The Stainless Steel Rat Returns, by Harry Harrison

This week we end Stainless Steel Rat month with what will probably be the last Stainless Steel Rat book, The Stainless Steel Rat Returns. As much as I hate to say it, I felt like this book was really more of a disappointment more than anything else and makes for an unfit final installment to the Rat's adventures. Perhaps I'm being overly critical or not liking something because it's different from the original, but it just didn't feel like any of the other adventures with Jim that I've read.

The basic plot of The Stainless Steel Rat Returns is that an entire ship full of distant relations and their porcuswine from Bit 'o Heaven have interrupted Jim's retirement and have faced him with a rather expensive an smelly problem. This drags Jim and his wife out of their erstwhile retirement on a series of adventures through the galaxy, looking for a good spot to get rid of Jim's tenuously related relatives and their porcine herd.

While the premise is good and the book's cover promises plenty of satirical entertainment, I feel like the book doesn't really deliver on said promises. There's an attempt at satirical humor with a banker, but it's very clearly a bitter "take-that" at banks after the 2008 financial crisis and falls flat. The introduction of religious extremes on the adventure, always good targets for satire, also fails because it boils down to little more than, "Religion can be crazy stuff, am I right?" Which for most audiences who are going to be reading this book I think we're going to already be aware of that and looking for a little bit more. I almost want to say there's an attempt at racism as well but for the life of me I couldn't find anything remotely satirical about it and if anything it supported segregation rather than integration which is definitely a step backwards.

The other big thing I noticed about this book is that I seldom felt as if the characters were in control of the situation. Things just sort of happened to Jim and company and they coped as well as possible, but they were always reacting to events rather than actively trying to make things happen to their benefit. Which I felt was fundamentally against the heart of the Stainless Steel Rat series. Jim is always plotting and scheming and working on making the next move so he can put his foes off-edge and gain an advantage. Certainly they do things unexpected and Jim has to plan in response for that, but Jim is always seeking to gain the advantage and very frequently his plans come to fruition. In this book Jim's almost always reacting and adapting to changing circumstances. When he does actively plan and put his adversaries off edge, the result is always anti-climatic and kind of an, "Oh. Well that certainly wasn't worth the effort."  At best Jim manages to affect a few minor changes but his ability as a person certainly is reduced.

The end result of this book is that the stakes are significantly lower than they have been in previous novels and so there isn't as much danger to his adventures. Worlds or universes aren't at stake, he's simply on an adventure trying to find a good place to dump a bunch of country bumpkins and their pigs. At best it's a Stainless Steel Rat adventure because it happens to have the same characters, not because it's got the same tone. I'd actually recommend avoiding this one if possible.

- Kalpar

A Stainless Steel Rat is Born, by Harry Harrison

In continuing the Stainless Steel Rat series I have gone to the first book in the series chronologically, although it was actually the sixth book published making it a prequel to the entire series. A Stainless Steel Rat is Born follows the adventures of a young James Bolivar DiGriz on his homeworld of Bit 'o Heaven and his entry into the ranks of professional criminals which shaped his entire life. We also get to meet Jim's mentor, The Bishop, Bit 'o Heaven's greatest criminal mastermind and see Jim grow from a rather naive youth into a competent professional. Overall it's an enjoyable, if somewhat short adventure.

In A Stainless Steel Rat is Born we get to meet Jim as a young man, which is a bit of a refreshing change from his usual adventures. Instead of the calm, confident, intergalactic con man we're familiar with, we get to meet Jim as a wet-behind-the-ears youth who only stays ahead of the authorities because of his wits and a decent amount of luck. As the novel progresses we get to see Jim develop his skills and become the smarmy and charming con man we all have come to know and love in the previous novels.

As a Star Wars fan I am painfully aware of how badly an origin prequel can go and how the main characters that you enjoy become objects of scorn as children. I feel that Harrison actually does a really good job in writing this prequel because Jim is still believable as a character. He may be young an inexperienced, but we can still see the potential for the universe's greatest con man and criminal so it doesn't suffer the same frustrations with other prequel installments. And this prequel certainly serves an important purpose because Jim's backstory was never really explored in previous books and with all of the material reasons for turning to crime eliminated by the peaceful galactic community it actually begs a really good question why someone would turn to crime. Although Jim's reason of sheer boredom with the culture he grows up in may seem a little thin, it's certainly understandable for someone who's clearly much brighter than everyone around him.

The one thing I also noticed, and this may because the book is a little more recent, is the casual sexism of Jim seems to have disappeared. I'm not sure if that's changing cultural viewpoints or if Harrison decided to eliminate it from the book, but it's thankfully gone and no longer a frustrating irritant to an otherwise enjoyable novel.

If you want to read this novel and are debating on whether to tackle the books in chronological order or publication order I'd certainly recommend publication order. I feel like you have to come to know Jim as a character before you can be bothered to care about his past and how he became who he is. Otherwise you're just reading the story of a guy who will eventually go on to do great things but you don't know what those things are yet so you have no reason to care. Definitely worth waiting for.

- Kalpar

The Stainless Steel Rat Wants You!, by Harry Harrison

This week we follow the ongoing adventures of James Bolivar DiGriz with the fairly short novel, The Stainless Steel Rat Wants You!, which I mentioned briefly in my review last week. In this novel we get to see the entire DiGriz family go to work, dodging not only the tax man but also the biggest threat humanity has ever faced. A massive alien invasion from a distant arm of the galaxy has put human forces on the run and the Special Corps needs someone to gain intelligence on who they're facing and what their strengths are, so they send in Slippery Jim and his family, the very best agents available.

