Harry Harrison

The Argument

Harry Harrison is best known for Make Room! Make Room! — the novel adapted into the film Soylent Green — and his significance for literary apologetics lies in the tradition he represents: science fiction as prophetic literature, using the extrapolation of present trends to confront readers with the consequences of their assumptions. His dystopian vision of an overcrowded, resource-depleted world is a moral argument dressed as a story.

The satirical Stainless Steel Rat series represents a different Harrison — the writer who used science fiction comedy to examine questions of justice, violence, and what it means to operate morally in a morally compromised world. His protagonist, Slippery Jim DiGriz, is a thief who becomes a secret agent, and the comic complications of his career raise, in their own way, the question of whether a good end can justify a questionable means.

For literary apologetics, Harrison represents the tradition of science fiction as moral philosophy — the genre that asks what kind of world our choices are building, what kind of human beings our institutions are forming, and whether the trajectory is one we would endorse if we could see it clearly. This is prophetic literature in the original sense: not prediction but moral diagnosis.