Harry Harrison, a first-class writer of modern science fiction, has
died. I'm sure everyone is familiar with the movie Soylent Green,
adapted from his novel Make Room! Make Room!


Harry Harrison, the American science fiction writer best known for the
Stainless Steel Rat comic space opera series and the dystopian Make
Room! Make Room! has died at the age of 87.

He also parodied the genre in his Bill the Galactic Hero books, seeing
his work as anti-war and anti-militaristic. Brian Aldiss, who worked
with Harrison on criticism and editing science fiction anthologies,
called him "a constant peer and great family friend".

Harrison's first novel, Deathworld, was published in 1960, with the
Stainless Steel Rat appearing for the first time a year later. "Slippery
Jim" diGriz, the books' anti-hero, whose latest appearance was in 2010,
was, one admirer pointed out on Wednesday, a "rogue smuggler" created
years before Han Solo in the Star Wars films.

The central idea of Make Room! Make Room!, his 1966 novel in which a
critical food shortage in overpopulated New York means a food substitute
is needed, was used in the 1973 film Soylent Green, starring Charlton
Heston.

Harrison, an advocate of the international language Esperanto, which
appears in several of his books, was born in Stamford, Connecticut, in
1925 and also lived for periods in Mexico, England, Ireland, Denmark and
Italy. After service in the second world war and art study, he ran a
studio selling illustrations to comics and science fiction magazines, He
married Joan (née Merkler) in 1954 in New York. She died from cancer in
2002. They had two children, Todd and Moira.

--
I'm a liberal because the militant fundamentalist ignorant
science-denying religious xenophobic corporate oligarchy of modern
Republican conservatism just doesn't work for me or my country.