Stainless Steel Rat

Sixty-five million years ago, a disastrous cataclysm eliminated three quarters of all life on Earth. Overnight, the age of dinosaurs ended. The age of mammals had begun.

But what if history had happened differently? What if the reptiles had survived to evolve intelligent life?

In West of Eden, bestselling author Harry Harrison has created a rich, dramatic saga of a world where the descendents of the dinosaurs struggled with a clan of humans in a battle for survival.

Here is the story of Kerrick, a young hunter who grows to manhood among the dinosaurs, escaping at last to rejoin his own kind. His knowledge of their strange customs makes him the humans' leader...and the dinosaurs' greatest enemy.

Rivalling Frank Herbert's Dune in the majesty of its scope and conception, West of Eden is a monumental epic of love and savagery, bravery and hope.

A legendary science fiction story, this trilogy, brought back into print in one single volume, presents hero Jason dinAlt as he discovers three separate planets. dinAlt finds excitement and intrigue as he investigates Pyrrus, a strange place where all the beasts, plants, and natural elements are out to destroy man; the unknown second planet, where every man has to kill other men or live as a slave; and Felicity, where creatures are bred for thousands of years for a single deadly purpose. Well-known to fantasy and science fiction enthusiasts, this tale portrays exciting adventures filled with the elements of classic characters and plot twists.

The stakes were slavery - or the life of Jason dinAlt.
The planet was unknown... a savagely primitive place where every man had to kill every other man - or live as a slave. Inhabitants lived in the early Bronze Age one minute, and in the early Machine Age the next. Technology had degenerated into a number of mysteries jealously guarded by separate brotherhoods. But Jason dinAlt was a gambler. He realised that if he was ever going to get a winning hand in this game, the brotherhoods would need a shuffle...

Note: The 1991 Orbit edition uses the same ISBN.

The planet was called Felicity. The name was a joke...except for those compelled to live there. Inhabiting it were beings bred for thousands of years for a single purpose: to attack and destroy.

Jason knew this. But he also knew the planet on which he lived was moving towards certain disaster. And Felicity was the only spot in the universe where he and his companions could survive. He thought he had worked out a perfect plan. But what awaited him on Felicity went far beyond his wildest imagings...

It was the highest honor to defend the Empire against the dreaded Chingers, an enemy race of seven-foot-tall lizards. But Bill, a Technical Fertilizer Operator from a planet of farmers, wasn't interested in honor-he was only interested in two things: his chosen career, and the shapely curves of Inga-Maria Calyphigia. Then a recruiting robot shanghaied him with knockout drops, and he came to in deep space, aboard the Empire warship Christine Keeler. And from there, things got even worse.

Once in a generation, a man is born with a heightened sense of empathy. Brion Brandd used this gift to win the Twenties, an annual physical and mental competition among the best and smartest people on Anvhar. But scarcely able to enjoy his victory, Brandd is swept off to the hellish planet Dis where he must use his heightened sense of empathy to help avert a global nuclear holocaust by negotiating with the blockading fleet, traversing the Disan underworld, and cracking the mystery of the savagely ruthless magter.

The planet was called Pyrrus...a strange place where all the beasts, plants and natural elements were designed for one specific purpose: to destroy man.
The settlers there were supermen...twice as strong as ordinary men and with milli-second reflexes. They had to be. For their business was murder...
It was up to Jason dinAlt, interplanetary gambler, to discover why Pyrrus had become so hostile during man's brief habitation...

In the vastness of space, the crimes just get bigger and Slippery Jim diGriz, the Stainless Steel Rat, is the biggest criminal of them all. He can con humans, aliens and any number of robots time after time. Jim is so slippery that all the inter-galactic cops can do is make him one of their own

An early classic of steampunk and neo-Victoriana.

The time is the 1970s—sort of. The place is Earth—in a way. The project: build a tunnel over four thousand miles in length, intended to sustain a pressure of one thousand atmospheres while accommodating cargo and passengers traveling in excess of a thousand miles per hour. The Transatlantic Tunnel will be the greatest engineering feat in the history of the British Empire, a structure worthy of Her Majesty’s Empire in this, the eighth decade of the twentieth century.

If the project is a success, the credit will belong to Captain Augustine Washington, the most brilliant engineer of our age. It is Washington’s greatest hope that his success will at last erase the family shame inspired by that other Washington: George, traitor to his king, who was hanged by Lord Cornwallis more than two centuries ago.

Harry Harrison, that incomparable creator of alternate worlds, has crafted a brilliant double exposure of history and a typically superb reading experience.