Harry Harrison
1925–2012 · United States
he drew the future before he wrote it
Harrison came into science fiction through its back door, as a commercial artist. Born in Stamford, Connecticut, in 1925, he drew for the EC Comics line after the war — inking and illustrating titles like Weird Science — then wrote and edited comics, and for a time scripted the Flash Gordon newspaper strip, before selling his first story in 1951. He was, by his own cheerful admission, a working writer who wrote to be paid, and remained frank about it his whole life.
The army left two lasting marks. It taught him to loathe military life, which he turned into the savage satire Bill, the Galactic Hero, a direct answer to the militarism he saw in the science fiction around him. And it taught him Esperanto, the invented international language he championed for the rest of his days, salting it through his novels and serving as honorary president of the Esperanto Association of Ireland. His most popular creation was Slippery Jim diGriz, the Stainless Steel Rat, a charming interstellar con man; his most serious book, Make Room! Make Room! (1966), imagined a starving, overcrowded future and became the loose basis for the film Soylent Green.
He spent most of his life abroad — Mexico, England, Italy, Denmark, Ireland — moving to live cheaply and write freely. In 2009 the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America named him a Grand Master. He died in England in 2012.