back issues smell predominantly of bacon roll and grease rather than caravan and sun cream, but I still thrill at the spaceships, the ray guns and the hero who is a crook and more moral than any upright citizen.
Harry Harrison wrote dystopian visions. A trilogy of books: ‘Homeworld’, ‘Wheelworld’ and ‘Starworld’. Read decades ago for the first time and then re-read in a burst of literary gluttony a couple of years ago and seeing the books with adult eyes, the effect like seeing a painting restored. The social commentary, and not just any commentary, but my kind of commentary. Highlighting injustice and prejudice and seeing science fiction reading like an edge of the seat thriller, with ray guns!
‘Technicolor time machine’, ‘Bill the galactic hero’ and ‘Star smashers of the galaxy rangers’ are to me the literary equivalents of favourite movies, ones that you ration yourself watching, but from which random scenes pop into your head at the oddest moment - and from which scenes you recognise in other books, in movies, in comics or on television.
Any science fiction fan learns after the first ten or twelve times not to explain to their date that the scene where the hero does that thing, with the girl…that’s from (insert short story written in the 1970s here). Any science fiction fan knows that Hollywood screenwriters spend 10% of their time at a typewriter and the remainder playing Dr Frankenstein with bits of genre stories they think nobody else has read.
Mr Harrison was influential.
He influenced me, at least. Made me a more voracious reader, probably made me a better person, or a more tolerant one anyway.
Everyone will be suggesting the best Harry Harrison story, or their favourite, so let me be no exception and join the celebration. There’s a story from 1965 called ‘Mute Milton’ which, in my collection of ‘The best of Harry Harrison’ (I pity the editor who had to make the choice of what constituted that, back in the day when I bought this, when a paperback cost £1.50 band new in a proper shop when the NET book agreement was still in place, before you could just publish a 10,000 pager in kindle edition). Mr Harrison himself introduces it as ‘an angry story’.
I read it, I got angry, I was a better person by the time I finished reading it.
Harry Harrison, Rest In Peace.
Labels: 2000AD, Books, Comics, Fiction, Harry Harrison, Science fiction
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home