Harry Harrison's Stainless Steel Rat really needs no introduction:
the adventures of Slippery Jim DiGriz are the most famous and widely
translated of the author's creations - in France he is Le Rat en Acier
Inox, or Ratinox; in Germany Stahlratte, and in Italy
Il Titano d'Acciaco. This being the case, I'm going to use this space
to first give a few background details about the series, and then to try and
answer two questions: Why is the Stainless Steel Rat so popular? And: If
the stories are so popular, can they possibly have any literary merit?
Historical Background
James Bolivar DiGriz - alias Slippery Jim, alias The Stainless Steel Rat -
first appeared in the August 1957 issue of John W. Campbell's
Astounding magazine. The 10,000 word novelette "The Stainless Steel
Rat" now forms the opening chapters of the novel of the same title.
Harry Harrison revealed the origins of the idea for the Stainless Steel Rat
in an introduction to the 2000 AD comic book adaptation: you can
read that introduction here. The original short story
began life as a narrative hook, written by Harrison as an exercise: "I was
practising narrative hooks and wrote one - the first three paragraphs of the
book - that hooked me so much that I had to keep going to find out what
happened next."
Harrison elaborated on the definition of a 'stainless steel rat' in A
Stainless Steel Rat is Born, written as a 'prequel' to the earlier
stories, when master-criminal the Bishop explains to the young Jim:
We must be as stealthy as rats in the wainscoting of their society. It was
easier in the old days, of course, and society had more rats when the rules
were looser, just as old wooden buildings have more rats than concrete
buildings. But there are rats in the building now as well. Now that society
is all ferrocrete and stainless steel there are fewer gaps in the joints. It
takes a very smart rat indeed to find these openings. Only a stainless steel
rat can be at home in this environment.
These words are taken almost exactly from a conversation between Harry
Harrison and author Katherine MacLean. Harrison reveals more about the
creation of the Stainless Steel Rat in an extensive interview which you can
read elsewhere on this page.
A second novelette - "The Misplaced Battleship" - appeared in the April 1960
issue of Astounding / Analog. This story now forms chapters 4 - 7 of
the novel The Stainless Steel Rat. The novel was first published in
November 1961. Since then nine more novels and three short stories have been
published.
You will find details of all the books, including translated editions, in
the bibliography. The short stories featuring the
Stainless Steel Rat are:
The Stainless Steel Rat stories are probably Harry Harrison's most popular
books: they have been widely translated, and their appeal seems to cross all
linguistic and cultural barriers. But why should this be? After all, they're
just a bunch of tongue-in-cheek adventure stories aren't they? Even Harrison's
friend Brian Aldiss dismisses them, in his Trillion Year Spree, as not
adding to the Harrison's reputation. But then, tellingly, Aldiss goes on to
quote the best part of a page from one of the novels... so the appeal is
obviously there, but what accounts for it?
One of the inspirations for the Stainless Steel Rat character was Rupert of
Hentzau, who originally appeared as one of the villains in Anthony Hope's
The Prisoner of Zenda (1894), and then got a sequel of his own
Rupert of Hentzau (1898). Rupert of Hentzau is a villain with great
charm: handsome, an excellent swordsman, and well able to live by his wits
outside the bounds of polite society. Harrison took this idea of a
swashbuckling anti-hero and put him in a plot based on the idea 'set a thief
to catch a thief' - having James Bolivar DiGriz drafted into the Special
Corps and becoming one of their agents. But Jim is a reluctant employee -
he has no respect for authority, and a mischievous streak which leads him to
try and humiliate authority figures at every opportunity. But such actions
are never malicious, they are instead motivated by the boredom of a highly
intelligent person trapped in a dull job.
It is this insubordination which accounts for much of the character's appeal:
whether the reader is a teenager rebelling against parents or school, or a
thirty-something bored by the daily grind of the nine-to-five, the Stainless
Steel Rat provides us with a hero who dares to do what we only daydream about.
He's a rebel, an outsider. He is intelligent, quick-witted, with a sense of
humour, and a seemingly endless supply of great high-tech gadgets. He values
his own freedom and individuality, but at the same time he is a person who
values life, all life: in ten novels he has only ever killed once, and then
only in defence and with great reluctance and regret. A refreshing change
from all those machine-gun wielding Hollywood heroes. Jim believes in justice
too, in the rights of the little person against the oppressive might of
corrupt regimes.
