Harry Harrison: "The Greatest Car in the World," "The Final Battle" and "The Powers of Observation"

Today we are surfing on over to the internet archive to read three stories from the 1983 printing of the 1970 Harry Harrison collection Prime Number, which has a great Peter Elson cover that looks like it belongs on Starship Troopers.  Some of these stories might be broad satires or lame jokes--the titles sound pretty sarcastic, after all--but Harrison is actually good at writing adventure stories, so maybe we'll get some thrills and chills as well as tired and boring attacks on religion or consumerism or American jingoism or environmental degradation or overpopulation or whatever.  (I'm actually not immune to Harrison's humor, as evidenced by my laughing at "The Fairly Civil Service" just a few days ago, so maybe these stories will wangle some laughs out of me whether I want them to or not.)   

"Mute Milton" (1966)

We read the first story in Prime Number back in 2018, a story about a black genius who could save the world but was murdered by a racist cop and member of the KKK.  I called it "heavy-handed" and likened it to a "homily for a child."      

"The Greatest Car in the World" (1966)

This is, I guess, a spoof on melodramas and the romanticization of the automobile and also an attack on modern mass-production techniques and American culture.

An American automobile enthusiast comes to the castle in which lives an aged Italian master craftsman and car designer, Bellini.  The old guy is in a wheelchair and his sexy granddaughter and his butler try to keep the Yankee away because the doctors have told grandpa that he must have no excitement.  Our guy gets through to gramps anyway, and the two hit it off over a shared love of automobiles.  The American tells the absurd story of how Bellini inspired his own love of cars.  The Yankee's father loved cars and came to Europe to see a car race in which one of Bellini's cars was in an accident caused by the driver of a competing vehicle--a flying radiator cap from the Bellini hit Dad in the noggin and Dad brought it home to America and displayed it prominently in the house, where it fired our hero's imagination.  

Bellini shows his visitor a car he has hand built, a one-of-a-kind prototype full of amazing innovations from the brakes to the motor to the battery to the beautiful shape of the body.  It is the most lovely, most efficient, most agile, most everything car in the world!  Bellini's last act is to give the car to our hero so he can reproduce it and share Bellini's genius with the world.

The central joke of the story, beyond the silly mock-melodrama plot, which is buttressed by ridiculous metaphors ("holding his note disdainfully by the edge, as though it were a soiled Kleenex") and goofy exaggerations ("Zero to one hundred miles an hour took four seconds because he was not yet used to the divine machine and was hesitant with the gas") is the twist ending, which isn't foreshadowed and sort of comes out of nowhere.  Our American protagonist, who says he worships Bellini and in whom Bellini on his death bed has put his trust, is going to betray Bellini--American capitalism is too greedy and American taste is too vulgar for Americans to appreciate or manufacture this super duper car--the car the protagonist will produce in Bellini's name will be a shoddy and cheap imitation no different than the mass-produced lowest-common-denominator junk already coming off the line in Detroit.  

Thumbs down.  "The Greatest Car in the World" debuted in the same issue of Michael Moorcock's New Worlds that featured Charles Platt's The Garbage World (we read the book version back in 2019) and a cover girl fashioned by Keith Roberts upon whom I have had an enduring crush.  Besides in Prime Number, "The Greatest Car in the World" has been reprinted in the 1979 anthology Car Sinister and the 2001 Harrison collection 50 in 50.

"The Final Battle" (1970)  

This is an eye-rollingly lame short-short, two pages.  The narrator says he lives in the era after a cataclysmic war, and that as a kid his father would often tell the story of that terrible war.  The text leads you to believe that this is a futuristic tale about life after some history-defining war between the liberal West and the socialist East, but then comes the punchline which I guess the author hopes is profound: Dad says that the last war was ended by the use of a terrible capital-"U" Ultimate capital-"W" Weapon that has made war too horrible to contemplate, so that mankind must now live in peace--that weapon is the bow!  The narrator and his father are cave men!  Presumably Harrison is telling us that mankind has always been monstrously violent and will never get better so we should expect to be nuked any day now!  O, will man never learn the folly of war?!?!1!11  

This pretentious waste of time debuted here in Prime Number, and Isaac Asimov and/or Martin H. Greenberg liked it enough to include it in their Microcosmic Tales collection of short-shorts, and a 1989 calendar that offered readers a short-short for each month. 

"The Powers of Observation" (1968)

It seems like my fears that Prime Number is chock a block with dreadful joke stories are being realized...but wait, perhaps here we have a glimmer of hope.  "The Powers of Observation" first appeared in John W. Campbell, Jr.'s Analog, in the same issue as the first installment of the James H. Schmitz serial "The Tuvela" (we read the book version of "The Tuvela," Demon Breed, back in 2020.)  Can we count on towering figure Campbell, who has a reputation as a guy who thought science fiction should portray man as a problem-solving animal capable of ferreting out the universe's secrets and thereby dominating that universe and as a right-winger who would say any provocative thing to shake people up, to ensure that Harrison isn't foisting another groaner on us?  Campbell didn't just think of "The Powers of Observation" as filler--he included it in Analog 8.  (It also showed up in a "Best of" Analog volume fourteen years after Campbell's death.)

The narrator of "The Powers of Observation" is an American spy in Yugoslavia who demonstrates the virtues we expect to find in a character in Astounding/Analog--he overcomes obstacles through his vast knowledge, through careful attention to detail, and through quick thinking, like the platonic ideal of the scientist or engineer.  The narrator's knowledge and skill are so exemplary, even over the top, that I have to suspect Harrison is sort of poking fun at tales of supercompetent heroes, but it is gentle fun and the story still has some of the thrills of a good action-espionage tale, and the twist ending makes the super spy's super abilities and super memory more believable.

The story includes good action scenes, including a compelling car chase which includes lots of local color (did Harrison drive in Yugoslavia himself or lift these details from a book?), and other stuff you expect in a spy story, like, you know, bribing foreigners and getting betrayed by foreigners.  Then we have the twist ending.  From the beginning we readers have suspected the Soviet agent the narrator is pursuing is a robot.  But in the final scenes we learn the triumphant American narrator is also a robot!  Harrison draws similarities between the space race and the robot race between the West and East, and gives a pithy summary and assessment of the differences between Soviet and American design strategies.

This is a fun story, displaying Harrison's ability to produce an adventure story with humor elements that don't render the story silly and undermine the action-suspense elements.  Thumbs up!

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"The Powers of Observation" saved this blog post from being a litany of distaste and derision, and has convinced me to keep reading Prime Number.  Stay tuned for more 1960s Harry Harrison short stories.