LAST EDITED ON Oct-09-01 AT 01:43 AM (EDT)

It astonishes me that, despite the fact that the United Galactica has all but collapsed and hundreds of civil wars pepper our corner of this galaxy, most of the actual people live in the same tranquil, bucolic, circumscribed lifestyles which dominated what historians have taken to calling the Golden Age of the Galaxy. The Galactica, and its guardians like the Wedge Defense Force, kept things peaceful and prosperous for so long that now the good people of the Galactica believe this peace and prosperity to be their birthright and are quite happy to let the chaos of civil disorder roll over them without a murmur.

My life is so different from that of these people that the comparison can scarcely be made, much less explained to any of them. They exist on a thousand scattered worlds, each wealthy and contented for the most part, with crime and injustice kept well below the common plebe's sensors. Oh, there are a few malcontents, the incompetents who escape the conformity-inducing school systems and public mental health facilities and turn to crime. These are brought to heel in good time, a week, a month, perhaps a year. They make up ninety percent of all crime in the galaxy and give the common people the pleasant illusion that order is being maintained.

Of the remaining ten percent, nine is organized crime. Although this phrase dredges up images of the Hutt families, the Orion clans, the Sicilian Mafia and the New Japan Yakusa, just as much of this is run by corporations, or even the government, as is run by the 'entrepeneur.' Thanks to their backing, they usually remain untouchable except under extreme conditions. The price for their invulnerability, of course, is a relative lack of ambition; they don't upset the apple cart, they take no chances, and when you get down to it there is not a lot of difference between a Mob kneecapper and a little league baseball coach, mentally speaking.

That makes up ninety-nine percent of all crime, and if that were the end of it you could simply let the organized nine percent handle the unorganized ninety and dispose of the police entirely. It is that last one percent that keeps the police agencies of the galaxy in business, which routinely makes the nightly news and provides entertainment for the bovine intelligences of the small-town Milky Way. That last one percent is myself, myself and a few lone agents like myself, scattered across the many star empires of the Perseus Arm. We are the rats in the wainscotting of society, and while some of us are content to nibble at the cheese hidden in the cupboard, some are rabid and sneak out to bite the hand which unwittingly feeds us. The two traits we all share are the unwillingness to live by society's rules and the intelligence to remain outside society's grip.

Society used to have more rats, back in the pre-contact days of each planet, when the rules were looser, just as the old wooden and concrete buildings had more rats than the steel towers and orbital habitats of today. Today it takes a special kind of rat to find the joints, to skip from world to world and law to law without being caught or, worse yet, becoming part of the system. Only a stainless steel rat can survive in such a society.

It is a proud and lonely thing to be a stainless steel rat- and very nice work if you can keep it. Unfortunately sometimes even a stainless steel rat gets caught, and so I was, brought down not by a police officer or an outraged crime lord but by, of all things, bill collectors. Now, in order to work off the debts held against me, I am employed by a secret agency to solve the kind of crimes I once committed, bringing the truly dangerous to justice and lowering the boom on those who hold themselves above the law.

I have been a thief, a con artist, a smuggler, a hacker, and many other things in my short lifetime. Never, however, had I considered for myself the possibility of being a -hero-...

2344
STAINLESS STEEL WEST

a story possibly coming to you by Kris Overstreet

(And no, the Redneck isn't in it. At all.)

-Redneck

Red wizard needs money badly...
www.wlpcomics.com
White Lightning Productions - don't tell the Pope

>caught or, worse yet, becoming part of the system. Only a stainless
>steel rat can survive in such a society.

Slippery Jim!

Will Angelina be in it too? I always dig reformed psychopathic babes.

-- Sean --

http://www.thebrokenlink.org The Broken Link 4.0 is live!
"All tribal myths are true, for a given value of 'true'." -- Terry Pratchett
Follow my random thoughts
Follow my creative process

>Will Angelina be in it too? I always dig reformed psychopathic babes.

Hmmm, probably not. The story idea which is currently gaining momentum is a solo Slippery Jim story, involving the planet of Neo-Texas and three Transformers...

As for Angelina, she's very nebulous in my mind. I have no less than three different possibilities for an equivalent character floating around my mental casting offices.

None of which I'm sharing with y'all, BTW.

Redneck

Red wizard needs money badly...
www.wlpcomics.com
White Lightning Productions - don't tell the Pope

>>Will Angelina be in it too? I always dig reformed psychopathic babes.
>
>Hmmm, probably not. The story idea which is currently gaining momentum
>is a solo Slippery Jim story, involving the planet of Neo-Texas and
>three Transformers...
>
>Redneck

No offense to Laudre, but... good. IMHO, the more family Harrison added, the worse the stories got. He was best in the beginning, a single rat against the universe!

Dan Brandon

>No offense to Laudre, but... good. IMHO, the more family Harrison
>added, the worse the stories got. He was best in the beginning, a
>single rat against the universe!

I've always liked the stories that were about Slippery Jim's solo exploits, 'cause it's just a lot of fun to watch him work on his own, but I like the character of Angelina because she's the one person in the entire galaxy that scares him, and because her competencies lie in entirely different areas than his. His two sons... ehh, I could take them or leave them.

-- Sean --

http://www.thebrokenlink.org The Broken Link 4.0 is live!
"All tribal myths are true, for a given value of 'true'." -- Terry Pratchett
Follow my random thoughts
Follow my creative process

>No offense to Laudre, but... good. IMHO, the more family Harrison
>added, the worse the stories got. He was best in the beginning, a
>single rat against the universe!

