My Science Fiction Trinity is Robert Heinlein, Keith Laumer, and Harry Harrison. Heinlein holds the top of the line, with Harrison and Laumer always in the other two spots, sometimes one pulls a bit ahead of the other but no one will ever push either of them out of these two spots.

I have read everything by Heinlein. Shoot, if I ever found a shopping list he wrote I would probably read it all the while waiting for Lazarus Long to walk up to me and hand me a pound of coffee. With Laumer I have read almost all of his works. I started with the “Bolo” stories, worked my way into his other stuff and finally started on the “Retief” books a few months ago.

Harrison I am a good deal more selective. While I have yet to read anything of his I have not liked, I have tried to pick out stuff that really reached out to me. Stuff that ‘just felt right’ when I picked it up and looked at it.

The first book of Harry Harrison’s I ever read was “Deathworld” which blew me away. I was in Junior High in West Memphis, Ark. And I spent most of my free time when I was not running away from home in the school library.

I remember it was raining and I was bored out of my mind. I had read all the Heinlein in the school and most of the stuff my Mark Twain or the other authors I liked when I saw this really ragged soft cover book on the rack.

I decided to take a chance and that launched me on the Harry Harrison train. Telling the story of Jason Dinalt, a gambler with a special gift who comes to the planet Pyrrus, where man has set up a colony to mine the heavy metals that the planet abounds in. Pyrrus has a gravity that is over twice that of Earth, and very extreme weather conditions. It is also a place where every thing on the world is out to destroy humans. From the plants to the animals, every living thing wants nothing more then to wipe out humanity.

It is Dinalt’s job to find a way to kill them and to stop the attacks on humans while helping man to conquer Pyrrus. Avoiding fungus that can rot a mans legs off, creatures that seem to be mostly claws, teeth and stingers, plus being in the middle of open hostility between the miners and the Grubbers, a group of farmers who live more or less at peace with the creatures of the planet.

The miners and their people live in a massive walled fortress, always on the watch for attacks from the flora and fauna of Pyrrus. It is only after Dinalt discovers the reason the

‘Grubbers’ are able to survive in the wilds that he is able to understand what has happened on Pyrrus.

The book was amazing, gripping and exciting. It combined a lot of the ideas of social farming and community that were big in the late to mid-1960 and into the mid-1970s while still trying to show that commerce and even the need to exploit nature to a certain extent might still be useful in the future.

Yes, the way that the corporation worked here was pretty negative. But, as the story progressed they were forced to face that some changes needed to be made. Even now, we have seen how life can reflect or be reflected in our literature, movies and music.

Harrison made stories like this work. He was able to demonstrate that man will evolve but will still retain most of his own standards and ideals throughout the generations.

Which can also be seen in most of his Stainless Steel Rat Books.