Galactic Dreams

A companion volume to the collection Stainless Steel Visions, this volume collects several of Harrison's best stories, such as Space Rats of the CCC; At Last, the True Story of Frankenstein; and Bill, the Gallactic Hero's Happy Holiday. Includes a hilarious new adventure of Bill, the Galactic Hero. Lavishly illustrated.

Galactic Dreams was published in April 1994 by Tor in the US and Legend in the UK, and it is, as the original cover copy suggests, the second of a pair of late-career Harrison collections, sitting alongside Stainless Steel Visions (1992). Twelve stories, plus a substantial introduction from Harrison himself called "A Writer's Life", in which he reflects on his peripatetic existence and the long arc of a career that by that point had already produced the Stainless Steel Rat books, the Bill the Galactic Hero series, the Eden trilogy, and Make Room! Make Room! (the novel that became the film Soylent Green). For UK readers in particular, this collection is also worth noting as the work of someone who, although American by birth, was a significant figure in British science fiction circles. Harrison was for years co-president of the Birmingham Science Fiction Group alongside Brian Aldiss, who described him as a constant peer and great family friend.

The contents themselves span several decades of Harrison's career. There's "Mute Milton", his short and unflinching story about racism in the American South, which sits uneasily but rightly alongside the comic pieces. There's "A Criminal Act", one of his returns to the population pressures he had explored more fully in Make Room! Make Room!, this time in the form of an amiable but pointed satire. "At Last, the True Story of Frankenstein" is a clever and funny piece that does exactly what it says on the tin. "Space Rats of the CCC" is the obligatory parody of cliché-soaked starship-trooper stories, and a reminder that Harrison was always at least half writing in conversation with the genre rather than just within it. There are also more whimsical pieces, time-travel yarns, and what one contemporary reviewer fairly described as a couple of stories that lean rather heavily on trick endings. The range is the point. This is a writer who never wanted to be tied to one register.

The headliner, of course, is "Bill, the Galactic Hero's Happy Holiday", the only piece of new material in the collection and Harrison's first return to Bill in his own short fiction for thirty years; Bill having first appeared in 1964's "The Starsloggers", the seed that grew into the famous anti-war satire Bill, the Galactic Hero the following year. Whether the new story earns its top billing is a separate question. One contemporary reviewer pointedly called it "one of the least worthy entries", and there is something to that; the Bill stories work best at novel length, where the cumulative absurdity has room to build, and a short Bill outing is necessarily a sketch rather than a full picture. But it is also a perfectly enjoyable sketch, and as a piece of fan service for those of us who grew up on Bill, its inclusion is welcome rather than otherwise.

What you have, overall, is a generous and varied late-career sampler from one of the most amiable voices in twentieth-century science fiction, presented in a handsome edition with interior illustrations by Bryn Barnard and, in the original hardback, cover art by Keith Parkinson. Christopher Priest's obituary of Harrison described him as "amiable, outspoken and endlessly amusing", and that is not a bad summary of the contents of Galactic Dreams too. It is not the place to start if you've never read Harrison; for that, go to The Stainless Steel Rat or Bill, The Galactic Hero first, and Make Room! Make Room! if you want him at his most serious. But for readers who already know what they're dealing with, this is a good evening's company with a writer who never thought science fiction needed to choose between fun and seriousness, and who proved it across most of a career.