They saw our lives as being a sparrow flying through the night and the whole world’s dark, and there’s a little neat hole there and he flies up to the hole and there’s warmth and light, and then back on through the endless night. Our existence is that little bit of something between the nothing on both sides. It’s a very gloomy religion!
They believed in this life, and that the chance was the afterlife was pretty bad, so make the best of it. They were good family people and they took care of each other.
They believed in live and let live, they didn’t have rules for everything. But it was superceded by these family feuds. Family feuds aside, they loved life. The religion itself was never that strong, which is why the Christians won against it so easily. The Vikings were pagans and believed in Thor and Odin and the rest, and theirs was a religion of strength. Bishop Absalon converted all the Vikings to Christianity in a very simple way. He would take the head Vikings and try and convince them to convert to Christianity, and if the Vikings didn’t convert, then the Bishop’s men would hold the Viking down and put a big lurhorn on his stomach and fill it full of rats, and put hot coals on the outside of the horn, and the rats would dig through the guy’s stomach to escape. The Vikings appreciated that—“That’s a good god you’ve got!”
Poor old Tom, he didn’t have to look this stuff up in a book, he has it all in his head! He can quote the Anglo-Saxon and Old Norse. I hadn’t realized that I had only read the “cleaned-up” versions. I’d played it down in The Technicolor Time Machine, but in The Hammer and the Cross it became an important part of the culture. I tried to ameliorate it, because there were good influences in the Viking culture: it was a very humanistic religion. But there was also a very negative side to it. It wasn’t inculcated in the Viking religion, it was just part of their national heritage. You win the fight. The word skol—skål—used by Scandinavians as a toast means “skull” in Old Norse. After they killed their enemy, they cut the bottom off his skull and drank mead out of the skull. That proves you won!
The Vikings were big people with big appetites. A smaller body radiates much more heat than a bigger body, it’s the inverse square—the surface of something like a sphere may double, but the total volume quadruples or quintuples. If you’re big, you conserve your heat better. Even today Scandinavians, like the Russians, are big. A six-month-old baby in a pram looks like a three-year-old! The minimum height for the Royal Guards in Denmark is two meters, and some are much taller than that. And they wear Busbys—which make them look nine feet tall!
Tom had all this information in his head—he never opened a book. He has an incredible eidetic memory. All the material there was out of his brain! He knows a lot of strange, strange stuff. There was a meeting of the Vikings, they’d meet once a year, and they had a tree and they hung the bodies from it and they hung a whole horse from it. That was very impressive. Tom was a font of strange and obscure details that you couldn’t find in a textbook. Anything to do with linguistics that I ever asked him he could answer like that.
Tom speaks and teaches Anglo-Saxon, four or five other dead languages, as well as German and the Germanic languages. We kicked the plot around and he had all these basic facts, and I would suggest things for the plot, and he would knock it on the head saying, “You can’t do that, but how about this…” I’m very strong on plotting. He would make little notes on a card: for a whole evening’s conversation he’d have about twelve words and he’d be able to transcribe directly from that. I have the exact opposite kind of memory, it’s like a sieve. He’d do up an outline and we’d work back and forth on it. It was a good collaboration. He learned a lot about writing from me, and I learned a lot about history from him. A good collaboration should be synergistic, it should be more than either person could do without the other. It was hard work, but it was a lot of fun to do.
I was ill toward the end and Tom ended up writing the final copy on the third book. Usually one of us would write it and the other would correct it. It turned out that Tom wasn’t able to put his own name on Hammer and the Cross because he was working at that time for a Jesuit school. They would have been a little unhappy about Professor Shippey putting his name on an atheist book! He used the pen name John Holm.
In a big alternate history like The Hammer and the Cross you begin with reality, what we know, and then you add the twist and start sliding away from what really happened. Sometimes that key incident, the twist that gets you where you want to be, is obvious. In The Hammer and the Cross everything came out of that original short story. In Stars and Stripes I was looking for a turning point, and went through my research on the Trent Affair. There almost was a war: the English sent fifteen thousand troops to Canada to invade the United States. Lord Palmerston hated the fact that someone had dared stop a British mail packet, and he wrote a really shitty letter insulting Lincoln, but Prince Albert read it and cleaned it up. That’s what happened historically. I had Prince Albert die before he’d had chance to clean it up. You look for the turning point, and then all else follows. Sometimes it’s obvious, but sometimes it takes time to find. Sometimes it comes with the whole idea of the alternate world, like The Hammer and the Cross.
