Thank You, Harry Harrison

Pictured at the left is the late Harry Harrison, a science fiction writer whose books always entertained me.  His "Eden" series showed an alternate Earth in which the dinosaurs survived.  The Stainless Steel Rat was a tongue-in-cheek look at future crime and anti-heroes.  His novel Make Room! Make Room! became the basis for the science fiction movie Soylent Green (starring Charlton Heston).

I'm most fond of The Stainless Steel Rat series.  On one level, the books are tongue-in-cheek action romps through space.  On another, they satirize the military, bureaucracy, politicians, and even violence.  They're loaded with some very imaginative gadgets, criminal schemes, and parodies of consumer products.  I treasured Harrison's work because of its ability to help me escape from the day-to-day world into a kind of swashbuckling, spacefaring, joke-filled land.

I credit the Stainless Steel Rat books with very literally changing some of my perspectives on life, the world around me, and physical security.

When I read how Jim DiGriz joked that picking some locks was as easy as picking his teeth, I wondered if that could be true.  I bought a set of lock picks by mail order (this was long before the Internet was a thing), a book on the methods, and a few padlocks at a local department store.  To my amazement, the cheapest padlock opened in about fifteen seconds.  The most expensive opened in about twenty-five.  DiGriz was right.  Opening some locks was just about as easy as flossing a bit of steak from between your teeth.  This changed my view of physical security, especially security based on a keyed lock.  While there are some extremely hard to open locks out there, many can give way to an expert lock picker in seconds, and a decent amateur in a couple of minutes.

DiGriz, despite being a criminal, saw himself as providing a valuable service to the community.  He reasoned that in his highly regimented, carefully controlled, highly secure society that police led very boring lives.  He believed that his criminal activities gave them something more interesting to do than catching the occasional shoplifter, jaywalker, or burglar.  He claimed to only steal from those who could afford the loss, or had insurance to cover it.  Since he tended to spend the funds he acquired, he saw himself as boosting the local economy as well.  The idea, however misguided, was eye-opening to a younger me.  I realized that, as Obi Wan Kenobi once said in Star Wars, "you're going to find that many of the truths we cling to depend greatly on our own point of view."  Here was a career criminal (DiGriz) who, from his viewpoint, was providing a valuable service to the world around him.  That made me realize from a relatively young age that different people can see things very differently, which is an insight that has been invaluable to me.

Another Jim DiGriz insight hit me many years later.  In the books, DiGriz often says that one reason he became a criminal was that he refused to accept the typical lifestyle. That is, most of us go to school when we're young to learn skills that will help us get a job.  Then, we get that job and spend the rest of our lives doing it.  While there's nothing at all wrong with that, some people (myself included) get tired of it.  If this happens early enough, you can begin looking for another job that interests you and leverages some of the same skills, and move to that.  If you stay in a field too long, though, you become something like the actor or actress who's been typecast in a particular role.  Changing your career trajectory becomes increasingly difficult.  DiGriz solved the problem by becoming a criminal, which allowed him to toy with banking, security systems, locks, electronics, and any number of other skills.  He was always learning and doing something new.  Although I've no desire to follow in his criminal footsteps, I would love to have that same flexibility.  I'm hoping that writing can offer it, if I become good enough.

So, Harry, if you're out there listening.... thank you!  Thank you for giving me many hours of escapist entertainment through your books, for giving me new perspectives on the world, and for giving me hope that there's a better way to live... and being an example of that better way.

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Analyzing The Stainless Steel Rat - Part 3

In the first two installments of this series, I looked at a statistical view of Harry Harrison's novel The Stainless Steel Rat.  In this installment, I want to examine how he developed the character James Bolivar "Slippery Jim" DiGriz, the aforementioned Stainless Steel Rat.

Jim DiGriz would not appear to be a sympathetic character at first glance.  He is a career criminal.  He makes his living stealing from others, eluding the police, and committing any number of other crimes.  Yet, almost from the first page, you find yourself liking Slippery Jim.  Why?

