http://io9.com/5934884/rip-harry-harrison-creator-of-the-stainless-steel-rat-bill-the-galactic-hero-and-soylent-green%E2%80%8E R.I.P. Harry Harrison, creator of the Stainless Steel Rat, Bill the Galactic Hero, and Soylent Green Charlie Jane Anders If Harry Harrison had only created "Slippery" Jim DiGriz, the roguish hero of the Stainless Steel Rat books, he would deserve a high place in science fiction history. But he also wrote dozens of other novels, including the hilarious Bill the Galactic Hero saga, the proto-Steampunk classic A Transatlantic Tunnel, Hurrah!, and the novel that became the movie Soylent Green, Make Room! Make Room!. Amazingly, Harrison kept writing great novels, with the last Stainless Steel Rat book coming out just two years ago. He died today, aged 87, according to his official website. No details are yet known. Top image: Cover of The Stainless Steel Rat Gets Drafted, artwork by Jim Burns. Full size There are few really great comic space opera novels, aside from Douglas Adams. And Harrison's Stainless Steel Rat books qualify —

Jim DiGriz is a really inspired creation, a rogue smuggler created years before Han Solo existed. Even as "Slippery" Jim sort of goes straight in the later books, he never stops being a source of ridiculous fun, and his romance with the equally criminal and devious Angelina is a really sweet, heartfelt relationship. I read the Stainless Steel Rat books at a very impressionable age, and a lot of clever bits stick in my mind — like the bit where "Slippery" Jim explains that intergalactic empires are impossible due to the problems with travel at relativistic speeds. This series was always smarter than a lot of other space operas, even alongside its gratifying levels of silliness. He achieves a very different sort of humor, parodying bad science fiction, in the Bill the Galactic Hero books. And meanwhile, Harrison also wrote one of the most influential future dystopias, a book about an overcrowded starving future facing huge environmental disasters. The movie version focused heavily on the eponymous "soylent green" storyline, but the actual novel Make Room! Make Room! is much more concerned with portraying the full horror of an overgrown future "megalopolis" of New York, crammed with 35 million people living in intense heat and drinking dirty brown water.

Reading Harrison's decidedly unfunny prose in Make Room, you can feel the heat of the city streets and the grime under your fingernails. Everybody who's writing or reading future dystopias today owes a huge debt to Harrison for proving just how grim and visceral a future nightmare could be. And long before steampunk was considered a whole book genre, Harrison was writing Victorian alternate history with fantastical technologies in Transatlantic Tunnel, a book that's just starting to be rediscovered thanks to a nifty new edition. Full size Harrison was also a prolific artist, who worked in comics as an artist and writer in the 1940s, working with such greats as Wally Wood and Jules Feiffer. He helped to pioneer the science fiction anthology comic, with a title called Weird Science. Harrison told Locus his books often have a pacifistic theme, in part thanks to his own experiences in the military: Over time the [Stainless Steel] Rat grew up, and got very pacifistic. In the first book he killed one person, but no one else dies in the whole damn series. It was the anti-Jerry Pournelle and Jim Baen kind of story, where it's 'Kill! Kill! Kill!' Bill, the Galactic Hero was my first book of that sort. I'd been in the army and hated it. Though almost all my books are anti-military, anti-war (the Deathworld series very much so), I try not to repeat myself. After the Stainless Steel Rat book that was published in 2010, Harrison was working on another new book, which he described as "a big secret." But we're not sure whether he finished it or not.

