The Stainless Steel Rat (1957 as a short story and 1962 fleshed out as a novel) by Harry Harrison.
Good Reads meta-data is 208 pages each rated 3.93 by 15,404 litizens. There are twelve titles in the sequence.
Genre: SyFy.
DNA: USA.
Verdict: Bring on the maze. This rat will beat it.
Tagline: Where there’s money, there’s the Stainless Steel Rat
Meet James Bolivar di Griz who goes by so many names he has lost track, but those who know him prefer Slippery Jim, those who don’t, call him Rat. He is occasionally charming and always a rouge, even on his wedding day. He is a fast-talking code hero who steals from rich, again and again. ‘Code hero?’ Look it up, Mortimer.
He is a rat because he gets into and out of places up to no good, and stainless steel because his world is made of steel and glass, not wood or cement with cracks and crevasses, but even so he finds interstices in the steel and glass at the joins. The rat is something of a thinker when he has a few minutes off from being an action man.
His ambition has long been to be the biggest criminal of them all and he is well on his way to that achievement when in the course of a one-man heist he cleverly takes refuge in an empty office, only to find the head of the ultra-secret Special Corps sitting there waiting with a complete file on him and a phalanx of heavily armed guards. Gulp! Until that moment the Rat had not really believed that the Corps existed and he had certainly not believed anyone could outmanoeuvre him. Those two truths were hard to swallow but swallow he must.
In the subsequent negotiations, the Rat is licensed to continue his larceny but only as directed by the Corps. It turns out there are many targets the Corps would like brought low and the Rat is the man to do it. Doing the Corps’ bidding, he travels through time and space to steal to his heart’s content, while compiling data for blackmail, destroying forged bonds, freeing hostages, sabotaging weapons, all in day’s work. A victim of the Everest Syndrome, he steals because it is there to be stolen. (Pretty much how I deal with eating chocolate.) While doing so he falls in love, marries, sires children and continues with his galactic crime spree through twelve novels in all. The stories are set in the far future, so far that the origins of humanity on Earth are unknown to humankind who are spread far and wide in the galaxy. One blogger nerd estimates the Rat was born of woman, if he was, in the 346th Century.
His first assignment with the Special Corps is, single-handedly, to overthrow a militarily aggressive world that is conquering its neighbours. Such long range invasions had long been impossible due to time and distance and their combined impact on logistics. No D-Days in the 346th Century, not until now! His mission is to find out how they do it and then scuttle it.
He finds that the Aggressors play a long game, and undermine the worlds to conquer by financial support for dissidents within. Sound familiar? It is Putin’s Moscow game plan, with agents of influence like Murdoch and The Other Guy (whose name never passes my lips or keyword). When the dissidents rise up, then the Aggressors move in as though aiding them, and then wallop everyone and takeover. See, I said he was a thinker.
He foils them by….means fantastic.
This rat is not the Chinese democracy campaigner, Liu Di, who used ‘The Stainless Steel Rat’ as a nom de guerre. She has been in the slammer since 2002 for her troubles. If only Slippery Jim could get her out with a little time travel.
I read a few of these in a teenage science fiction phase and stumbled across one the other night trawling for Kindle reading, and once I started, well, I kept going. But one is enough.