To be certain, Jim has a few imperfections aside from his chosen profession:

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  • He's very smug and sure of himself. When he disables the police robot that tries to arrest him in the opening scene, we are told "He squashed very nicely, thank you."  Later, when the robot tries to grab him on the way out of the office, Jim says "I had been waiting for that and they [the robot fingers] closed about two inches short."  When he hears the police sirens outside, it's "a wonderful sound" and he tells us that "I accepted it as any artist accepts tribute."   At one point, he tells us "The very idea that someone could outthink me was odious."
  
  
  • He has little respect for authority or the police. When describing the reaction to his escape, he says "They were sure making a big fuss over a little larceny, but that's the way it goes on these overcivilized worlds. Crime is such a rarity now that the police really get carried away when they run across some. In a way I can't blame them, giving out traffic tickets must be an awful dull job.  I really believe they ought to thank me for putting a little excitement in their otherwise dull lives."  When he meets the leader of The Special Corps, the elite government unit that hunts down people like him, DiGriz describes him as "The old boy behind the desk".
  
  
  • He doesn't see his actions as harmful. In addition to thinking that the police should thank him for giving them some excitement, Jim also mentions that no one is really harmed by his crimes.  If he robs a bank or a business, for example, he figures they're reimbursed by their insurance company so no one really got hurt.  What about the insurance company?  They've lost money, and they're probably going to raise the victim's insurance rates, too.
  
  
  
  

Still, Jim DiGriz is a sympathetic and likable character.

Bestselling author Michael A. Stackpole says that there are seven traits that tend to make characters likable:

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  • They are admirable.
  
  
  • They are "in control".
  
  
  • They are virtuous.
  
  
  • They are "human".
  
  
  • They exhibit courage.
  
  
  • They seem like "a force of nature".
  
  
  • Reading about them is a kind of "guilty pleasure".
  
  
  
  

How does Slippery Jim stack up to this list?

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  • He is admirable in spite of himself. Jim is creative, telling us "One of the main reasons I have stayed out of the arms of the law for as long as I have, is that I have never repeated myself.  I have dreamed up some of the sweetest little rackets, run them off once, then stayed away from them forever after."  He becomes more admirable when he joins The Special Corps and agrees to take down the more dangerous, homicidal killers.
  
  
  • He is "in control" by virtue of being a skilled planner and sharp thinker. In the opening scene, he knew a police robot would come for him and had already prepared the large safe and explosive charge in the ceiling to drop onto its head, disabling the radio that would call for backup.  He had an escape panel in the wall, knew how long it would take to make it through various parts of his escape route, etc
  
  The early scene where he's prepared his escape shows him to be in control.  The fact that his carefully considered plan to trap Pepe and Angelina worked, up until the point he let her escape (showing his "human" side), illustrates this.
  
  In most situations, in fact, Jim is a "take charge" guy who not only tends to bring others around to his way of thinking but also has a strong handle on his own emotions.  At various times he tells us "I stifled that train of thought before it started", and "Think first, then act." when he's feeling paralyzed with fear
  
  • He is virtuous, in his own way. Throughout all of his criminal exploits, Jim has never killed anyone.  This is confirmed during his "interview" with Inskipp.  Jim tells Inskipp that he hasn't killed anyone that he knows of.  Inskipp confirms this by saying "Well you haven't, if that will make you sleep any better tonight.  You're not a homicidal, I checked that on your record before I came out after you…"We see evidence of this non-violent nature throughout the book.  Jim's weapon of choice for incapacitating foes is a gas grenade.  He uses them on the occupants of the armored car he steals, on pursuers inside the department store, and elsewhere.  During the chase in the department store, he tells us that he "put an entire clip of slugs through the door, aiming high so I wouldn't hurt anyone."Even when he short-changes a cab drive "to break the monotony" he tells us "the tip I gave him more than made up the loss"… showing that he can't steal from individuals.
  
  
  • He is human. During the armored car scenes, we see Jim make his first mistake, failing to realize that the same trucks were going in and out of the parking lot. Later, when he finds himself in the office with Inskipp, he is asked "Don't tell me you thought it was an accident that you ended up here?"  His response is "I had, up until that moment, and the lack of intelligent reasoning on my part brought on a wave of shame that snapped me back to reality.  I had been outwitted and outfought, the least I could do was surrender graciously."Later, when he catches up to Angelina and Pepe, Angelina (the mastermind) pretends to be a victim of Pepe's evil schemes (when in reality the opposite is true).  When Pepe tells him that the whole plan was Angelina's and he's just let her get away, he says "The cold feeling was now a ball of ice that threatened to paralyze me.  'You're lying,' I said hoarsely, and even I didn't believe it."  This won't be the last time Angelina fools with Jim during the story.
  
