New York: Tor Books, 2014; $26.99 hc; 338 pages

Assemble all the autobiographies and biographies of science fiction writers, and you’ll fill a thick shelf. But there’s always room for more. Perhaps the most significant autobiography published in 2014 was Harry Harrison’s.
Harry Harrison! Harry Harrison! (subtitled “It Seemed Like a Good Idea At The Time”) is an incomplete work. Harrison, who died in 2012, wrote a continuous narrative covering 12the first 50 years of his life; the remainder of the book consists of essays on various topics that Harrison would have integrated into the book had he lived longer. It is a sprightly look at one of sf’s most popular adventure writers.
Harry Harrison was born in Stamford, Connecticut, in 1925, and he grew up in New York City. His father was a permanent substitute worker for the New York Daily News, who dutifully showed up every night at 1 am to see if he could fill in for printers who were sick. Some weeks, Bill Harrison would work five days; more often than not, he’d work one or two. So like most in the 1930s, Harrison’s family struggled. “It was mostly a dark and grim existence,” Harrison writes. “Fun it was not.”
One escape came from science fiction. In 1930, Bill Harrison brought home an issue of Amazing, and Harry fell in love. “In the gray and empty Depression years, the science fiction magazines rang out like a fire bell in the night,” Harrison wrote, “They had color, excitement, inspiration, excitement, everything the real world had not.”
Harrison read every fiction magazine he could, and he frequented the used magazine stores that sold back-issue pulps for a nickel apiece—and gave you a free one if you turned in three issues. He joined the Queens Science Fiction League and in 1939 went to the first Worldcon, saving money by sneaking in without buying a membership.
In 1943, Harrison graduated from high school and was drafted. He eventually ended up spending World War II in Laredo, Texas, teaching draftees how to fire machine guns on airplanes. He emerged from the war with a passionate hatred of military bureaucracy, which manifests itself in Bill, the Galactic Hero (1965) and its sequels. But an evening lecture at Harrison’s base one night introduced him to Esperanto. Harrison became a passionate Esperantist, and his love of Esperanto gained him many friends.
Returning to civilian life, Harrison used his GI Bill benefits to go the Cartoonists and Illustrators School, run by renowned Tarzan illustrator, Burne Hogarth. Harrison and his fellow students, including Roy Krenkel, Al Williamson, and Wally Wood, learned to turn out art fast for sleazy publishers who had plenty of work for a quarter or a third of what DC paid. According to Harrison, the sensational attacks on comics by Fredric Wertham (whom Harrison calls “Wertheim”) convinced him to quit comics and write fiction for a living. (He kept his hand in comics by writing continuity for the Buck Rogers comic strip for ten years, which provided him with a financial cushion that substantially aided his freelancing.)
The editor who most influenced Harrison’s writing was John W. Campbell, and Harrison adds to our knowledge of what Campbell was like. Harrison and Campbell had sharp political differences—Campbell was a conservative, Harrison a man of the left. “Although we were opposites politically, John and I got along extremely well,” Harrison writes. “We spent a lot of time together and became good friends.”
Campbell mostly worked at home, coming into the office one day a week, where he’d spend the morning closing the issue and then inviting writers to lunch. “He was a big man in every way,” Harrison wrote. “Six foot tall, and none of it fat. His head was shaved, and he always had a cigarette holder in one hand, an inhaler in the other. Poul Anderson once said that having a conversation with John was like throwing manhole covers at each other, but they were intellectual manhole covers.”
Another significant chapter is about Harrison’s involvement with the film Soylent Green (1973), a very loose adaptation of Make Room! Make Room! (1966). Harrison had no control over the script and rightly blasted the revelation that, as Charlton Heston memorably bellowed, “Soylent Green is people!” (In Harrison’s novel, “soylent” is a mixture of soybeans and lentils.) The filmmakers did let Harrison visit the set. He gave cast and crew copies of his novel and informally advised the film’s designers to correct some blatant bloopers such as selling “mystery meat” in plastic bags when the world Harrison describes is running out of petroleum.
Harrison also coached Edward G. Robinson about how he should approach his role as the last person who remembers the times of plenty in a future inexorably headed toward overpopulation and environmental apocalypse.
About a scene where Heston and Robinson’s characters share their disgust about black-market food, Harrison wrote, “Robinson virtually embodied repulsion and despair. And it’s not in the script. They’re not saying anything, really. Robinson is acting and inventing the role on camera.” After director Richard Fleischer called, “Cut!” “all the bored professional audience, carpenters, grips, and technicians—no visitors—burst into applause.” (Soylent Green was Robinson’s last role, and he died shortly after the film wrapped.)
There’s a lot more in Harrison’s book, including how he helped create World SF and the inspiration behind his most popular character, the Stainless Steel Rat. Anyone interested in the science fiction of the 1950s, ’60s, or ’70s will find Harry Harrison! Harry Harrison! very enjoyable.
Martin Morse Wooster lives in Silver Spring, Maryland.
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