Well, I'm about to blaspheme here.

Harrison has some -very- neat ideas (witness Make Room, Make Room! and the Eden series, to say nothing of the Rat's adventures), but he is at best, IMHO, a mediocre -writer.- His characters tend to be -very- one-dimensional, Slippery Jim being one of the few we get a more solid picture of. My favorite Rat story, for this reason is 'A Stainless Steel Rat is Born,' which gives us a solid view of where Jim comes from and how, despite his criminal tendencies, he developed his inner moral core.

OTOH, my -second- favorite Rat story is 'Stainless Steel Rat Wants You!', which involves Jim and his rescue cre- um, his family.

There will be an Angelina of some sort- whether she is actually named Angelina I don't know, but she -will- be Jim's intellectual equal. Any children of the union, however, will be different, as James and Bolivar were not even complex enough to be one-dimensional characters. They're the sci-fi pulp version of Rosencranz and Guildenstern.

Redneck

Red wizard needs money badly...
www.wlpcomics.com
White Lightning Productions - don't tell the Pope

>Harrison has some -very- neat ideas (witness Make Room, Make Room! and
>the Eden series, to say nothing of the Rat's adventures), but he is at
>best, IMHO, a mediocre -writer.- His characters tend to be -very-
>one-dimensional, Slippery Jim being one of the few we get a more solid
>picture of.

No argument here, at least as far as the Stainless Steel Rat novels go. But then, the Rat books are maent to be full of one-dimensional caricatures that act pretty much as background material against which Our Hero acts.

I'd argue that his To The Stars trilogy (that's the name I know it by; I forget the titles of the individual novels, but it's some of the hardest SF I've ever read, and I have it in a book club omnibus edition) is an example of the kind of stuff he can do when he's being dead serious, and not having fun (Rat) or playing interesting what-if games (Eden, another work of his I greatly enjoy that has a few glaring flaws in its character development). While I'd have to sit down and reread it to give a more informed opinion (I read it in high school; while I still have it, I haven't reread it yet), I do recall being amazed that this was written by the same man responsible for Slippery Jim. (Though I get the same feeling when I read any given Eden book.)

> My favorite Rat story, for this reason is 'A Stainless
>Steel Rat is Born,' which gives us a solid view of where Jim comes
>from and how, despite his criminal tendencies, he developed his inner
>moral core.

That, I think, is my single favorite Rat story as well. I also greatly enjoy reading about the character of the Bishop, and the dialogue between Jim and the Bishop is hugely entertaining.

> as James and
>Bolivar were not even complex enough to be one-dimensional characters.
>They're the sci-fi pulp version of Rosencranz and Guildenstern.

They're mini-Jims. That's their entire raison d'etre from a plot standpoint.

-- Sean --

http://www.thebrokenlink.org The Broken Link 4.0 is live!
"All tribal myths are true, for a given value of 'true'." -- Terry Pratchett
Follow my random thoughts
Follow my creative process

>
>>Will Angelina be in it too? I always dig reformed psychopathic babes.
>
>Hmmm, probably not. The story idea which is currently gaining momentum
>is a solo Slippery Jim story, involving the planet of Neo-Texas and
>three Transformers...
>
>As for Angelina, she's very nebulous in my mind. I have no less than
>three different possibilities for an equivalent character floating
>around my mental casting offices.
>
>None of which I'm sharing with y'all, BTW.
>

Meanie!!! ;p

Seriously, though... as someone mentions elesewhere in the thread, Now I have this image of Will Smith as sort of a Jim West/Jim DeGriz fusion. Don't ask me why, though... And that was sort of the thing that attracted me to SSR... An anti-hero turned hero... initially against his will, but to me it seemed like he started to enjoy the job in later capers.

___________________

Vaughn doesn't know I exist. I guess this explains why the rest of reality keeps ignoring me as well. >_<

LAST EDITED ON Oct-09-01 AT 03:46 PM (EDT)

Ryoko?

It just kind of sounds like her. No real contempt for the dregs of society or the criminals, just a passive observance. Whatever doesn't stop her from having fun...

Plus, you know, sake and carrots cost alot, I'd imagine.

Next time, I read the whole thread first.

Static-Pulse
- the most impulsive post alive
DarkBeast.com

>Plus, you know, sake and carrots cost alot, I'd imagine.
>
>Next time, I read the whole thread first.

Yeah, well, my first thought was _Will Smith_ as Jim DiGriz... Followed immediately by an idle wondering of which Dirty Pair fic did he get a mention in, anyway?

Blessed be.
Nathan Baxter

>LAST EDITED ON Oct-09-01 AT
>03:46 PM (EDT)
>
>Ryoko?
>
>It just kind of sounds like her. No real contempt for the dregs of
>society or the criminals, just a passive observance. Whatever doesn't
>stop her from having fun...
>
>Plus, you know, sake and carrots cost alot, I'd imagine.
>
>Next time, I read the whole thread first.

Well, to answer your question anyway, no.

If I can find a plot for the story, Ryouko already has a role in UF, probably in the sequel story to 'Privateer: One Fine Mess.'

Redneck

Red wizard needs money badly...
www.wlpcomics.com
White Lightning Productions - don't tell the Pope