  
  • He exhibits courage. Jim goes through several tense moments escaping from the police in the early scene, including walking across a plank between two tall buildings with no safety precautions.  He sets himself up as a potential victim for Pepe and Angelina, even though they shot a hole through a previous victim's shop.  In fact, Jim exhibits courage consistently throughout the story.
  
  
  • The book itself is a "guilty pleasure". There are many people who enjoy reading about criminal capers because they enjoy secretly imagining themselves to be the ones in the stories.  For example, they vicariously live the thrill of cracking a safe, robbing a bank, or running an elaborate con.  The Stainless Steel Rat books (there are at least 10) are told in first person perspective, making it even easier for a reader to imagine being Jim DiGriz.
  
  
  
  

So, by Stackpole's guidelines, Harrison has done a great job establishing Jim DiGriz as a likable, sympathetic character.  What might be equally interesting would be to see how Harrison turns Angelina from a psychotic, cold-hearted killer into a doting wife and mother.  However, that doesn't happen in this book.  It will have to be a topic for a later article.

In Part 4, I'm going to examine Harrison's use of Dialogue and Description in the novel to paint images of the characters, scenes, and action.

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Analyzing Harry Harrison’s “The Stainless Steel Rat” – Part 2

Part one of this series looked at Harry Harrison's The Stainless Steel Rat from a purely statistical viewpoint, examining chapter length, sentence length, and various readability indexes. This installment will take a look at the craft used by Harrison to tell the story.

Analyzing the Chapter "Hooks"

I've been told that if you want your novel to be a real page turner, there are a few simple techniques that can help you achieve that. First, start each chapter with a "hook" that gets the reader asking questions like "Who is this? Why did that happen?" End each chapter with a cliff hanger of sorts that makes the reader wonder what's next. If you also keep chapters close to an average length of around 2,500 words, most readers can get through one fairly quickly. They'll get to the end of the chapter they're reading and think, "That last chapter went pretty quick. I wonder what will happen next. I'll just read one more chapter before I quit." This cycle continues chapter after chapter, and soon the reader has finished the whole book. With this thinking in mind, I took a look at how Harrison started and ended the 19 chapters in The Stainless Steel Rat. (For me, the book has always been a page-turner.)

Chapter 1 starts off with a pretty strong hook:

When the office door opened suddenly I knew the game was up. It had been a money-maker — but it was all over. As the cop walked in I sat back in the chair and put on a happy grin. He had the same somber expression and heavy foot that they all have — and the same lack of humor. I almost knew to the word what he was going to say before he uttered a syllable.

At once, the reader starts asking questions. Who is telling me this? What money-making game is over? Why is a cop coming in, and why does that make the character smile? How does he know what the cop is going to say? The rest of the chapter explains that our main character is a career criminal who has been running a scam where cans of fruit stolen from a government warehouse are re-labeled by robots and sold to unwitting shopkeepers at great prices. He knows what the cop is going to say because it isn't the first time they've tried to arrest him. The cliff hanger at the end of Chapter 1 is that although Jim has eluded the initial pursuit, he is still on the planet and might not get away.

Chapter 2 doesn't a hook at the beginning. It takes some time to explain what our anti-hero is all about, how he views his life of crime as a sort of public service, and that there aren't many like him in the galaxy. It ends with him on a different world, about to end a second criminal enterprise, only to realize that something isn't right. Someone is looking for him.

Chapter 3 starts with Jim wondering who is after him, and trying to escape from them. It ends with him receiving an offer to join The Special Corps, an elite government agency that catches dangerous criminals and solves problems that individual planetary governments can't. Jim sees this as "the end of loneliness".

Chapter 4 shows Jim finding life in The Special Corps as a new recruit incredibly dull. It ends with him discovering a plot to build a nearly unstoppable battleship and being sent to investigate it.

Chapter 5 begins with a description of the planet Cittanuvo, on which the battleship is being built. It ends with the battleship taking off ahead of schedule and escaping, and Jim wondering how he's going to catch it.

