
Harry Harrison, the American science fiction writer best known for the Stainless Steel Rat comic space opera series and the dystopian Make Room! Make Room! has died at the age of 87.
He also parodied the genre in his Bill the Galactic Hero books, seeing his work as anti-war and anti-militaristic. .
Harrison's first novel, Deathworld, was published in 1960, with the Stainless Steel Rat appearing for the first time a year later. "Slippery Jim" diGriz, the books' anti-hero, whose latest appearance was a "rogue smuggler" created years before Han Solo in the Star Wars films.
The central idea of Make Room! Make Room!, his 1966 novel in which a critical food shortage in overpopulated New York means a food substitute is needed, was used in the 1973 film Soylent Green, starring Charlton Heston.