There is another significance in Harrison citing Rupert of Hentzau as
an inspiration for the Stainless Steel Rat, for the universe
in which the Rat stories are set has a distinctly Ruritanian feel to it.
Ruritania is the fictional German-speaking middle-European kingdom in which
Anthony Hope set his novels.
John Clute, writing in The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, says that
the two ingredients required for a story to be considered Ruritanian are that
"the tale must provide a fairy-tale enclave located both within and beyond
normal civilisation; and it must be infused with an air of nostalgia." The
best of the Stainless Steel Rat stories have both these features. The normal
civilisation of the Rat novels is an empire or federation - the League -
straight out of Asimov, but the individual planets on which the stories are
set often appear in the form of middle-European Kingdoms, with castles and
palaces and eccentric rulers, while the technology used is a bizarre mixture
of science fiction rocketships and rayguns and Victorian steam power. And,
curiously, it is this nostalgic air which has helped keep the Rat stories
fresh and timeless: where other science fiction seems firmly rooted in the
decade in which it was written, the original 1957 Rat story is not at all
dated.
I think the appeal of Slippery Jim, too, is that he is not a perfect,
whiter-than-white hero. He's something of a contradiction - a
thief-turned-lawman - and this means that the distinction between hero and
villain, good and evil, is not entirely clear cut: in the world of the Rat,
there are good 'thieves' and evil 'lawmen', just as there are in the real
world. It is not a person's deeds which define them, but rather their
intentions. While appearing to be a self-centred, reckless individual,
the Rat's actions reveal his strong sense of social responsibility. These are
two sides of our own character which we strongly prize: we are proud of our
individuality, but at the same time we are aware of our responsibility for
others.
The Stainless Steel Rat is someone who is like us, someone who shares the
same frustrations with daily life that we do, and has the same social values,
and who also dares to do the sort of thing we wish we could do. The perfect
fictional hero for exciting escapist entertainment. But is there anything
more to these stories than simple light-hearted adventure?
Do the Stainless Steel Rat Stories Have Any Literary Merit?
Literary critics seem to believe that because something is popular it can't
actually be any good. And if something is funny and popular, then it must be
juvenile rubbish. Leon Stover, in his book Harry Harrison, is damning
with faint praise when he says of the series: "They really are not as
'juvenile' as their targeted audience might indicate. The adult reader can
find much amusement in them at a more sophisticated level of appreciation."
Unfortunately Stover doesn't probe very deeply to reveal what these more
sophisticated levels of appeal are.
Steven R. Carter is a little more obliging. He wrote a lengthy critique of
the first three Rat novels in the Summer 1980 edition of Extrapolation.
He said it is: "a series in which the desire to entertain frequently
interfaces with the desire to instruct ... [These novels] although delightful
to read, might be dismissed as the literary equivalent of cotton candy if one
failed to note the number of interfaces in them and the humanistic viewpoint
developed from the interfaces."
Carter then details these 'interfaces', pointing out that the stories blend
science fiction elements with crime fiction ones; adventure with humour. He
also considers the humanistic elements of the stories: the criminal is not
an evil creature which must be destroyed, rather he or she is a human being
who can be saved. The character of Angelina, both as the criminal and as Jim's
wife following her rehabilitation, is equal in abilities to the Stainless
Steel Rat, showing that "Harrison is on the side of women's liberation."
But the most important interface is "between humanistic concerns and
technological advances in Slippery Jim's philosophy about killing." Carter
quotes this philosophy in the Stainless Steel Rat's own words:
Cold-blooded killing is just not my thing. I've killed in self-defence,
I'll not deny that, but I still maintain an exaggerated respect for life in
all forms. Now that we know that the only thing on the other side of the sky
is more sky, the idea of an afterlife has finally been slid into the history
books alongside the rest of the quaint and forgotten religions. With heaven
and hell gone we are faced with the necessity of making a heaven or hell
right here. What with societies and metatechnology and allied disciplines we
have come a long way and life on the civilised worlds is better than it was
during the black days of superstition. But with the improving of here and
now comes the stark realisation that here and now is all we have. Each of us
has only this one brief experience with the bright light of consciousness in
that endless dark night of eternity and must make the most of it. Doing this
means we must respect the existence of everyone else and the most criminal
act imaginable is the terminating of one of these conscious existences.
