Harry Harrison (1925–2012)

Playing "what if" with the fate of the "dinosaurs" is certainly not new, Harry Harrison is in good company with the likes of Verne, Burroughs, Doyle, and many others. Each have done their own spin on "What if the fate of the dinosaurs was different?"

Harry Harrison's variant on this is excellent. He presents us with the Yilanè a race of sentient beings that evolved from a reptilian ancestor. All too often, fiction paints a reptilian species as ruthless villains, an over-abused archetype show more which Harrison carefully avoids.

Instead he gives us a species (descended from some reptilian ancestor) that has a complex culture, with its own customs, technological successes, and internal conflicts. The Yilanè are already struggling to (re)define itself when they make their first contact with the Tanu.

The Tanu, if they're not homo sapiens, they're something very close to it--sentient bipedal mammals. They too, have their own culture and customs--centered around an early hunter-gatherer culture.

Harrison succeeds in making both cultures plausible and believable and successfully avoids painting a picture of either culture as the villain. There are characters who do, but the author carefully does not--and there are individuals on both sides who are villains--and heroes. And sometimes, who is which is a matter of perspective.

The book is a good read, but it was slow to hook me. I think because the first four chapters are more of a prologue, and the real story begins in chapter five. We need those chapters--but I didn't enjoy them as much as the rest of the book. The book is a longer read, overall, around 470 pages in the paperback edition, which in a couple of spots had me feeling impatient for the climax of the story.

If you love first contact fiction, you should read this one--it may not be aliens, as both cultures developed on the same planet, but they're definitely alien to each other, and the issues remain the same. Likewise, if you love the "what if the dinosaurs..." question, you should read Harry Harrison's answer to the question. show less

"Solyent Green is people!" Charlton Heston's character reveals at the end of the classic sci-fi film Solyent Green.

Harry Harrison's sci-fi novel, Make Room! Make Room!, though the source material for the film is an entirely different work though with a similar warning against unbridled consumption and the dangers of overpopulation.

In Harrison's novel, Andy Rusch is under pressure to investigate and solve the murder of a prominent gangster while becoming enamoured by the gangster's mistress. show more The plot then is a murder-mystery but it is the setting that really distinguishes Make Room! Make Room! and causes it to stand out from other works. It is 1999 and New York City is full - 35 million people are crowded into the city and there are food, water, and power shortages. Harrison adeptly creates a believably overcrowded world that is too-quickly coming apart at the seams.

Similar in theme to John Brunner's [b:Stand on Zanzibar|41069|Stand on Zanzibar|John Brunner|http://d202m5krfqbpi5.cloudfront.net/books/1360613921s/41069.jpg|2184253], Make Room! Make Room! excellently addresses the now-present danger of overconsumption and overpopulation that threatens the world's resources. As Harrison writes in the afterword of this edition, though his predictions were generally off the mark, his aim was not to predict but to warn readers of the importance of sustainable development and population control. That warning is as prescient now as it was fifty years ago. show less

Above all else, this book is great at creating a central mood that dominates the setting and your mind while reading. It's dark, disgusting, claustrophobic, and corrupt. A mild mystery and cop drama was a great way to explore this mood. I enjoyed the general sense of apathy from most of the characters over the circumstances of their lives, and the ending really reinforced the general feeling of hopelessness that mounted through the book.

That all being said, I do think that Harrison used an show more extremely heavy hand to deliver his rather singular message against overpopulation. The character that serves as his mouthpiece throughout the book goes on several unnecessary pointed triads about contraceptive and overpopulation, that brought me out of the flow of the plot and the mood.

Overall, I enjoyed my time with this book. It dipped a little into the pulp end of fiction, but was deeply immersive and depressing. show less

Harrison, science fiction’s most prolific practioneer of the alternate history sub-genre before Harry Turtledove came along, uses not a pivot point involving human social history but an alternate version of the Earth’s geologic past – a comet does not wipe out the dinosaurs – as the grounding premise of this novel.

This is Harrison’s most ambitious work and was marketed originally to appeal to readers of Jean Auel who was new on the scene at the time. Biologist Jack Cohen, who also show more helped develop the aliens of Larry Niven, Jerry Pournelle, and Steven Barnes’ The Legacy of Heorot, helped Harrison develop the Yilane, the intelligent descendents of reptiles. They are masters of this world and biological engineering. Their boats, cities, and even microscopes are all modified organisms. (Given what seems to be their limited idea of DNA, I find this somewhat implausible but still interesting.)

Their language, developed by Thomas Shippey, professor of literature and an academic critic of science fiction, is so complex many Yilane never learn to speak it, and body gestures are an integral part. Physiology is so tied up with it that Yilane ca not lie. At best, they can only keep their body very still while talking. The very act of being exiled is, for most, a psychosomatic sentence of death.

Most of the these biological and linguistic details are explained in an appendix amusingly written in sort of a prudish Victorian scientist tone.

While a proud race with cities throughout the world, things are not going well with the Yilane. An encroaching ice age is causing some abandonment of their cities in the northern zones of earth, and an effort is being undertaken to migrate from the eastern hemisphere to the western hemisphere. The building of the western colony is directed by Vainte, a Yilante with political ambitions. However, the nesting grounds where the species’ docile, somewhat silly, and definitely disposable males hang out, is found by a group of hunting Tanu – Stone Age but anatomically modern humans. The old enmity between lizard and human awakens; the nesting grounds are destroyed; the Yilante retaliate by hunting down the hunting party, killing all except a young boy named Kerrick.

Kerrick’s story is at the heart of this novel. He becomes useful in Vainte’s schemes – his innate human ability to lie aids in an assassination. He even becomes a sexual plaything to her (all Yilante leaders are female) though this is not handled in a prurient manner but in a way that seems a bit inspired by the 1980s’ obsession with the effects of childhood sexual abuse. By the time he escapes the Yilane as a man and returns to his people, he has a unique ability to aid the humans in their war against the reptiles. But he also sees some worth and value in Yilane ways, has friends there he left.

It’s a relatively thick book but Harrison keeps the story moving and develops his background well (you really don’t have to read that appendix to understand things). Kerrick is the classic caught-between-two-worlds figure.

Though Harrison wrote two more novels in this series, this feels like a self-contained work which is not true of the others. show less