Book description
Slippery Jim diGriz is in the process of robbing the new Mint on
Paskonjak when the heist goes terribly wrong. Threatened with a horrific
death, Slippery Jim is allowed to cut a deal with the Galactic League:
voyage to the planet Liokukae and bring back a missing artifact - the
only known evidence of alien life-forms found in 32,000 years of
galactic exploration. For diGriz there are a few catches. One is
Liokukae itself - a dumping ground for the League's misfits, murderers,
maniacs, and the incurably obnoxious. Another is a little matter of life
and death. To ensure the utterly untrustworthy diGriz's cooperation, the
League has given him a slow-acting poison, allowing him thirty days in
which to succeed . . . or die. Now the Stainless Steel Rat is on his way
to a world that is hurtling backward down the evolutionary scale - a
land of fanatic, goat-herding Fundamentaloids, murderous Machmen, and a
rusty guru named Iron John. DiGriz has developed an almost perfect
cover: a four-member rock band that has a way of giving its audiences
what they want to hear. But while the days tick away and diGriz's life
expectancy lowers, the mission evolves from finding an artifact to
liberating a planet . . . which is a tune the Stainless Steel Rat most
certainly knows how to sing.
Harry Harrison (1925 - 2012)
Harry Harrison was born Henry Maxwell Dempsey in Connecticut, in 1925.
He is the author of a number of much-loved series including the
Stainless Steel Rat and Bill the Galactic Hero sequences and the
Deathworld Trilogy. He is known as a passionate advocate of Esperanto,
the most popular of the constructed international languages, which
appears in many of his novels. He has been publishing novels for over
half a century and is perhaps best known for his seminal novel of
overpopulation, Make Room! Make Room!, which was adapted into the cult
film Soylent Green. He died in 2012.