That's pretty profound for a tongue-in-cheek action-adventure story! But
it does, as Carter points out, go "to the heart of Harrison's philosophy as
represented in various works since it offers a key to his ideas about the
brutalising effects of war (as in Bill, the Galactic Hero), a key to
the dangers of superstition and too great a respect for any type of authority,
including religious authority (as in Captive Universe), and a key to
the need for international co-operation to solve the worldwide problems of
overpopulation, poverty, and dwindling resources (as in Make Room! Make
Room! and Skyfall). To make this speech, Slippery Jim diGriz, the
Stainless Steel Rat himself, must have had an all-too-brief interface with
nobility. In him, the mock hero meets the true hero to form the most
interesting interface of all."
Stover is correct, then, it is possible to enjoy these stories on a more
sophisticated level. And that these 'serious' subtexts exist is no accident,
it is a conscious and important of Harrison's method: "I have found that an
action story with two or three levels of intellectual content below the
surface enables me to say just what I want to say," he is quoted as saying
in Twentieth Century Science Fiction Writers. "I have also found that
humour - and black humour - can carry ideas that can be expressed in no other
way."
PT: You made your name in John W. Campbell's magazine with the Deathworld series,
which were serious SF adventure stories - when did you decide you wanted to be a writer of
humorous science fiction?
HH: I like humour. I was a cartoonist and did humorous cartoons, and always wanted to write
humour, but there was no place for it in science fiction then. There were two or three writers who
were allowed to be funny, and only them, writers like Fredric Brown, a fantastically funny
guy. So I had to sneak it in.
After Deathworld I was looking for a second novel to do. I really wanted to do something
lighter, and I had this property which had been well received, the readers liked it and I also had
at the back of my mind that I'd like to write some humour, which you couldn't sell at all, and this
thing was slightly humorous...
PT: This was the original short story "The Stainless Steel Rat" - When did that come into
being?
HH: Back in New York when I was still an artist. I knew all the writers because I was
illustrating science fiction magazines, and we'd sit around and talk, and one of the things we
discussed was the narrative hook. Narrative hook is a pulp term - the first page of a pulp story
manuscript has the name and the address of the person to be paid for the story up in the
left-hand corner; and in the right-hand corner we have the number of words in the story. That's the
money! Then we jump to the middle of the page - because we need a lot of white for the editor to
write on - the title, double space, 'by' any name at all, double space, then the first paragraph.
And its all double-spaced! At this point you end up with six or seven or eight lines on the front
page of the manuscript, and the narrative hook is something that will hook the pulp-editor into
turning the page - because there's so much crap comes in front of him that's so
rotten...Eeerah! He looks at it and throws it away. But if you get him to turn the page,
he says, 'My God! I turned the page... I'll buy it!'
So I wrote a dozen or so narrative hooks, and if you look at the first page of The Stainless
Steel Rat you'll see that it has something about - in the 'first person' - "I sat behind the
desk and the door opened and the policeman says "James diGriz I arrest you on the charge"... and on
the word 'charge' I hit the button, the dynamite went off and the five ton safe
fell through the floor, landed on his head - he said: You shouldn't have done that!" -
and then turn page. And after writing it I said 'What's happening here?' - and I kept thinking
about it and thinking about it... about what happens. And I had this idea in my head about this
Picaresque character - the villain-as-hero - and it fitted with the idea and that started the whole
thing going.
PT: You followed "The Stainless Steel Rat" with another short story about Slippery Jim
diGriz, "The Misplaced Battleship"...
HH: That's right... I thought this is a character that could be developed a bit, and there
are other stories possible. So I wrote a second story around him... And I was working on
Deathworld all the time I was working on these - in fact, I think I sold "The Stainless
Steel Rat" even before I started Deathworld - I was working on the novel and did a few short
stories, then after Deathworld was finished I looked at these stories and thought I
could use these as the structure to get a novel out of it. So I rewrote them, kept the opening, and
went on from there.