With Hammer and the Cross we had the starting point. A lot of our conversations were about what would logically come out of it. We tried to bend it toward the good, but there was an awful lot of dead Vikings before we got them civilized!
What if the Catholic Church hadn’t evolved and run Europe? It wasn’t an anti-religious story, it was just a what-if story. We tried to make a realistic story out of it, an alternate version of the past. Unfortunately the trilogy wasn’t as successful as we’d hoped. It didn’t break through. If it had been attacked by the religious right we might have sold a lot more copies!
In the Stars and Stripes trilogy I tried to have the Americans doing good for a change, starting in Lincoln’s time, in a simpler kind of age—perhaps—when America was not the demon of the world the way it is now. They hadn’t done any of the terrible things they’ve done now. All my Tory friends in America said, “Harry, this is a Republican book!” I said, “No, this is a truthful book. I’m not trying to be right wing, it’s just that—for a change—I agree with you.”
The basic idea for Stars and Stripes came out of the research I did when I wrote Rebel in Time. By the end of the American Civil War there were a hundred thousand soldiers in total on the two sides, and they were a modern army: if they had been united, they could have beat every other army in the world at the same time. Everyone else was still using Brown Bess muskets and outdated tactics.
Science fiction sales have fallen, and there’s no backlist anymore. All of my books used to be in print and on the shelves, and I could rely on them to make some money, but not anymore. To make money now you need a big idea, something like West of Eden or the Stars and Stripes trilogy. Big ideas, my agent says, make for big advances.
I like writing the “big idea” alternate history because it allows you to exercise your imagination, and it is hard to do, which means that lazy writers don’t do it, so there’s less competition. Alternate history requires an awful lot of research if you’re going to do it well. I like that, it’s fun, but it puts off a lot of people. The other benefit of an alternate history novel is that it can “break through” and pick up sales beyond the usual science fiction readership.
Some reviewers and readers believe that alternate histories need a big change to a pivotal historic event, the Nazis win the Second World War, for example. But I don’t really believe that. I much prefer there to be a succession of changes, one building on the other. I wanted to make the changes subtle, so that the reader is never quite sure when I’ve left the real world behind.
I made my pivotal change after the Battle of Shiloh, the first meeting of the two armies in the American Civil War. In two days the North lost twelve thousand men and the South lost ten thousand, and the battle lines didn’t change at all. By the end of the war, two hundred thousand soldiers were dead,
and another four hundred thousand people died from disease and other causes. Six hundred thousand people, or about 2 percent of the American population, died; it was death on a massive scale. I had to stop the war before it got past the point where the two sides could be reconciled, so I stopped it at Shiloh.
The combined forces of the American armies would have been the most powerful army in the world, but so what? The trick was to find a reason for them to come together. If I stopped the war early enough, it might happen, but how could I do that? Finally I came up with the idea of the English invading. A lot of English reviewers and readers hated the fact that the English were the villains, but in this story they had to be. And if you’re going to make them bastards, they have to be bastards. I had them as the heroes in A Transatlantic Tunnel, Hurrah! so I have been even-handed, and the real “hero” of Stars and Stripes isn’t the Americans, it is the Constitution, democracy.
Science fiction, like the mystery story, requires backplotting. That means you know where the story is going to end, and you build to that. That’s the craft. The art is disguising the fact you know the ending, so that the reader is surprised by it. The reader must see new things that they never knew were coming, that way they’ll keep reading. But it all has to be within a logical flow, so that with hindsight you can see it’s logical, but you couldn’t actually see it coming. That’s very important in alternate history.
