Comedy is hard enough under normal circumstances. Being funny while writing in a genre as demanding and conceptual as science fiction must be even more so. Yet we know it can be done.
Sci-fi fantasy readers often sing the praises of “The Stainless Steel Rat,” which for decades mixed adventure and laughs in the far-flung future. The series features Jim diGriz, also known as “Slippery Jim,” one of very few active criminals left in a universe where such impulses are controlled by technology and social engineering. Even the thought of crime is inconceivable to most.
But Jim is nothing if not determined to think for himself. He may be a thief, but he’s got a good heart, and in a cosmos dominated by bland conformity, offers a real rooting interest for readers.
“It had been like the sound of the starting gun to a sprinter.” That is how diGriz describes the news of a mint producing half-million-credit coins. He senses a quick killing. Unfortunately, what’s on offer after he gets caught is more of a summary execution. The planet Paskönjak is so rigid it first executes thieves, then gives them their day in court.
But Jim gets a reprieve – of sorts; the powerful Galactic League needs his help recovering a strange artifact, alien in construction, left on a prison planet. Jim is told he has only thirty days to bring the object to them or he will die from a poison they just slipped him.
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| Prison planets are such a common trope they almost qualify as a sci-fi subgenre. But the one Jim diGriz is put on is more primitive and boring than the more fanciful depiction seen here. Image from https://www.pinterest.ca/pin/38632509278834038/ |
An official with the unsavory name of Pederasis Narcoses explains:
“The League has need of a criminal. One who is both skilled and reliable. Which is an oxymoron. You have proved your criminalistic ability by your almost-successful theft. The poison guarantees your reliability. Do I assume that you will cooperate? At the minimum you have a life extension of thirty days.”
The rest of the book follows Jim’s exploration of this prison planet, Liokukae, where scattered groups of people live in exile and social backwardness independent from one another and unwelcoming of outsiders. Jim and three mission partners chosen from League ranks must penetrate Liokukae, locate the artifact, and call in the Marines before Jim’s 30 days expire, along with Jim.
It is a protracted plot, and I left out a lot to keep it focused. In one sense, there is too much plot. In another, there isn’t nearly enough of one.
“The Stainless Steel Rat” series was in a strange place when this book came out. By 1994 there had been seven prior novels and a short story, but Sings The Blues and its two predecessors stand apart as prequels to the very first short story which launched the series back in 1957.
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| The December 1957 issue of Astounding Science Fiction magazine marked the debut of Jim diGriz in the Harry Harrison short story "The Stainless Steel Rat," which was later combined with another short story to become a novel of the same name. Image from http://grognardia.blogspot.com/2011/12/pulp-science-fiction-library-stainless.html |
Confused? Well, don’t be because none of it matters. Little of this novel connects with the rest of the series; it could be any person of the future at its center. That is why I think the Stainless Steel Rat connection actually hurts this novel, for what there is of it. For such a legendarily resourceful criminal, he seems pretty easy for the authorities to manipulate (or capture, for that matter.)
One of the subplots I left off mentioning at the start is referenced in the book’s title. Jim isn’t just singing the blues metaphorically, from being sent to a prison planet and all. He’s really singing, as leader of a pop band who play songs like “I’m All Alone,” “Mutants Of Mercury,” and “The Spaceship Way.”
“Mutants Of Mercury” goes like this:
One
head good – but two heads better –
Got brown eyes like an English setter…
Is Slippery Jim at all musical in his other books? It felt like quite a stretch here. For a while, it appears Harrison is setting out to parody the music scene specifically around the time the book came out. We learn about the perils of song publishing, how loud performance helps to cover up bad musicianship, and are introduced to a female singer named Madonette.
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| Rock 'n' roll and science fiction shouldn't mix. Just ask these Martians. Image from https://www.pinterest.com/samhain82/50s-sci-fi/ |
diGriz explains how he selects the band’s set list:
I held up a handful of recordings. “These are the survivors of a grueling test I put them through. If I could listen for more than fifteen seconds I made a copy. We will now refine the process even more. Anything we can bear for thirty seconds goes into the second round.”
The parody is complete when the Stainless Steel Rats, as diGriz dubs his band, become massively popular. Because they are so terrible, get it?
I’m not sure how diGriz and his team are supposed to work undercover and simultaneously be bigger than the Beatles, who only hit it big on one planet, but never mind. As with many tangents, Harrison mercifully drops this band idea halfway through the book. Instead, the book focuses its scattershot satiric lens on other elements of the 1994 American cultural landscape, like survivalists and religious zealots:
“There is only one Way, only one Book. All who think differently are damned. Now is your chance to be cleansed for I have shown you the true way.”