PT: So Slippery Jim was a popular character even when he first appeared?
HH: Very popular short story, yes. It got the prize, you know a penny-a-word extra because
the readers liked it... Then when it came out as an original paperback from Pyramid it was
completely invisible. It was never heard of again! It was never done as a serial, it just lay
there. And nothing happened for a number of years... and I'm trying to think if this is correct or
not, but it sounds pretty close to it - Toby Roxburgh (a Scotsman with an Oxford accent, living in
America at the time!), he was editor of the publishing house Walker, had this very good idea - this
was back in the early sixties and there were a lot of very good original paperbacks which never
appeared in hardcover, and Toby was buying up these rights for $500 and doing a small edition in
hardcover, mostly for library sale. And that way the writer'd make some money and his publisher
would make some money. And he had the pick of the pack because no one was doing hardcover.
These books had already appeared, so no one wanted to do them in hardcover. I said sure, but $500
is not enough for me, so I worked out a deal with Walker and Bantam for $2000 if I wrote a new book
- and Bantam paid all the money, he got the book and Bantam got the paperback The Stainless Steel
Rat's Revenge. I think Toby is probably responsible for starting the whole series going... then it
started going, very slow at first in the sense that there was no real attention to it. All books
were the same in those days, even Heinlein wasn't selling that much, it was a very slow time.
If you look at the publication dates, they're really quite far apart. After a very heavy book, when
I was feeling depressed, I'd write another Rat book to cheer myself up... and cheer the reader up.
They got lighter and lighter and madder and madder. If you look at the first one it's a very
serious book except for a few jokes...
PT: The second book (The Stainless Steel Rat's Revenge) is probably more serious than
the first…
HH: Yeah, that was a serious one... serious things happen because I couldn't sell them as
funny novels, they wouldn't accept it. You can't sell humour unless you're accepted as a humour
writer. No one wanted to buy humour, so I had to disguise them as adventure novels and slip in any
lightness and humour. Once they were accepted, they got madder and madder.
I was writing The Stainless Steel Rat Wants You - you may remember all those eely squabby
horrible things and every alien in the universe hates humans because they're soft and squishy (or
hard and crunchy, I forget which) and the Rat looks at photos of all these aliens and they
construct a Rat disguise, the ugliest thing they can possibly put together - claws and teeth and
eyeballs and a bomb launcher in the arsehole and everything, and he gets a ship and flies out
there, and I'm writing this thing and I know he's gone to save his wife out there or something, and
he comes on the TV screen and he looks at the screen and there's this horrible thing and he says
Hello, and this thing says Hello, sweetie, and I thought "Eh? Did I write that?
Hello sweetie? Where the hell did that come from?" And I realised, he's so horrible that
he's probably attractive to all of them... and the whole plot went ape at that point and he's wearing pink nighties and they're all trying to
seduce him... and you're into an alien drag story and your mind wipes out at that point! There's
nothing you can do bad at that point with an idea like that! Where does it come from? That's the
untapped wells of creativity, you know?
PT: When you wrote an introduction for the British comics adaptation of The Stainless
Steel Rat, Harrison said that Slippery Jim was inspired by a mouse you had in your apartment,
in the heart of New York City...
HH: Did I write that?! I don't even remember what I wrote. Though I did have mice in the
flat when I was writing it. I worked all night and the mouse used to wake me up. It'd get in my
cereal box. I'd shove it in a paper bag and take it up on the roof, and by the time I got back to
my typewriter he was back in the box! So he might well have been around because by God, we had mice!
PT: So that's how the name for The Stainless Steel Rat came about?
HH: Er, yes. It was a suggestion which came up in a conversation with Kathleen MacLean. We
were talking about the future and the politicsof the future and about future life, and I
think she said this - I mean I'll give her credit for it - but I think she said that if we have
flesh mice in wooden houses, so in the concrete houses of the future we'll have stainless steel
mice, or steel mice, she may have said, or mechanical mice, and it sort of followed on and fell
together with this idea I had in the back of my mind for this future villain and at the same time I
had this damn narrative hook... oh, it's all very vague now!