In any case, he left behind an amazing body of work, and he was still creating right up until the end, which is in itself a fantastic achievement. [via Jonathan Strahan] Ron Palillo, best known as mouthy classroom goofball Arnold Horshack on the 1970s TV series Welcome Back, Kotter, has died, according to Greg Hauptner, founder and CEO of G-Star Academy, the Palm Springs charter school where the actor taught classes in 2009. Palillo was 63. According to friends, Palillo died at his Palm Beach Gardens home at 4:30 this morning. Before being hired by G-Star in 2009, Palillo had lectured in colleges and high schools all over the country for years and isn’t worried. “From the moment I heard about G-Star seven, eight years ago, it sounded like everything I wanted as a student when I went to high school,” Palillo said in 2009. “To have this when I was a kid would’ve been astonishing and I knew I wanted to be part of it.” Palillo is a University of Connecticut graduate who taught entry-level acting at G-Star. Palillo played Horshack on the popular show Welcome Back Kotter that also starred a young John Travolta. Palillo had said he loved Palm Beach County, having served as artistic director for the Cuillo Center for the Arts where he directed and acted in A Closer Walk with Patsy Cline and The Phantom of the Opera. “I’ve always felt very at home here,” Palillo said in 2009. “People go out of their way for you in West Palm Beach. They don’t do that in New York.” http://www.wptv.com/dpp/entertainment/ron-palillo-arnold-horshack-on-welcome-back-kotter-dies-at-age-63#ixzz23XGYfhMK She played Ma Kent in the 1978 superhero film after appearing years earlier in such classics as “Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo” and “Act of Violence.”

Phyllis Thaxter, the wholesome actress who played Ma Kent in 1978’s Superman and the faithful girlfriend to vengeful POW Robert Ryan in the 1948 film noir classic Act of Violence, has died. She was 90. Related Topics •ObituariesThaxter died Tuesday at her home in Florida after a long bout with Alzheimer's, according to her daughter, actress Skye Aubrey. A contract player at MGM and Warner Bros. in the 1940s and ’50s before her career was derailed by illness, Thaxter also starred in the psychological thriller Bewitched (1945), playing opposite Edmund Gwenn as a woman fighting to hold off a conniving, murderous alter ego. “She was one of the most beautiful and patrician icons of the golden age of movies, TV and theater,” veteran movie critic Rex Reed told The Hollywood Reporter. After playing on Broadway in such productions as Claudia and There Shall Be No Night -- the latter starring Alfred Lunt, Lynn Fontanne, Sydney Greenstreet and Montgomery Clift -- Thaxter, the daughter of a Maine state Supreme Court justice, attracted the attention of Hollywood and signed with MGM in the early '40s. Her film debut came in Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo (1944) as the wife of Van Johnson, and a year later, she starred in Bewitched and then appeared in Week-End at the Waldorf, a remake of the Greta Garbo classic Grand Hotel.

The hazel-eyed brunette followed with The Sea of Grass (1947) opposite Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn; Tenth Avenue Angel (1948) with Margaret O’Brien; Blood on the Moon, a Western with Robert Mitchum; and Fred Zinneman’s taut Act of Violence (1948), as the woman who stands by Ryan, an embittered POW out for revenge against his former war buddy Van Heflin. Thaxter then joined Warner Bros. and appeared in such films as Michael Curtiz' sThe Breaking Point (1950) with John Garfield and Patricia Neal; Come Fill the Cup (1951) with Gig Young; Springfield Rifle with Gary Cooper; another Curtiz film, Jim Thorpe — All-American (1951), with Burt Lancaster; and She’s Working Her Way Through College (1952) with Ronald Reagan. However, she contracted a form of infantile paralysis while visiting her family in Portland, Maine, and her contract was terminated. That led her to television, where she appeared in guest-starring roles in Lux Video Theatre, Climax!, Wagon Train, Rawhide, The Defenders, Medical Center, Marcus Welby, M.D. and many other series. In 1978, Thaxter made one final movie splash when she was cast along with Glenn Ford as Clark Kent’s adoptive parents on Earth in Richard Donner’s Superman, starring Christopher Reeve. Her daughter Skye was married to Superman executive producer Iiya Salkind. “I worked harder on that film than anything I’d done — I couldn’t be bad,” Thaxter once said. The actress spent the 1980s on the stage in such productions as The Little Foxes with Anne Baxter and The Gin Game with Larry Gates. In 1944, Thaxter married

James Aubrey Jr., who was president of CBS in the early 1960s and then was hired by Kirk Kerkorian to preside over MGM during a brutal budget-slashing period in the '70s. They divorced in 1962 (he died in 1994). Thaxter then wed former Princeton football star Gilbert Lea, a mariage that lasted for 46 years until his death in May 2008. http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/actress-phyllis-thaxter-dies-superman-mother-362757