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Originally Posted by Difflugia
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.
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I have all of them in paper and loved the satire.
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His love interest, Angelina - also a criminal genius, but lacking in Jim's relatively high moral codes and strictures against killing. She is attempting to have an illegal space battleship built on an otherwise peaceful planet. Angelina was born unattractive and committed crimes to pay for her transformation into a beautiful woman; her psychological traumas are treated when Jim captures her, but she retains her allure and her criminal tendencies and joins in the Special Corps as Jim's partner.
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Apache