PT: How did Jim come about? The thief-hero, the rebel?
HH: Just a device I've always admired... Rupert of Hentzau in The Prisoner of Zenda.
It's not been done very much. Like a lot of writers I write stories which I would like to read. I
think it' s a wonderful device to have the villain as hero, there's much more dimension to it.
Raffles has this cricketer who, in the early ones, was a real criminal - stealing was okay.
Then along came morality and he confessed and it all faded away. I wanted a real Rupert of
Hentzauwho got away in the end, and gives the finger to everybody! He's good at his job.
Also a lot more character comes out - like this anti-violence thing: I thought it would be great to
have a series where the hero doesn't believe in killing people. In eight books he's killed only one
person - in the first book to save Angelina's life.
PT: Angelina is a great character, one of the best female villains in SF...
HH: Yeah... it was a plot device in a short story. Where the Rat was chasing this guy in the
stolen battleship, and that's pretty straightforward and then I had the idea - he has an assistant,
and I looked back and it's a female assistant, and I thought it's a nice twist to the plot if he
arrests the wrong person; they get the guy and she escapes, and it makes the plot move on.
She was invented as a device to forward the plot really, and once I had her as the
super-villainess, I had to justify her. I don't believe in the Bond thing, where pretty girls are
killers, they're not. Take a look at the murderesses in jail, they're horrible and deformed in mind
and brain... adenoids and an IQ of three, or something, that's what your murderesses are like. So
I, thought of the device - she's so beautiful now, why? What happened? So I made her very ugly,
insane and hideously ugly, when young, and the world hated her which gives her motivation. And
she's intelligent, so she commits crimes to get money for her operations. So she's very beautiful
outside, but inside she's a very ugly girl who hates the whole world. It builds from there.
Science fiction is the direct opposite of the usual novel character, in that in a mainstream story
people are established and the story comes out of their character. In science fiction you have a
plot established, things have to get done, and the characters fit the roles in the machinery of the
plot. But you have to do a decent job, you don't do one-dimensional characters… but a lot of people
do. So that's why I have real motivation for her... now, we've had so many books to flesh her out
in... we gradually got away from the fact that she's evil...she does pretty well in an emergency,
she polishes the guys off pretty well!
PT:A Stainless Steel Rat is Born and The Stainless Steel Rat Gets
Drafted, are set before the original Rat story and feature a teenage Slippery Jim. Why did you
go back and write these as a prequel to the series?
HH: There were six books and he's now grey-haired and he's got grown sons going to
university, probably twenty years of age, and this makes him a little long in the tooth - I didn't
want to write about the old-age pensioner stainless steel rat! And people said get the kids
involved. But that's a different kind of thing. If the boys were more involved it would be a
different series altogether, he isn't the protagonist. That was the main reason. And the second
reason was that I'd forgotten what had happened! I'd written the books over a period of twenty
years or so, and by having them all expanding out, I had to do endless research to find out what
I'd written... So (a) you get out of the endless research trying to find out what the hell's
happened and to get all your names right; and (b) now you've established the character, you'd like
to go back and find out how he got that way. You've got a full-blown character, and what happened
suddenly becomes intriguing.
There's a third reason. I discovered in the States that though there are a lot of adult readers,
these books are immensely popular with teenagers and university students. They have a very, very
big teen readership... I mean, every book you sign for a teen reader will be a stainless steel rat.
One hundred percent. And I thought, why not give them a break, let's do a teen Rat.
PT: Which is why you didn't go back as far as his really young childhood?
HH: I couldn't do that, I just wasn't interested... it'd be too boring.
PT: We never saw his parents...
HH: No, we heard a lot about them though! They were pretty square!
PT: Do you think that's how allkids feel about their parents?
HH: All intellectual kids who read science fiction feel that their parents are the wrong
generation, that they're not related at all... they have the myth that they were adopted! That
they're really royal blood or something! All teenagers who don't get on with their parents have
myths like that. I think all of us would like to become the Rat and have your parents as porcuswine
breeders on a backward planet! All young readers want to break away from their parents anyway.
PT: The original Stainless Steel Rat novel has been optioned to be adapted into a movie by
Bill McCutcheon (who produced The Scarlet and The Black starring Gregory Peck and the
"Eisenhower" mini-series for tv): what will be your involvement in the project?
