But there was a bar there, so I went to the bar and I exhausted a few of my words of Russian: vino, pivo, and ordered a red wine for Moira and two Russian beers, and I paid for it in cash. I know about six words of Russian that I’ve picked up over the years—beer, wine, vodka, water, and one, two, three, and four in numbers—and most of that was from Yugoslavian and Czech, which have the same words.
We sat and had a drink, and then I went to bother the cashiers again, and eventually got to speak to the supervisor, and while she didn’t speak any English either, she was more intelligent, and she figured out why we were in a restaurant: maybe we wanted some food! You were supposed to read the printed sheet with food on it by the cash register, then order and pay for what you wanted, then go into the dining room and hand the receipt to one of the grimly lurking waiting staff. I thought I ordered a meal and paid my cash, and they brought us three of everything: three slices of bread, three orders of soup, and three fried eggs. That was probably the best meal we had there, even if we did fight over the bread! The main meals we had once the convention got started were really bad. We had watery, cold soup and overcooked vegetables with cabbage appearing in many guises, even at breakfast. The meat was served the same way (possibly boiled until dead), irrespective of species. Russian food can be terrible, absolutely awful. The wonderful meals we had in Moscow were but a fading dream. I had a young man, Kyril, coming out to interview me, and as soon as we realized he spoke pretty good English, Moira pounced on him, invited him to join us for dinner, and then let him translate for us so that we actually managed to order a whole meal. He plowed his way through the awful food—nobody leaves food on their plate in Russia, it is still considered a precious commodity.
Moira and Mark were going back home the day before me: I was staying on an extra day after the con to have some fun (I thought). The next day we managed to get a breakfast—there were people coming in for the con, bit by bit, and there was one girl who spoke English: I stopped her as she came in through the door and asked her if she would help me. And she got a meal for us, three of each again. And about noon the science fiction people started coming in. David Lally turned up, and in response to Moira’s concerns about what would happen to me and how I would get back to the airport in Moscow once she and Mark left, offered to let me sleep in his room if I had to. Moira will be forever grateful for his offer. Then my agent showed up, and my publisher, and Moira started working on him. It was all very confused. We sorted the whole thing out—almost. And Moira was very worried about me being left alone there, because the convention ended a day before my flight. Alex and my publisher sorted out my room and got me a car that would drive me to the airport. Moira and Mark left in a broken-down van so decrepit that they kissed the ground when they arrived in one piece at the airport. The agent and publisher finally got it all arranged for me—until they discovered it was the wrong airport! I eventually ended up in a motel at the airport—Alex took me there and we rang Moira to reassure her I was alive and well and at the airport and not languishing in the now-abandoned holiday camp.
But what a difference between poverty and millionaire!
* * *
I’d been to Russia once before, in 1987, as a result of World SF. I was invited by Yeremy Parnov and went there with Joan and a few others, including Fred Pohl. It was a one-week conference. We had a little banquet at the Writers’ Union, this was the Writers’ Union of all Soviet Russia, and Parnov and his apparatchik picked who got published. They were really a power in the land. It was in this very nice, elegant prewar building, with chandeliers and staircases, and I went to the toilet to find it was a urinal that was broken in half: your pee went right on the floor. That was it. No one ever fixed the damn thing—it was hanging off the wall, had been for years. You get this strange dichotomy.…
We stayed in the Cosmos hotel, which was a real typical Russian-style hotel that held five thousand people. When the Russians do it, they do it big. Why they bothered making a hotel for five thousand people I have no idea. They had two dining rooms, one where the food was twice the price of the other, and the same menu, but the food came in five minutes instead of five hours! Somewhere in the middle of the hotel I found a little bar where they served all kinds of Western drinks, Budweiser beer and everything, and you had to pay in dollars. I was with another writer, I forget his name. And they had caviar sandwiches, and we used to go in and have caviar every day, courtesy of foreign currency. In the hotel was an eye clinic, where a lot of Arabs with glaucoma were being operated on. There were big lifts and the doors would open and the elevator would be full of Arabs with patches over their eyes.
We had a very nice translator, who spied for the government, of course. And we did some sightseeing—they took us out to Star City where the cosmonauts were, and I met a cosmonaut. They had a landing capsule there—they landed in Siberia. The American space program did research into food and put it in tubes so they could squeeze it out in space. In the Russian capsule was a box with glass on top, and it was full of tins. The Russians took tinned food with them. Tinned fish, tinned caviar … why not? Eight million dollars’ research saved right there. They had a cosmonaut there, a little guy, about five foot one—all the cosmonauts were very small, because you save weight that way! My translator was with me, and I said can I ask him a question, and he was a very serious-looking guy, and I asked him if he flew in this capsule, and he said da, and this is the food he ate? Da. And I said: “Will you ask him, did he remember to take a can opener with him?” She translated, and his face broke into a big smile.… He said: “Da, da.… Many tin openers.” Russians are very funny people, and very easy to get along with.
