The Stainless Steel Rat's Revenge

It was more than 20 years ago that The Stainless Steel Rat was first recommended to me by a friend, and in the intervening years many other friends have expressed surprise and possibly a little disbelief that I had never read any of them. As a sci fi and fantasy fan, there are a number of these series that I'm yet to read that by all right I should have, from Asimov to Zelazny*. I've read one Harry Harrison, but I can't remember which one. It wasn't one of these.

Revenge was the second written of the series, but chronologically it was the fifth (I found this out when Jen, after expressing her shock and disbelief that I hadn't previously read any of the Stainless Steel Rat [henceforth SSR] novels, pointed out that I should've started with SSR is Born). In any case, it stands on its own quite well.

It starts with Jim diGriz, the Stainless Steel Rat, on vacation** with his beloved Angelina, where they cause destruction and mayhem before turning themselves in to the Special Corps, who it turns out are their employer. He is then sent on a mission to infiltrate and stop the interstellar conquests by the inhabitants of the planet Cliaand.

It's a grand adventure, filled with old school sci-fi technologies. Maybe I've been reading too many tales of the Singularity, but it feels like a pleasant change to be in a universe of starships and warpdrive generators and non-nanotechnology personality surgery. Like a holiday in a country town where they don't have mobile phone signal, and small CRT TVs.

The characters are eminently entertaining; it brings to mind some of the joy of reading The Flashman Papers; the protagonist is shady and self-centred but you can't help but like him and enjoy his adventures. The plot is pretty generic 60s/70s sci-fi, but that's largely not the point; the point is the entertainment of watching the anti-hero weasel his way out of an endless series of traps and tight situations.

So, definitely worth a read. Apparently you shouldn't start with this one like I did; start with SSR or SSR is Born. Though really, I can't see it hurting reading these in any random order at all. I'll certainly be reading more of them.

* OK, I'm exaggerating for the sake of alphabetical completeness - I finally read Zelazny's the Chronicles of Amber a couple of years ago. It was bizarro.

** technically it wasn't actually a proper vacation, but I'll leave the book to explain the details

738 books revisited

Not much to say but crikey! Google has done an estimate of how many books there are out there, and are 129,864,880 of the blighters. So once I get through my allotment of 738, there are still 129,864,142 I haven't read. I'll be able to get through 0.00057% or so of the books out there.