Last month, I wrapped up Joe R. Lansdale's 'Hap and Leonard' series with my nineteenth review, even if there's the possibility of further books, given that Lansdale is still actively writing. This month, it's the turn of Harry Harrison's 'Stainless Steel Rat' series because this is my eleventh and final review. It isn't entirely unfair to simply write "ditto" to my review of the previous novel, 'The Stainless Steel Rat Joins the Circus' but there are a few things worth saying here, so I'll behave.

Firstly, this one is a novel that wasn't going to happen for the longest time. That previous book was the nominal end to the series, though Harrison did leave himself open to the possibility of another one and eventually did so, a little more firmly. While this will always be the final episode in the saga of Slippery Jim diGriz, the Stainless Steel Rat, because the author died two years later in 2012, it's likely that, had he lived for another hundred years, he may never have written another one. This feels like the end and it also underlines why it had to be.

Much of the reason for that is that, with the exception of a prequel trilogy that he snuck in midway, the entire series unfolds chronologically. Jim was a young man when Harrison first wrote about him in 1957 in a novelette for 'Astounding'. By the fourth novel, he was getting older and he's notably middle-aged in 'The Stainless Steel Rat for President'. After a trilogy of respite as a young adult coming of age as an intergalactic criminal, he returns unabated as a greying crook in the nineties novels. It shouldn't be too surprising therefore to find him entirely retired at this point, enjoying a well-earned rest on the planet of Moolaplenty.

Of course, that doesn't last because quiet retirement would not a Stainless Steel Rat novel make, so his peace and quiet is promptly destroyed by the unexpected arrival of a distant relative all the way from Bit o' Heaven by the name of Elmo. He's the backwoods hick you might expect from the name and he's brought a whole collection of other relatives with him and a herd of porcuswine to boot, what with the bottom dropping out of the market back home. They found Jim and imposed on his good will, what with being kin and all, and that imposition turns into a serious financial outlay.

I really ought to know better at this point, given how silly the series got at points—I'm thinking of that alien invasion of bug-eyed monsters in 'The Stainless Steel Wants You' first and foremost, but quite the runners up list too—but I'm a sucker for internal logic and Harry Harrison seems to have ditched that a page or two after starting this book. Jim and his lovely wife Angelina are, of course, incredibly rich and an entire lifetime of successful crime ought to have underlined that. Somehow, however, the arrival of Elmo and the clan shifts our heroic duo into immediate poverty and they can't just rob the local bank to remedy that situation. Put simply, I don't buy it. It makes no sense, except to prompt a change in locale for its own sake and no other reason. Their money sure does vanish quickly when they're able to steal it on a whim.

You see, what Harrison had in mind for the absolutely final Stainless Steel Rat novel was for Jim to take over the ship that brought Elmo and the rest to Moolaplenty and set off on a sort of quest to find them some new planet where they could live and farm porcuswine in peace that, of course, didn't involve any further drain on his finances. So instant poverty was needed to trigger this journey, just as a convenient set of successful acts of sabotage by the villainous former captain of the 'Rose of Rifuti', now renamed the 'Porcuswine Express', means that they can't just come back.

Instead, we're treated to a sort of series in miniature, an episodic set of jumps through space that land them on one troubled planet after another, where they solve a problem and take off again, only for the way home to be blocked to them once more. Rinse and repeat until the page count reaches high enough to warrant delivery to the publisher. Instant profit. And yeah, that sounds cynical, but it's pretty true, I feel. This book serves one purpose and one purpose only: to stamp a full stop at the end of this series in no uncertain terms. Other than that, I don't think Harrison really knew what to put into its pages.

The first stop ought to be Mechanistria, but another act of delayed sabotage means that they end up at Floradora instead, where they find themselves saving the peaceful rural vegetarians from the clutches of the Church of the Vengeful God. That task takes fewer than forty pages, so it's off again, courtesy of another timely explosion, to Salvation, which is anything but. This time, the social commentary is about skin colour, with the pink skins pitted against the green skins, who are mostly congenital morons but do rule the planet. This gives Harrison the opportunity to introduce characters like Grinchh and N'thrax to spice up the pot and for Jim to save the world again and eventually they're off to...

And so it goes. I don't want to be dismissive but, while I got some chuckles out of this series of debacles and good deeds done, this is easily the most disposable of the books thus far. It's not without its fun, as long-term fans of the Stainless Steel Rat are happy about, but it's more sparsely distributed than ever. I didn't ever get to the point where I wanted to put this book down and be done with it. It would never be a DNF. However, I was happy that it's as quick and easy a read as these novels tend to be, because it has a habit of overstaying its welcome, something I'm sad to see the series finally reaching.

There are a few moments of note, as there tend to be in these books. One is that Harrison didn't merely bring his regular characters back, to join a few new ones; he also reintroduced us to a character from an earlier book. The mechanic on the Porcuswine Express is an old colleague of Jim's, who's thankful that the Stainless Steel Rat ended the constant state of war his people were stuck in on Cliiand. He knew Jim as a pilot named Lt. Vaska Hulja, but still. It's good to see him back. Another cool moment is the use of a strange device called a sinaphone, which is a cellphone implanted into the sinus, which proves exactly as annoying as you think it would in about five minutes.

Another moment worth mentioning, though I'm not sure if it's for good reason or bad, is the inclusion of a very particular phrase. At one point, Jim sees a propaganda message with a beautiful but scantily clad young lady attempting to persuade people to come and work on Mechanistria. She makes a great case except for one very telltale part that nobody would notice in this far future but we certainly do or at least I hope we do. "Our happy workers are joyful in their labors," she suggests, "for they know that work will make them free." Yeah, I remember what it said in German above the gates to Auschwitz.

Whether that's a clever telegraphing of the intentions of the powerful on Mechanistria or the author's attempt to Godwin his own book, I've thoroughly enjoyed revisiting this series and discovering all the newer entries that I didn't have in the eighties. There are eleven novels all-told and I read half a dozen of them as a kid and a young adult, revisiting them more than once. I enjoyed them as an adult on this read-through too, though I found an array of issues that I didn't notice a few decades ago.

My favourite book back in the day was 'The Stainless Rat for President' and it remains my favourite now, followed by the original, but I had fun to, at least, some degree with every other entry in the series, even the last one before this, 'The Stainless Steel Rat Joins the Circus', which was relatively unnecessary but did boast a complex and inventive story. This one not so much.

The bottom line is that it was good to spend some final time with Slippery Jim diGriz, the one and only Stainless Steel Rat, even if he's getting past it and needs a lot of help getting around. I hope you got to enjoy your retirement after this one, Jim. It's been a blast. ~~ Hal C F Astell

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