Chapter 6 is primarily there to slow down the frantic pace of action established in the earlier chapters. Jim spends time thinking about the mysterious people behind the battleship, what their motives might be, and how he might catch them. It ends with the cliff hanger that "the next four days passed very slowly", leaving a reader to wonder what happened after that.

Chapter 7 ramps the action back up, with the battleship threatening Jim's ship (which has been setup as a tempting robbery target). It ends with Angelina, who turns out to be the criminal mastermind behind the battleship's construction, escaping. Jim realizes he'll be seeing Angelina again.

Chapter 8 has Jim stealing a ship and heading out after Angelina. When an explosive device detonates on the ship just after Jim disconnects it, he realizes that he's on his own now and can't expect help from the Corps.

Chapter 9 sees Jim as an independent again, deciding how to find and capture Angelina. It ends with him finding her in a bar, pretending to be a prostitute.

Chapter 10 starts with Jim pretending to hire Angelina's services following her back to her room. It ends with Jim realizing that this was a trap, and that she knew who he was. "Then, at the exact and ultimate moment of my maximum realization and despair she pulled the trigger. Not once, but over and over again. Four tearing, thundering bullets of pain directly into my heart. And a final slug directly between my eyes." Naturally, the reader wonders how in the heck Jim can survive that.

Chapter 11 finds Jim coming around in an ambulance, groggy and in pain. He survived because of a bullet proof vest and a reflexive move to shield his head with his arms. He modifies his medical charts to appear dead on arrival and is taken to the morgue. He exits the hospital before being treated.

Chapter 12 finds Jim looking for a disgraced medical professional to help heal his wounds and perform plastic surgery on him. It ends with a realization that Angelina is mentally ill, and that he'll have to "follow her down the path of insanity" if he hopes to catch her. This is another chapter that breaks the action for a bit.

Chapter 13 starts with Jim taking a combination of drugs to simulate Angelina's various psychological issues. It ends with him passing out, after triggering a booby trap he set for himself to prevent him from taking human life in his psychotic state.

Chapter 14 begins with Jim realizing he's in love with Angelina and that simulating her psychotic mind was intoxicating to him ("Even while detesting the thought I felt the desire for more of the same.") It ends with executing the first step in plan to get her attention as a member of the planet's royalty.

Chapter 15 starts with Jim in the royal prison wondering if he'll ever get out. It ends with hooded figures breaking into the prison and pulling him out.

Chapter 16 finds Jim being introduced to Count Rdenrundt, who wants to take over the planet (presumably with Angelina's help). There's no way for Jim to know if Angelina is here or not, but he plays along anyway. It ends with him meeting Angelina and learning that he had killed the Count's wife, only to cause her family to threaten revenge.

Chapter 17 has Jim wondering what to do. Should he turn Angelina in or stay with her? It ends with him learning that her psychotic nature was caused by childhood taunting over her ugliness, and Jim telling her that she's not that little girl anymore (but slipping and calling her "Angelina" in the process).

Chapter 18 begins with some suspicion over an assassin sent to kill Angelina the night before. It ends with The Special Corps showing up and capturing Angelina, who thinks Jim was stalling her so that they could close in.

Chapter 19 explains that The Special Corps had been monitoring Jim all along, and waited to see what he did with Angelina before finally swooping in to capture her. It ends with Jim and Inkskipp believing they might be able to cure Angelina of her homicidal tendencies.

So we see that most of the chapters in the book follow the pattern. There is something of a mystery at the start of the chapter, and a question at the end that makes you wonder what will happen next. Chapters 6 and 12 serve as a kind of break in the action and provide readers with a chance to catch their breath.

The hooks are a bit subtle in some cases, but are present in nearly every chapter.

Coming Up in Part 3 - Characterization

In Part 3 of the analysis, I'm going to look at characterization. How does Harrison establish Jim DiGriz as a career criminal, yet a sympathetic and likable guy? How does he depict Angelina as a cold, calculating criminal, yet leave her sympathetic enough that Jim can fall in love with her? And how has Harrison set the stage for Angelina to become a major character in future Stainless Steel Rat novels?