Svetlana, Stalin’s daughter, married an American and moved to America, and she always wondered why the Russians and the Americans didn’t get along, because they were very much the same kind of people. And we are. Russians have a great sense of humor, and are a lot of fun to be with, they love to eat and drink. We were only enemies because the politicians thought the Cold War was a great idea. When Eisenhower left office—and bear in mind he was a general and president of the United States—his parting shot was: What America needs to watch out for is being taken over by the military-industrial complex. And they took over. They won! That’s why we have all these nice little wars all over the world.
The guy who was our translator on that first trip to Russia was very good, a great fan and a great collector: fandom is international. In Russia, everything was late. We were supposed to be going on this coach tour, and we were sitting in the lobby, and Fred Pohl and I were bullshitting each other, and we were talking about who is the ugliest science fiction writer—there’s a lot of competition! And we looked up and saw the translator’s face: I said, “What’s the matter?” He said: “You’re talking about my gods!” A true fan.
* * *
I was guest of honor at the 2008 Eurocon, which was held in Russia and which was also the Russian national convention, Roscon. My appearance there was reported—or I might say “misreported”—by Pravda. I was interviewed and asked a lot of leading questions, and they managed to misquote me just enough to make it quotable: “Within several years of Bush’s rule the American democratic power has turned into the state of a fascist or Stalinist type—the president violates the Constitution, such key principles as freedom of speech and freedom of conscience,” I am quoted as saying, having been translated into Russian and then back into English for the Pravda Web site. This led one fan Web site to declare: “Stainless Steel Rat Author Defects to Russia!”
For the record: I did not say that the USA is a fascist state. I said that Bush had consistently violated the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. But America is a constitutional democracy and I have great faith in this document. The inherent checks and balances in the U.S. system would cancel out Bush’s violations, I said. I am a great believer in the strength of American democracy. In the long run. Read my Stars and Stripes trilogy if you doubt me.
STAINLESS STEEL RAT
My first sale to John Campbell was “The Stainless Steel Rat,” a short story that appeared in the August 1957 issue of Astounding. It introduced a character—James Bolivar “Slippery Jim” diGriz—who would stay with me for the next fifty-five years.
I was in New York and making the transition from “Harry the artist” to being a writer. As a comics artist I’d collaborated with Wally, Ernie Bache, and others, and when I started writing men’s adventures and confessions I worked with my old friend Hubert Pritchard. I met Katherine MacLean at the Hydra Club, and somehow we ended up collaborating on a story called “Web of the Norns.” It just seemed natural—a lot of writers were collaborating back then. We passed chapters back and forth, and were going to expand it into a novel, but we never did. I eventually published it in Fantasy, which I was editing at the time.
At that time there was a mouse in my apartment; it used to steal my cereal. I’d catch it and shove it in a paper bag and release it up on the roof, and by the time I got back to my typewriter he was back in the cereal box! I’m pretty sure that the idea came up in a conversation with Katherine that while we have flesh-and-blood mice in our apartments, in the future they will have steel mice, or she may have said mechanical mice. I’m happy to give her credit for that idea, because I was able to put it together with an idea I’d had in mind for an antihero in the future.
I write stories that I would like to read, and I’d always admired Rupert of Hentzau from Anthony Hope’s The Prisoner of Zenda. It’s a wonderful device to have the villain as hero. Raffles was a real criminal in the early stories, then along came morality and he confessed his sins and the series faded away. I wanted to have a real Rupert of Hentzau type, who gets away in the end and gives everybody the finger! That sort of character, a criminal who’s good at his job, has much more dimension to it, and you can explore things like the Rat’s opposition to violence: I wanted to have a hero who doesn’t believe in killing people.
The final piece that fell into place for the original short story was a narrative hook that I wrote. At the Hydra Club I’d sit around and talk with the other writers, and one of the things we discussed was the narrative hook. When you were writing for the pulp magazines, the first page of a manuscript for a story would have the name and address of the person to be paid for the story up in the left-hand corner, and in the right-hand corner the number of words in the story. That’s the money sorted. Then you jump to the middle of the page—leaving lots of white space for the editor to write on—and type the title, double space, “by” any name at all, double space, then the first paragraph of the story. And it’s all double-spaced! At this point you have six or eight lines on the first page of the manuscript in which to write something that will “hook” the pulp editor’s attention and get him to turn the page. So much garbage comes in front of him that if you can catch him with the hook he says, “My God! I turned the page … I’ll buy it!”
I was practicing writing narrative hooks and wrote a dozen or so, and I wrote one that hooked me. The first page of “The Stainless Steel Rat” is written in the first person:
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.
“James Bolivar diGriz, I arrest you on the charge—”
I was waiting for the word “charge,” I thought it made a nice touch that way. As he said it I pressed the button that set off the charge of black powder in the ceiling, the crossbeam buckled, and the three-ton safe dropped through right on the top of the cop’s head. He squashed very nicely, thank you. The cloud of plaster dust settled and all I could see of him was one hand, slightly crumpled. It twitched a bit and the index finger pointed at me accusingly. His voice was a little muffled by the safe and sounded a bit annoyed. In fact he repeated himself a bit.
“On the charge of illegal entry, theft, forgery—”
After writing this I thought, “What’s happening here?” And I kept thinking about it and thinking about it. And I put it together with the idea of the mouse and the villain-as-hero, and that started the whole thing going.
