Harry Harrison! Harry Harrison!

by Harry Harrison

  The Stainless Steel Rat books have always been popular with readers. In the UK their popularity was boosted when three of the books were adapted for the comic 2000 AD. They wanted to adapt an existing property, and they were all science fiction fans who wanted to do it well. My only criticism is that they were perhaps being too true to the stories by keeping all my dialogue. I kept telling them, “Cut! Cut! Keep the action moving!” But the comics were very popular. Judge Dredd got top votes for the violence, and the Rat came second with the readers’ poll because Angelina was sexy! The artist, Carlos Ezquerra, did a great job. Book dealers in Britain used to tell me that they stocked copies of the Rat books because so many kids read 2000 AD growing up and went on to the paperbacks of the same character.

  The books weren’t always so well received by the critics. Brian Aldiss did a history of SF years ago called Billion Year Spree, and on the whole he was pretty favorable about my work, but I was a little hurt that he inferred that the Stainless Steel Rat books were “hastily written” potboilers that “hardly add to his reputation.” Twenty years or so later he did Trillion Year Spree—and the Rat books had been popular all that time—and he still says the same thing about them. I guess even Brian’s opinion is wrong sometimes! They have been my most popular books, in English and in translation. And Brian does go on to quote a couple of pages from the first novel, so he can’t have hated it that much.

  The problem is that fast-paced humorous adventure stories are rarely taken seriously. Books that appear to be written quickly are actually harder to write. The story moves at a faster pace, but only because of the work the author has put in. Sentences are shortened and paragraphs have fewer sentences. Punctuation becomes simpler, with commas dropped so that the reader zips through the sentences. Dialogue is punchier. It is disappointing when critics say “he writes hastily.” I still have to do my homework and get my facts right.

  Humor is often dismissed too, as if it cannot carry serious themes. But satire like Bill, the Galactic Hero is more serious than a lot of fiction—it’s a serious look at the military and the future of war. The Stainless Steel Rat Gets Drafted is a variation on the same theme.

  I have a great interest in languages, as well as in science fiction, and the two of them finally met in the Stainless Steel Rat books. When I do a book and I need an alien language for another planet, I use a foreign language. I have dozens of language dictionaries and I just pick one off the shelf. On one planet, for example, everyone speaks Turkish. But the universal language in Slippery Jim’s universe is Esperanto. The Stainless Steel Rat speaks Esperanto like a native. I say that in fun, but the idea of a “universal” language designed to remove a barrier to communication is a serious one.

  Unusually for an action-adventure hero, the Stainless Steel Rat has aged as the years have passed. The downside of this is that you risk writing yourself into a corner. After six books he was gray-haired and had grown-up sons—he’s pretty long in the tooth. Did I want to write about a stainless steel senior (or pensioner)? I did, in a short story, “The Golden Years of the Stainless Steel Rat.” But where did that leave the series? How could I continue? If in doubt, steal an idea from another writer, preferably a great one. C. S. Forester went back and wrote about Hornblower in his younger days—I could do the same with the Rat, and did.

  There were a couple of good reasons for wanting to write a prequel. Firstly, you have an established character and you can go back and find out how he got to be that way. What happened in his past is intriguing, for both reader and writer. Secondly, it saves you endless research and re-reading! I’d written the books over a period of twenty years or so, which meant I had to go back and remind myself what I’d written—what had happened where and getting everybody’s names right.

  There was also a third reason. The Rat novels have a big teenage readership—every book I’d sign for a teenage fan would be a Rat book. Why not give them a teenage Rat? Making him a teenager in A Stainless Steel Rat Is Born meant that I didn’t have to show his family life. We hear about his parents, and they sound pretty square, which will resonate with intelligent kids who read science fiction. Jim’s parents were porcuswine breeders on a backward planet and he escapes to a new life of his own. The porcuswine started as a one-liner—Jim’s father is a porcuswine farmer. But it grew from there and I had Jim hiding out at McSwiney’s and eating nothing but porcuswine burgers. “It’s the food of my generation,” Jim tells the Bishop at one point.

  I brought the porcuswine back for the final Rat book, The Stainless Steel Rat Returns! It brings the story full circle, with Jim’s relatives—all porcuswine farmers—destroying the tranquility of his retirement. The porcuswine are yet another example of John Campbell’s influence—him and his damn pigs again.…

  WEST OF EDEN

  Book ideas usually grow and develop and it is very difficult to pin the genesis down with any degree of accuracy, but with West of Eden I remember the whole process. I got the idea from a television documentary that showed what an intelligent dinosaur would look like today. It was a very obvious idea. In fact, on my shelf I had a few nonfiction books about the same thing, so the idea had been around for a long time. But no one had ever done it in fiction.

  I thought about it and I thought it was too big an idea to throw away on a single book. The size of the thing—it is now sixty-five million years later and we have intelligent dinosaurs. Now where did they come from? What happened there? Where is mankind?

