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In New Worlds Quarterly No. 4 published in 1972, Alfred Bester in an interview with Charles Platt revealed the secret of writing a good article. Start with your second best anecdote, he said, to attract the attention of the reader.
The first time I saw Harry Harrison in action was at a convention in England some years ago. He had a pint of beer clutched in one hand and a microphone in the other and he prowled around like a tiger in a cage, taking long reviving draughts of beer and yammering into the mike. “I want to talk about two things,” he said. “Something that interests you—sex, and something that interests me—my new book.”
He spoke for well over an hour, and the talk was full of bad jokes that amused Harrison even more than they amused his audience. He laughs a lot and very infectiously too. But the mood swung wildly and the jokes about the Hollywood moguls who took his novel Make Room, Make Room and ruined it as the movie Soylent Green were bitter jokes indeed. He was hurt by the way they had trivialised what he had to say for that book was very close to his heart. He told them about overpopulation and pollution; about the world running out of natural resources. They were dubious and shook their heads. It didn’t seem important enough to make a film about. Then someone produced the idea of cannibalism, and the moguls took fire. “Hey yes—that’s something we can really get our teeth into.” Harrison shrugged his shoulders eloquently and he raised his eyes to heaven. Then he told us about the bit that hurt most of all. He was willing, he said, to forgive them the rubbish, to put up with the trivialisation because the film did have its good parts. There was the gritty naturalistic way it was shot, showing the harsh realities of life in the overpopulated world just around the corner. You could smell and taste the poverty in the images on the film. That was worthy and it was worthwhile. And there was a most wonderful scene that summed up the point of the movie for Harrison, that gave it a reason for existing in his eyes. One character asks another, “How did we get into this mess anyway?” The reply was “Because no government ever had the courage to force a policy of birth control on the people.” Harrison paused for a moment at that point. It was a great scene, he explained. Of course you don’t remember it, he said. You never saw it. They cut it out of the movie in case it offended the Catholics. Jesus Christ!
For a moment the bitterness and the pain showed.
Harry Harrison is an infuriating writer. So good and at the same time so bad. He can be brilliant when he puts his mind to it. Just look at Bill, The Galactic Hero or West of Eden to take the two extremes of his writing style. The one is a comedic tour de force, the other a beautifully imagined and immaculately written biological/sociological speculation (true sense of wonder). Yet this same writer also turns out such unutterable rubbish as Planet of No Return, a book so bad, so vile that I once suggested that the only way to get through it without throwing up was to read it with your eyes closed. How do you answer the riddle of such a man?
He started his professional life as a commercial artist. In an autobiographical article published in Hell’s Cartographers in 1975 he recalls the assignments he got from various editors:
Harrison, I want a three by four of an eight tentacled monster squashing a girl with big tits in a transparent space suit, line and none of your zip-a-tones or damned Benday, twelve bucks by tomorrow afternoon.
What more natural then that when he graduated to writing, he went to the editors to find what they wanted, and then he wrote it. Men’s adventures, that’s what he wrote.
I Went Down With My Ship.
I Cut Off My Own Arm.
Magruder—The Wooden Cannon General.
He wrote true confessions.
He Threw Acid In My Face.
My Iron Lung Baby.
My Husband Gambled My Body Away.
(All titles mentioned in that article in Hell’s Cartographers.)
I think this explains a large part of the paradox that is Harry Harrison the writer. He makes his living at it, it pays the bills. Despite his love of SF (and he does love it, that shines like a beacon through everything he says and does) he knows that hackwork, the action novel will always sell. He has always been very commercial in his attitude. If it will sell, he will write it. He has even ghost-written. The novel Vendetta for the Saint by Leslie Charteris was written by Harry Harrison. Bills have to be paid.
But despite all this, the artist breaks through on occasion. West of Eden is a long complicated book. It is deeply felt. I doubt that it will sell well—it is too complex, too slow moving to appeal to the great unwashed. It assumes that the dinosaurs did not die out but continued to evolve and develop a civilisation. It examines what happens when the dinosaur culture meets that upstart mammal man. If you read nothing else by Harry Harrison, you should read this one.
In person Harry Harrison talks like a machine gun, spraying ideas and jokes like bullets around a landscape. His talks are never scripted (or if they are he pays no attention to his lines). Ideas spark off one another in a continual stream of consciousness which is one reason why this article is so anecdotal. Harrison the man illustrates his points with anecdote and barbed wit. The same method is the best way to approach Harrison the writer. There is a lot of the man in his books. The passionately held beliefs of Make Room, Make Room and the humour of The Technicolour Time Machine.
There is a convention as old as science fiction. At some point in the book the hero asks the mad scientist to explain his wonderful galaxy saving device. That question then becomes an excuse for the writer to fill the next ten pages with pseudoscientific technobabble, while the hero nods knowingly and says “Gee, that’s right. I forgot.” At half a cent a word, you need all the words you can get. This is a good way of getting them. In The Technicolour Time Machine, Harrison explained to us, he decided to have some fun with this convention. In due course one of the characters asks the mad scientist to explain his time machine. The scientist, who is rather irascible, takes a deep breath and says words to the effect that “Aaah, you’re too stupid to understand.”