HH: The agreement with Bill McCutcheon is, when the film is done - hopefully, if and when -
I'll do the screenplay myself or in collaboration with an established screenwriter - film people
with money want a writer with big-screen credits that have earned a lot of money. So, if needed,
we're going to find someone I can work with on the screenplay.
PT: Which actor could you see playing the role of the Stainless Steel Rat?
HH: They keep dying off! I mean, I've had the book optioned on and off for the last twenty
years. Steve McQueen was one of the best ones for it when he was in his twenties or something… It
has to be a good, serious actor like McQueen, who can do anything, and be funny as well.
PT: I think it should be a complete unknown.
HH: Probably. Like they did with Superman and Christopher Reeve. It has to be a
decent actor with physical build, capable of physical things, who can do his own stunts…
PT: So what does Jim look like? In the first book he says he's got brown hair...
HH: That's right...
PT: But in every picture of him since his first paperbacks appearance he seems to have had
white hair...
HH: Yes, I wonder why... In one of the disguises he had white hair... he disguises himself
in so many ways that I don't think anyone knows what he looks like. He has to be something of a
shapechanger… has to have good physical build: he does one hundred push-ups a day - every morning -
which is not impossible so don't knock it!
He does karate... he's pretty average height, average build... an average-looking sort of guy...
PT: So he could look like anyone reading the book?
HH: That's the whole point of it!
PT: A lot of readers - particularly in Britain - now identify Jim with the way he looked in
the comics drawn by Carlos Ezquerra. How did the 2000 AD comic strip adaptation come about?
HH: They approached my agent. It's a science fiction magazine and they wanted to do a
science fiction property already existing, and adapt it. And I said if they do, I want to meet them
- I've had some experience with comics. And they were all science fiction fans, they'd all read the
stuff and we were in complete agreement, so I had very little to say. In fact, I think they were
being too true to the stories with the dialogue and everything - I kept telling them to "Cut! Cut!
Keep the action moving!" They wouldn't listen to me. But it was very popular...
PT: Did you get to see character drawings before the whole thing went ahead?
HH: They showed me some illustrations the guy made for it, sure. The guy's a good artist. He
made Angelina sexy enough, that'll get the little monsters!
PT: Did the characters look like you imagined them yourself?
HH: No, no. But I never imagined what they looked like.
PT: Did the comic strip drawings affect how you saw them afterwards when you were writing
about them?
HH: No, the vision in my head that I write from is always there. Fixed immutably. You can't
really describe a character like that - unless he's a hunchback with a scar on his face! I mean,
what can you say? He's handsome, with a rock-like jaw, blue eyes... come on!
PT: When you write humorous fiction, it tends to be dismissed by critics as not worth taking
seriously, they regard it as just something to laugh at…
HH: It can be the direct opposite. If you look at Bill, the Galactic Hero, it's more
serious than a lot of fiction - it's a serious look at the military and the future of war.
PT: Some of the Stainless Steel Rat books have serious subject matter too - The Stainless
Steel Rat For President was about El Salvador...
HH: No, not El Salvador, just anywhere in South America. Any crooked state... El Salvador's
one of them; Peru, Chile... so I thought these South Americans think they know about crooked
elections, let's see the Rat involved with his crooked ideas... and that was the whole plot idea.
PT: Another misconception is that if you write a fast-moving book, they must have been
written quickly…
HH: I write books which appear to be written fast, but they're not. I really write
them very slow. A fast-paced book just moves fast...
PT: You don't write fast, but the reader reads fast.
HH: That's right! And there's a difference in that. I do my homework and get all my facts
right and I write very slowly... in fact, the 'fast' writing is harder than the slow... than pages
of dialogue. Everything's speeded up, the motion of the characters and the plot. Very carefully I
change the nature of the sentences and dialogue. The sentences get shorter, the paragraphs have
less sentences, sometimes they have only two. Punctuation becomes simpler, I drop out all the
commas so that you move through the sentences like that! [Gestures quickly] It's
deliberately done, so I'm a little pissed off that critics say that "he writes too fast." But I
don't mind, so long as the readers don't think that!