With this kind of story it’s a matter of changing things gradually, so that it becomes like a snowball going down a hill, slowly picking up speed. It is fun making those changes, but as with all science fiction there is a limit to the number of changes you can make. H. G. Wells said that if a pig came flying over a hedge toward you, you’d be surprised. But if you then saw cows flying and then houses, it would soon become boring.
I accelerated history a little bit in the second book by bringing in the Gatling gun a few years earlier. The observation balloons were there; the telegraph was there; utilizing trains for troop movements was there; there was trench warfare—the American Civil War really was the first modern war. I’m accelerating just a few things by just a few years. I’m not inventing technology, I’m just having it come on stage a few years early, which is not that bad a crime. I have the ironclad ships being used in warfare—in reality most of them were sunk for targets!
The Constitution is what keeps America working; even though Washington is full of crooks, the Constitution will hold up. I’m a Constitutionalist, I believe very much in the Bill of Rights, and I’m writing about the good stuff in it that could have come out of American history if American politics hadn’t been so full of crooks. The bribe-taking crooks then were even bigger than they are now. In a way I have written a utopian novel—and as for the fact that it’s an American utopia, that’s totally beside the point. It’s about how the history of the world could have been so much better with a few slight changes.
Every once in a while the American Constitution comes through, because it is written out clearly. And it’s very hard to amend. All the amendments were pretty decent amendments, except giving up drink—they had to amend the amendment there. But they built it better than they knew. So even though it is religious as hell there, the schools are still nonreligious, the Constitution says you must separate the church and the state. The only time in my life that I agreed with Newt Gingrich was when he said the Constitution was the most important legal document ever created.
I’m not anti-American. I have spent a lot of my time in Europe defending America: most Europeans knock America for the wrong reasons. I am very much anti the “actions” that America carried out in Vietnam and places like that. I wanted to try and give America a decent role in the world. It’s a way of looking at a possible future by rewriting the past. Stars and Stripes is a utopian novel.
HARRY HARRISON—BIBLIOGRAPHY OF FIRST EDITIONS
Compiled by Paul Tomlinson
NOVELS
Deathworld. Analog, January, February, and March 1960; New York: Bantam, September 1960.
The Stainless Steel Rat. New York: Pyramid, November 1961.
Planet of the Damned (as: Sense of Obligation). Analog, September, October, and November 1961; New York: Bantam, January 1962.
Vendetta for the Saint (Published under the name “Leslie Charteris”). The Saint Mystery Magazine, January, February, March, and April 1964; New York: Doubleday (Crime Club), 1964.
Deathworld 2. New York: Bantam, September 1964.
Bill, the Galactic Hero. New York: Doubleday, October 1965.
Plague from Space. Science Fantasy #79 December 1965, #80 January 1966, and #81 February 1966; New York: Doubleday, September 1965.
Make Room! Make Room! SF Impulse #6 August, #7 September, and #8 October 1966; New York: Doubleday, 1966, 216pp., hbk. Jacket: Charles & Cuffari.
The Technicolor Time Machine (as: The Time-Machined Saga). Analog, March, April, and May 1967; New York: Doubleday, 1967.
Deathworld 3 (as: The Horse Barbarians). Analog, February, March, and April 1968; New York: Dell, May 1968.
Captive Universe. New York: Putnam, 1969.
Spaceship Medic (as: Plague Ship). Venture Science Fiction, November 1969; London: Faber & Faber, April 1970.
In Our Hands, the Stars. Analog, December 1969, January and February 1970; as: The Daleth Effect. New York: Putnam.
The Stainless Steel Rat’s Revenge. New York: Walker, 1970.
Stonehenge (by Harry Harrison and Leon Stover). London: Peter Davies, April 1972.
A Transatlantic Tunnel, Hurrah!. Analog, April, May, and June 1972; as: Tunnel Through the Deeps. New York: Putnam, 1972.
The Stainless Steel Rat Saves the World. Worlds of If, September / October 1971, January / February 1972, March / April 1972; New York: Putnam, 1972.
Montezuma’s Revenge. New York: Doubleday, 1972.
Star Smashers of the Galaxy Rangers. New York: Putnam, 1973.
Queen Victoria’s Revenge. New York: Doubleday (Crime Club), 1974.
