Max Lieberman
Pulpy adventure science fiction like only Harrison could write it. “Serious” in that he’s not in Stainless Steel Rat or Bill, the Galactic Hero mode, but there’s plenty of satire here.
This isn’t literature, and it’s at least 60% escapism to help the ideas go down easy — every beautiful woman wants to sleep with the hero; there mustn’t be 10 pages that go by in the whole novel where he doesn’t have a drink or six.
But the villains are carefully chosen, and the gap between the world’s elites and its permanent underclass doesn’t seem as outlandish as it did upon publication (the treatment of Israel as basically heroic is also a snapshot in time).
Onwards to the sequel, Wheelworld.
Pulpy adventure science fiction like only Harrison could write it. “Serious” in that he’s not in Stainless Steel Rat or Bill, the Galactic Hero mode, but there’s plenty of satire here.
This isn’t literature, and it’s at least 60% escapism to help the ideas go down easy — every beautiful woman wants to sleep with the hero; there mustn’t be 10 pages that go by in the whole novel where he doesn’t have a drink or six.
But the villains are carefully chosen, and the gap between the world’s elites and its permanent underclass doesn’t seem as outlandish as it did upon publication (the treatment of Israel as basically heroic is also a snapshot in time).
Onwards to the sequel, Wheelworld.