Harry Harrison

Harry Harrison has been one of Octocon's biggest supporters for many years. In that time, he has attended a large number of our fine conventions and we're delighted to have him return this year!

Harry began his SF career as a comic-book artist and regularly found himself rewriting scripts written by people who didn't actually read or understand comics. Before long he was writing his own, then editing comics, then publishing them... Around this time he was also illustrating pulp magazines, particularly men's "adventure" publications, for which he was soon writing "true" stories along the lines of "I was an Iron-Lung Baby" and "I Ate a Pygmy".

Harry's first SF story was published in 1951, written purely because he was sick with the flu and his hands were shaking too much to draw - but not too much to type.

In 1957 he published a short story called "The Stainless Steel Rat" which was very well received, and so he wrote a sequel. These were later combined into a novel, also called The Stainless Steel Rat, and thus began one of sceince fiction's most engaging and enduring characters, the cosmic crook / reluctant hero  James Bolivar DiGriz. 2010 will see the publication of the eleventh Rat novel!

To date, Harry has published 55 novels and about 120 short stories, some of which are among the most widely-published SF tales ever written: "The Streets of Ashkelon", his classic tale of an alien civilisation learning to embrace certain wide-spread human values (I won't say any more than that for fear of spoiling it), has been anthologised more than fifty times.

Harry's wickedly dark and intelligent sense of humour permeates his works - especially the Deathworld, Bill, the Galactic Hero and Stainless Steel Rat novels - but he is equally regarded for his more serious works, particularly the Eden trilogy and Make Room! Make Room! (which was very, very loosely adapted as the movie Soylent Green).

For more information see Harry's official website, which - incidentally - was launched at Octocon in 1999, making this year its tenth anniversary... The website organisers have hinted that there may be a little treat in store by way of celebration!