  I was talking to Tom Shippey about it, and I said: “Why don’t I get some professional help? Perhaps a professional from every field?” I approached Jack Cohen, an eminent reproductive biologist, to talk to me about all things biological to do with intelligent dinosaurs. There was no trouble getting Jack Cohen to talk—can you imagine! I think one time we even managed to tire Jack out! Jack, being his usual acerbic self, had seen the program about intelligent dinosaurs, and he said: “It’s all nonsense! It’s all wrong! They got all the biology wrong.” He said many of the details, such as the eyeballs, were wrong. It looked like an alien—skinny with big eyeballs.

  Jack Cohen is an incredibly bright guy, an incredibly good teacher, and incredibly temperamental. He did research into prostitutes and syphilis and enjoyed working with the Birmingham-area prostitutes. He found out that some of them become immune to things like AIDS and syphilis because of overexposure. Interesting stuff. He knows everything about biology—and if he doesn’t, he fakes it so well that you’d never know!

  Tom and Jack and I met in Birmingham to have a meal and do some work. Jack had a couple of geckos there. They would sit and not even move their eyes. If you came near them they would follow you with their eyes, but that was it. Jack poked this wooden pencil near one, and the gecko bit it in half. I was very interested in all this, but when I looked at Tom his eyes were bulging. There is an innate fear of lizards in most human beings. I didn’t know that. Right away we had the idea that each species fears the other one. That goes in the plot.

  The Yilanè (the intelligent reptiles) had only biological science, no heat. Chemistry will work at any temperature, we just use heat to speed up the reaction. About twelve o’clock one night I called Jack and I said: “Jack, do you have to use a centrifuge?” And he said, “Absolutely, I couldn’t work without it.”

  Damn! You can substitute specialized animals for many things, but if you spin an animal it is eventually going to have to stop and spin in the opposite direction. We can’t have that. A centrifuge must keep going for a couple of hours to separate out all your chemicals. I said, “Jack, could you do it with a fractioning column?” He said, “Well, you could, but it would take a long time.” I said, “That’s okay, we’ve got sixty-five million years!”

  When I had a query, instead of trying to answer it myself, I’d go to a specialist and they’d do it for me. When you talk to specialist, you find out what is going on in the field. There’s research going on that will take a year or two to get published, and it can be four or five
years before they get any results. In addition you make them think. They dig out recondite material that can be used in the book.

  Early on when we were designing the Yilanè, we were looking at Jack’s gecko, and Jack said, “Like most lizards, he has two penises.”

  I said, “What do you mean like most lizards? I never heard that before.”

  Jack said, “It’s a commonly known fact.”

  “Only to you, what’s the second one for?”

  “Obvious. If the first one gets tired, they use the second one.”

  I was accused by the feminists of being anti-women because of the Yilanè. But it came out of creating the opposite of the humans at all times. So the females must be dominant. There are an awful lot of lizards and amphibians that go into a torpid state. There is also one species of frog where the male carries the eggs on the back of his neck. Another carried the eggs in his mouth. So I had a torpid period when the Yilanè males are pregnant. And if they’re torpid when they’re pregnant, that makes the females dominant, as they must protect them. Biology has assigned the “female role” to men and the “male” to women.

  While I was listening to Jack expatiating, I realized that intelligent dinosaurs would be just as alien as creatures from the stars. It was somewhere about here that the big idea clicked.

  Why isn’t the alien world, everything about it, the direct opposite of mankind? Where the humans would still be in the late stone age, the hunter-gatherer stage.

  Jack had done some work for Anne McCaffrey and other writers, and he volunteered to help me as well. That was when I decided no freebees. I thought, no, these academics are friends of mine and they’re hard-working guys, I’ll pay them real money. That way they can come and go, and I have the work that I’ve paid for. I can either use it or not as I see fit.

  In science fiction there are many mansions. Many people I know teach PhD courses and they are more than willing to help. Ask them about their specialty and they can produce endless material.

  I was talking about the idea with John R. Pierce—from Bell Labs—and he remembered a story in John Campbell’s Astounding, a long time ago, that had a flying plane with bird’s wings. However when you go inside you see that there’s no engine—and no bird—just a muscle attachment. So I thought, why don’t I do a biological-based science? I would have to go all the way. There will be no fire. Everything is done biologically and chemically. I worked with Jack on that. Tom Shippey built the language. Leon Stover sorted out the anthropology. Then, somewhere about halfway through plotting, I needed a real religion—that doesn’t exist yet—for the Daughters of Life. I dug through the Science Fiction Research Association directory, and there—among all the professors of English Literature—was one professor who taught philosophy and religion.

  Next time I was in America I went to visit him and we had a meal and a chat. He was more than happy to design the religion. It was wonderful. I could never have designed anything even close.

  I had a bit of money in the bank at this time so I was able to spend two years working on this new book. I had no plot yet, no story—and about thirty thousand words of notes! I wrote to my agent about this and when he looked at the heap of material he said, “This isn’t one book—it’s a trilogy.” He was right. I ended up with about half a million words across three books. I turned this thirty thousand words of research around and I looked at it, closely, and thought, what do I do with the story here?

