You Can Be the Stainless Steel Rat

Stainless Steel Rat (Publication Order)

by Harry Harrison

(This is a choose your own adventure book)

You are the stainless steel rat...

...well, almost. The newest recruit in the Special Corps, you take your orders from the legendary Slippery Jim diGriz. Rogue. Rascal. And master-criminal turned cop. Linked by a hi-tech mind-meld, he'll be with you every step of the way. But you deal with his heckling.

Your mission: kidnap the mad scientist Professor Geisteskrank from the planet Skraldespand. Why, you ask? Because he's invented a device that could end life as we know (and love) it in the entire universe.

Oh yes, and did we mention that the planet Skraldespand is a prison planet and home to the felonious refuse of a thousand human and alien worlds? Good luck. You're going to need it.

Genres: Science Fiction, Fiction, Humor, Gamebooks, Role Playing Games

156 pages, Mass Market Paperback

First published October 31, 1985

About the author

Librarian Note: There is more than one author in the Goodreads database with this name.

Harry Harrison (born Henry Maxwell Dempsey) was an American science fiction author best known for his character the The Stainless Steel Rat and the novel Make Room! Make Room! (1966), the basis for the film Soylent Green (1973). He was also (with Brian W. Aldiss) co-president of the Birmingham Science Fiction Group.

Excerpted from Wikipedia.

Reviews

[Surly Gliffs · Rating 3 out of 5]

I swear there's some current or former Dreamhaven employee who's putting back stock into a Free Library in our south Minneapolis neighborhood. And this book, mass-market first printing June 1988, looked like it had never even been opened. I can't resist obscure choosable path adventure books.

So you don't play the Stainless Steel Rat. Of course not! Slippery Jim DeGriz is too cool for that. You're on a Special Corps mission with Jim "coaching" you through. But this is really just a chance for Harrison to troll you as much as possible.

The choices really don't affect your destiny, only the quality of the insults, with some decisions controlled by coin flip (sorry, by Ambisphenic Bipolar Determinator). Along the way, Harrison phones in every stupid trope he could, like he wrote most story on bar napkins over the course of aweek. The fourth wall is broken, rendered to dust, and mixed with bourbon. Characters say things like, "The path goes thataway, right to 73."

If Jim tells you to draw a map, draw a map. If confronted with a porcuswine, sing along. And if you don't mind silly, obscure choosable path adventures, You Can Be the Stainless Steel Rat.

[Krzysztof · Rating 2 out of 5]

Książka, która jest grą paragrafową. Wcielamy się w postać rekruta, który chce się dostać do Korpusu Specjalnego i właśnie zostaje wysłany na swoją pierwszą misję. Pod opieką oczywiście samego Stalowego Szczura, który tu pełni też rolę narratora. Niestety przyznać muszę, że o ile lubię serię Stalowego Szczura, to ta pozycja zupełnie mi nie pasuje. Akcja jest nierówna, miejscami z jakimiś dziwnymi przeskokami. Brak tu też jakiegoś dobrego scenariusza. Grałem w znacznie znacznie lepsze paragrafówki. Jeśli ktoś lubi ten rodzaj rozrywki może z ciekawości sięgnąć po tą pozycję, tylko nie należy robić sobie zbyt wielkich nadziei. Zwłaszcza, że równie dobrze każdy fan paragrafówek może tą pozycję całkowicie pominąć.

[Bastian · Rating 4 out of 5]

Entertaining and short. Don't expect high literature, but do expect a good chuckle. A few of the more obscure branches were mislabeled in my copy, but it wasn't hard to recover. I very much enjoyed that this book does not have any fail states, so I sometimes made a "stupid" decision just to see what hilarity it would trigger. And I was often rewarded. Good fun!

[Nathan · Rating 3 out of 5]

Fairly straight-forward 'Choose-your-own-adventure' book but obviously Stainless Steel Rat themed. Entertaining.

[Anna Rogovets · Rating 3 out of 5]

Занятно. Игра, чтобы скоротать вечер. Сам текст простецкий какой-то, может быть дело в переводе?

[Dmitry · Rating 3 out of 5]

Mildly entertaining and clever, but useless nontheless :-)

[Ivan Misyats · Rating 3 out of 5]

Very interesting new experience