Sam J. Lundwall

Photo: Sam Lundwall
Harry has been a particularly good friend for more years than I can remember - certainly more than thirty, and these have been interesting years, I can tell you. We have met and drunk in strange corners of the world. I fondly remember long walks in Cornwall, cockroach races in New York, Ham Sandwiches in London, sill in Stockholm and Copenhagen, fistfights in Dublin, Chicken Paprikasch in Budapest, Fernet Branca in San Marino, Grappa absolutely everywhere, and at all times Harry filled to the brim with spit and vinegar and a devil-may-care attitude unlike anyone else in the world. He is, as we all know, a person slightly larger than life, a man who only could have been created for a Harrison novel..

We all know Harry's impressive literary merits, from the fabled Stainless Steel Rat books, probably the funniest and deep inside most melancholy and sad of all science fiction works, to the blackest of all near future dystopias, Make Room, Make Room!, to the dinosaur Eden books, the alternate history novels, and a perfect gem of a short stories, one of the truly best sf stories ever written, the incomparable By the Falls. We also know him as one of the founders of World SF, the first and only truly international organization of science fiction professionals. Harry is an international man, he has lived everywhere and has drunk everything and knows everyone and speaks all languages.

But more than all this I appreciate and admire one great trait of his. He has a quality which should make the world a much better place if more people had it; he has a capacity of friendship. He inspires to friendship, and once your friend he stays your friend. I regard myself as his friend, and I have been one ever since I first heard his thundering voice demanding whisky and cigars. It has been a great privilege knowing Harry for all these years, it has never been boring, and this surely must be the very best that can be said of any human being, and certainly about a writer: that he is never boring.

Congratulations to the big day, Harry. Pass the cigars, have a drink. And go on being just the way you are.

- Sam J. Lundwall

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