“Thanks a lot – but no thanks.”
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| In addition to the books, Slippery Jim also became the protagonist of his own line of "Stainless Steel Rat" comic books, which are themselves prized by many fans. Image from https://2000ad.com/news/rat-turned-ratcatcher-outsiders-and-authority-in-gosnell-ezquerras-stainless-steel-rat/ |
The handling of these tangents is basic and perfunctory, a set-up, a wry one-liner from diGriz, and some one-sided, non-lethal combat that resolves matters diGriz’s way. While managing to get his way is part of diGriz’s accustomed style, here the resolutions to his various challenges are neither clever nor especially fun. They come off pat and jaded instead.
If you were around back in the 1990s, you might remember something called the Men’s Movement, which pushed the idea of men being men in the company of other men, beating drums, wearing headbands, and so on. I’m not doing it justice, but plenty of people made fun of it back in the day. Harrison doubles down on the jeering here:
“Out there in the androgynous settled worlds of the galaxy, the effete intellectuals rule. Men who act like women. Here we hearken back to the days of the primitive, viral, important men. Strength through strength. I like that. And I make the rules here.”
That is Svinjar, despotic ruler of one of the planet’s self-isolated subgroups. Another manly type is called Iron John, which also happens to be the title of a book by Robert Bly that popularized the 1990s men’s movement. On Liokukae, Iron John proves more horrid than Svinjar, even dosing Jim with hypnotic gasses to make him think he needs to find the true man hiding within him and thus reducing Jim to helpless tears.
Eventually Slippery Jim’s plans evolve from simply recovering the artifact to taking down these terrible leaders running Liokukae. “If it weren’t for the inhabitants this planet would be a paradise,” he notes.
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| Robert Bly (on left) holds court in his 1989 film "On Being A Man." Bly's men's movement was apolitical and focused on finding inner peace. In The Stainless Steel Rat Sings The Blues, it becomes the basis for a reactionary, anti-woman cult. Image from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DfV31Xo4Rs4 |
The humor in Sings The Blues comes in the form of one-liners by Jim directed at the numbskulls he encounters, telling us of their pungent odor or poor speech. Or he bemoans his general situation: “Only one continent to search and about three weeks to do it in. I shook off the depression that was depressing my depression.”
Science fiction does best when it promotes an element of speculative wonder. If nothing else, you need a sense of something formidable being encountered, something potentially awesome and mind-bending, to challenge both the reader and the hero, however it might be revealed as a sham or not later on. In Sings The Blues, only varying shades of stupidity are on offer from the people diGriz encounters.
Liokukae itself is a setting lacking any color or depth, very backward in a way that feels contrived in this distant-future setting. For example, one city has a wall that separates the men from the women. One of diGriz’s companions points this out as a key flaw: “This is a fractured society here, without women and without even the knowledge of women. Not good. Quite sick.” The men especially show this in their meek acceptance of brutal oppression.
The women we later meet, who while far more intelligent, independent, and humane than the men, prove just as blind to their own flaws:
“Sounds pretty terrible,” Madonette said. “Turning all those men into slaves.”
“Never say slaves! Willing collaborators is more like it.”
I chuckled a bit at that, and also enjoyed a robot dog that the explorers AI companionship as their close on their goal, but I never felt the slightest bit invested in the exploration of Liokukae, or cared a fig if Jim would find that artifact or reorder the planet into something of his own liking. The stakes were set too low. Worse, Harrison’s relentlessly ironic point-of-view put everything on a much-too-casual footing, snark passing for wit.
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| Author Harry Harrison. Among his other interests was a desire to popularize the international language Esperanto, which he plugs several times in The Stainless Steel Rat Sings The Blues. Image from https://openlibrary.org/authors/OL27278A/Harry_Harrison |
Harrison often noted the fact his light-hearted stories included little loss of life. As a humanist, he said, he understood that one life was all we had, and too precious to waste. In this vein, Slippery Jim is always taking pains not to inflict permanent injury on even the nastiest of his foes. But it really ices the tension when the only person at risk of becoming a fatality in the story is the one narrating it.
Humor may not be a natural fit for science fiction, yet there are many funny writers in the genre. Douglas Adams, for one. Also Bob Shaw, a personal favorite. Even Robert Heinlein could be quite playful. On the flip side, Harrison could get quite dark and conceptual when he wanted, being the originator of a story that became Soylent Green.
But
The Stainless Steel Rat Sings The Blues is neither inventive nor
enjoyable. It is Harrison goofing on his own proven formula and on fans who
wanted more of the same. I can see the formula working well enough in other
books; here it falls flat.
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