Three of the Stainless Steel Rat novels were adapted by IPC Magazines'
2000 AD, a British science fiction comic which contains half-a-dozen
different stories each week, including Judge Dredd. The Rat books
adapted were: The Stainless Steel Rat, The Stainless Steel Rat
Saves the World and The Stainless Steel Rat for President.
The adaptations were all scripted by Kelvin Gosnell and drawn by Carlos
Ezquerra. The adaptations were then published by Eagle Comics as a series
of standard monthly comic books for the American market.
From the cover of 2000 AD issue 141, 1st December 1979
Harry Harrison - who had both written and drawn comics in the 1950s - was
quite pleased with the adaptations, particularly the artwork: "The guy's a
good artist. He made Angelina sexy enough!" His main criticism was that,
perhaps, the scripts had remained too faithful to his original novels: "I
said: Leave the dialogue out and go for the action, keep it moving! But the
writer put all the dialogue in, which slowed it down." But despite this,
the adaptations proved very popular with 2000 AD readers: "Every week
they ran it, it came second in popularity to Judge Dredd, because
that had violence and blood, and the little maggots like that more! But it
was very successful."
The comics also brought a whole new readership to Harrison's novels.
Harry Harrison wrote an introduction which appeared in the 24th
November 1979 issue of 2000 AD. It did not appear in the Eagle comics
editions. You can read that introduction here.
The artist, Carlos Ezquerra, is the co-creator of two of 2000 AD's
longest-running and best-loved characters, Judge Dredd and Strontium Dog.
The Stainless Steel Rat
Adapted in 12 parts in issues 140 - 151 (24th November 1979 -
9th February 1980). Each issue contained a full-colour
centre-spread and four pages of black and white art, and the comics were
approximately 11" x 10" (28 x 25cm). The following issues also had colour
cover illustrations for the story: 141, 143, 147, 150, 151.
These 12 parts were edited and (badly) recoloured to form issues 1 and 2
(October and November 1985) in a series of 10" x 7" (26 x 17cm) comic books
published by Eagle Comics (another subsidiary of IPC Magazines). These comic
books featured all-new cover art.
Art from 2000 AD issue 145, 29th December 1979
The Stainless Steel Rat Saves the World
Adapted in 12 parts in issues 166 - 177 (5th July 1980 -
13th September 1980). Artwork was black and white throughout,
with a colour cover on issue 171, and a colour back cover illustration on
issue 173.
These 12 parts were edited and coloured to form issues 3 and 4 (December
1985 and January 1986) of the Eagle Comics series. These comic books featured all-new cover art.
Cover of 2000 AD issue 171, 2nd August 1980
The Stainless Steel Rat for President
Adapted in 12 parts in issues 393 - 404 (24th November 1984 -
9th February 1985). Artwork was black and white throughout, with
colour covers on issues 393 and 400. Issue 405 (16th February 1985) has a
back cover illustration of the diGriz family.
These 12 parts were edited and coloured to form issues 5 and 6 (February and
March 1986) of the Eagle Comics series. These comic books featured all-new cover
art.
Cover of 2000 AD issue 393, 24th November 1984
Cover of 2000 AD issue 400, 12th January 1985
In June 2010, Rebellion - the company that now owns 2000 AD - published a
single-volume graphic novel collecting all of the stories adapted in 2000 AD,
along with a small gallery of covers.
While this edition is vastly superior to the
poorly-resized Eagle reprints, it does suffer from a trait common to some of Rebellion's
other reprint volumes... Double-page spreads (which featured in every issue of the first
story) are reproduced without any concession to the different media: the artwork and dialogue
in the centre of the spread cannot easily be read without cracking the book's spine!
Issue 10 (September 1981) of Ares - The Magazine of Science Fiction and Fantasy
Adventure Gaming featured a short story by Harry Harrison - The Return of the Stainless
Steel Rat - and a "game feature" designed to accompany the story.
The game consists of a 16-page booklet entitled "Rules of Play", a sheet of
thick cardboard playing counters, and the game board itself, which measures
approximately 170cm by 60cm (66" by 30").
