Jason Pettus's Reviews > The Stainless Steel Rat

2023 reads, #76. When I was first becoming an adult science-fiction fan as a teen in the early 1980s, the "Stainless Steel Rat" books were known as a favorite among heavily reading insiders in the know, the kind of books difficult to find in mall stores but that the coolest people at the annual Coniconicon were always seeming to rave about. And now, forty years later, I've finally read my first Stainless Steel Rat novel myself, LOL; and I have to confess that I now deeply regret waiting so long to do so, because at least this first book in the series turned out to be quite amazing, not just for the story itself but because it's turned out to have held up way better than most of the other '50s sci-fi being published by his peers like Isaac Asimov and Robert Heinlein.

It's essentially a heist story about an intergalactic con man named James "Slippery Jim" Bolivar diGriz, who lives in a Star Trek-like post-scarcity universe where crime has been virtually eliminated; he himself commits crimes simply for fun, and as a subversive act of rebellion against a tediously clean and optimistic universe, just to prove that he has free will and doesn't have to buy into the Starfleet-like goody-two-shoes attitude about the so-called "dignity of all humankind" and all their other garbage-people nonsense if he doesn't want to. As he explains, back before the invention of skyscrapers (keep in mind that this was written in 1957), rats pretty much ran things in the crumbling old wooden and brick buildings companies used to try to run their businesses out of; but if you want to be a rat in an age of all stainless steel buildings, you have to become a stainless steel rat yourself, a poetic way of explaining the book series' main pleasure, of how diGriz takes the exact futuristic implements of this brave new galaxy and uses them against the happy, shiny people who were under the impression that this tech would turn the entire human race into one big hand-holding family of man, where there would finally be no more war and no more crime and everyone will live in complete tech-enhanced harmony.

So in this, you can very much see this as a precursor to and informer of the cyberpunk movement that would begin around 25 years later, in that Harrison's main point in this book is that all the utopian ideals of the Mid-Century Modernist era in which he was living at the time were essentially one big smokescreen, and that all the new inventions and gadgets that were being introduced to a stunned, grateful populace every month in these years are actually double-edged swords, easily able to be used for evil no matter what the perpetual Hugo-winning tech utopians like Asimov and Heinlein had to say about the subject. That's one of the two main reasons this reads so much better 70-odd years later than his peers, because Harrison had the attitude about it all that we here in the 21st century much more commonly have too, that the human race is still shit and always will be, no matter how many doodads we invent, so we might as well sit back, have a drink, enjoy ourselves, and not worry too much about the repercussions.

And then the other reason this has aged so much better than books by people like Asimov and Heinlein -- and I admit, the aspect of this I found most refreshing and surprising of all -- is that Harrison had a truly progressive attitude about female characters even back then, not only making a woman the main wily villain of this particular book who always seems one step ahead of diGriz's futile attempts to track her down, but then making her a highly complex, often contradictory, always competent and sometimes kind of insane person, such an astoundingly noticeable change from my recent attempts to re-read Asimov and Heinlein in the modern 2020s, and realizing that pretty much every woman in every story by those two in the '50s (when you see any female characters in them at all) is a secretary or a housewife or some other kind of damsel in distress, and that their one and only character trait tends to be a description of how much most men will want to or not want to have sex with them, more often than not based exclusively on their boob size. It's a shame that we need to celebrate the embrace of female complexity so much in 1950s science-fiction when coming across it, because of it having been so rare in genre fiction at the time to be almost non-existent; but that's unfortunately the world we actually live in, which means that if you're someone who's been interested in exploring the origins of this genre but can't stand the insulting ways everyone but straight white males are treated in most of them, these books are absolutely some of the ones from that period that you can safely read without having to worry about being inadvertently offended every few pages.

Ultimately what diGriz discovers over the course of this book is that the skills and attitude that make him such an adept criminal are the same exact skills and attitude that would make him an excellent police investigator of other such criminals, eventually getting recruited into basically a sci-fi version of the dirty-tricks wing of the CIA (again, keep in mind the year this was written); so in this, you can see this book on top of everything else as being a precursor and inspiration for Star Trek's dirty-tricks wing of Starfleet, the infamous Section 31, although in this case with the Section 31 agent being the hero of the story instead of the villain. That tells you everything you need to know to understand whether or not you're going to like this book yourself, that the cynical, world-weary, wisecracking con artist with the contemptuously low regard for the human race is the guy we're supposed to be rooting for; and I'm assuming for now that it's this recruitment into Harrison's version of the Mid-Century Modernist-era CIA that ends up providing the framing device for the eleven other books in the series, written slowly over the remainder of the 20th century. (The second-to-last book of the series was published in 1999, with one final victory-lap novel in 2010 right before Harrison's death.) I'll be reading the rest of them in the coming years with great relish; and if you're a fan of my other book reviews and the way I approach literature in general, you'll surely want to jump into this series without delay yourself.