≡ Libro Free The Stainless Steel Rat Returns Harry Harrison 9780765324412 Books

The Stainless Steel Rat Returns Harry Harrison 9780765324412 Books

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The Stainless Steel Rat Returns Harry Harrison 9780765324412 Books

I'm going to have to spend this comment taking apart the idiot and dullard of a professional book reviewer at Publisher's Weekly who tried unfairly to paint Harrison as a racist in his public review. It seems to be removed here But I'll post here anyway as I did at Barnes and Noble.
This is a bit spoilerish, just a warning...............

As he hasn't read the series much less Harrison's background from WWII where he worked with black soldiers as a Sgt. while their white jackass Officers were always giving them crap and trying to get them written up or jailed. Harrison wrote a long time ago about his experience of this, and how it was about time the day black soldiers got their equal rights and were desegregated in the military back in the late 40s when he was stationed in the south at a training base. Harrison has never been a racist.
The Reviewer quotes the one sentence where jim remarks:
> Jim (himself quite pink) declares that the different skin colors "should
> have been bred out centuries ago."

Firstly Jim is not pink. His race is never mentioned in the books, though he is generally portrayed as a white guy by artists on some covers and the comic book by creative license alone. Harrison (and he has said this before himself) always tried to keep race specifically vague for the main characters in his Rat books so that any reader identifies with them.
Jim mentioned that racial differences on the same planet and same continent were odd to him BECAUSE in his world (this series) humans had colonized the galaxy thousands of years ago. With an end to racial bigotry in THEIR modern social culture anyone would naturally be likely to marry anyone else regardless of race, so after thousands of years of mixed breeding everyone is just a standard light brown color- why this color? It was predicted by scientists back in the 80s that that was what people would look like if all the races mixed out of existence. The result would be sort of brown with slightly asian eyes. Harrison went with this hypothesis, he WASN'T saying that Jim is this certain color so it is the best some how.

Secondly, if you have read any number of Harrison's books, you'll know he always paints country folk as being ignorant bumpkins. He seems to think this is funny, I don't know...
Same with those on planets that lost their technology. They are always ignorant dullards in need of schooling and galactic contact.

Except for the Grey Men they faced in the third book. The inhabitance of a lost forgotten iceplanet had evolved separate from the rest of the human race, were very strong and hyper intelligent to the point of telepathy. He only beat their scheme to subvert the normal humans (who they resented for forgetting about them while they suffered in their cold mining colony) by a bit of trickery and misdirection playing on their nihilistic paranoia.

The reviewer also writes:
> the green-skinned, shiftless, slow-witted majority oppresses the
> smarter, slower-breeding, pink-skinned minority

I didn't see the greens being any more shiftless than the LIGHT BROWN humans, or any more slow witted than the shipwrecked humans who were also savage bumpkins. Again its like the reviewer is trying here to compare this story to black-white prejudice and accuse Harrison of being an earth-race bigot.

The greens, being a mutated species had a non-human hive like caste system where the majority were like drones and didn't need to be bread to be smart, they were bred to do menial labor and could be replaced easily. The minority in the greens were bred to lead and so had higher intelligence bred into them. This was a self inflicted culture which had nothing to do with the normal humans. There was no use of comparison.

When Jim landed the smart leader greens colored themselves different human colors to be most pleasing to who ever they might be talking to. They knew of the different colors humans might come in, because different groups of humans had landed there long ago before people fully integrated.
And the remaining normal humans all interbred giving the "nice healthy brown" look that Jim saw on the real humans that would be normal in Jim's homogenized universe.

Too bad many real humans these days appear no smarter than the 'green mutant majority', of whom the writer for the publishers weekly review is obviously a member, so maybe Harrison really should have written this back in the 60s as the reviewer suggested, before the rise of the cult of the reactionary and the dumbing down of the American people started.


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The Stainless Steel Rat Returns Harry Harrison 9780765324412 Books Reviews

just a great sci fi wrighter
I love the Stainless Steel Rat series ... I read several of the books when I was a young man ...now reading it as a grown one I get the message a bit better. Humor, fixed with reality Jim DiGriz slyly pulls off that which we all dream we could. Thank you Harry Harrison ... Your mind is wonderful!
I deeply respect and love Harry Harrison for some (but not all) of his sci-fi novels,and I am a huge fun of his Death World and (mostly) brilliant Stainless Steel series. I guess that I am not the only one. However, the pressure from the fans which Harry Harrison probably felt at the time , which pressure probably forced him to publish this sequel, should not have been an excuse for a sloppy, thoughtless piece with little entertaining & moral value from a very talented author. Well, nobody is perfect. Or was. Unfortunately.
I'd read many of these books as a youngster and own most of the series in paper back. I loved them when I was 16-22ish. Now... I recognize the flaws in the writing, but still found the series to be a candy read. This book however was completely unreadable to me.

This character reminds me of Bruce Campbell (not a bad thing) and events happen where he magically gets out of a jam every time. Readers of his past books know this. It's very flip. The character is invulnerable and you know it and he knows it. The other books are like that and I did reread some before jumping to this one. So, what makes this one a one star when i would give the other books a three?

It starts off with Jim on a world where only the very rich can live. He has tons of cash, and yet manages to lose all his wealth within a day (I assume it was a day, but the author does a horrible job keeping you aware of time). This just screams at my suspension of disbelief to the point that I can't ignore it. His family heard he was rich and the answer to all their issues is to book an expensive interstellar transport with their barnyard animals and fly to Jim's planet without the ability to pay for the trip. Again a flaw in the writing.