The game loosely follows the plot of the short story: the player, as Jim diGriz
(or, if playing the two-player version, as Angelina), must make his way
around a space station teeming with out-of-control robots. At certain points
in the game the player is instructed to refer to specific Event Paragraphs in
the Rules of Play that control the course of the game. This greatly enhances
the game's atmosphere, though it does at times make an already complex game
somewhat difficult to get to grips with. However, the game's replay value
is very high - it's almost addictive - and once the rules have been mastered
it's a lot of fun.
Ares magazine is now long gone, so this game is particularly difficult to
find, and a mint, unplayed version (with the counters unpunched) is extremely
rare. It is occasionally listed on
eBay, but it's a true
collector's item, so be prepared to fight for it! (Your humble webmaster only
recently managed to win one of these auctions, after more than five years of
trying).
Check out the News page for the
latest info on the movie.
Interview by Paul Tomlinson – Brighton, 13th August 1999
HH: I saw Bill McCutcheon in January or February in Los Angeles: he
was all ready to do the movie with a famous director.* Since then – nothing's
happened! This is typical Hollywood.
PT: Bill McCutcheon's had an option on the book for ten or twelve years
now, hasn't he?
HH: At least. And he pays me money every year to renew the option.
PT: What kind of stuff has he produced in the past?
HH: He makes a good number of made-for-television projects each year. Some
of them are very, very good, when he has a bit more money for the budget. He made the
Eisenhower mini-series, which was very good, and the one with Gregory Peck as
the priest in Berlin, The Scarlet and the Black. He also did Heidi under
contract for Disney, the latest version.
So he has no problem making films, I imagine that he does three or four a year. But
The Stainless Steel Rat is big budget: it started out as thirty million, now it's up to
sixty or seventy million. To get that kind of money you have to have an awful lot of clout, an
awful lot of people behind you.
PT: Bill McCutcheon wants to keep control of the Rat movie, doesn't he?
HH: Artistic control, yeah. He could have sold it a number of times, but they just
wanted to buy him off and make their own film. He wants to have complete artistic control.
PT: Has he actually got a script?
HH: There is a script.
PT: Getting a screenplay written is pretty expensive, isn't it?
HH: It depends. At the bottom end about sixty or seventy thousand dollars.
PT: That sounds expensive from where I'm sitting.
HH: Depends who you are. We're talking Hollywood, don't forget. A million dollars
is not unheard of.
PT: There's not many screenwriters get a million dollars.
HH: Not many. But an independent producer can get 30, 40, 50 million dollars if
the film makes profit.
PT: Which makes the screenwriter's fee look like peanuts.
HH: These figures are just so far out of the real world I don't even think about it
anymore. I used to lie awake at night thinking: If they make this movie, how much will I
make? Not anymore. I like the option money – I get five or ten grand for an option, and
there's a pick-up thing in the contract where, if the film goes into production, I get a set
fee. A good one.
PT: They pay you money for the option, which you get to keep no matter what. If
they make the movie, then great. If they don't, you got the option money, and at least you
don't have to worry about a crap movie being made from one of your books.
HH: It's like renewed virginity! They option it for a year, and then at the end of the
year you get it back and sell it to someone else. I sold the Rat book at least three or four
times before Bill picked it up.
PT: Would you like to do a script for The Stainless Steel Rat, or would
you sooner leave them to it?
HH: I would love to do the screenplay. I've done a million scripts in my time – I
did Flash Gordon comic strips for ten years. I've written – I think – six
screenplays, all commissioned, not on spec.
All of my books are very visual books: I visualise things as a result of all my time in
commercial art. So I'd have no problem with doing a screenplay.
* Harry is not allowed to reveal who – he's been sworn to secrecy by the producer!**
** But now we know! Click here to see the Variety press
release, and the interview elsewhere on this page for some more of Harry's
thoughts on the movie.
In June 2010, Rebellion - the company that now owns 2000 AD - published a
single-volume graphic novel collecting all of the stories adapted in 2000 AD,
along with a small gallery of covers.
Issue 10 (September 1981) of Ares - The Magazine of Science Fiction and Fantasy
Adventure Gaming featured a short story by Harry Harrison - The Return of the Stainless
Steel Rat - and a "game feature" designed to accompany the story.