  I built in the separation of the two species so that they didn’t meet until the events of my book brought them together. The Yilanè ran all of Africa and Europe, and the Tanu, the humans, had the New World. That caused me some problems, because we are descended from Old World monkeys. The Tanu had to be descended from New World monkeys. We are tailless, but the New World monkeys all have tails. In the book, one group of humans, the Paramutan, have fur and a tail—each problem leads to its own interesting solutions.

  In my book there is a new ice age that is coming on. Leon Stover was upset at this. He said that once you change what happened 65 million years BC, you louse up the whole cycle of the ice ages. I was happy to do this. The ice is coming down, the climate is changing, and it sends the Tanu south to Florida.

  In the Old World the Yilanè have elaborate city-states, completely separate from the humans’. One city has been wiped out by the advancing ice; seeking new land the Yilanè send an exploration party to the New World. When they meet the Tanu the feeling of hatred is mutual: they clash. Like Tom Shippey and the gecko, they just loathe each other from the very first moment.

  The Tanu and the Yilanè had separate cultures and separate languages. And their innate fear and hatred meant there could be no peace between them. To carry the story I needed a bridge between the two species. I went to history. In America at the turn of the century, there were many books about Native American Indians capturing white children and raising them as Indians. In turn I must have a captured child who grows up among the Yilanè, speaking both languages. The various problems and their eventual solutions developed enough plot for three books. I worked it out so that every detail had its opposite. The story develops from the clash.

  The geography of the world is the same as it is now, except that the ice cap is coming down, farther and farther south. I had Bill Sanderson (an incredibly gifted artist) do a map and it turned out that Alpèasak was the Florida Keys. We did the projection of the maps from the Yilanè point of view.

  West of Eden is a classic example of how you plot a science fiction book. Although the world is our world, there is still world-building going on there; there are new languages and cultures. The Yilanè are not aliens in the bug-eyed monster sense, they were created as an “alien” race. I was as naïve as the reader. But when you have conflict, you have plot. With plot you have a book or books.

  * * *

  Science fiction people are outsiders, and they know it. I remember going to some convention somewhere, and in the main lobby was a kid reading a science fiction book. Every time I went through the lobby he was still reading the book. He didn’t bother going to panels or anything. At home his parents would probably tear his magazines up and throw them out, but here he could sit in public and read science fiction! We are just one big family. You can talk to complete strangers but have a common reference point—the science fiction stories you have read. When I was younger we all read the same magazines and could talk about individual stories we liked. And we all have the same rejection by our parents.

  I read one story, a serial, in some forgotten magazine. I was so in love with that story that I tore out the three parts and bound them together. I loaned it to a friend of mine—and his mother threw it out!

  Then, after the war, one of the small presses printed it as a book. Great! The Green Man of Graypec by Festus Pragnell. I’ve never heard of Festus Pragnell. The story is about Leroy Spoffit, lawn tennis champion of the world. He gets whisked through to another dimension and ends up in a world called Graypec where the green men are fighting a tank war. I bought this book, paid two and a half dollars for it, bound, wow! I started reading it, read about three or four pages, and then the letters all fell off the page in front of my eyes.

  It was terrible pulp in every way. Only a teenager—which I was then—would see any value in it.

  I have a letter in my correspondence file from Terry Carr saying how terrible “Doc” Smith is. I said, “How old were you when you read it?” He said, “I was twenty-one.” I was eight years old, and let me tell you, when you’re eight years old it reads pretty well. It’s age-dependent, bad writing and stupid plotting, and a lot of juvenility. When I was teaching my science fiction course at San Diego State, a high school kid who got good marks could pick an elective, and a lot of them picked science fiction. Greg Bear was my student at the time, and said he could get me a job teaching teachers science fiction. We decided that “Doc” Smith was science fiction written for boys. And if you open Kimball Kinnison’s zipper, he’d be smooth all the way down
. He was a prepubescent boy too!

  One thing that detective stories share with science fiction is that you have to know the ending before you can write the book. In a detective novel you start at the end and work backward. In science fiction you do the same thing at different points in the story—you do it more often. So in West of Eden I needed the hero to speak the Yilanè language, so I had to work backward from there and plot how this came about. Mainstream fiction is oriented around the character—the story comes out of the characters. Science fiction is plot oriented: you get a plot and then you create a character to fit the plot. In science fiction the plot is based on an idea, it is about a novelty and an exploration of that novelty. Someone once said that science fiction was the only form of fiction where the plot was the hero.

  I remember one story, written by a very nice Scottish writer who came over to visit me in Denmark. In his story he built a giant robot ship to explore the galaxy. It’s all robot operated, and it was a very nicely developed story. They send it out, it goes out to the galactic edge and comes back, which takes a couple of million years or more. When it gets back it lands on Earth and the robots look out and there’s nothing there. So it takes off and goes round again! The machine is hero, the plot is hero. You don’t do that in other forms of fiction.

  In detective fiction and romances and Westerns there are certain standard plots. In science fiction there is no formula plot. The plot comes out of the exploration of the idea. You can use plots from all of fiction.