That first story was popular and got the extra penny a word because the readers said they liked it. And I thought this was a character that could be developed, that other stories were possible, so I wrote a second story, “The Misplaced Battleship.” In that story I introduced Angelina, and initially she was just another device to forward the plot. The Rat was chasing a guy who has stolen the battleship, which is pretty straightforward, and then I had the idea for a twist at the end: the villain has an assistant, and it happened to be a female assistant, and I thought it’s a nice reversal if he arrests the wrong person. He gets the guy but she’s the real villain, and she escapes.
After Deathworld I wanted to do a second novel, and I had it in the back of my mind that I’d like to do something lighter—I really wanted to write humor. And I had this property that had been well received, the readers liked it, and it was slightly humorous.… The two short stories became the opening of the novel, and I carried on from there. In a mainstream story, people are established and the story comes out of their character. In science fiction it’s the opposite: you have a plot established, things have to get done, and the characters fit the roles in the machinery of the plot. But you have to do a decent job, you shouldn’t have one-dimensional characters—though many writers do. Although I’d invented Angelina as a plot device, she was now my supervillainess and I wanted to give her a real motivation. It’s not enough to say that she’s evil. I had to justify her actions. I don’t believe in that James Bond thing where pretty girls are psychopathic killers; they’re not. Murderesses in jail don’t look like that. I asked myself how she could be beautiful now and yet insane and ugly inside. What happened? I made it so that she was ugly when young, such that the world hated her, and this provided her motivation. She was intelligent and committed crimes for the money for operations to make her beautiful. So she is very beautiful outside, but inside she’s a very ugly girl who hates the whole world. It builds from there.
As a novel, The Stainless Steel Rat came out as an original paperback from Pyramid in 1961—and it was completely invisible! Nothing happened with it, and that may well have been the last we heard from Slippery Jim. But fate stepped in, in the form of Toby Roxburgh, a Scotsman with an Oxford accent, living in America. In the early ’60s he was an editor at Walker, which was a publishing house that had come up with a very good idea. Back then there were a lot of very good original paperbacks that never appeared in hardcover, and Toby was buying up these rights for five hundred dollars and doing a small edition in hardcover, mostly for library sale. He had the pick of the bunch because no one wanted to do them in hardcover. He asked me if he could have The Stainless Steel Rat, and I said sure, but five hundred was not enough for me. I worked out a deal with Walker and Bantam for two thousand dollars—I would write a new book for Bantam to publish in paperback, and Walker would get the hardback rights to both The Stainless Steel Rat and this new book. I wrote The Stainless Steel Rat’s Revenge for them. I’d never thought of it as a series, it was just a one-off. That means Toby is probably responsible for it becoming a series.
Many years later—name dropping—I’m sitting with Kingsley Amis, drinking, and he mentioned that he’d just read The Stainless Steel Rat, and he told me how much he liked it, and he said, “You know, it’s the first picaresque science fiction novel.” And I nodded and said, “Perhaps, Kingsley, perhaps.” And then I rushed home to see what “picaresque” meant. It’s a story with a villain or rogue as the hero. Jim is antiestablishment, and he’s also antiwar. Except for the one time when he had to save Angelina’s life, he’s never killed anyone in all the ten books. Not bad for adventure novels. From that character the whole thing grew.
I never tired of the character because there was always a gap between the books. After a very heavy book, when I was feeling depressed, I’d write another Rat book to cheer myself up. Graham Greene used to call books like that his “entertainments”—you do a serious book and then you do an entertainment. I don’t count myself in Greene’s category, but I’d still do something important, some of which would take three, four, or five years, and fill in with a Rat book or something like that, an adventure book. I’d only ever write a new Rat book when I had a mad idea to motivate it. I remember one time reading in a newspaper about a South American election, and I said to myself, “These South Americans think they know about crooked elections, but wouldn’t it be interesting if you had a planet very much like South America and you had an election there and the Rat got involved!” Click!—plot for story. That was the whole idea.
The first two are quite serious books except for a few jokes, but as time went on the Rat books grew lighter and lighter and madder and madder. I was writing The Stainless Steel Rat Wants You and had his world invaded by various horrible aliens who hate all humans because they’re soft and squishy (or hard and crunchy, I forget which) and the Rat needs to disguise himself as one of these creatures so he can infiltrate their lair. He looks at photos of all these aliens, then has the computer put together the ugliest thing ever, combining claws and teeth and eyeballs and scales and whatever. And he gets into his disguise and flies out there. As I’m writing, I know he’s gone to rescue his wife or something, and as he approaches the alien planet one of these horrible creatures appears on the view screen and Jim says, “Hello.” And this thing says, “Hello, sweetie.” And I thought, “Eh? Hello, sweetie! Did I write that? Where the hell did that come from?” But then it’s obvious—in creating the ugliest thing to us, he’s created what the other aliens think is the most attractive alien in the world. At that point the whole plot went ape, and he’s wearing pink negligees and they’re all trying to seduce him—it became an alien in drag story. Hello, sweetie—I typed it first and I read it second.
Harry Harrison! Harry Harrison! Page 30