The plot is very space operatic, humanity facing an alien menace that seeks to wipe them out from the galaxy to the last person, but it seems almost incidental to everything to be perfectly honest. Jim's actions certainly influence the course of the war, but we never really see it happening on the front lines and never really get a true sense of how big it is. I guess what you really get is how one man is able to influence events in small ways well beyond the scope you would normally expect out of one person. The story ultimately is really about Jim and his adventures rather than the war for survival humanity has found themselves involved in.

The other big thing about this book is that it brings back the Gray Men, the main villains from The Stainless Steel Rat's Revenge who act largely from behind the scenes and use their limited numbers, much like Jim, to influence events in their favor. This book does a really good job of humanizing an enemy and making you understand why they behave a certain way, albeit in a very short amount of page matter. While I certainly would not condone the Gray Men's methods, I can at least understand why they do what they do. Sadly, I don't think they appear in any later novels and so fall by the wayside as characters after this story.

The one thing I really noticed about this book, and again, I think this is an result of the book being written when it was written, was that Jim repeatedly states during this novel that he takes a little bit of pride in being a male chauvinist pig. What he seems to mean by that is he enjoys being a philanderer and womanizer and doesn't seem to hold women in quite the same regard as he holds men, and he refuses to apologize for it. And yet during the novel he runs into a culture that is the very extreme of male chauvinism where women are really little more than property and do what they're told, which makes him more sympathetic to the women's liberation movement.

Again, this is rather jarring to a twenty-first century audience because no one would declare with pride that they're a male chauvinist. Okay, there are some people who do, but they're very quickly attacked for their ill-informed and hurtful viewpoints as they should be. I feel like a lot of audiences might tolerate some playful philandering but there becomes a point where people are no longer going to tolerate it because we find that behavior creepy and socially unacceptable. I'll accept it as character growth for Jim DiGriz, though, and hopefully in later novels he grows out of that male chauvinist pride.

The Stainless Steel Rat Wants You! is a pretty short novella that you could probably read in a day off with no trouble. If you've got a lazy day and want something fun to read you could certainly do worse.

- Kalpar

The Adventures of the Stainless Steel Rat, by Harry Harrison

Hello everyone and welcome to Stainless Steel Rat month. To provide some backstory for my readers unfamiliar with the writings of Harry Harrison, the Stainless Steel Rat series follows the adventures of galactic supercriminal James Bolivar DiGriz. DiGriz eventually gets recruited by the Special Corps, an interstellar police agency that captures the best criminals in the galaxy and puts them to work to catch other criminals. The name of the series comes from a metaphor by the main character who says that rats have always existed between the walls of society and there were more rats in the olden days but in the modern society of the future there's less and less space between the walls and it takes a rat of stainless steel to survive. DiGriz's adventures were chronicled across a dozen novels that Harrison wrote over half a century and run from serious to silly depending on the situation. This month I'm going to be looking at four books, technically six of the Rat's adventures because the first novel contains the first three stories written by Harrison, although now that I'm aware of the other novels I may look into my friend James DiGriz again in the future.

The Adventures of the Stainless Steel Rat contain the first three adventures of Slippery Jim DiGriz ever written, although they're not the first three temporally as a few prequels were written at a later date. However, I think it's an excellent position to start from and meet James for the first time. The first story, The Stainless Steel Rat, details how Jim came to be captured by the Special Corps and recruited as one of their agents, as well as his first big assignment and how he eventually met his wife. The second story, The Stainless Steel Rat's Revenge introduced the Grey Men, a mysterious enemy that will come back again in The Stainless Steel Rat Wants You! which I'll be talking about next week. The final story, The Stainless Steel Rat Saves the World, sends Jim on an adventure across both time and space back to the mythical home planet of humanity in an attempt to save the Special Corps and everyone Jim has ever known from ceasing to exist. Overall they're pretty interesting adventures and it's fun to watch Jim tackle various challenges with his criminal's bag of tricks, but this does not mean the book is not without issues.

One of the biggest things that I noticed was that there was a lot of casual old-timey sexism sort of woven into the stories in this novel. I had to keep reminding myself that these stories had been written forty to fifty years ago so they're going to have very different viewpoints on gender, but it's still jarring to read them. For example, one of the female villain's main motivations for why she turns to crime is because she was born ugly so she committed crimes to get money for plastic surgery so she could become beautiful. Another example is a planet ruled by women where men are almost second-class citizens, being limited to certain job fields and not being able to vote until a much later age. I almost got the impression of the author standing to one side and saying, "See! See how exotic it is! The absurdity of it, I tell you!" Based on Harrison's other views I think he was trying to help support the feminist movement, but it still felt weird to me and hasn't aged as well. Ultimately I would not blame it on malice but rather the prevailing culture of the time period in which these novels were written.

Another issue was inconsistencies in the overall universe between books. For example, the first story casually mentions Earth and it's implied that the home planet of humanity is a matter of fact, however in the third novel the home planet is referred to as Dirt or something like that and only exists as part of the distant past that's only distantly remembered. I feel like this is more a result of the first couple of books being written roughly a decade apart, which gives the author plenty of time to have forgotten some of his lore already. Again, something that you just have to accept as part of the nature of the series.

For whatever reason I greatly enjoy the first two stories in this novel and think they're some pretty fun space adventures that fans of pulp sci-fi could greatly enjoy. I'm more frustrated with the third story because of time travel shenanigans more than anything else, I think, but otherwise it's fairly good. I definitely recommend it for fans of space opera who are looking for something different.