The Stainless Steel Rat Returns (Stainless Steel Rat Books) [Englisch] [Taschenbuch]

I'm going to have to spend this comment taking apart the idiot and dullard of a professional book reviewer at Publisher's Weekly who tried unfairly to paint Harrison as a racist in his public review. It seems to be removed here But I'll post here anyway as I did at Barnes and Noble.
This is a bit spoilerish, just a warning...............

As he hasn't read the series much less Harrison's background from WWII where he worked with black soldiers as a Sgt. while their white jackass Officers were always giving them crap and trying to get them written up or jailed. Harrison wrote a long time ago about his experience of this, and how it was about time the day black soldiers got their equal rights and were desegregated in the military back in the late 40s when he was stationed in the south at a training base. Harrison has never been a racist.
The Reviewer quotes the one sentence where jim remarks:
> Jim (himself quite pink) declares that the different skin colors "should
> have been bred out centuries ago."

Firstly Jim is not pink. His race is never mentioned in the books, though he is generally portrayed as a white guy by artists on some covers and the comic book by creative license alone. Harrison (and he has said this before himself) always tried to keep race specifically vague for the main characters in his Rat books so that any reader identifies with them.
Jim mentioned that racial differences on the same planet and same continent were odd to him BECAUSE in his world (this series) humans had colonized the galaxy thousands of years ago. With an end to racial bigotry in THEIR modern social culture anyone would naturally be likely to marry anyone else regardless of race, so after thousands of years of mixed breeding everyone is just a standard light brown color- why this color? It was predicted by scientists back in the 80s that that was what people would look like if all the races mixed out of existence. The result would be sort of brown with slightly asian eyes. Harrison went with this hypothesis, he WASN'T saying that Jim is this certain color so it is the best some how.

Secondly, if you have read any number of Harrison's books, you'll know he always paints country folk as being ignorant bumpkins. He seems to think this is funny, I don't know...
Same with those on planets that lost their technology. They are always ignorant dullards in need of schooling and galactic contact.

Except for the Grey Men they faced in the third book. The inhabitance of a lost forgotten iceplanet had evolved separate from the rest of the human race, were very strong and hyper intelligent to the point of telepathy. He only beat their scheme to subvert the normal humans (who they resented for forgetting about them while they suffered in their cold mining colony) by a bit of trickery and misdirection playing on their nihilistic paranoia.

The reviewer also writes:
> the green-skinned, shiftless, slow-witted majority oppresses the
> smarter, slower-breeding, pink-skinned minority

I didn't see the greens being any more shiftless than the LIGHT BROWN humans, or any more slow witted than the shipwrecked humans who were also savage bumpkins. Again its like the reviewer is trying here to compare this story to black-white prejudice and accuse Harrison of being an earth-race bigot.

The greens, being a mutated species had a non-human hive like caste system where the majority were like drones and didn't need to be bread to be smart, they were bred to do menial labor and could be replaced easily. The minority in the greens were bred to lead and so had higher intelligence bred into them. This was a self inflicted culture which had nothing to do with the normal humans. There was no use of comparison.

When Jim landed the smart leader greens colored themselves different human colors to be most pleasing to who ever they might be talking to. They knew of the different colors humans might come in, because different groups of humans had landed there long ago before people fully integrated.
And the remaining normal humans all interbred giving the "nice healthy brown" look that Jim saw on the real humans that would be normal in Jim's homogenized universe.

Too bad many real humans these days appear no smarter than the 'green mutant majority', of whom the writer for the publishers weekly review is obviously a member, so maybe Harrison really should have written this back in the 60s as the reviewer suggested, before the rise of the cult of the reactionary and the dumbing down of the American people started.

I don't know where all the 5-star reviews have come from, because I'm having a hard time believing them. Harrison has taken everything good about the Stainless Steel Rat and left it out of this novel. Jim DiGriz is a con man, but there are no cons. He's also know for his fantastic robberies, but this book had none. He works for the Special Corps, saving the universe, but not here. Everything that's special about The Stainless Steel Rat is missing.

When I found out there was a new novel in the series, I was really excited. But reading it was a disappointment. The plot does not require Slippery Jim DiGriz -- it could have been any normal person facing difficulties in a future world. Harrison has let us down in this one.

I finished this book last night after a 5 day reading binge. The rat is back and he's wittier than ever. I laughed out loud constantly in the first few chapters, and was glued to the book after that. I would definitely start out with at least a few of the older stainless-steel-rat books first then read this one. Thank you Harry Harrison! This book is highly recommended.