Quote:
Originally Posted by andyh2000
That's not how I remember the Stainless Steel Rat books. Didn't Slippery Jim always go his own way fixing the mistakes of bumbling bureaucracies?
Andrew
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The government was cumbersome, but was also always the ultimate good guy.
Jim was (I think) a government agent that had once been a criminal. The bureaucracy was well-meaning, but had too much inertia to react to an evil genius, so there was a secret agency that specifically dealt with them. Jim was the hero because he used his talents to help society rather than for individual gain. Harrison also had a soft spot in general for villains that became good guys and I seem to recall that's how Jim found his wife.
I
think. Now I need to dig those out and read them again. They were actually my introduction to Harrison's books and I didn't notice the pro-government sentiments the first time I read them. It was one of his short stories (something about airlifting toilets to a non-technological village? I Googled for it, but couldn't find it) where his political thought was much more in-your-face that made me start looking deeper into the other ones.