As I said before, the artist continues to show himself. Although himself an avowedly commercial writer whose books are conventional and often formulaic, when he wears the guise of editor he allows the writers that he publishes more artistic freedom than he ever allows himself. In collaboration with Brian Aldiss (an old drinking pal) he edited for many years The Year’s Best SF. By himself he edited the Nova series of anthologies. Both series are dead now (alas) but while they lived they published some marvellous works—stories which (had you read only Harrison’s published fiction) you would never have believed he would have countenanced. It was there that I first encountered the fabulations of Josef Nesvadba and J. G. Ballard’s The Assassination of John Fitzgerald Kennedy Considered as a Downhill Motor Race. Strange and wonderful stories.
Again with Aldiss, he edited a series of novels (the SF Master Series)—books which the editors considered were classic and important works in the field. With supreme egotism, he chose one of his own novels for the series (A Transatlantic Tunnel, Hurrah!). That is typical of the man.
Aldiss popped up again as co-editor of The Astounding-Analog Reader; stories chosen from the golden age of SF when Campbell was king. Then there was the Decade series where the two of them chose the best and most representative stories of the given decade—the 1940s, the 1950s and the 1960s. These books were a labour of true love.
I seem to be mentioning Brian Aldiss a lot, so let me digress here in true Harry Harrison lecture style. At British conventions they always start by introducing the celebrities who are present so that everyone will recognise them and be able to pester them for the rest of the convention. The MC, who is slightly nervous because he’s never done much public speaking before says “Now I’d like to introduce Brian Aldiss.” Everybody applauds and looks round. No Brian Aldiss. A small voice from the back of the hall says “He’s in the bar!”. The MC clears his throat and says, “Well—let’s introduce Harry Harrison.” More applause. This time there is a chorus. “He’s in the bar!”. They aren’t stupid. They know that everyone else is in the hall for the opening ceremony and the bar is quiet and the best place to be. They can get in some serious drinking and talking. Harrison and Aldiss are inseparable at conventions. Each wrapped around a pint of beer, they talk and they talk and they talk. As writers they are poles apart but they are nonetheless kindred spirits and they both love the SF genre they have worked so hard in. Aldiss the iconoclast, Harrison the commercial writer. Aldiss and Harrison—fans. Aldiss wrote Billion Year Spree, arguably the best literary history of SF to date, full of stimulating ideas. Harrison wrote Great Balls of Fire, a history of sex in SF illustration; a clever joke and a tightly argued thesis at one and the same time. The symbolic development of SF art takes a radically different approach from the prose that it illustrates. Together the two of them edited Hell’s Cartographers, a collection of autobiographical essays by various SF writers. As I said, labours of love. Only an SF enthusiast could have taken those projects to completion.
I once asked Robert Silverberg for his autograph. Embarrassingly I didn’t have a pen, and neither did he. He looked around in desperation. Seated at a nearby table were Aldiss and Harrison. “Harrison,” said Silverberg, “give me writing machine.” Harrison looked round. “Silverberg,” he said, “you are a writing machine.” He went back to his beer.
Being a commercial writer is not necessarily a bad thing. Other
writers operating under the same economic stimulation have produced
profound and moving works. Philip K. Dick did it
consistently. Michael Moorcock, once he got rid of his more
rough-edged prose style, also did it. There is no reason why Harry
Harrison should not have done it too. But he fell into the trap of the
sequel. I’ve just counted and there are now six Stainless Steel
Rat books, each one worse than the one before. There are three
Deathworld books and the strain begins to show in the last one. The
awful Planet of No Return is a sequel to the equally awful Planet of
the Damned. The To the Stars trilogy is a three volume cliche. Sometimes even the singletons fall into the continuation
trap. Skyfall is just too damned long for its length. At half the size
it could have been a tense and exciting book. As it is, it is just
plain flabby and rife with coincidence. But buried in the dross of
Harrison’s work is just enough gold to keep me reading even
though I am disappointed so many times. Captive Universe is a hoary
old idea very cleverly put together (would you believe Aztecs in
space?). In Our Hands the Stars (also published as The Daleth Effect)
is a clever satire on government funded research and an exciting
thriller to boot. A Transatlantic Tunnel, Hurrah!; The Technicolour
Time Machine and Bill, the Galactic Hero are novels that never fail to
make me laugh no matter how many times I read them. Make Room, Make
Room and West of Eden are pure gold in anybody’s currency.
Damn the man. He is so inconsistent. He is also very prolific. During the course of this article, I have mentioned perhaps half of his output—the best and the worst. What remains is a halfway house. Books which are merely competent, books that are simply marking time.
In that same interview in New Worlds Quarterly that I started with, Alfred Bester reveals that you should end your article on a high note with your best anecdote.
I asked Harry Harrison to autograph my copy of Make Room, Make Room. He glared at me. “John Campbell liked this book,” he said. “Do you know who John Campbell was?”
“Yes,” I said. “The editor of Astounding.”
Harrison nodded. “He used to write long letters to all his authors telling them the best way to write their books. The letters always bulged at the seams with ideas. They were very useful. I got a lot of letters like that. The letters always ended the same way. Do you know how they ended?”
“No,” I said.
“With a signature!” said Harrison, and he laughed with vast delight at his joke. “With a signature, like this.” Then he signed my book. John W. Campbell.
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