Overall the writing feels like there's a point A and a point B and everything in the middle is just junk to rush through to get to the next point. Character development is non-existent. An outline of a plot is provided, but it feels very unbelievable.

Not only that but this is slippery jim we're talking about. Universe class thief. Even if he ran out of money, he's on the Universe's richest planet and he can't find a way to get his money back? He's on the on this planet and DOESN'T have some sort of scheme going on? Apart from the bad writing it seems like the character isn't the character we all know. He whines and stresses instead of problem solving.

I purchased this book on my kindle, only got about 75 pages in and I wish I could return it for I will never read it.

I wish that my childhood memory lived up to what the series was really like, but even more I wish that this book had been at least as good as the others in the series and it is definitely the worst book I've ever read. Considering the breadth of my reading, that's saying something.

In summary
This book is rushed, no development, unbelievable unless you can REALLY suspend disbelief, the character feels not himself, and the book feels like the author tossed words on paper for the sole purpose of making money.

I really want my money back but it looks like I started reading this and it's too late to return.
I discovered the Stainless Steel Rat, Slippery Jim DiGriz, more than thirty years ago and have read nearly every book in the series. It's been more than ten years since I picked up a Rat book and I hadn't realized how much I truly missed the rogue. Harrison is one of my all time favorite authors and this entry into the Stainless Steel Rat series isn't up to some of the early books, it is still a great ride. True, Jim doesn't put over any enormous con's and he doesn't save the world or even just Galactic Civilization, but it is still a fun read. All of the humor is here and the characters you are familiar with are here as well James DiGriz, the Stainless Steel Rat; his wife Angelina, as beautiful and lethal as ever; their son Bolivar, now a Banker (one presumes from the family history he is now practicing legal thievery), even Jim's boss, the ever grumpy Inskip, makes an appearance. For fans of the Rat, or as your first introduction to the Stainless Steel Rat, I recommend this book.
I'm going to have to spend this comment taking apart the idiot and dullard of a professional book reviewer at Publisher's Weekly who tried unfairly to paint Harrison as a racist in his public review. It seems to be removed here But I'll post here anyway as I did at Barnes and Noble.
This is a bit spoilerish, just a warning...............

As he hasn't read the series much less Harrison's background from WWII where he worked with black soldiers as a Sgt. while their white jackass Officers were always giving them crap and trying to get them written up or jailed. Harrison wrote a long time ago about his experience of this, and how it was about time the day black soldiers got their equal rights and were desegregated in the military back in the late 40s when he was stationed in the south at a training base. Harrison has never been a racist.
The Reviewer quotes the one sentence where jim remarks
> Jim (himself quite pink) declares that the different skin colors "should
> have been bred out centuries ago."

Firstly Jim is not pink. His race is never mentioned in the books, though he is generally portrayed as a white guy by artists on some covers and the comic book by creative license alone. Harrison (and he has said this before himself) always tried to keep race specifically vague for the main characters in his Rat books so that any reader identifies with them.
Jim mentioned that racial differences on the same planet and same continent were odd to him BECAUSE in his world (this series) humans had colonized the galaxy thousands of years ago. With an end to racial bigotry in THEIR modern social culture anyone would naturally be likely to marry anyone else regardless of race, so after thousands of years of mixed breeding everyone is just a standard light brown color- why this color? It was predicted by scientists back in the 80s that that was what people would look like if all the races mixed out of existence. The result would be sort of brown with slightly asian eyes. Harrison went with this hypothesis, he WASN'T saying that Jim is this certain color so it is the best some how.

Secondly, if you have read any number of Harrison's books, you'll know he always paints country folk as being ignorant bumpkins. He seems to think this is funny, I don't know...
Same with those on planets that lost their technology. They are always ignorant dullards in need of schooling and galactic contact.

Except for the Grey Men they faced in the third book. The inhabitance of a lost forgotten iceplanet had evolved separate from the rest of the human race, were very strong and hyper intelligent to the point of telepathy. He only beat their scheme to subvert the normal humans (who they resented for forgetting about them while they suffered in their cold mining colony) by a bit of trickery and misdirection playing on their nihilistic paranoia.

The reviewer also writes
> the green-skinned, shiftless, slow-witted majority oppresses the
> smarter, slower-breeding, pink-skinned minority

I didn't see the greens being any more shiftless than the LIGHT BROWN humans, or any more slow witted than the shipwrecked humans who were also savage bumpkins. Again its like the reviewer is trying here to compare this story to black-white prejudice and accuse Harrison of being an earth-race bigot.

The greens, being a mutated species had a non-human hive like caste system where the majority were like drones and didn't need to be bread to be smart, they were bred to do menial labor and could be replaced easily. The minority in the greens were bred to lead and so had higher intelligence bred into them. This was a self inflicted culture which had nothing to do with the normal humans. There was no use of comparison.

When Jim landed the smart leader greens colored themselves different human colors to be most pleasing to who ever they might be talking to. They knew of the different colors humans might come in, because different groups of humans had landed there long ago before people fully integrated.
And the remaining normal humans all interbred giving the "nice healthy brown" look that Jim saw on the real humans that would be normal in Jim's homogenized universe.

Too bad many real humans these days appear no smarter than the 'green mutant majority', of whom the writer for the publishers weekly review is obviously a member, so maybe Harrison really should have written this back in the 60s as the reviewer suggested, before the rise of the cult of the reactionary and the dumbing down of the American people started.