The Deathworld Trilogy. New York: Science Fiction Book Club (Doubleday), 1974.
The Men From P.I.G and R.O.B.O.T. London: Faber & Faber, October 1974.
Lifeboat (by Harry Harrison and Gordon R. Dickson). Analog, February, March, and April 1975; New York: Harper & Row, 1976.
The California Iceberg. London: Faber & Faber, March 1975.
Skyfall. London: Faber & Faber, September 1976.
The Adventures of the Stainless Steel Rat. New York: Science Fiction Book Club (Doubleday), 1977.
The Stainless Steel Rat Wants You! London: Michael Joseph, September 1978.
Planet Story (written by Harry Harrison and illustrated by Jim Burns). London: Pierrot, August 1979.
The QE II Is Missing. London: Futura, November 1980.
Homeworld. London: Granada, August 1980.
Planet of No Return. New York: Simon & Schuster, September 1981.
Wheelworld. London: Granada, March 1981.
Starworld. New York: Bantam, June 1981.
To the Stars. New York: Science Fiction Book Club (Doubleday), 1981.
Invasion: Earth. New York: Ace, April 1982.
The Jupiter Plague. New York: Tor, July 1982.
The Stainless Steel Rat for President. New York: Doubleday (Book Club), September 1982.
A Rebel in Time. London: Granada, February 1983.
Stonehenge: Where Atlantis Died (by Harry Harrison and Leon Stover). New York: Tor, September 1983.
West of Eden. New York: Bantam, August 1984.
A Stainless Steel Rat Is Born. London: Titan Books, August 1985.
You Can Be the Stainless Steel Rat: An Interactive Game Book. London: Grafton, October 1985.
Winter in Eden. London: Grafton, September 1986.
The Stainless Steel Rat Gets Drafted. London: Bantam, August 20, 1987.
Return to Eden. New York: Bantam, August 1988.
Bill, the Galactic Hero on the Planet of Robot Slaves. New York: Avon, July 1989.
Bill, the Gal
actic Hero on the Planet of Bottled Brains (by Harry Harrison and Robert Sheckley). New York: Avon, 1990.
The Turing Option (by Harry Harrison and Marvin Minsky). New York: Warner Books, August 25, 1992.
Bill, the Galactic Hero on the Planet of Tasteless Pleasures (by Harry Harrison and David Bischoff). New York: Avon, January 1991.
Bill, the Galactic Hero on the Planet of Zombie Vampires (by Harry Harrison and Jack C. Haldeman II). New York: Avon, April 1991.
Bill, the Galactic Hero on the Planet of Ten Thousand Bars (by Harry Harrison and David Bischoff). New York: Avon, September 1991.
Bill, the Galactic Hero: the Final Incoherent Adventure (by Harry Harrison and David Harris). New York: Avon, September 1991.
The Hammer and the Cross (by Harry Harrison and John Holm). London: Legend Books, June 1993.
The Stainless Steel Rat Sings the Blues. London: Bantam Press, March 31, 1994.
One King’s Way (by Harry Harrison and John Holm). London: Legend Books, December 1994.
King and Emperor (by Harry Harrison and John Holm). London: Legend Books, July 18, 1996.
The Stainless Steel Rat Goes to Hell. New York: Tor, November 1996.
Stars and Stripes Forever! London: Hodder & Stoughton, March 1998.
The Stainless Steel Rat Joins the Circus. Moscow: Eksmo / A. Korzhenevski, March 1999. Translated by Gennady Korchagin.
Stars and Stripes in Peril. London: Hodder & Stoughton, April 2000.
Stars and Stripes Triumphant. London: Hodder & Stoughton, 2002.
The Stainless Steel Rat Returns. New York: Tor, 2010.
SHORT STORY COLLECTIONS
(English language editions only)
War with the Robots. New York: Pyramid, September 1962.
Two Tales and Eight Tomorrows. London: Gollancz, May 1965.
Prime Number. New York: Berkley, July 1970.
One Step from Earth. New York: Macmillan, 1970.
Harry Harrison! Harry Harrison! Page 33