The other day, I was reading an interview with Harry Harrison, in which he complains that "most science fiction isn't well written", and "that's why you can't go back and read any of the stuff you read when you were a kid."

So, out of curiosity, I went back to see how well his stuff held up: the books of his that I'd enjoyed when I was younger. I picked up To the Stars! — a trilogy of his books which which I was less familiar, having read the Deathworld and Stainless Steel Rat series a number of times in my youth.

The first thing that struck me was that his punctuation was atrocious! He couldn't seem to grasp the proper use of the comma (nor, apparently, did his editor); apostrophes were few and far between, because he rarely used contractions. This latter fact lent his dialogue an incredibly stilted and artificial feel. He rarely described any of the characters, pausing only to note when a character was black, or to describe the breasts and silky skin of any woman with whom the protagonist was about to have sex.

Another thing missing was emotion. Perhaps a large part of this was the stilted dialogue, for characters spoke no differently when happy, sad, angry or agitated. Admittedly, the protagonist was an upper-class Englishman, but most of the other characters were not; apart from a few American black characters who spoke in an insulting stereotypical dialect, everyone (English proles, Israelis, offworlders descended from Russians and Asians) spoke in a bland English devoid of emotional cues or character.

But his biggest failing was that his protagonists rarely faced any actual difficulties. As soon as a problem presented itself, it was immediately solved, robbing the stories of most of their tension. Antagonists were easily deceived or physically overcome, mechanical difficulties were quickly fixed, and even the deadly environmental conditions which were described in dire terms didn't seem to hinder Our Hero in the slightest.

In the interview, Harrison stated his preference for "stories that move and have colour to them — action. And that's the way I write." Dipping lightly into an obstacle and then breezing immediately out again is indeed a way to keep things moving, but it doesn't permit much of an emotional investment; I found myself not caring about any of the characters.

It's a pity, because I remember really enjoying the Stainless Steel Rat books. Now I'm afraid to read them again, for fear of tarnishing the memory of that enjoyment.