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Analyzing Harry Harrison's "The Stainless Steel Rat" - Part 1

One of my favorite science-fiction books is Harry Harrison's The Stainless Steel Rat. It tells the story of James Bolivar "Slippery Jim" DiGriz, an interstellar criminal. DiGriz eludes the police after a successful caper, only to be captured on his next venture by an elite police unit called "The Special Corps". The Special Corps recruits him to help them catch other, more dangerous criminals. On his first assignment, he encounters a lovely but homicidal woman named Angelina. He spends most of the novel chasing her down, eventually falling in love with her. This makes turning her in a tough proposition, especially when she admits to caring for him.

In various writing books and seminars, it has been suggested that fledgling novelists take the time to examine the works of their favorite authors to study their craft and learn from it. Last night, I re-read Harrison's book with an eye toward learning what I could from it. I'm going to share my analysis of the book here.  It may help other novelists improve their craft as well.

Statistical Breakdown

Author Michael A. Stackpole suggested that novelists become familiar with several writing statistics to help ensure that their novels are publishable, accessible to readers, and hard to put down. Among the suggestions he offered:

• Novels should be between 80,000 and 100,000 words long. Longer novels have been published, but usually by established, best-selling authors like Stephen King.


• Sentences should average 12 words in length across the novel.  Naturally, sentence length should vary, but it should average around 12 words.  Longer sentences will tend to lose readers.


• Chapters should be approximately 2,500 words long on average.


• Readability scores like the Gunning-Fog index, Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level, and the like should place your novel in the 8th grade reading level and as "easy to read" as is appropriate for the material.

I want to point out that Stackpole did NOT suggest that these were hard and inflexible rules. They are merely guidelines to help you identify possible problems.  For example, in "The Rules of Writing", Stackpole says:

The point of this rule is not to drive you insane by having you count words and agonize over word selection.  It's more of a diagnostic.  If you find a scene lagging, or a character not reading true, then you should go in and look at your sentence structures, lengths, word choices and the like. A little tinkering there can solve a plethora of problems, and set you up for avoiding them in the future.

Given Stackpole's suggested guidelines, I decided to analyze Harrison's novel using an electronic copy of the text and software that computes various readability measures. Here's what I learned about The Stainless Steel Rat:

• The novel is approximately 52,000 words long. This makes it quite a bit shorter than Stackpole's recommended length, but Harrison's novel was first published in 1961. Its size is fairly typical for science-fiction novels of its day.


• It consists of 19 chapters with an average length of 2,744 words. That's only about 10% higher than Stackpole's recommendation but not far out of line.


• The average sentence length is 14 words. This is two words longer than the recommended length, but again not far out of line.  The main character in The Stainless Steel Rat is a bit full of himself and is intended to be seen as quite intelligent, so the longer sentences make some sense.


• Its Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level rating is 6.94. This means that a seventh grade student should be able to understand the story.


• Its Gunning-Fog Index is 9.75 (where 6 is "easy to read" and 20 is "hard to read"). This means the story is relatively easy to read by this measure.


• Its Flesch-Kincaid Readability index is 73.04. A story in the 60-70 range is accessible to most students aged 15-16.


• Its SMOG (Simple Measure of Gobbledygook) index is 9.81 (which means anyone with a ninth grade education should be able to understand it)


• Its Coleman-Liau Readability Index is 7.97. This implies that someone with an eigth grade education should be able to read it.

These results validate what Stackpole suggests in his seminars.  Harrison's writing certainly comes very close to Stackpole's suggested guidelines.

Below is a graph of the length of each chapter in the novel. The vertical axis represents the number of words in the chapter, and the horizontal axis represents each individual chapter in the book. As you can see, Harrison does a good job of varying the chapter length, while keeping the overall average at 2744.

Of course, all this statistical analysis is only a high-level look at the novel. Just stringing together sentences and paragraphs that generate the same statistics isn't going to get you a published novel. Of much greater importance is the craft with which the story is told.

Coming Up in Part 2

In Part 2, I plan to examine the "hooks" that Harrison used at the beginning and end of the chapters in his book. I'm curious to see how he made The Stainless Steel Rat such a page-turner for me. I also hope to look at how he used the often-discussed "showing versus telling" technique to enhance his novel.

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